Coming soon to a cell phone near you: A personal assistant that scours the Web for news and information, then lines up a list of must-see stories, photos and videos for you to review next time you check in. This new "desktop" application lets you request updates on the topics of your choice and then sends you feeds from around the Web based on those preferences. This news assistant for your phone doesn't exist yet, but it's coming soon, thanks to a recent breakthrough in cell phone technology: Since May 2002, some cell phones have allowed users to select one "desktop" application to run constantly in the background on their cell phones -- even when the handset is not in use. Many analysts predict desktop applications could make cell phones a new mainstay for news delivery. The Java revolution Until recently, cell phones were relatively unsophisticated -- their software was burned into silicon and fixed for the life of the handset. In 2001, cell phone giant NTT DoCoMo started making a new breed of cell phones that could download and execute programs. Soon after, wireless providers began rolling out thousands of "appli" -- Java-based applications small enough to be downloaded and used efficiently on cell phones.
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"Java will allow us to deliver less content that is more relevant," says Robin Birtle, head of wireless strategy at Reuters' Tokyo office. |
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Thanks to Java appli, you can use a cell phone to play games, trade stocks, stream videos and surf compact wireless Web sites designed for phones' tiny browsers and slower speeds. Some phones allowed users to browse Web pages as early as 1999, but only via slow, noninteractive, HTML-only Web pages.For news sites, appli mean wireless readers can view animated graphics and search online databases associated with news stories. And NTT DoCoMo recently announced that their phones will soon be able to use Flash, which will make for an even richer wireless news experience. The new desktop appli take the wireless news revolution a step further: Because they are always on, these appli can continuously fetch mail, news, stock quotes or any other real-time data, which are then immediately available when the user flips open the handset. Japanese mobile phone makers, software developers and news executives say the innovation has the potential to remake the mobile Internet. "A lot of printing will be replaced by the wireless Internet," says Tetsuzo Matsumoto, president of the Japanese division of mobile technology provider Qualcomm.
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