CellHow.com

We Americans like to think of ourselves as the world’s most technologically advanced nation. Unfortunately for us, this simply isn’t true in some very important areas of technology. One such area is cellular communications. That’s right, your “cutting edge” US cellphone is probably about two years behind the times in a country like Japan.

One benefit of seeing the technologically advanced Japanese cellphone market from a distance is that it allows us to see where cell phone technology is going in this country. In other words, what new features can we expect from our cell phones within a couple of years?

Some of the Japanese features are already available here in the US but are more costly and limited. For example, mobile TV and mobile radio are already available to US customers on higher end handsets for an extra monthly subscription of between $10 and $20, but in Japan the service is less expensive, streams faster, and is available across a wider range of handsets. Furthermore, GPS tracking is available in very limited quantities here in the US but GPS enabled phones have been widely used in Japan for years. And of course, Japanese cellphones tend to have larger screen resolutions, more memory and faster processors for storing more data and playing more complicated cellphone games.

But two cellphone features really stand out as being cutting edge features not yet available in the US. The first is the use of fingerprint sensors to authenticate users. As the cellphone becomes more and more of a personal information storage device, it becomes more important to the user that that information is protected. Soon, cellphones in the US will start to appear with small fingerprint scanning sensors built into the phone. The user enters a fingerprint by sliding his or her finger over this sensor. If features of the fingerprint match those stored in a database on the cellphone, the fingerprint is verified and the user can get access to sensitive data on the cellphone.

This feature is also a building block of what will be a truly revolutionary cellphone technology, which is mobile payments. It is already the case in Japan that users can store financial information on their phones and can use their phones to use certain subways or even to buy soda from a machine. Fingerprint authentication is used as a sort of digital signature to authorize these payments. Soon the US cellphone market will start to see these same technologies appear on US phones. The sensors and fingerprint recognition technologies already exist. The major work required is in the area of infrastructure development and information security to provide all the players in the arena (users, financial institutions, merchants) with enough trust and security to make the widespread rollout of such a system a success.

How would such a system work? Payment is made and received by sending and receiving text messages. For systems without fingerprint authorization, it is necessary to use a PIN code to authorize the payment. For phones with fingerprint authorization, a fingerprint scan will authorize the payment. The fingerprint scan is inherently more secure than the PIN code, and there is currently a debate in the US as to whether mobile payment technology will need to wait for the widespread rollout of phones with fingerprint scanners.

But regardless of the specific details of the eventual system, mobile payments are definitely coming down the road. Remember a few years ago when the skeptics thought no one would ever want to send money via email? Now that Paypal has become a dominant force in online payments, no one is laughing anymore.