Ask every business executive and he would have his own recollection of yesterday’s gadgets. It might be a war story – of how in the early days of the cellular phones, one had to lug heavy equipment, much like carrying ammunition to, yes, war. It might be a story of liberation – of how the desktop computer finally liberated one from the pains of correction fluid and carbon paper, allowing mistakes in grammar and spelling to be written over with a few keystrokes. Younger storytellers would probably recall the awe they felt with the arrival of the internet and e-mail, or the computer mouse, or the alphanumeric pager, or the personal digital assistant (PDA).

These stories would most probably come with much enthusiasm – swathed as they are with the nostalgia of working years past, and the realization that one has indeed gone far. But if one were to look at the gadgets and possibilities in the horizon, there would also be that realization that one can yet go much farther.

Three Generations in a Decade
The development of cellular phones is compelling. In a short span of about ten years, the world has seen two generational shifts in cellular phones. In real life, generations shift once every twenty-five years. It turns out that in the world of the cellular phone, generations last so much shorter.

First generation phones were the analog phones, essentially mobile versions of the simple house or office phone. They were chunky and cumbersome, and too antiseptic compared to the colorful, designer gadgets of today. Second generation cellular phones are associated with being “cool.” Nokia is with reason credited to have led the effort of putting this concept into cellular phones, as it ditched the antenna and manufactured small (and getting smaller), user-friendly, personalized models. In the late 1990s, Globe Telecom in its successful introduction of one of the first second-generation phone features came out with an ad featuring a young, trendy guy proud of his new cellular phone – showing off to friends how, through the marvels of caller ID, he could tell who was calling. It was indeed great, cool stuff at that time.

Strictly however, second generation phones differ from first generation analogs not so much of the cool factor but because of digital systems like GSM (Global System for Mobiles) or CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). These systems have speeds that are fast enough to allow the can’t-live-without-it SMS (short messaging service), internet services, e-mail delivery and global positioning. The capabilities are so great, you are often reminded by service providers of how their services, channeled through more powerful phones, can make your life easier. When your phone tells you how much your stock portfolio has moved for the day, you can then celebrate with a nice dinner (locating the restaurant through your phone), checking the news, traffic condition and weather on your phone screen on the way. That is of course, if your portfolio has grown for the day. If it did not – well, the phone just tells you it did not.

Mobile information services have not caught as much fire in the Philippines as SMS did. This is because of staid service providers and the fees that come with these services. The major reason however is the relatively slow speed and limited internet access that second generation phones offer – up to 9.6 kbps, a third slower than the standard home landline internet speeds. Enter the third generation phones with data rates that top 2mbps, allowing high-speed internet access and video. To the ‘techie,’ 3G phones use packet switching, ferrying data with an address attached to the data packet. To the normal user, it just makes your life so much easier than it already is. Suddenly, it might be possible to see live market action on your phone so that you know for sure whether your portfolio has moved up or down. The first G3 phones will yet be introduced in one or two years, but the current state-of-the-art phones that have colored screens, digital cameras and MMS (multimedia messaging system) capability – technically 2½G – predict great things ahead.

Pagers– and what were we thinking?
There were, however, few indications of the speed with which the pager met its disuse. In 1998, industry observers were still saying the paging industry would grow by 30-40%, bringing the number of pager units to about 580,000. This was usual growth that the industry was exhibiting since Easycall introduced alphanumeric paging in Manila in 1989.

Soon enough however, there was the trendy guy showing off the marvels of caller ID and digital phones on television. Suddenly, the era of the cellular phone arrived. The industry’s effort to bring in the cool factor to pagers – with units that glowed in the dark and with lights around the screen – was, in the language of the young target market, not “chill” enough. The virtues of the gadgets themselves should have served as adequate forewarning: paging services were only available in major urban centers while cellular phone services were made available in more areas; paging needed third parties – and it was in fact weird to let telephone operators know the most mundane things of your life, like what you had for dinner; and yes, you could still do more things with a phone. Today, the most competitive paging companies of yesteryears have gone on to ISP and call center services, or have closed shop altogether.

Will Handhelds rule the World?
Will things eventually come full eventually so that the cellular phone, 3G and all, fall into disuse? Chances are, however, that the cellular phone will be integrated into a device that brings together voice, data and computing. The device would not be called a phone, as the name would implicitly disregard its data and computing powers. Neither would it be called a PDA, nor a pocket PC. This early in the first incarnations of such devices, “handheld” seem to be the word of choice. Never mind of course that future versions may have components on the wrists and fingers, ears, the lips and clothes.

Currently, the most advanced handhelds try to put together the most sought-after features, although the emphasis on one feature invariably sacrifices other features: voice capabilities; web navigation and e-mail; colored screens; a keyboard; a camera; MP3 and games; standard PDA functions; Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents; and wireless technology like Bluetooth that allows the device to communicate with other devices up to several meters away. You run out of breath making that checklist of features. Needless to say, each unit is designed to possess that all-important “cool” feel, so that once again, the gadgets take your breath away. It is surprising that this early in the evolution of the handheld, certain models are already easy to use and very functional. The jury is still out on how long it will take for the handheld to rule the world – or if it will rule the world at all.

From Desktops to Laps, and away
It was said that as the computer was placed on desktops, executives and managers were made wary that while before, they dealt with things that they could see and understand, they now had to deal with chips, drives, bits and bytes – things that they could not see, much less understand. Gladly, that fear was short-lived. It would have been dangerous if executives were struck with fear in every stage of the office computer evolution (or the evolution of other devices). That evolution after all has been a never-ending, fluid, dynamic process. Indeed, the computer has gone far from the very slow speeds and low memories of the past – to the not so distant possibilities of 20 GHz processor speeds by 2007 (more than ten times faster than current models) and 20 tetrabytes of storage by 2011 (about a thousand times more than present disk drive storage).

The computer has evolved not only in terms of speed or capacity but also in shape and form – from black-white-and-green screens to the flatscreens that are currently state-of-the art, to laptops and notebooks and still to the smaller pocket PCs. This year will see the introduction of the tablet PCs that are flexible in use as they are in pivots – as monitors when attached to a keyboard or as writing slates. Tablet PCs are said to take the computer away from desktops or laps - although one would be pressed to imagine how else one would be able to write anyway. The possibilities, according to an oft-used saying in these times, are only endless.