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Cell phone: your next computer One hundre

游客2024-06-17  11
问题                                    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 landscape. The slower upheavals 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 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 are also smart-phones on the way with video cameras, GPS antennas and access to local Wi-Fi hotspots, the superfast wireless networks often found in offices, airports and local cafes. There’s not yet a phone that doubles as an electric toothbrush, but that can’t be far away.
    The smart-phone market constitutes only a slender 5 percent of overall mobile phone sales today, but the figure has been doubling each year, according to the Gartner research firm. In the United States, it’s the business crowd that’s primarily buying these souped-up handsets. "what makes(the smart-phone ) so much better than the computer is that it’s always with you, always up and always ready," says Jeff Hackett of Gordon, Feinblatt, an 80-member law firm in Baltimore, Maryland, that recently started giving its lawyers Treo 600s of laptops.
Can the cell phone provide location-based services?
    Mobile-phone watchers say that handsets in the next few years will pack a gigabyte(字节) or more of flash memory, turning the phone into a huge photo album or music player and giving stand-alone iPods a run for their money. For several years the industry has also talked about "location-based Services", built around a phone’s ability to detect its exact location anywhere in the world. With this capability, phones will soon be able to provide precise driving directions, serve up discounts for stores as you walk by them and expand dating services.
Can the cell phone perform many of the function of the PC?
    But it’s not all mobile technologists think the ultimate promise of the mobile phone ends there. Could your phone one day actually perform many of the functions of the PC, like word processing and Web browsing? PalmOne’s Hawkins thinks so. Within the next few decades, he predicts, all phones will become mobile phones; all networks will be capable of receiving voice and Internet signals at broadband speeds, and all mobile bills will shrink to only a few dollars as the phone companies pay off their investments in the new networks. "You are going to have the equivalent of a persistent (fast) T1 line in your pocket. That’s it. It’s going to happen," Hawkins predicts. The computer won’t go away, he says, but it might fade to the background, since people prefer portability and devices that turn on instantly instead of having to boot up.
    Defenders of the PC react with religions outrage to this kind of prophecy. Laptops allow another kind of mobile computing, they point out, particularly with the emergence of thousands of Wi-Fi networks around the world over the past four years. By the end of this year half of all laptops shipped will be Wi-Fi-equipped, allowing laptop owners to set up temporary offices in the local café or public park. Then there’s the matter of simple practicality: mobile phones are small and getting smaller. Humans are not. "Hundreds of millions of people are not going to replace the full screen, mouse and keyboard experience, with staring at a little screen," says Sean Maloney, an executive VP at chipmaker Intel.
    Yet mobile-phone innovators are working to solve that tricky problem, too. Scientists are continuing decades of research into speech-recognition systems and have recently introduced the technology into PDAs. Users can control these gadgets with simple voice commands. Phones don’t have enough processing power for speech recognition yet, but Moore’s Law—the inevitability of annual improvements in computing power—will help phones get there soon, provided that battery life can keep up. Other innovators are working on improving the keyboard instead of scrapping it altogether.
The problems of the cell phone facing in the future
    Cell phones aren’t likely to take the fastest road to this bright future. Innovation in the mobile industry is full of frustration and wrong turns, often because no single company completely controls the device in your pocket. Local carriers sell the phone to customers provide billing and run the phone network; devices makers like Sony, Nokia and Samsung design the phone itself, and outsource the actual manufacturing to factories in China. Another challenge is that, unlike the Internet, the phone world has no open and single set of protocols(协议) for programmers to build around. Software written for one kind of phone won’t work on all the others. The uncoordinated, noncommercial programming that led to the quick evolution of the Internet hasn’t taken hold in the world of mobile phones.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案 B
解析 本题定位信息是Adam Rappoport，与Adam Rappoport使用手机的情况有关，从而锁定文章第一段。该段倒数第二句提到，“I know the touch-tone pad on the phone better than I know a keyboard，”he says。由此可知，他对手机的按钮式拨号比对电脑键盘还熟悉。题干表述与文章事实明显不符，因此答案为N。
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