Dashtop mobile

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Dashtop mobile equipment collectively refers to wireless mobile devices mounted on the vehicle dashboards. Indications are that there is a huge growth potential in dashtop mobile equipment(DME), associated applications and services. These wireless devices include satellite radios,GPS navigation,OnStar, mobile TV, HD radio,vehicle tracking system, MVEDR[1] and BWA devices. Currently, the dashtop mobile devices are mostly satellite-based wireless technology. Except for OnStar and BWA devices, most of them are currently in the stage of passive one-way communications equipment.

However, fast-evolving mobile technology is on the threshold of turning dashtop mobile equipment into full-duplex multimedia gadgetry on the strength of fast-growing broadband infrastructure, including widely expanding WiMAX networks worldwide. In view of a wide gap in product cycles of motor vehicles and vehicle electronics, vehicle gadget manufacturers have been focused on aftermarket. But there is an increasing tendency toward wayward or haphazard 'dashtop sprawl' [2]of electronic vehicle gadgetry, with growing indications that convergence into an all-in-one dashtop mobile device is an ultimate destination.[3]

Contents

[edit] History

Since affordable personal computers were introduced on mass market by Apple in late 1970s and by IBM in early 1980s, personal computers took spatial transitions from desktops to laptops. In the United States, laptops outstripped the sales of desktops in 2006 for the first time.

Since the commercial debut of cellular phones in the early 1990s, Palm Inc took the lead in developing a generation of palmtop handheld personal computers that worked like an electronic personal organizer. As cellular phones eventually branched out into data-intensive market needs, palmtops turned into PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with mobile phone functions, after briefly experiencing an "endangered species" status.

As of 2007, PDA phones are preferred by young and tech-savvy users, due mainly to wider screens and easier texting plus mobile multimedia functions, such as audio video playback, mobile web and mobile TV. Apple's iPhone made a sensational debut in late June, 2007, heating up a mobile frenzy for wider and keypadless touchscreens feaured with multi-touch.

[edit] Mobile Issues

Mobile technology is evolving at a dizzying tempo, and in the 2007 NEXTcomm opening keynote in Chicago, Ed Zander, then CEO of Motorola, noted,“Today it’s about fast,affordable broadband Internet. Tomorrow I believe it’s about wireless and broadband media platforms. And we as an industry have to work together, software and platforms, the content players and the carriers, as well as the equipment suppliers like ourselves, to bring this vision of this broadband media platform to a reality.”[4]

At the same NXTcomm conference, Verizon Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg also proclaimed, “We have barely begun to imagine all the ways that rich graphics, two-way broadband and virtual reality will transform medicine, education and creative industries. This surge in visual, interactive content – delivered to any screen, anytime, anywhere – has changed our industry forever,”[5]

While the two telecom industry luminaries stated the visionary missions, but there are hidden agendas that are challenging the "converged communications, entertainment and information" industry going mobile for "any screen, anytime, anywhere".The massive recall of lithium ion battery for laptops in 2006, and the emerging safety issue concerning portable handheld devices, like iPOD. [6]Besides, format wars in broadband media markets may ultimately cost consumers and industry 'arms and legs'.

The ongoing cladogenetic evolution of mobile broadband segments seems to generate a diversity of business alliances. These alliances are aiming to carve out more of the market by touting their mobile platforms. Microsoft, Google, Nokia and Apple are among them. Nonetheless, curretnly dominant mobile platforms remain still blind to the emerging needs for all-in-one dashtop mobile centerpiece as of late 2007.

Unlike mobile handsets,however, the biggest challenge for Dashtop Mobile operations is to sync the virtual world on dashtop and the physical real world outside the automotive vehicle. Simply put, how to build a real-time bridge between a dashtop mobile device and a real world is a more pressing issue to address, when compared with portable handsets.

[edit] Market Developments

Dashtop mobile equipment market will be led by GPS navigators for a while, but there will come a turning point when GPS navigation leans more toward tracking and will marry GPS data and mobile web to genreate LBS (Location-Based Services). In support of this view, Location-based services are a "cornerstone" of Nokia's Internet strategy, Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said on Oct. 1, 2007.

