Motorola R&D Looks to 5G, Morphing Keypads

3G is old news. At Motorola's annual Research Experience Day Thursday, where the mobile phone giant's researchers showed off their not-ready-for-prime-time technologies, the company's network experts were looking at 4G and beyond.

"We're going to focus on creating the next new set of markets, which will be very different, with different devices and different business models" than today's mobile world, Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior said.

In terms of phones, that means "simplifying the user experience," Warrior said. She pointed out two technologies that Motorola was working on. The first was "morphing" keypads, which have keys that change from activity to activity. They're presumably like the keypad on the Firefly FlyPhone, which appears as a standard number keypad when you're making phone calls, but turns into a music control keypad when you're playing MP3s.

Motorola is also working with haptics, Warrior said. Haptic keypads are touch keypads that bite back; imagine an iPhone where, after a user has pressed a virtual button, he or she could feel a vibration in the exact location that was pressed, making the virtual button feel like a real one. That kind of localized haptic response has been demonstrated by Synaptics on a kiosk, but has never been shown working on something as small as a phone.

But phones weren't the stars of the day. The day's demos and speeches by Warrior and Motorola chief operating officer Greg Brown spent relatively little time talking about specific handsets, focusing instead on Motorola's work on next generation networks.

"It's not just about the devices. It's beyond devices," Brown said.

I wouldn't read too much into the focus on "experiences" rather than specific phones. While Motorola has been struggling to find the next big thing after the decline of the RAZR, the annual Experience Day was about networks and off-the-wall technologies last year, too.

This year, Motorola wanted to showcase the company's work on WiMAX and LTE, both commonly called "4G" mobile technologies – and something even beyond 4G. Is it 5G? Who knows?

The future of the network

For WiMAX, which will be used by Sprint's upcoming Xohm home and mobile Internet service, Motorola showed two elegant tabletop modems, both smaller than a breadbox. One looked rather like a tiny Dalek, the Doctor Who villain; the other was a smooth black cube. Both can connect home networks to WiMAX. A new Motorola base station technology, spatial division multiple access, could double or quadruple the capacity of WiMAX base stations by aiming signals in different directions.

The 4G technologies will bring true broadband speed to mobile networks. Sprint has committed to WiMAX, and Verizon and AT&T have announced they're moving to LTE.

"We also plan on continuing to leverage the early leadership position with WiMAX," Brown said. "The Sprint/Clearwire [Xohm] deal will facilitate and accelerate WiMAX deployment in the US, and Motorola will play a key component."

But 4G will be in place by 2010, and Motorola's looking past that. Motorola's "Beyond 4G" demo theorized a network where antennas and base stations cooperate to achieve even higher speeds by dividing the work. For instance, a mobile device could connect to two base stations at once, transmitting data through both of them. Or it could connect to both a base station and another device, using the second cell phone (with its permission) as a sort of pass-through to leap over to another base station.

In a country where the radio spectrum is crowded, Motorola's cognitive radio technology may come in handy. Cognitive radio, otherwise known as "white space" radio, finds channels in the UHF TV band that aren't currently being used by broadcasters and uses them for data connections, without interfering with existing TV signals. The FCC has rejected one white-space scheme, but Motorola said theirs is superior because it combines two ways of avoiding existing signals: it uses a database of reserved channels from the FCC, and also tries to automatically sniff out occupied channels that might not be in the database.

Of course, some countries are still working on 1G, and Motorola showed intriguing technologies for the developing world at the show.

For towns with little electricity, Motorola showed solar-powered base stations and solar-powered phone booths that functioned both as public phones and charging stations for up to 20 cell phones at a time. And for towns with little connectivity, they had a kiosk where villagers could write email or picture messages. When a bus passed through town, the kiosk would wirelessly off-load its messages to a cellular unit on the bus, which would store them until it got into range of a wireless network.

Motorola also showed off a grab-bag of technologies for a wide range of consumer experiences. In Motorola's future you'll be able to unlock your car using a Bluetooth phone, which will automatically bump your calls to voice mail if your driving gets too "complex," according to a Motorola engineer doing the demo. "Social TV" will let you gab about your favorite shows over instant messager with communities formed through your cable box. Your kids will wear "e-charms," little bits of jewelry which glow when a friend calls them.

And when they call back, Motorola's hoping, it'll still be on one of Motorola's phones.