What You’ll Do With Your Cellphone Some Day

Wired News had a story about an Australian entrepreneur who has started a new cell phone company called Amp’d.

“Here’s how Peter Adderton sees the near future: You’ll be asleep in your house, and your wireless entertainment device will wake you up. It’ll be voice-activated, so if you want some music -­- Nelly or Eminem ­– you just say so. You’ll use the device to turn on your TV and change channels or to surf the internet on your computer. Just tell it what you want to do and it’ll take you there.

When you go outside, you’ll plug it into your car and it will serve as a global positioning system and give you detailed directions to where you’re going. The device will tell the car stereo what tunes you have on your iPod and play them over the speakers. If someone else is driving, you can watch TV news or surf the internet, answer e-mail, download music or read an electronic book. At work you can put the phone up to a special reader and pay for lunch or coffee. Perhaps you’ll hold a video conference. Or pay bills.

If you are in e-commerce mode, you can purchase music or movies, which will automatically be stored in your home entertainment system as well as in your wireless device, which will hold 34 MB of data -­- or much more with an optional card. Or you can download an interview with Dave Chappelle as you watch reruns of his show on Comedy Central, because the device will function like TiVo, too.

To anyone who has set up a wireless network at home, Adderton’s vision of the future doesn’t seem far-fetched. About 30 percent of all cell-phone calls are made within a Wi-Fi hotspot, he says. The problem would be to link up these wireless networks, which are like little fiefdoms, which he predicts will occur within three years.