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The Future is Now

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for June 8, 2000

I'm holding in my hands two things that are going to change the way we think about the Internet and telephones and wireless communication — two things that would make Alexander Graham Bell — if not roll over in his grave — at least become a little twitchy.

The first item is a combination of a wireless pager, hand-held organizer, and e-mail appliance called the BlackBerry Internet Edition. It's manufactured by a Canadian company called RIM (Research In Motion), but it's being distributed in Canada through Rogers/AT&T Wireless Communications.

It's not the first BlackBerry, nor is it the last. The previous "Exchange Edition" was designed to allow the user to communicate directly with a corporate server somewhere — and the corporation in question had to be running BlackBerry's server-side software in order for it to work.

Physically identical, the BlackBerry Internet Edition is divorced from any particular corporate network. It communicates through Rogers/AT&T in eastern Canada (and other providers elsewhere).

The diminutive unit is about the size of a deck of standard-sized playing cards (3.5 inches long by 2.5 inches wide by .89 inches thick). It comes with a cradle you can attach to your belt or slip into your purse, plus another cradle that hooks to a desktop PC via serial cable (sigh) instead of Universal Serial Bus.

The PC docking cradle doesn't do battery recharging — the BlackBerry runs off a single, standard AA battery. Instead the cradle is the conduit through which you can synchronize the contents of the BlackBerry's address book, calendar, memo pad, and tasks with a variety of personal information managers (PIMs) including products from Symantec, Lotus, and Microsoft through the BlackBerry's version of IntelliSync software.

You can also save back-ups (but not synchronize) e-mail messages, options for the various BlackBerry programs, and other things it would be a pain to lose such as network host routing tables.

Sharpen your thumbnails

The BlackBerry worked best for me when I held it in both hands and used my thumbnails to work its tiny QUERTY keyboard. There's no handwriting recognition characters to remember because the BlackBerry doesn't accept stylus input. Nevertheless, because I'm naturally a full-hand typist, using both left and right thumbs to locate the keys proved fairly easy, if not fast, and the symbol library for numeric input and punctuation is laid out in a fairly logical manner.

The tiny 132 by 65 pixel LCD screen provides an 8 line by 25 character readout and under bright light it's quite readable. It also has a backlight available for use in dim lighting conditions.

Navigation around the various menus and options will take a little getting used to, but once you realize that you can click as well as rotate its scrolling wheel, a lot of otherwise hidden menu functions appear. You'll also be using three of its keys a lot — the orange "Alt" key on the lower left corner and both the enter and backspace keys on the right side.

Part of the past

Say, did you ever wonder what happened to those old '386 processors Intel once developed in the distant past? Wonder no more; there's one of them in the BlackBerry, along with 2 MB of flash (non-volatile) memory and an additional 384 KB of working memory.

It lets you know when you've got a pager message or e-mail by vibrating when in the belt-holder and beeping when it's not (actually you can set it to a variety of notifications including first vibrating, then beeping).
Getting to the on-off switch is easy, and so is another little trick. You can keep the BlackBerry on to compose e-mail messages or memos, but shut its radio off while in a plane or a hospital that forbids the use of cellular phones while you're on the premises.

What you get from Rogers/AT&T is a pager number, e-mail address, and PIN (personal identification number). Anyone can call your page number or send you e-mail (which you don't have to retrieve — it simply arrives in the BlackBerry so long as it and its radio are on), but if you have someone else's PIN or they have yours and you both have BlackBerries, you can send each other messages directly from unit to unit without going through your e-mail drops.

Here Comes the Future

Why I said the BlackBerry represents changes to come in your understanding of how communications and the Internet work is that the only thing it lacks is a handwriting input screen and cell phone of some type to become a really useful mobile device. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when all of these services, including colour Net browsing, come in a single unit. And it's not that far off. Another model of BlackBerry, the 957, with bigger screen and hand-held format designed to compete with 3Com's Palm VII is in the works. You can see details at the manufacturer's Web site (www.blackberry.net) but it will be a few months before it's available through Rogers/AT&T.

How much?

