1896/7 Telephone Exchanges1901 Wireless Telegraphy 1946 The Computer1956 Communications Satellites 2000? Mobile Phones2000? The Internet The Mobile Phone Fifteen years ago a mobile phone was not exactly mobile. You had to lug round a piece of metal the size and weight of a car battery, pray the wind was in the right direction, hope the battery didn't expire before you had a chance to tell the wife you were on the train and that she could hear you above the crackling and the echo. The Nokia 7110 The latest generation of mobile phones are as small as a pack of playing cards. But thinner. Their lithium polymer batteries are the thickness of a piece of paper and last hundreds of hours. These digital/GSM phones canwork on two or three different frequencies and cope with different networks around the world. The Nokia 7110, the first Wide Application Protocol phone, is to be launched before the end of the year. The handsets will have larger screens will be able to browse the Internet and send and receive e-mail. Fine for speech but they do have drawbacks in accessing data like train timetables. Speed. The current transmission rate from a mobile is 9.6k per second, though Orange is planning to raise its network speed to 28.8Kb/s. That's fine for email but steam driven in exploiting the potential of the World Wide Web. At present, conversation by phone is one dimensional, facial expression and body language are lost (except to passers by!). Videophones don't really work because the slow speed of transmission makes the pictures fuzzy, movements appear as jerky as they do in silent movies and the mouth is out of sync with the words. The next generation of videophones will make talking to someone just like watching them being grilled by Chris Tarrant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The first mobile video phones will be launched in 2000 and will be able to converse with other mobiles and people with cameras on their PCs at home. They will have a mini camera included on the phone and which eventually will be able to operate as a digicam. Videophones will really come into their own with the Universal Mobile Telephone Standard. This is the third generation of communications. In theory the UMTS network will have a capacity of 2 Megs - 200 times the current capacity - but only if you are standing next to the transmitting aerial when everybody else on the network was asleep. However average speeds are expected to run at around 580k (10 times faster than the average modem on a home PC). This means the mobiles can receive CD quality music, have video conferencing, receive TV quality pictures, access computers, play online games, do Internet shopping - including payment - and access most Internet services. The size of a phone is governed by two constraints. While they have shrunk considerably a s long as there is need for a screen and a keypad they can't get much smaller. Wildfire, a voice activation system already in operation, can cut that out completely. Samsung have just brought out a phone that can be worn on the wrist. Another answer to size is Bluetooth, a revolutionary new radio chip, that enables computers and mobile phones to talk to each other without the need for connecting cables and all the other hassle that come with trying to get different and competing technologies to communicate. The model for Bluetooth is simple and brilliant. Build a single, common radio into every mobile computer. The Bluetooth communications device is a small, low-powered radio in a chip that will 'talk' to other Bluetooth-enabled products, eliminating the need for cables or infrared beams to connect portable computers, mobile phones, printers, and fax machines. Bluetooth was originally developed by Ericsson which has now linked up with other computer and communications companies like Intel, Nokia, IBM, Toshiba, Motorola, and Palm (3Com) Its wireless technology uses one of the available unlicensed, yet virtually worldwide radio bands 2.4GHz which can support both voice and data. Everything needed to be Bluetooth-capable can be contained in a module that will cost between £10 and £16 at first. The unit cost should drop to about under £4 by 2001. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists are working on ideas that may do away with the phone - as we know it today - completely. The component parts would be incorporated into our clothes. The battery into a shoe, the transmitter/receiver in a belt buckle, the ear piece a single personal stereo head phone and a tiny mike clipped to the collar. The human body itself would be the conduit. Which would make networking a very personal thing.