In Japan and South Korea, the future is already here.
We’ve got some pretty slick phones on the American market today. From Motorola’s Razr to Nokia’s art-deco-inspired 7280, each is a pocketful of gadgets-camera, MP3 player, video game console and PDA-magically converged into one sleek package. But compared to their Asian counterparts, our handsets look a bit like grandpa’s Automatic Electric. Take Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo’s new 901i series. These wireless hot rods are capable of four-way videoconferencing and high-speed mobile Internet surfing (up to 384 kilobytes per second). The 901is can send e-mail with attachments as large as 500 kilobytes. They can act as TV remote controls and have 3-D screens with up to 262,144 colors. Each model has at least a two-megapixel camera and miniature “3-D sound” speakers. One even has a biometric fingerprint sensor to ensure that no one can use the phone but its owner, and three of the five models come with a nifty function called FeliCa, which enables the 901i to serve as a digital wallet. You download cash into the phone’s guts, then simply swipe it over a FeliCa reader at the local mini-mart. Almost anything else you might place in your wallet-a gym membership ID, video-store card or tickets to a concert-can be digitized on a FeliCa-enabled handset. Some apartment buildings in Tokyo are even making their locks compatible. Now that’s convergence.
Read the rest of the article at forbes.com/fyi.