Smart Phones: Finally, Computer Integration Is Real

Computer Telephone Integration (CTI or simply, computer telephony) was supposed to revolutionize the workplace by enabling telephones and personal computers to work in sync. The term acquired such hype that magazines, trade shows, and an entire industry formed around the idea. Like most technological fads, the first- and second-generation products didn't live up to their hype, and people moved on to bigger and better things, like the Internet and the Web.

The Internet, in a sense, was the first popular computer telephony application (besides MovieFone, originally known simply as 777-FILM, which has since evolved into an Internet service). Although most people tend to think of the Internet as an entity unto itself, it is intricately linked to the public telephone network. The vast majority of Internet users still connect to the Internet either through dial-up modems or DSL, both of which route data over voice-telephone lines. So, if you think of it this way, the Internet, as most of us use it, is literally the result of the wedding of the computer and the voice-telephone network. The Internet, of course, eclipsed the computer telephony industry in terms of hype (and the amount of money investors threw at it).

The Internet, like the computer telephony industry, also failed to live up to its commercial hype. A few companies, like eBay, have figured out how to turn a profit on the Internet, but most of the much-heralded dot-coms are gone or greatly diminished. Although investors got burned, just as many did during the computer telephony industry's boom and bust, the rest of us benefitted from lasting technological and productivity gains.

Nobody really pays much attention to the computer telephony industry anymore. Most people take technologies such as interactive voice response, speech recognition, and such for granted. In the past year or so, companies have finally started to build products that really do meld the computer and telephone together, and in a way that the first-generation CT companies never predicted. In fact, most of the innovation these days is being done by wireless and PDA vendors, neither of which were especially interested in computer telephony during its heyday.

The products I'm talking about are smartphones, cellphone-and-PDA combinations that integrate the functions of a handheld computer and a telephone. The first attempts at doing this, the Nokia Communicator and the Qualcomm pdQ phone, were ugly, clunky devices, essentially a telephone bolted onto a PDA. In the past year, these devices have been refined considerably. One company, Handspring, has produced a device that sets a new standard for computer and telephone integration with its Treo Communicator.

The original vision for computer telephony was built around the desktop computer. CT software would coordinate between your contact manager (for example, Outlook), desktop telephone, and telephone system (PBX). A common term you heard in those days was "screen pop", the idea being that as a call rang on your desk, all of the relevant information about the caller would appear on your computer. It's a neat idea, and if you field hundreds of calls per day, it is beneficial, but it was expensive and difficult to make work with office phone systems (most of which are dinosaurs that date back to the mainframe computing era).

Things changed quickly since the 1990s. Workers are much more mobile today. Companies are much more mobile too. Who wants to be chained to their cubicle all day? And who wants to pay thousands of dollars per worker just so they can use Outlook to dial a phone number for them? Wireless is the big thing today, wireless phones and wireless networking. The new smartphones capitalize on this trend in a big way.

I recently bought a Treo Communicator that uses Sprint PCS's new voice/data network PCS Vision. Calling the Treo a phone is a misnomer. It is really a handheld computer, and a good one, with a color display, 16MB of memory, Palm OS, a small QWERTY keyboard, wireless Internet connectivity, and a fairly complete set of applications. I can even play Simcity and Tetris on the Treo.

The Handspring Treo 300 Smart Phone.

And, of course, it's also a cellphone. The phone features are all tightly integrated with the programs on the phone. When someone calls me, the phone displays the caller's contact information, so I always know who is on the other end. Softkeys display numerous options for handling calls (holding, transfer, and so on). The phone can scrape telephone numbers out of email and SMS messages, making returning a call from email a snap. These sound like minor things, but when you're walking around anything that cuts down on extra keystrokes is a good thing. The Treo isn't a perfect device, and it has its issues, but it is impressive what they've managed to consolidate into a single device.

What's interesting about all of this is that instead of tying a computer to a telephone (the original vision), the telephone became a computer. This was probably inevitable as computing technology became cheaper and required less and less power. It is finally getting to the point where a handheld device can become a general-purpose, Swiss Army Knife computing and communication device, as the desktop PC did.

What has already been built is impressive. I highly recommend the latest Treo phones to anybody who needs a computer/phone combo on the road. What comes along in the next year or so should be even more useful. I could easily see something like the Treo being extended to include additional features like local TV/radio receiver (just link a tuner chip to the color display), MP3 player/recorder, and even a digital camera.

Not that everyone needs all of these features all the time, but as the cost of the silicon gets cheaper and cheaper, why not.

Brian McConnell is an inventor, author, and serial telecom entrepreneur. He has founded three telecom startups since moving to California. The most recent, Open Communication Systems, designs cutting-edge telecom applications based on open standards telephony technology.

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