Is that your video game ringing?

Bruce Pilgrim
Contributing Editor

Edited by Leland E. Teschler

Will you be watching Phantom Menace on your next cell phone? Or perhaps using it to blast your way out of a skirmish in an online game of Quake? These are possibilities if wireless phones become platforms for games, streaming media, and other PC-style applications.

It's not clear that there will ever be much of a demand for cell phones able to handle such seem-ingly exotic uses. Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped telecom sup-pliers from doing the groundwork necessary to make such developments possible.

Planning is well underway for what are called third-generation (3G for short) cell phones. The 3G phones are envisioned as part phone, part PDA (personal digital assistant), and part video-player on demand.

A hint of these capabilities is due to soon arrive in the form of Samsung's MPEG-4 Video Phone and Nokia's 9210 Color Communicator, both powered by a special chip from Emblaze Systems Ltd. in Israel. The screen on the Samsung device is said to have 16 million-color display capability and 1 million-pixel resolution, and will allow viewing video at 15 frames/sec. It is currently operational in Korea over a 3G wireless network and is slated for U.S. debut later this year. The Nokia device is expected to become available this year as well.

Handsets able to provide such features obviously pack a lot of electronics into a small package. Therein lies a challenge for designers.

"Designing user interfaces that keep controls and displays large enough to be user friendly on increasingly smaller devices becomes extremely important," says Randy Roberts, manager, Digital Convergence for Nokia. "Additionally, people now see mobile phones as fashion accessories, rather than just communication tools. There is the challenge of making sure that phone designs are also in step with the current fashion trends."

Tony Indindoli, general manager of Innodesign agrees. "Cell-phone design used to be all about reducing size and weight, and while those are still important criteria, more and more the challenge is to differentiate your phone in the marketplace. Style and finish become important as people begin to view phones as not just a device, but as an expression of their individual identity."

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Innodesign recently used Unigraphics CAD/CAM software to design the TouchPoint 3000, a handset manufactured by LG Electronics in Korea and marketed by Sprint. The design conceals a proprietary PDA user interface (not based on either the Palm or Windows CE platforms) beneath the keypad and LCD.

Thermal management is also becoming an increasing concern, as cell phones get smaller and more powerful. "Especially in a hot climate," says Mark Hodes, a researcher at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. "A cell phone can quickly become uncomfortable after prolonged use and the reliability of the electronics is very dependent on temperature."

The electronics inside most cell phones is designed to operate at temperatures up to 100°C. "But you don't want to be operating a phone near that maximum temperature," Hodes cautions.

In one effort to address this problem, Hodes and colleagues at Bell Labs and Villanova University experimented with Phase Change Material (PCM), a waxlike organic substance, lining the cell-phone handset itself. The experiments did not result in a material incorporated in an end product. Nevertheless, they illustrate the direction of current thermal-research on portable electronics.

The materials tested were alkane tricosane and Thermosorb-122, a microencapsulated PCM manufactured by Frisby Technologies, Winston-Salem, N.C. The Thermo-sorb-122 is in the form of a powder consisting of capsules of one to several hundred microns in diameter which are 80 to 85% organic PCM by weight.

As the temperature increases, the wax melts and absorbs heat. This boosts handset reliability and the time a user can comfortably hold it. The Bell Labs experiment borrowed on earlier uses of PCM in such equipment as infrared cameras used by firefighters, wearable computers, and even thermal packs which can be heated or frozen.

And then there's 3G
One reason for the excitement about 3G phones is that they will bring users an "always on" Internet connection at up to a 2 Mbits/sec rate. You're 3G phone will instantly notify you of incoming e-mail, for example, and the Internet will be available without the need to log in. (To make a call, of course, you'll still have to punch in a number or at least say it out loud). These smart phones are likely to usher in services like buying tickets over the wireless Web, or even charging vending machine purchases on your credit card.

Depending on the expert quoted, it might take as many as three years for 3G to come into full bloom. Services such as movies or news headlines beamed to handheld devices will come only when service providers make them available. For a glimpse at how such services would come about, it is interesting to see how phones equipped with the Emblaze chip will get multi-media content.

The Emblaze video decoder in the handset works in conjunction with a server maintained by Emblaze Systems Ltd. This server encodes video content in the MPEG-4 format for transmission to the handset. OEMs have to sign up with Emblaze to integrate its streaming video content. For example, Ericsson is deploying the service over the GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) it provides. Ericsson is said to have pilot programs in place with about 25 cellular carriers to deliver news content.

Estimates are that there will be 1.2 billion cell phones in use by 2005, and that perhaps 40% of those will be enabled for streaming media.

Differing standards
European cell-phone users will likely be the first to see futuristic programming simply because Europe has one standard for transmission and information encoding: GSM, for Global System for Mobile Communications. GSM was developed in the early 1980s to permit roaming throughout Europe. In contrast, the U.S. wireless industry employs multiple standards. It's unlikely they'll evolve into a single standard soon. That means vendors fielding wireless networks each have to make their own arrangements for providing entertainment and video.

In Japan, NTT DoCoMo expects next month to begin broadband mobile phone services capable of delivering video, CD-quality sound, and fast Net access. The mobile Inter-net access provider will use a transmission standard called W-CDMA. There are European mobile phone operators currently working with W-CDMA as well.

But San Diego-based Qualcomm Corp. is instead promoting cdma2000, a competing standard which will appear in Korea and Japan as well as the U.S. later this year. Both W-CDMA and cdma2000 are based on code division multiple access (CDMA). Carriers currently using CDMA technology are expected to migrate to cdma2000 for 3G phones.

CDMA uses digital-encoding spread-spectrum radio techniques. It breaks up speech into small, digitized segments and encodes them to identify each call. It lets a large number of users share the same band of spectrum. This has the benefit of greatly increasing system capacity. CDMA offers more than 10 times the capacity of existing analog (AMPS) systems and three times the capacity of TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). TDMA is a digital wireless technology that divides a narrow radio channel into framed time slots (typically three or eight) and allocates a slot to each user.

Qualcomm has also devised a software platform for developing applications on its CDMA-based wireless devices. Called Brew, for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, it uses features in Qualcomm CDMA Technologies' (QCT) integrated circuits.

"Brewable" phones may be out near the end of the year. They will let users download applications over the air through the carrier network, then configure the phone to use the software based on the phone's own capabilities. Qualcomm has signed up carriers and developers like Verizon, Sam-sung, and Kyocera to use Brew.

Brew might show up on wireless devices besides those using the CDMA format. Qualcomm says it will Brew-enable chips from other wireless chipmakers.

Finally, there is also a standard designed to extend GSM networks as are operating in Europe to 3G. GPRS, general packet radio service, provides wireless packet data access to mobile GSM users. The main feature of GPRS is that it reserves radio resources only when needed and these radio resources are shared by all mobile stations in a cell. This helps use network resources effectively for bursty data applications as in telemetry, interactive data access, and Internet browsing. Data rates of up to 115 kb/sec are supported.

The GPRS is designed to be embedded in the conventional GSM network architecture.