'Holy Grail' on Your Hip: The Must-Have Product of Tomorrow

Oct. 17, 2006 — -- If you could have just one thing -- one portable, electronic gizmo that could fit in your pocket or your purse -- what would it be?

Would it play music? Would you use it to make calls, surf the Web, message friends, play games?

"To me, the holy grail product is something that does wireless connectivity really well, something that takes great pictures so I don't have to lug a digital camera around, and something that's a great music player," says Mark McClusky, product editor for Wired Magazine.

Ask different people and you'll get different answers, but one thing's for sure: The gadget needs to be small, easy to use and cheap.

Though there are products on the market that can do a couple of things well -- like cell phones that let you take pictures or browse the Web -- there still isn't one tool that can do it all. If you want to get an idea of what the "it" product of tomorrow can do, you have to look deep into the proverbial crystal ball -- batteries not included.

Cell Phones Leading the Charge

Take a bus ride in any major city in the United States these days and you'll likely notice the sagging pants and drooping drawers of commuters weighed down by cell phones, iPods, PDAs and other electronic gadgets attached to their hips.

But McClusky believes that just over the horizon, all that will change.

"I think there is some gadget that is going to hit the market in the next six months or a year from now, and we're going to say, 'Yeah, that's it,'" he said.

Twenty years ago, just over a half million people had cell phones in the United States. Since then, the cell phone has become the communication tool of choice, with 66 percent of Americans gabbing away on the devices, according to a 2005 MIT study.

But as cell phones become increasingly popular, people demand more functions from their phones.

A poll conducted in April by the Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of those sampled want some kind of map or GPS ability on their phones; 38 percent want to be able to send instant messages to friends; 24 percent say they'd like to search for things like movie listings and weather reports; and another 24 percent say they want to send and receive e-mails.

Most cell phones now come with some additional functionality, such as cameras, text messaging capability, GPS or Web browsing. But the device of tomorrow needs to do all those things and do them well.

"It's difficult to optimize a device for so many uses, especially one that needs to function as a phone," says Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for the NPD Group. "It may never incorporate the best of breed of everything, but it doesn't have to to have a wide appeal."

Rubin says that as manufacturers get better at making technology smaller, they'll continue to release products that meet our needs and still fit in our pockets.

Apple's long-rumored iPhone, which would work as both a cell phone and a portable media player, is one device McClusky thinks could fit that bill.

"We know they're working on it. It's coming at some point. Nobody knows when," he says. "It would not surprise me if that were a pretty unbelievable product."

The Rub

So what's the holdup?

A big part of the problem with building an all-in-one device is that when you start cramming all kinds of secondary and tertiary functions into it, it tends to get bigger and no one wants to carry around a brick, regardless of what it can do.

But McClusky says that an even bigger hurdle is power.

"Battery technology is not progressing at the same rate as these other technologies are," he says. "The power a battery can provide is directly proportionate to its size."

While he says there is research going on around the world to make batteries stronger and smaller, nothing has yet been developed that's small enough and powerful enough to drive all the things people want in a reasonably sized device. In the meantime, he says, people will have to choose what functions they want.

The Products of Tomorrow Today

If you can't wait for the future and need a do-it-all toy today, there are a few devices on the market now that come close.

"The PSP [Playstation Portable] can do many of these things already," says Rubin. "It's optimized for gaming, but it can show photos and movies, play music. It can browse the Web and can get RSS feeds and podcasts, and there are other attachments coming."

Among them are a GPS add-on and a camera attachment, but no phone. Ross also points out that the PSP is not small, and all those attachments take up space in your pocket.

"Last year we saw the Nokia 770, which had a large screen and a good Web browser and was optimized for a Web experience but could also do other things," Ross says. "This year we saw Sony release Mylo, a device that can go online and do instant messaging, and both of those products use Wi-Fi Internet connections."

Though these devices aren't the holy grail products McClusky mentions, they incorporate lots of different functions to cater to the growing demands of consumers looking to ditch the Batman utility belt and carry a single device that does it all.

"The functionality continues to improve, the form factor continues to improve and the cost of components continue to drop," Rubin says. "Now you are starting to see cell phones that can accommodate a couple of gigs [gigabytes] of music and have multimegapixel cameras that can display photos and video and access the Web."