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Phone As Your Next Computer?
Octagon Most writes "Newsweek magazine ponders if a mobile phone will be 'Your Next Computer' and enlists Frog Design to mock-up an 'Integrated Fusion Device'. With mobile phones selling at a rate of 650 million per year and climbing, there are already three times as many phones in use as personal computers. PalmOne's Jeff Hawkins predicts that devices like the Treo will become the new centers of our digital lives as millions of people own phones but not computers."
"One hundred nineteen hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds. That's the amount of time Adam Rappoport, a high-school senior in Philadelphia, has spent talking into his silver Verizon LG phone since he got it as a gift last Chanukah. That's not even the full extent of his habit. He also spends countless additional hours using his phone's Internet connection to check sports scores, download new ringtones (at a buck apiece) and send short messages to his friends' phones, even in the middle of class. "I know the touch-tone pad on the phone better than I know a keyboard," he says. "I'm a phone guy."
So this kid spends an average of 1025 minutes a MONTH on his cell phone? That rivals most business people.. And I would hate to be the parent who pays that bill including the ungodly amount of ringtones that he probably also already has.
Hmmm.
For all practical purposes, mobiles have already become many people's secondary computer at least. For me at least, the mobile has become my defacto "little black book," primary timepiece, alarm clock, egg timer, to-do list, stock ticker, IM device, etc.
Voice mail on the mobile is actully higher-priority than my e-mail (and spam free for the moment). I think people's overall relationship with their mobiles may even be deeper than with their computers--especially in the world out there beyond slashdot.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
I have three "computers". One is a 1ghz laptop, the second is a desktop 486 (which works just fine for email, IRC etc) I also have a Nokia 6600, which is a series 60 (symbian) phone. It has a 100mhz arm processor powering it, and takes MMC cards for extra storage. It too can do email (IMAP or POP), irc, ssh, and also browse the web (using Opera). Since you can program for it with C++ or Java, there's not a lot you can't then get it to do For a lot of people, it almost does everything they want of a computer (writing documents on it is a bit icky, even with a bluetooth keyboard. Won't be long until someone's done a good word processor for it. It already supports printing via BlueTooth). So, I'd say it's pretty likely that many people (non tech types) will quickly get smart phones like (or just beyond) mine, and just use those
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Artist Howard Hallis came up with The Mini as a concept for such a device.
Oddly, he created this work of "art" in the medium of "lenticular," those tilt-the-page things to see a different image.
Still, I wouldn't mind such a device.
That's great! Since, I cancelled my cell phones services (because I got sick of people getting a hold of me when I was trying to be OUT) I've been using it only as a address and phone book keeper. I'm excited about other useful features for my out of service cell phone.
Thank you!
In any case, until hands shrink or eyes focus more tightly or web sites start publishing for 100x100 displays, there are going to be big monitors and keyboards that will likely be connected to big boxes of some kind for the forseeable future.
My finances are already basically all tied up in my PDA; just about any personal application development or service rollout I consider has to take into account access from a PDA, too. It's not as powerful nor can it handle complex tasks as well as my computer, but it's an extremely valuable data entry device and it can handle basic computing tasks quite handily. In the past, people ran an entire small business on a computer with less power.
--Matthew
As Sun says, the network is the computer. We're not going to have phones as computers until the phones are on the Net, and I don't mean 2400 baud GPRS.
Give me, in a Treo package (i.e. with thumbboard), a 320x480 screen (like a Tungsten, not a 160x160 like the Treo 600), high-speed Internet, and a video recorder with sound (because the failure of the mainstream media demands that the citizenry does its own reporting). Give me that now. Don't wait for the translation. Don't wait for 1X EV-DV.
