One number to rule them all: What smartphones miss today

All eyes are on smartphones. Last week saw the Lumia 920, Nokia’s attempt to become relevant to mobile users through digital photography, along with Motorola Razr upgrades that showed Google’s Motorola Mobility is still mired in device thinking. This week, the iPhone 5 added performance improvements, though of the sort that stayed within the traditional lines of a smartphone.

These incremental updates show that Apple, the Google/Motorola/Samsung/HTC Android axis, and the Microsoft-Nokia Windows Phone partnership are missing a key gap in today’s mobile market: the phone itself. Apple’s iPhone reinvented the smartphone as a computer that can make phone calls; Android and Windows Phone take the same fundamental view. That’s problematic in a world where many workers are increasingly mobile, moving from site to site or even between the home and the office, juggling multiple phone lines and numbers. (Analyst firms call these workers “digital nomads,” by the way.)

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Yes, there have been attempts to make phone numbers and phone connections portable, but they’re all unsatisfactory. The truth is that most digital nomads have an office phone, a home office phone, and a mobile phone. It’s tempting to consolidate on a smartphone, especially now as major carriers are moving to unlimited voice usage. Because people use less voice service these days as they text and email more, that capacity is increasingly idle, and carriers don’t want to allocate it to data because they can make more on it when used for voice — or raise data fees due to alleged bandwidth scarcity. The hope is to migrate users from landlines to cellular.

Even with the removal of the price barrier to going all-cellphone for phone calls, plenty of other barriers render the cellphone-only option unpalatable:

• Call quality is inferior.
• Smartphone batteries don’t last long with frequent radio use, such as when talking.
• Smartphones tend to get hot and sticky during long calls.
• Calls from salespeople, pollsters, and others become unavoidable, interrupting you even if you don’t answer them.
• Separating work time from personal time becomes even harder.
• Smartphones don’t handle faxes (a decreasing need, to be sure).

While the smartphone industry ignores the phone part of the equation, the phone and conferencing industries have done little for the digital nomads in return.

Microsoft has been pushing its Lync unified communications service for several years, but it’s tied into Exchange and biased toward Windows, requiring huge overhead to maintain and an admin to manage. Cisco Systems and Avaya have similarly complex, proprietary systems designed for the Fortune 500 — and no one else. Avaya recently unveiled a VoIP service for small businesses, but like so many similar products, it’s tied to a PC you must leave running. Thus, you’re less mobile than with a landline (cordless phones have much more range than Bluetooth headsets) and an enemy of the planet. The fudamental technology was designed for telemarketers and other call center employees, not digital nomads — and it shows.

Broadband-connected VoIP-only services like Vonage are similarly limiting. The cheapest of such services, MagicJack Plus makes its money by playing advertisements on the phone — robocalls you can’t turn off. T-Mobile has tried on and off for several years to offer cellphones that switch to Wi-Fi when available, but it never quite delivers.

Plus, using VoIP doesn’t address the actual need: the ability to manage several call streams on a device you take with you. A call stream is basically a phone number, and digital nomads usually need two, one for personal use and another for business. A dual-number cellphone could suffice if you could turn off the business ringer. (Apple’s forthcoming iOS 6 has such a capability for all alerts, so that could be adapted to specific alerts or call streams.) But there are no such smartphones, and although some apps provide this capability, the services are expensive. You’re still left with the drawbacks of the cellphone itself as a phone.

A better option would be a base station that uses VoIP over your choice of Wi-Fi or Ethernet, providing the same number to other base stations, such as one at home and one at work. You’d use a traditional handset (possibly cordless) for better voice quality, and when you’re away from your base stations, the calls you want are autoforwarded to your cellphone, which would have a client that lets you respond from the call stream’s number. That way, your personal cellphone number doesn’t end up in business colleagues’ hands — or, worse, in marketers’.

Google Voice comes closest to delivering on this need, allowing you to set up groups and accompanying rules. For example, you might have calls from people in your friends and family groups ring each of your phone lines at any time of the day. People in your business group would have their calls routed to your home office and work office lines, and perhaps to your cellphone during business hours only. Strangers could be sent to Google Voice itself, which is essentially a cloud-based voicemail system that forwards you emails containing the audio files and call transcripts.

The Google Voice mobile app even lets you take and initiate calls on your smartphone using your Google Voice number, if you want, to hide your personal cellphone number from those who shouldn’t have it. Google Voice is nearly free, charging only for international calls and some extra services. But Google Voice has flaws:

• It gives you a single number for all callers. If you want any modicum of privacy and work/life balance, you end up treating it as a business call stream number and having your friends and family use only your actual cellphone number — with the quality and battery-life problems that accompany smartphones.
• To call out from your Google Voice number, you must use a software client. Pretty soon, people get a collection of multiple numbers for you anyhow.
• It doesn’t work with foreign phone numbers, such as to forward calls to your office in London. That’s not an issue for most people, I admit.

Then there’s the issue of privacy: I don’t trust Web compamies with free services not to abuse information such as my personal contacts that it collects in those services. After all, the reason the services are free is that the company is using your personal information and/or ads to make money. In its Google Voice pages, Google makes no promises as to how it will use those phone numbers, emails, addresses, and so on in the uploaded contacts — which made me fear it would mine them heavily and probably resell them. But a Google spokesperson assures me, “We never use your personal information without your approval, and we do not sell your personal information to third parties,” and cites Google’s privacy policy to that effect. Glad to hear! But I’m reminded that the Federal Trade Commission recently fined Google $22.5 million for breaking another privacy promise.

You can see the outlines of a successful digital-nomad phone service in Google Voice’s rule-based approach, if it supported multiple phone numbers, if it supported handsets via VoIP for the same numbers in multiple locations, and if it didn’t require a landline to use a quality handset. The ability to handle faxes should be a simple option, given that digital fax services have been around for years, exorbitant costs and all; ditto for basic teleconferencing. Videoconferencing is another story, but I suspect few really need it beyond simple “look, there’s Grandma” uses that FaceTime and Skype handle quite well today.

Such a “digital nomad” service needn’t be free — and shouldn’t, given that users would pay the worse price of robocalls à la MagicJack or sell their friends, as is likely the case in Google Voice.

So why are Apple, Google, or Microsoft (or their hardware partners) not delivering such a “true smartphone” service? One reason is that the telcos don’t want to give up the landline businesses unless it is to their cellular businesses. If landlines became VoIP and cellphones use VoIP within buildings, telco profits would go down. You could argue that given their fretting over heavily burdened cellular networks, the telcos would be all over this notion, which makes you wonder about the true toll on those networks.

I suspect something like this will happen sooner or later, and carriers will make us pay for it through surcharges or bandwidth tiers, as they’ve started to do in cellular data. If the net cost is no more than the cost of maintaining landlines, I bet many of us will switch. Who’s going to lead the way?

This article, “One number to rule them all: What smartphones miss today,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.