Should smartphones get any smaller?
It seems that screens need to be large enough to keep documents like Excel and Word legible, and Qwerty keyboards need to be large enough to operate. Have they already reached the smallest size limits that make sense?

"When it comes to miniaturization, the Audiovox 5600 (i-mate SP3) smartphone is already pretty small," observed IDC research analyst Dave Linsalata. "The question is whether going any smaller would make for a useable device," he muses.
"You can shrink a keyboard, certainly, but unless you are shrinking people's thumbs along side of it you are going to run into a usability problem," agreed Research In Motion vice president Mark Guibert.
"The more important question is how mobile devices will change over time to take advantage of miniaturization," Linsalata told NewsFactor. "Having music on the handset is certainly going to be an exciting area going forward, but there are still quite a few things to work out," he noted.
"But what's even more interesting is the arrival of ever-smaller expansion cards, integrated flash cards, and even 1.8 inch hard drives for mobile applications," Linsalata said. "A couple of years ago nobody even dreamed that any of this would happen."

With all of these hardware features, there is the challenge of finding the sweet spot, as opposed to continuing down the convergence path, Guibert points out.
"I think a lot of the products that end up hitting home runs are the ones that are successful in finding that sweet spot," Guibert told NewsFactor. "These are not necessarily the ones that best achieve total convergence."
Guibert cites the example of the well-known Swiss army knife. "None of the blades are necessarily best in class, and no one uses them when they need a higher quality utensil," he says. "But you are not necessarily going to use the Swiss knife every day."

Although next-generation smartphones may need additional physical features to keep pace with ever-evolving customer needs, Guibert sees more need for development on the application side.
"When you consider the power of the devices now available and their ability to act as a secure mobile link to a company's intranet, the next step is to leverage that secure mobile link" to provide an increasing number of mobile applications, as well as increasing levels of integration with the home office," Guibert suggests.
"E-mail continues to drive adoption and capture people's interest," he adds, "but [there is] a lot more that still [must] be done to integrate it with other types of applications."

"We have integrated all the disparate parts of the cell phone into a single device, including RF analog, audio, power management - together with the digital heart or brain of the cell phone itself," said Texas Instruments director of technology strategy Mike Yonker.

The first single-chip phone devices from TI will target larger markets overseas where device penetration is still low and where the cellular industry really needs "low-end phones, including some with low-level messaging capabilities ... probably not included in the most expensive devices in the shop," Yonker told NewsFactor. "But we will also have the ability to apply that technology to higher-end smartphones in the future."
In the past, it was necessary to have "a dual sized PCB (printed circuit board) to fit all the electronics into the phone," observed Yonker. But TI's new single-chip technology will give OEMs "the ability to reduce substantially the amount of work space required" by shrinking the electronics to fit onto "a single sided PCB that is less expensive because of the integration."

Another advantage of TI's single-chip phone is that it results in lower power consumption, which "some OEMs will use that to advantage to reduce battery size and capacity, to reduce the size of the form factor and the weight of their products," Yonker said.
The bottom line is that the technology gives back space so that manufacturers can add new capabilities while continuing to pass under the "limbo bar" for any wireless handheld device, which Yonker defines as one having a volume of 100cc and a maximum weight of about 100gms.

Although memory is certainly one area in which smartphones could use a boost, Guibert notes that the amount required is dependent on the way that the overall system has been designed. RIM offers "a client-server model where the bulk of the processing and data storage is relying on the back-end servers and not depending on large storage requirements on the device," Guibert explained.

Right now, RIM finds 32 MB of memory on its latest BlackBerry handhelds to be more than enough for enterprise applications.
However, the practical reality is that smartphone designers always must remain "cognizant of the resource requirements, not only in terms of memory, but also with respect to bandwidth over the wireless link and battery capacity in order to optimize the overall usability experience," Guibert said.

Although such wireless vendors as Nokia and T-Mobile already have announced the impending arrival of smartphones with 802.11 capabilities, Linsalata notes that the addition of Wi-Fi cards and Voice-over-IP software raises a number of concerns for the wireless carriers that supposedly are going to be selling them.

"VoIP is coming one way or another when it comes to the Internet world in general," Linsalata said. "Having it on a smartphone is going to happen, but the key" to its universal rollout in the cellular space "will obviously depend on whether the carriers can find a way to derive revenue from it."
From the carrier's perspective, "will it end up being a cannibalizing agent?" Linsalata asks. "To answer that question, we'll just need to have some of these devices come into action and then see what happens."

Source: CIO Today