... but if it's the "center of my digital life", it has to be able to play games at least as well as the next gen GBA, fit a gig or two of MP3's and play them back (while I play my GBA type games), have a nice web browser (guess I'll need an external monitor jack) read email (could do that even on a small LCD screen), send email (voice recognition or external keyboard that stays home with the monitor), and be able to do all the PDA tasks. Make it the size of my LG-10 flip phone. Battery life of 6 hours of constant use and 96 hours of stand by.
Do that and I'll take it at any price under $400 US. Otherwise, don't bother me.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Imagine a tiny "dock" station that had VGA-out, USB connectors, and ethernet. You wouldn't need it all the time, but when the occasion arises, like to play a game of Quake3 or write a report in Abiword, then you just plug it in and it becomes a normal computer. Pop it out and it goes with you.
The Internet cafes wouldn't even need computers any more because everyone would carry one with them. All they would need are monitors, keyboards, mice, and a little (cheap) dock thingamajig.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
See Intel's Personal Server concept for more information. The bottom line is that we'll all likely being carrying around a replica of our data and operating environment and, like in Soviet Russia, a "dumb terminal" will LOG ONTO YOU. It won't matter what PC you are sitting at - it will look and feel just like your own.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
At this point, you have got to stop thinking of a computer as a single defined device. Even if you ignore mainframes and restrict yourself to the PC-compatible market, people use computers for many things. Cellphoneas are never going to be web-servers. They are never going to be full-blown geek machines - you are not going to program on them. But probably 90% of users never do anything like that.
The fact of interest is that CPU power is no longer a restriction - a cellphone has enough oomph to run most applciations that mist users run. Where it lacks, as you point out, is input devices, output devices, and to some extent storage.
Input on most cellphones is frankly awful for anything other than dialling numbers or very simple menu driven systems. Output on that tiny screen is poor, but not that bad. In fact, if the possibility of it beaing read on a cellphone screen stops people sending HTML email, I'll count that a win. Likewise, storage is enough for most peoples text needs, but will be rapidly drained by images, even still.
So the "killer feature" to make these work is better input. Of course, one day one day true voice recognition will arrive, delivered by a flight of pigs. Until that porcine dawn, people will keep trying to find other input mechanisms that work. Until they do, I think the proposal by the OP is, so some extent, wishful thinking.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
And so will I, and so will nearly all Slashdotters. The point is, the market will expand dramtically because many, many people who will never own a PC will own one of these phones; and the phone will be the biggest percentage in this much bigger market.
Phones supplanting the PC is like the PC supplanting the mainframe. The mainframes didn't go away, there are probably more companies using more mainframes today than there ever were during The Age of The Mainframe. It's just that vast hordes of ordinary people bought PCs, so that's currently the major part of the market. The same will soon be true of phones, they will knock PCs into second place. Nothing really bad will happen to those that own PCs (or mainframes).
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
The Dell Axim was my latest PDA attempt and I got a bluetooth card for it and connected to the net via my Sony t610. Pocket Outlook still just sucks for use with a regular ole imap server (I'm sure it's great with Exchange of course). It'd do braindead things like want to download all headers even though I'm just interested in last few of them. Syncing was a pain too, since it requires outlook on the desktop and active sync to sync contacts, calendar entries, etc.
I settled on the 6600 and a Mac powerbook using isync and bluetooth and couldn't be happier. For one thing, the 6600's mail app is quick and efficient for what it does, browsing latest messages. I have mine set to just download the headers of the last 30 messages (quick), then only the body if I set it. Since GPRS is built into the phone, it doesn't require anything else. And it's small. The syncing of contacts and calendar is a breeze over bluetooth and isync.
Opera web browser (paid for it extra, since it doesn't come with U.S. 6600s) works remarkably well, reformatting pages to better appear on a small screen device.
The mail has some pleasant surprises, like if you try to send a mail message and it fails due to lack of signal or whatever, it'll drop it in a mail outbox and automatically retry it every 15 minutes.
The camera on the phone is incredible too. Compare this close up shot I took with the 6600 with the same subject matter and distance taken on my Sony t610.
