We live in a world running in a race to become smarter. There is actually no limit to smartness. Smartness increases with interactions & connections. Internet shrank the world to a great extent & wide opened the ways to get smart easily.
21st anniversary of invention of internet has just passed & it is actually an irremovable part of our life. The slow dial up connections serving web 1.0 are a history & people like no less than fast internet provided by broadband internet services these days which are a must to access Web 2.0+.
Till now, the main limitation of fast internet was its limitation to wired connections only. However with the advent of third generation mobile communication technologies, we are now capable of getting fast internet wirelessly. Today, Tata Docomo is releasing its 3G services in India which is powered by NTT Docomo (Fact is that NTT Docomo was the first company in the world to launch 3G services in Japan in 2002, courtesy Wikipedia). This is actually going to change the complete scenario of smartness.
The mobile phone is the single most thing which got popular at the fastest rate in India allowing people to carry mini computers in their pockets. The only limitation till now was fast wireless internet (special thanks to TRAI for this delay). These days, smartphones are available in the lower range & most of the people can afford them. With so wide userbase of smartphones, 3G is actually available to everyone.
3G is not only limited to phones. Rather, all the embedded devices we use in our daily life can become smarter by actually interacting with each other using 3G. The power of 3G combined with availability of powerful smartphones & various cloud services has virtually enabled us to carry supercomputers in our pockets.
If you are new to the term 3G (which is hard due to so much hype these days), 3G refers to the third generation mobile communication services which can provide you simultaneous speech & data services at very high data rates (Mbps). It means fast internet on mobile devices. Specially targeted services are video based like video conferencing or video streaming.
We can now have an internet browser enabled phone & can virtually get any task done using the cloud services without even needing a very powerful processor in our cellphones. Like we can handle office documents & presentations using Google Docs, check mails using online mail clients, GPS navigation using browser based maps, social networking using browser based widgets etc. The possibilities are endless.
Cars can be smarter with the option of interacting with each other as well as information & processing hubs making it easier to find the best possible & most efficient way to travel on the road & reach destination. Somewhere I read last week about a car which can actually tweet its mood, with 3G, it can actually Youtube its funny driving moments.
One good application is getting free from the tension of booking movie tickets for first day first show. Movies can be available on demand while directly being streamed on the mobile devices. Encryption is not a big deal as Amazon Kindle is a good example of how ebooks can be so securely protected. So, great minds can also find a secure way of video protection to fight piracy.
Monitoring systems can be very advanced by providing high quality video streams from anywhere just with a click of a button making life easier. A working mother can monitor her baby or a business man can monitor his saferoom just using a mobile device with a 3G connection.
The task of reporters can be easier now. While covering breaking news in the middle of the chaos, they need not run to find a satellite link to transmit videos now. They can just just shoot it with their iPhone 4 or Nokia N8 while directly streaming it to the news center.
One great advantage to every net surfer is saving of precious time which was earlier wasted waiting for the webpage or web service to be loaded on a mobile device. This wait also gave rise to various mental disorders like frustration, irritation etc. which can now be no problem with 3G services.
One more fact of 3G services is that it has way larger capacity than existing 2G services & thus now we may also miss the network busy alerts we get making our most important calls. This again can save great time & huge irritation which usually is exhaled in the form of aggression sometimes combined with abusive words & violent actions.
Augmented reality mobile devices like the one in Iron Man’s helmet & Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense are going to get much more usability & relevance in India with these services as they solely depend on high speed connectivity with the web. We can just put on our mobile camera & point it on anything around us & within seconds, it will tell us everything about that thing.
Not only mobile phones, but all the mobile gadgets like laptops, netbooks, GPS Devices, In-built embedded systems in cars & other embedded things we use in our daily life are going to be smarter due to the availability of the power to connect to the web in a faster & more efficient manner in the form of 3G services. Its going to make everything around us & thus us, smarter.