Imagine leaving your house with nothing but your cell phone. No kidding. No wallet, road map or bus schedule, no personal diary, novel or disc player to pass the time. All that and more will be installed in your personal hand-held device, the mobile phone so many regarded with suspicion just five years ago.
No, this isn’t a tall tale or science fiction. It is a reality waiting right around the corner, under advanced development at labs run by the local cellular operators.
Soon even the worst faux pas will be easily corrected.
Forget your mother’s birthday? Not a problem. Surf your mobile Internet for the florist nearest her home, order a nice bouquet, and authorize payment with a password sent over the cellular network. Your account will be debited along with your monthly cell phone bill.
Ordering at the McDonald’s drive-in when you suddenly realize you have no cash or credit cards? Put it on your cell phone account instead.
Tired of going around in circles looking for the company you were supposed to have an interview with half an hour ago? Just ask your cell phone for directions.
The options are endless, and only the imagination sets the limit.
At the March Internet World exposition in Los Angeles, Cellcom showed off coming attractions. Among them was a Wireless Application Protocol purchasing service developed by the Israeli company TrivNet that will, in the first stage, allow 500 Cellcom subscribers to buy anything from pizza to movie tickets to over-the-counter drugs with their mobile phones. The pilot is set to be launched in coming weeks.
Partner Communications has already launched a cellular wallet pilot in which stores run a customer’s mobile phone instead of his or her credit card through a debit beam. The customer is charged on a monthly cellular phone bill. Both consumers and merchants like the idea.
Dan Eldar, Partner’s vice president of investor relations, says that the company is inundated with requests to join the pilot. He says the operator plans to offer the service to the general public in the near future.
Pelephone, too, is at the height of its development of cellular wallet services that will allow subscribers to use their phones to pay for fast food or a place in the parking lot.
The operators are also busy working on cellular map services to help their subscribers both out of traffic jams and endless searches for those elusive addresses.
At Internet World, Cellcom demonstrated eMap, a service based on WAP that allows subscribers to punch in the addresses — or even just the phone numbers — of their destinations and receive, within seconds, detailed instructions on how to get there.
Games based on Short Message Service — like Trivia or tick-tack-toe — or messages with moving graphics are Cellcom’s newest attraction for the young and young at-heart, allowing those who are courageous to send messages like “Sex Bomb” with a matching dancing icon to the women or men of their dreams.
Cellcom, which came out with the entertainment services after its competitors, has been aggressive in its marketing, posting instructors at community centers and outside schools. So far the campaign has been successful: The games have boosted Cellcom’s SMS business to more than 400,000 messages a day.
Shopping, too, will be enhanced by the cellular networks, which will offer the perfect solution to the bargain hunter.
Location-based services specific to malls or commercial centers will cater to everyone’s addiction to discounts, letting subscribers sign up for a service that notes their entrances into the areas and automatically sends them electronic coupons to use in their favorite stores.
The same technology will offer community services, allowing groups of classmates or co-workers to ask the cellular network to inform them when one another are near, making the spontaneous cup of coffee perhaps a little less spur-of-the-moment.
For those who must keep in touch with the office, soon-to-be-released services by Pelephone and Cellcom will not only allow them to receive and send e-mail from their phones (a service already available), but also will synchronize those message with the Outlook box in the office.
Pelephone is also working on an MP3 solution that will allow the downloading of music into a phone’s memory, allowing later playback.
If handset manufacturers finally come out with an affordable WAP phone, and the operators insure quality of their network service, then the cellular world’s dream of a personal mobile all-in-one device that nobody would leave home without may be a reality by the end of the year.