Aye, there's the rub and why you're going to be allocating larger and larger portions of your budget to communications in the future. The BlackBerry is $299 with a 24-month service agreement and $399 if you only sign up for a year. Airtime is extra but all schemes below include "roaming" in Canada.

Short messaging (occasional usage) is $25 per month for up to 75,000 characters (i.e., 75 KB), plus a 30-cent charge per 1,000 characters over that ceiling.
Messaging Plus (frequent usage) is $35 per month for up to 250 KB of data, with a 15-cent overage charge per 1,000 characters.
Elite Messaging (high usage) is a $50 per month flat rate.

Other options include US roaming through the BellSouth Mobitex network ($25 per month)

The Other Shoe.

I said I was looking at two items. The second is a long, technical report by Deloitte Research. It's title is "Third Generation Mobile, a six-step guide to building a 3G telco."

It's full of lovely, undefined acronyms such as "second generation GSM" (Global System for Mobile Communications — more info at www.gsmworld.com). And it tosses around, with great abandon, other terms such as WAP (the Wireless Applications Protocol forum), Symbian (another forum group with similar aims), Bluetooth (another group trying to set standards for short-distance wireless connectivity), and the Voice Technology Initiative for Mobile Enterprise Solutions (VoiceTIMES).

The report predicts that third-generation mobile devices will be data-centric and, using Europe as an example, notes that the speed of these devices and their increased bandwidth will eventually provide download rates to these devices ranging from 128 Kbps (roughly what you get from ISDN — Integrated Services Digital Network — now) to 2 Mbps (twice what Sympatico High-speed Edition provides home users now).

And say the Deloitte researchers, we're going to need that speed. According to figures they quote supplied by Nortel and MCI, there was more data than voice traffic over fixed-wire systems as of 1997 and data transmission will triple by 2005.

In the meantime, the growth of the Internet continues. The researchers say the growth of domain names and hosts doubles every three months in the US (and Canada) and every six months in Europe. One set of figures in the study suggests that the number of domains globally has gone from just over 5 million in 1995 to approaching 45 million by June of last year.

To put it into a slightly different context, the Internet is available to nearly four per cent of the world's population while the telephone is available to just over 11.5 per cent. Neither of these is a large number compared to the global population, but the significance lies in the amount of time it has taken for the Internet to achieve even this degree of penetration. To quote the study, "In just 10 years, the Internet has achieved about 50 percent of the penetration of fixed-line telephones, which took the telecommunications industry 70 years! While the Internet is still in its infancy, its growth rate fore-shadows a future of unprecedented personal connectivity."

The study goes on to suggest, "By bringing the vast amount of information the Internet has to offer to simple, non-PC devices — like wireless telephones — it may be feasible to get at least half of the developed world online."

So what?

The Deloitte researchers are predicting that the future of constant connectivity will have as fundamental an effect on our society as the "critical mass" of automobile use did in the 1950's. They've even coined a term to describe these changes, "Car2neT."

Here's a description of how they see the future:

"Car2neT will depersonalise the shopping experience, changing the patterns of consumption and service delivery. (It) will involve a movement away from physical proximity involving the shopper and seller. Shopping will in that sense be less personal and more remote. The Internet will gain in popularity is that electronic intelligence will be better than real people behind counters at achieving something akin to the individualised service that was part of the old way of doing business. Those living in the Car2neT era will increasingly demand more and more services over the Internet, so that they will not have to drive their cars to wander unattended through vast warehouse-like retail facilities, or suffer the ministrations often poorly informed clerks."

Some little factoids to back up their predictions:

By 2002, transactions via e-Business are expected to total around $1.1 trillion. Music over the Internet, or MP3, alone is expected to reach $1.1 billion in annual sales by 2003, according to Forrester Research.
The business to business (B2B) commerce is expected to account for $842 billion of the $1.1 trillion e-Business market in 2002.
As of April of 1997, only 5 percent of the Fortune 500 had implemented a basic e-Business Web site, but by October of 1998, the numbers had more than quadrupled to 21 percent.

What I get from the study, which goes on to detail how emerging standards and technological advances will make third generation mobile communications a reality, is that the future is being planned now and it may be on us long before we expected it.

Contacting me