Concept Phones – A
Peek Into Our Mobile Future
August 2000 By Daniel Cheung
With all this talk of 3G, mobile
multimedia and the like, what will our future mobile phones look
like? What can we actually do in
the future that is so different from the mobile phones today? How can we get a “sneak-preview” of what
is to come in the world of mobile phones?
The answer – concept phones.
Don’t worry – concept phones are by
no means like the solar-powered concept cars we have seen before (that is, they
look nice and sound terrific, but are never seen or used outside of the
exhibitions). The technology for
these phones of the future is sure to come sooner rather than later.
What is 3G, W-CDMA and Mobile
Multimedia?
Well, before we start looking deeper
into what is possible with concept phones, let’s just clear up some mobile phone
jargons once and for all so we’re speaking the same language.
In simple terms, 3G (Third Generation
mobile technology) means the combining of high-speed mobile access and Internet
access services. That’s simple
enough…
W-CDMA (Wideband CDMA) is the most
promising technology candidate for delivering 3G. Basically, it is a radio-transmission
technology (still being tested on) that will provide unprecedented data transfer
rates for the mobile phone world.
 
For the technologically inclined,
here’s how it works – it transmits radio signals spread over a wide frequency
band, rather than using a single narrow frequency band. The first benefit of this is a higher
data transfer rate (up to 2 MB per second). Secondly, it is less likely to be
affected by interference, noise and other signal disturbances that occur at
narrow frequency bands. The third benefit
of this is that with W-CDMA, cells (the areas each base station covers) no
longer need to use different frequencies since one wide frequency band is used
for all cells, increasing user mobility – mobile global communications will
become widespread.
Mobile multimedia communications
means that users can use mobile phones to transmit and receive not only speech
(one medium), but also video and digital data. W-CDMA will enable all these due to its
high data transfer rate and steadiness of data transfer.
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