Your Phone Is Becoming a Swiss Army Knife

Aug. 9, 2004 -- Look through your bag or your pockets if you're a technophile, and you'll find a lot of stuff.

A cell phone. A PDA. A digital camera. A music player. To say nothing of keys, change, a wallet.

It's a bit much. If you really use all those gadgets, and manufacturers could combine them into one all-purpose device, would you buy it?

"Yes, definitely," said Jill Zimmer, a tourist visiting New York, "because when we're going out it's such a mess to take the whole bag."

They were hoping you'd say that. Companies around the world are racing to turn your cell phone into an electronic version of the Swiss Army knife. They hope to sell you a device that does everything, from e-mailing your pictures to paying your bills to keeping your schedule to — oh, by the way — making calls.

Techie Heaven

The revolution is most advanced in Japan, where cities are too crowded for most teenagers to have their own rooms with their own computers, so they surf the Web with their camera-equipped cell phones instead. They type e-mail with their thumbs. They use their phones as GPS locators, to link up with friends.

The market leader in Japan, NTT DoCoMo, is counting on a future in which people watch video on their handheld screens, pay for soda at vending machines from an account in their phones, and are online — for work or play — almost all the time.

In the United States this fall, the wireless provider T-Mobile will start selling a unit called the Sidekick II. It is held horizontally much of the time, vaguely resembling Nintendo's Game Boy; its key feature is a color screen that rotates out of the way to reveal a tiny QWERTY keyboard.