News.com has an interview with Ya-Qin Zhang, VP of mobile and embedded devices at Microsoft. Excerpts:
If you look at the hardware, you are going to see probably half a gigahertz- to 1GHz-embedded processors. That is very powerful. Moore’s Law continues–but obviously with constraints.
The constraint is battery power, which is not progressing at a rate beyond 10 percent. The processing power, the storage and the communications bandwidth are going to continue to follow Moore’s Law. The more exciting part is really the software and the connectivity.
I don’t know if it’s exactly two years or three years, but let’s say in the foreseeable future that we will have seamless mobile computing. The first thing is really seamless connectivity, really making the transition from a single radio to multiple radios. It could be Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, WiMax, UWB (ultra wideband) and also other cellular radios. The important thing is to make sure that there is seamless roaming and handover and a consistent experience. That is a critical technology that we need to enable.
There are technical challenges, because the smart phone is very constrained. It’s constrained by the real estate, the battery power, the footprint, the screen size and the way you interact with it–you don’t have a huge keyboard.
A smart phone has to make phone calls in a way that is transparent to users. It should be transparent to users. Usability: I think we have a very nice user interface, but when you put in a lot of features, you want to create a very easy-to-navigate experience. I think that we can improve in all of these things. The features are there, but we need more.
