Smartphones Fast Becoming ‘Center of CE Universe,’ Says Sony Ericsson CTO
SAN FRANCISCO -- Smartphones will be “the center of the consumer electronics universe” within a couple of years, Sony Ericsson’s chief technology officer said Tuesday. Large-screen TVs will run Netflix-style streaming from handsets, and their computing power will allow notebook computers to be reduced to keyboards, Jan Uddenfeldt predicted at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference. “From 3-inch to 100-inch, you have the same capabilities” across devices because of the huge computing power in phones, he said.
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The CES show indicates the industry’s transformation around smartphones, said Uddenfeldt, an inventor of the GSM and HSPA mobile technologies. “Nobody cared about mobile at that conference until about two years ago,” he said. “Now it’s becoming the dominating thing” there. Game consoles, cameras, notebooks, TVs -- all are becoming part of a solar system revolving around smartphones, Uddenfeldt said.
"I don’t think this is obvious, and I don’t think it is the strategy of all the companies in the consumer electronics industry,” Uddenfeldt said. The realization is spreading in the business, “but I do not think it is there yet.” At Sony, though, “the phone is becoming a very strong part of the company’s electronics ecosystem, he said.
A head start on LTE has made the U.S. the world mobile leader for the first time in 20 years, Uddenfeldt said. “This is a whole new ballgame.” Europe and Asia will catch up eventually, he said. The emerging world of mobile broadband data results from PC technologies taking over, Uddenfeldt said. A market led by Google’s Android and dominated by it and the Apple iPhone probably will persist, because “it’s really hard to break in,” he said. Mobile broadband is developing much more quickly than GSM did, Uddenfeldt said. “Things are growing much faster than anyone anticipated."
"You're probably going to need 1,000 times more capacity in the networks,” Uddenfeldt said. It will need to come from increases of 10 times each in available spectrum, advanced MIMO capabilities and base-station deployment, he said. “With all of these, we can probably keep up with the demand,” but it will require innovation, Uddenfeldt said. Spectrum can come from smarter use of the 2.4 GHz band and from converting to broadband even more of the TV frequencies than the U.S. is dealing with now, he said.
Smartphones’ powerful processors and displays have revived a battery problem that had been solved for predecessor handsets, Uddenfeldt said. “We are now back to battery lives of less than one day,” he said. The solution will come from components including high-powered processors turning down or off when they aren’t needed, Uddenfeldt said. “I'm quite optimistic that we can improve this gradually” to the point that the industry returns to offering battery charges that last a week, he said.