Cell phone: your next computerOne hundred nineteen hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds. That'

Cell phone: your next computer

One hundred nineteen hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds. That's the amount of time Adam Rappoport, a high school senior in Philadelphia, has spent talking into his silver Verizon LG phone since he got it as a gift last Christmas. That's not even the full extent of his habit. He also spends countless additional hours using his phone's Internet connection to check sports scores, download new ring-tones and send short messages to his friends' phones, even in the middle of class. "I know the touch-tone pad on the phone better than I know a keyboard," he says. "I'm a phone guy."

In Tokyo, halfway around the world, Satoshi Koiso also closely eyes his mobile phone. Koiso, a college junior, lives in the global capital of fancy new gadgets—20 percent of all phones in Tokyo link to the fastest mobile networks in the world. Tokyoites use their phones to watch TV, read books and magazines and play games. But Koiso also depends on his phone for something simpler and more profound: an anti-smoking message that pops up on his small screen each morning as part of a program to help students kick cigarettes.

Technology revolutions come in two flavors: greatly fast and imperceptibly slow. The fast kind, like the sudden ubiquity of iPods or the proliferation(增殖) of music-sharing sites on the Net, seem to instantly reshape the cultural lahdscape. The slower upheavals(巨变) grind away over the course of decades, subtly transforming the way we live and work.

There are 1.5 billion cell phones in the world today, more than three times the number of PCs. Mobile phones are so integral to our lives that it's difficult to remember how the life we ever got on without them.

Can the cell phone turn into the next computer？

As our phones get smarter, smaller and faster, and enable users to connect at high speeds to the Internet, an obvious question arises: is the mobile handset turning into the next computer？ In one sense, it already has. Today's most sophisticated phones have the processing power of a mid-1990s PC while consuming 100 times less electricity. And more and more of today's phones have computer-like features, allowing their owners to send e-mail, browse the Web and even take photos; 84 million phones with digital cameras were shipped last year. Change it into another same question, though, to ask to whether mobile phones will ever eclipse, or replace, the PC, and the issue suddenly becomes Controversial. PC proponents say phones are too small and connect too sluggishly to the Internet to become effective at tasks now performed on the luxuriously large screens and keyboards of today's computers. Fans of the phone respond: just wait. Coming innovations will solve the limitations of the phone. "One day, 2 or 3 billion people will have cell phones, and they are all not going to have PCs," says Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot and the chief technology officer of PalmOne. "The mobile phone will become their digital life."

Smart cell phones

PalmOne is among the firms racing to trot out the full-featured computer-like phones that the industry dubs "smart-phones". Hawkins' newest product, the sleek, pocket-size Treo 600, has a tiny keyboard, a built-in digital camera and slots for added memory, etc. Other device makers have introduced their own unique versions of the smart-phone. Nokia's N-Gage, launched last fall, with a new version to hit stores this month, plays videogames. Motorola's upcoming MPx has a nifty "dual-hinge" design: the handset opens in one direction and looks like a regular phone, but it also flips open along another axis and looks like an e-mail device, with the expanded phone keypad serving as a small QWERTY keyboard. There axe also smart- phones on the way with video cameras, GPS antennas and access to local Wi-Fi hotspots, the snperfast wireless networks often found in offices, airp

A．Y

B．N

C．NG