Take music players. The cellphone looks as though it will eventually take over the role of the stand-alone MP3 music player. While Apple’s übertrendy iPod still grabs all the attention, KDDI, Japan’s second largest cellular operator, is enjoying quiet success with a music download service for 3G phones. By early February, subscribers had downloaded more than 2 million songs since the service’s debut in November 2004.

At 300 yen ($2.85) a song, the fee is almost three times the 99 cents charged by Apple. But the service’s convenience – allowing people to download a song in 30 seconds from anywhere, without a computer, and having the charge added to the phone bill – is making it irresistible.

Another emerging feature could change the way we control phones. Sharp has just introduced a handset for Vodafone Japan that incorporates a 3D motion sensor, providing a novel way of scrolling and playing games. You scroll through menus by twitching the entire phone up or down, left or right. In a driving game, moving the phone steers a rally car, while to play golf you swing the phone to describe the arc of the club. The feature, says Vodafone, will also make phones easier to use for the less nimble-fingered, who struggle with tiny buttons.

The motion phone is yet another example of the way the cellphone is changing human behaviour: just as we have become used to people apparently talking to themselves in the street when they are in fact using hands-free phone kits, so we may have to get used to phone users twitching and shaking in public.

One thing that might get you shaking your phone in future is controlling your PC. Toshiba is launching secure software called Ubiquitous Viewer for phone and PC that lets you remotely operate Windows PCs (New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 29 January, p 22). It lets you open, say, a Word document, make changes, then send it as an email attachment. The program compresses the PC screen data by 97 per cent, recreating it in scrollable form on the handset’s display.

KDDI is also harnessing satellite navigation technology, and more than half of its 19 million subscribers now own GPS-capable phones. Its GPS services include one called EZ Navi Walk, a real-time navigation system that displays the user’s current location and guides them on a scrolling map to a keyed-in location.

By promoting data-rich services like GPS and music downloads, KDDI has been gaining subscribers faster than Japan’s market-leading network NTT DoCoMo, which boasts 48 million users. One reason is that KDDI uses a faster protocol to send 3G data than its rivals, providing a peak transmission speed of 2.4 megabits per second, against DoCoMo and Vodafone’s 384 kilobits per second.

Speed aside, DoCoMo is setting the pace in another area of feature creep: phones used as electronic wallets or credit cards. DoCoMo has sold 2 million “mobile wallet” handsets since their launch last summer. Users can swipe these phones over readers at some 90,000 stores to charge purchases to bank or credit accounts.

DoCoMo is preparing to leapfrog KDDI in the data download race, too, with the launch of a high-speed downlink packet access upgrade service by the end of 2006. Kiyohito Nagata, managing director of DoCoMo’s product department, says the service will raise the peak transmission speed to 14.4 megabits per second, with an estimated average speed of between 8 and 10 megabits per second.

“You can scroll through menus by twitching the entire phone up and down, left or right”

Looking further ahead, DoCoMo is pushing the development of fourth generation (4G) phone technology. Last August, it achieved a record downlink packet transmission speed of 1000 megabits per second in the lab, employing similar signal broadcasting technology to that used to broadcast digital TV and radio in Europe. The trick is to split a fast data stream into thousands of parallel streams sent out on different frequencies across the spectrum, and then reassemble them at the receiver.

The increased bandwidth in 4G is expected to usher in data-hungry applications like hand-held virtual reality games, perhaps experienced via a stereoscopic headset plugged into the phone. But DoCoMo does not expect 4G services to start until 2010. By that time, DoCoMo’s Nagata hopes to see cellphones employing high-resolution roll-out flexible e-paper displays, followed in turn by a raft of new, as yet undreamed of applications that will spawn ever more feature creep.

The result is that flat panel TVs are being enhanced so rapidly that any performance comparisons quickly go out of date.

Take a simple measure like screen size. At Japan’s leading consumer electronics show, CEATEC, held in Makuhari on Tokyo bay in September, hundreds of would-be home cinema owners crowded around Panasonic’s new 65-inch plasma panel TV, which was being billed as “the largest commercial TV set in the world”.

But just two weeks later, the company had to withdraw the claim when its bitter rivals, South Korean firms Samsung and LG Electronics, leapfrogged it with 67-inch and 71-inch plasma panel TVs respectively.

And if constantly shifting specifications are not enough of a problem, there is the small matter of which of the three available large screen technologies is best: plasma display panel (PDP), liquid crystal display (LCD) or rear projection.

And then there are the forthcoming “quantum effect” surface-conduction emission displays (SEDs) that are due out in 2005, and still in the pipeline are flat screens based on organic LEDs.

Gas-filled pixels

Driving this confusing multiplicity of formats is the desire of screen makers to grab a share of the estimated $30 billion per annum market that flat panel TV sets are expected to command by 2007.

It is too early to say which technology will win: each has its own advantages and disadvantages, stemming from the way an image is produced.

A plasma panel display is made up of millions of phosphor-coated gas-filled pixel cells. When excited by a voltage, the gas emits UV light that makes the cell’s red, green or blue phosphor coating emit visible light.

There have been significant improvements in brightness and picture quality since the first 40-inch-plus plasma screens were launched in the mid-1990s. Proponents say that the technology produces more natural colours and a softer picture than the stark brightness of a uniformly backlit LCD – making viewing easier for tired eyes. However, PDP screens have a shorter lifetime than an LCD and consume more power.

LCDs lagging

At the moment LCDs are the most popular, according to US market research firm DisplaySearch (see graphic). That is in part due to the maturity of the technology and wide variety of sizes available.

An electric field controls the orientation of liquid crystal molecules in an LCD cell so that they either block the passage of polarised light from a backlight or let it pass through. Red, green and blue filters on top of the cell determine its colour.

LCDs have lagged behind plasma displays in size because they are harder to make. The process is more akin to making an enormous microchip: any flaw and you have to start over. Consequently screen size used to taper off at around 45 inches. But LG Electronics has just launched a 55-inch screen and Sharp has a 65-inch one in the works.

An LCD’s polarised light is highly directional, making it harder to view from the side than a cathode-ray tube (CRT) or plasma display. And the speed at which picture frames are refreshed is slower than a plasma display, causing blurring in some fast action scenes.

Not too bright

In rear projection TVs a small image is projected onto a device at the back of the TV – a CRT, LCD or micromirror chip – and then shone onto a large screen at the front. These TVs are the most competitively priced and come in sizes as large as 82 inches. On the downside, they are typically about 12 inches thick and are not as bright as rival technologies.

The drawbacks of plasma displays, LCD and projection TVs have driven research and development on the new SED and OLED technologies.

SEDs, newly developed by Canon and Toshiba, work much like CRTs. But instead of one electron gun, an SED has a flat array of hundreds of thousands of minuscule low-voltage electron guns that use a quantum tunnelling effect to jump across a gap to excite a phosphor (New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ print edition, 24 April.

The 36-inch prototype SED on show at CEATEC produced very impressive pictures, crisp and equal in brightness to a CRT. The makers claim it has a faster video response time and better colour reproduction than either an LCD or plasma display of comparable size.

It should also consume a lot less power as there is no backlight and no gas to ionise. SED TVs of over 40 inches are promised for 2005 and, on the evidence available at CEATEC, they may well be worth waiting for.

The manufacturers’ claims and counterclaims of superiority will doubtless continue, making it hard for the consumer to make the right choice. And the new technologies on the horizon will not make it any easier.