"Handset makers led by Nokia Oyj will sell 48 percent more GPS-equipped phones this year than last, according to researcher iSuppli. Consumers also will find navigation systems available in more new cars, giving them little reason to pay $250 or more for units from Garmin or TomTom, said consultant Blair Swedeen," said Bloomberg News in Nov. 15, 2007.

Carmakers are also buying navigation displays from parts companies such as Denso Corp. and building them into the dashboard at the factory. More than 7 percent of new cars and light trucks sold in 2006 had built-in GPS, up from about 6 percent in 2005, according to Ward's Automotive Yearbook. [7]

Mobile-phone makers are working with carmakers to turn cell phones into the focal point for providing functions such as navigation and music in the car, said Canalys's Jones. "By 2015, the handset will be the natural server, the one device that's got everything," said Jones. "Portable navigation devices are a dangerous place to be if that's all you're doing."

Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Motorola. and other handset makers will sell 162 million GPS phones in 2007, dwarfing the 20 million GPS units Garmin and TomTom have forecast they will sell combined, according to iSuppli [8],a leading market researcher in California. It shows a spatial shift of GPS navigation to mobile handsets, and the next spatial shift points to the dashtop centers due to the widespread legal bans of mobile handsets while driving.

[edit] Harnessing Vehicle Traffic

As the above-mentioned spatial transition of personal computers advances, dashtop mobile operations are confronted with a set of new dimensional issues that has never been the case with portable mobile equipment, such as laptops, palmtops and mobile phones.

  • Freedom from battery life concerns due to a possible shift to car battery[9]
  • Driving safety associated with driver focus and driver distraction paving the way for convergence into a handy all-in-one device
  • Harnessing vehicle traffic to generate an antidote to its poisonous by-product of traffic congestion
  • A new dimension of mobility closely linked to real-time gaps between virtuality and real world
  • Transition from voice-intensive cellular technology to media-intensive broadband technology
  • Open Access plans adopted for FCC’s 700 MHz Airwave Auctions held for early 2008 in USA and the subsequent openness of the controversial C Block to be realized by Verizon Wireless, the successful bidder[10]

[edit] Academic Researches

Scientific researches and market-based R&D endeavors are focused on harnessing vehicle traffic and wireless connections. MIT embarked on Real Time Rome, a project that is designed to create real-time maps of people moving around a city through mobile phone networks with the aim of beating traffic congestion. "Real Time Rome might also help with the better allocation of transport resources." [11][12][13]

Meantime, UCLA researchers are also working on the project to encourage installation of vehicle-to-vehicle mobile computer networks to ensure driving safety and deal with congestions. [14] The heated-up zeal for harnessing vehicle traffic through mobile networks signals a takeoff for mobile content and/or mobile multimedia.

[edit] Challenges for Automakers

Global automakers are facing a variety of mounting challenges, and among them are

  • how to improve fuel efficiency in keeping with green technology[15]
  • how to enhance driving safety, mainly based on electronic gadgets
  • how to adapt to fast-evolving mobile broadband technology to stay ahead of competition.
  • how to winnow out the obsolescent, dominant and emerging technologies for synergistic optimization.

Ironically enough, a yawning gap in product cycles of automobiles and vehicular electronics has been tantalizingly driven automobile designers overboard, but with the result of creating a larger aftermarket for vehicular electronic gadgets and gimmicks. Besides, "In-dash" GPS navigators, HD radio and satellite radio, the forerunners of dashtop mobile devices, still wait for another phase that will determine their technological hierarchy in the center of vehicular dashboards.

Topping the list of dashtop gadgetry issues are MP3 players, video streaming and playback, mega-bit-per-second downloads of multimedia, mobile TV formats, dashtop interfaces either for mobile phones or smartphones, choices of 4G technologies between LTE, UMB and mobile WiMAX. More important, how to integrate and synergize them in harmony with ever-changing hierarchy and viability in terms of technology and market preferences is the daunting task for automobile designers all across the board.

