VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly Issue 11, January 24, 2006
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

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An important component of Unified Communications (UC) is methods for personal communications. And one idea that keeps reappearing is the notion of a universal access device that we’re all going to be using in that bright future.

However, this all-encompassing phone-plus-screen-plus-keyboard-etc. remains elusive because of competing design goals. Small enough to slip easily into a shirt pocket. Large enough screen to readily display everything we want to see. Full keyboard, but fully portable. One device vs. separate Bluetooth keyboard and headset. The list goes on.

Many vendors are working on these devices, products with a “universal” design—the notion is that we will all gravitate to one device.

But, maybe not. I saw a short article recently entitled “Phones Are The New Cars,” (The Economist, December 2), which compares the history of automobile functionality with that of cellular phones. The article makes the point that just as people buy cars to express and extend their personalities, the same is true with their phones—colors, features, underlying functionality, and it goes on to argue that the current fascination with communications convergence is “misguided.” There’s is no single “ideal” car design—there are sports cars, SUVs, minivans, sedans, trucks, etc.—so why will one design emerge for phones? Aren’t variations needed for certain job requirements or communications styles?

Moreover, many people have more than one car, so why won’t they want to multiple personal communication devices. I use a different device in my office than I use at home during the weekend. To be sure, the need to connect one type of device to another type requires communications “plumbing” work, but what’s new about that? I think the notion of having only one device is flawed.

Disclosure: I’ve never gone over to PDAs; I had a fling with a Treo, but went back to my basic, smaller, battery-friendly cell phone. But that reflects how I work and communicate. I lug a PC around because it suits me. Typing one letter at a time on a PDA pad takes me too much time. But clearly, others who I know—maybe you—have made different tradeoffs.

In addition to the personal preference issue, the quest for a single personal communications device also runs squarely into the problem of technology—what it can do, and what it can’t.

For example, the industry has tried for years to develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) capability that can immediately translate the sender’s words into readable text. The sender speaks; the recipient reads. Unfortunately, while ASR has come a long way in the last 20 years, today’s technology can’t come close to reliably transcribing natural language, free-form speech, especially from cell phone-quality lines. ASR is starting to be used with certain command functions on cell phones to achieve hands-free operation, but even now my phone usually has me select from the three or four guesses it makes about the number I’m trying to call. The bottom line: Speech as a universal input mechanism is still off in the future.

Output is also an issue. Even with improved screen technology (and better battery life), there is still the size vs. clarity vs. quantity issue. Surfing web pages on a cell phone is painful, even pages designed for PDA access. Perhaps in the future we will use Bluetooth to link our cell phone screens to the nearest TV or PC, assuming we can also solve the addressing issues. And add the seamless wireline-to-wireless linkage. But the key words are “perhaps” and “future.”

Designing a communications access device inevitably requires compromise and tradeoffs regarding size, ease of use, portability and other characteristics. And the weighting of these tradeoffs changes, depending on whether I want communications access while working in the office, working remotely or while watching a game on Saturday. We won’t all quickly gravitate to a single design, or even to a single list of capabilities. The oft-spoken goal of a universal access device seems very distant.

What do you think? Let me know at dvandoren@vanguard.net or here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Don Van Doren
President, Vanguard Communications
Co-founder, UC Strategies.com

Posted in Market Trends, User Devices, Equipment, Applications, Don Van Doren, Tech Trends, Unified Communications |

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