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Shelley Osterloh Reporting Just in the last eight years or so, cell phones have changed our lives in so many ways. Well, get ready for a giant leap forward in cell phone technology.
To start with, many of our viewers will soon be watching our newscasts on their cell phones. Here is an example, a phone that has a little memory chip that you can download a full-length motion picture and watch it on your cell phone.
Interesting, but won't you have a dead battery by the end? You would think so, but they've come up with ways to both -- use less power and extend the battery. It's all part of the next generation of cell phones.
All the latest cell phone gadgets are on display at the Wireless Expo in Las Vegas. The big news is the arrival of 3G, the so called third generation wireless technology with features that could dramatically change the way we use our phones.
Rob Mesirow CITA VP: "A lot of the major metro areas are already 'lit up', as they say, with 3G, and more are coming online every day."
Streaming TV on cell phones including shows from your own TIVO; a service called Sling will let you do this. While a dedicated graphic by nVida gives this phone the ability to deliver smooth, high definition video and hours of it.
Andrew Humber, nVida: "'We can reduce the power consumption of the device by up to twenty times."
Perhaps the new king of the music phones is the new 550 by LG electronics. It has unlimited capacity thanks to micro SD memory cards, and it's the first phone that lets you sing your own ring.
Woman: "The way you do a ring tone is you hum any song, like say, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and the phone turns that into real music. So no matter how bad a singer you are, ou always get a great ring tone."
Imagine never getting lost in the car, or on foot for that matter, because your cell phone is giving you turn-by-turn directions. Mapquest Mobile will be available later this year.
As our phones handle more duties for us, we'll want them to be more secure. A buiilt-in finger scanner by Authen makes a stolen phone worthless to the thief.
And wireless will affect us in other ways too. Chrysler thinks it'll make new safety warnings much easier to deploy.
Some of these features have been available for a while in Japan, but these new 3G phones are just coming out in the US. Look for a lot of these new phones within the next year.