Some gadgets are on the way out and other are on the way in, and the big question remains as to how much longer they are to stay technologically viable. Choosing the right technologies and integrateing them are the growing challenges for automakers that stick to the typical pattern of "3-year R&D for a new model and 5-year product run". Integrating the growing list of dashtop mobile devices into an all-in-one device is an emerging trend that looms large as perhaps the biggest challenge for automobile industry. Underlying this challenge is where to draw the line between "positive" and "negative" driver distraction that is to be caused by using vehicular gadgets and gimmicks.

While you are doing 70 mph at the wheel,for instance, you won't feel like listening to monotonous 'turn by turn' robot-voiced instructions from the GPS navigation all the while until you reach your destination. Instead, you will listen to some local news and traffic inforamtion for a while, and then will switch to the need to talk to your spouse or family on the mobile phone. Eventually, you will pay a toll at a tollgate, listen to some MP3 music, reserve a parking spot wirelessly, order some carryout food wirelessly and even check in remotely for a ball game or for boarding at an airport.

All these part-time and 'sporadic' activities will need to be integrated into an all-in-one Dashtop Mobile device instead of having many part-time function-specific gadgets and gismos causing a dashtop sprawl. There could emerge a lot more dashtop mobile functions in the near future. Automakers are faced with pressing options of either making some of these function-specific gadgets on their own or licensing a vendor to make them or leaving them to the aftermarket. In short, automakers are increasingly forced to seek ways to optimize these fast-evolving 'part-time functions' into synergistical behaviors in the ever-shifting vehicular gadgetry ecosystem.[16]

[edit] Scope of Applications

Vehicular mobility to lure more BWA equipment and applications

Dashtop mobile operations, which include hardware, application software, and service operations, tend to spread out in both width and depth, adding a new dimension to the mobile wireless industry. The mushrooming mobile wireless segments currently centered on mobile phones are pervasively branching out into dashtop mobile equipment in view of battery life concern, screen size and mobility.

The scope of applications may soon expand vertically and horizontally, but scope of applications, currently either on lab benches or in implementation stages, can be summarized as below:

  • JIT(Just In Time) eCommerce on the go[17]
  • Mobile banking
  • Mobile advertising
  • Mobile marketing
  • Location-based services (LBS)
  • Mobile ticketing[18] & remote check-in processes for transport hubs, ballparks and expos (Compare with "cellphone use as paperless boarding pass"[19])
  • Mass surveillance at transportation hubs, targeted at both passengers and motorists
  • Distance Mobile payment of parking fees, tolls, bills ( in terms of range and real-time sync, it differs from proximity-based mobile payments, such as contacless payment, NFC (Near Field Communication), smartcards, RFID tags, and online payments like PayPal and Google Checkout )
  • Mobile entertainment, including paid downloading of music, movies, video games and playback functions. Microsoft is showcasing such features in its Windows Mobile for Autmotive.[20]
  • Mobile vehicle-to-vehicle driving safety monitoring[21]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ IEEE 1616 MVEDR
  2. ^ Dashtop Sprawl
  3. ^ "Mobile WiMAX" IEEE 802.16e-2005
  4. ^ NXTComm Show
  5. ^ NXTComm Show
  6. ^ New York may ban iPods while crossing street
  7. ^ Ward's Automove Yearbook
  8. ^ iSuppli
  9. ^ Sony's battery recall
  10. ^ FCC 700MHz Band Auction
  11. ^ Beating Congestion with Mobiles
  12. ^ Real Time Rome
  13. ^ Rethinking Traffic Congestion
  14. ^ UCLA Newsroom: Taking It to the Streets: UCLA Scientists Seek to Turn Cars Into a Mobile Communications Network
  15. ^ Green Car Congress
  16. ^ Dashboard Centerpiece
  17. ^ JITeCGO
  18. ^ Mobile Ticketing
  19. ^ Information Week: Paperless Boarding Pass Program Kicks Off
  20. ^ Windowns Mobile for Autmotive 1.0
  21. ^ Popular Mechanics

[edit] External links