Upward Mobility

Ultrafast networks and whizzy features are about to turn your cellphone into—well, your right arm

Park Hyun-A is someone you might want to watch. A 21-year-old student at Korea University in Seoul, she'd like to be a marketing executive for a telecom or fashion company someday and enjoys playing matchmaker for friends looking for the perfect mate.

But what's really intriguing is the way Park uses her Samsung mobile phone. Each day she waves it over a reader at a turnstile in the train station to pay her fare. Then, during the long ride to school, she flips open the screen and rotates it 90 degrees to watch satellite TV. On the same screen, Park pages through an e-book version of Joachim de Posada's Don't Eat the Marshmallow...Yet!: The Secret to Sweet Success in Work and Life. She sends an average of 66 text messages a day, snaps pictures of cute guys and sends them to friends, and plays an online game in which she runs a virtual fruit store. "I can hardly think of my life without my handset," Park says.
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Loopt is a $2.99-a-month service available through youth-oriented wireless carrier Boost Mobile in 41 states and parts of Mexico. It combines mapping software with global-positioning technology and proprietary code to send out alerts when a friend in your opt-in personal network is nearby. With Loopt, you also can view photo diaries of your friends' lives, "chirp" them with the push-to-talk feature on certain phones, and display maps that show where your friends have gathered.

Nobody expects a seamless transition to this new wireless world. Even in areas where there is plenty of venture funding, such as cashless payments and mobile TV, two startups will probably fail for each one that succeeds. More than a dozen companies already offer social mapping software similar to Loopt, and there's a good chance Google, Microsoft (MSFT ), or Yahoo! (YHOO ) could trump such services with their own ad-supported deals.

Features, however cool, may not always win fans. Wireless carriers expected digital cameras on phones to boost their data revenues as consumers e-mailed millions of pictures to one another. But in the five years since Nokia Corp. (NOK ) introduced camera phones, most pictures snapped by Americans remain in the phones' memory. On the upside, U.S. carriers were surprised by how readily Americans paid $2.99 for personalized ringtones. (Sometimes expectations are dead on: Everyone thought NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s (DCM ) Hello Kitty paraphernalia, heavily downloaded in Asia, would fail in the U.S., and they were right.)

The next big battleground could be your back pocket. Studies show that people notice their cell phone is missing within an hour of losing it, compared with a day or more for credit cards and wallets. Such insights helped persuade MasterCard (MA ), Visa, and American Express (AXP ) that phones are central to people's lives and actually could start to replace wallets. The Big Three are working with handset makers and service providers to add low-power chips for two-way communication between handhelds and payment systems, on the model of Seoul's electronic turnstiles.