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.

It is too small to be considered a laptop, so its manufacturer, Danger, Inc., bills it as a "hiptop."

"Without a doubt the cell phone is morphing into a handheld multipurpose device," says Paul Saffo, a research director at Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. He asks, though, if the push toward all-in-one units is such a good thing. No single device, he cautions, can do everything well.

But he does think people will buy them — not because they are useful, but because they are cool.

The Next Wave

"For most consumers, phones have ceased to be technology, and they've become fashion," he says. "We replace them as quickly as we replace our summer clothes."

Already, manufacturers are showing off handheld units that will check you through security gates, help you buy plane tickets, forward your e-mail, program your microwave as you drive home, and store your pictures.

But for now, many people will agree with one man we spoke with in Tokyo:

"As long as I can talk on the phone," he said, "that's all I care about."