More Options With Tomorrow's Cell Phones

Open to the Outside World

Another advantage of an open phone platform: It enables easier interaction with remote services that store or provide information. Consider a phone with a GPS chip, a camera, and a persistent cell or Wi-Fi network connection. Flickr, for example, could release a simple program that would stamp your photos with geographic coordinates stored in the picture's metadata, and automatically upload photos as they're taken. Certain cameras and hacks have similar functionality today, but no cell phone supports such a mashup out of the box.

But that sort of application won't come first. The initial wave of new software will likely tie together basic components--features like contacts, calendars, notes, to-do lists, alarms, ring tones, and other media. The Android software development kit (SDK), for instance, includes standard, accessible formats for basic contacts, calendar functions, and media. Contrast that to many current phones, in which the data sits in separate and often incompatible databases or proprietary formats.

Hate the programs that ship with your Android model? You can probably install new ones while making no other data changes.

The iPhone SDK may allow such access, given that the iPhone runs a version of Apple's Unix-based OS X operating system that's much like the desktop release, which lets program developers work with similar types of underlying user information, databases, and file storage.

As Charles Golvin, a wireless analyst with Forrester Research, observes, integrating tasks with today's phones is practically impossible. "You're listening to your voice mail, [and] you'd like to use the note-taking application on your phone to write notes to yourself, all in one standard workflow [as] if you were sitting at your desk," he says. "But nobody, bar none, has done an implementation of that workflow that an average person could figure out and use."

New Services

The next offerings will be new paid services. In most cases now, only your service provider--or its partners--can offer you paid cell phone services such as directions. An open platform allows any company to do so, which should lead to lower rates.

Location-based services, including navigation help, are controlled almost entirely by cell carriers. All cell phones are required to provide coordinates for E911 operators, but each carrier has chosen a different approach. Verizon built GPS chips into many of its handsets; however, only subscribers to its VZ Navigator service can access that data.

With an Android or other open phone running a GPS chip, cell-tower-based location mapping, or Wi-Fi, you could choose among several services that provide customized information. And Google, Yahoo, and other mapping and search sites will compete for your dollars.

Having decent cameras on cell phones becomes possible, too. Carriers generally include only relatively low-resolution cameras, and then downgrade the quality of images sent over their data networks. To get a full-res image, you must connect the camera via USB to your PC or swap out a memory card.

With an open platform, handset makers will be motivated to include better cameras, and to allow the user to choose the image transfer method. It's slightly ridiculous that even a phone with Wi-Fi installed must use a USB connection to move a picture to a computer on a local network.

Finally, an open phone platform will give users access to such VoIP applications as Skype or The Gizmo Program operating natively and with few or no restrictions over either the Wi-Fi or cell data connection. Heavy callers could then avoid paying for expensive cell-calling minutes.

Many Wi-Fi-equipped phones, including a large number of Nokia models, can already make VoIP calls over Wi-Fi. Few, though, can yet use the cellular data network to make VoIP calls.