I installed putty, and while it works, I can't imagine it being useful for anything but maybe an emergency login to restart a failed service or something.
And accessing the net from the powerbook over bluetooth thru the 6600 is a real easy affair.
The only quirk I've seen with the 6600 is that file transfers TO the device over bluetooth only occur at about 3KB/sec -- which is way below the bluetooth spec.
How can you compare a $500+ device to a $30 device? The hiptop is great for what it does, you can send/receive email in a format that actually is workable (unlike most cell phones) you can browse the web, go on IM and even SSH to your favorite server with its console app. Tetris, old school football, calendar and notes all for $30.
For a student who wants to do all of the above and have it in a cool little package that wont break the bank, why not the Sidekick?
I ask for a car and I get a computer. How's about that for being born under a bad
Convergence devices are crap.
I'd rather see a standard for wireless personal data network access and portable storage -- and let individual devices miniaturize and specialize.
E.g.
I don't want a camera phone with a bad camera interface, crappy resolution, limited features, tiny memory and nonexistant output choices.
Instead I'd like to be able to buy a wireless data storage device: HD, Flash, Removable media, whatever - it doesn't matter. Just an independent device that stores data and can wirelessly transmit it to devices that need it over a common protocol (bluetooth would be fine).
Then I can buy a phone that grabs my contact list, ringtones and games from there. No more having content locked to a service provider or a device. Then I can buy a PDA which uses the portable storage for apps, data, contact list, etc. Then I can buy an MP3 player, a digital camera, etc, etc.
I don't need my screen and battery life being sucked out of my phone when I'm just listening to MP3s. I don't need PDA processing burning through my battery when I just want to use the phone. I don't need a device which tries to wrap one bad interface around a half dozen sepcialized functions.
Furthermore, I want to be able to take my mp3 player or my phone into the gym, or the corporate offices of my clients, while leaving the camera functionality in the car so I don't violate the camera bans.
Not to mention the benefit of finally being free of the nonportability of data. No more duplicating contact lists to new devices. No more shuffling CF cards between the MP3 player, the camera, and the PDA. No more waiting for the right device to show up with the right storage solution.
Of course, I'm not holding my breath.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Let me introduce you to the phone companies wet dream:
The device is your basic PDA/Phone hybrid that most phones are today, with camera of course. It has little memory of its own, doesnt dock with a PC, doesnt have a removable memory card and once the (write once) PROM has been set, it will only work on one network. You can listen to music on it, watch films, tv, browse the net, whatever. Everything you do, from adding a number to your address book (which is automatically backed up by the network) to saving a photo (which is automatically backed up by the network) requires the network, theres a small amount of memory to buffer things if you happen to be outside network coverage (unlikely) but the phone is essentially a locked device. If your a good little consumer and pay the network you get a gadget to die for, leave them and you loose all your data (unless you pay the transfer fee). It does most of what you need, but for things that require a big computer with a big screen and printer, you'll still need a PC untill they trick you out of that. The future of hardware is services, money and DRM, the idea is to make the hardware as cheap as shit, controllable by the corporations and to extract as much money from you as they can. Forget a Beowulf cluster, this is a money making cluster, 24/7 baby!
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There are already a few mobile phones based on Linux available. Two Linux editions dedicated to mobile phones, the one from Mizi and the other one from Trolltech are out. As well as Linux PDAs which come pre-installed with Linux. So it shouldn't take too long until a true Linux smartphone will hit the market.
So this kid spends an average of 1025 minutes a MONTH on his cell phone? That rivals most business people
If he uses 1,025 minutes in one month that is equivalent to 12,300 minutes per year. (1,025 x 12 months)
Which is 33.676283938921307392522844820568 minutes a day. (12,300 / 365.242199 days)
I think if you added up all the little phonecalls through the working day a lot of business people would beat this kid. Sorry for the big numbers but I wanted to