Mobile Phone as Home Computer?

theodp writes "Citing millions of Japanese consumers as proof it can work, MIT's Philip Greenspun hasissued a call for comments on his hypothesis that the mobile phone can function as a home computer for a substantial number of consumers if it's paired up with an appliance that drives the phone from a full-size keyboard and display."

Comments

Is this really about phones?

[richg74]

After reading TFA, it seems to me that his idea is mostly about how software for "grandma" should be designed. (For exammple, he dismisses the idea of just having better interconnections between cell phones and PCs by arguing that the underlying PC system is still visible to the user.) In other words, I don't see anything that ties this particularly to cell phones, although they do have some obvious thinigs going for them, communications capability in particular.

Perhaps I'm just being thick, but this seems like another variation on the "make the PC an appliance" theme. The idea certainly has some appeal, but past efforts toward this sort of goal (e.g., the MailStation, WebTV) have had only modest success, if that.

One other thing: I am slightly skeptical of the use of Japan as a demonstration that a Cell phone can catch on as a general-purpose computing device. The Japanese writing system is complicated: two different sets of ideograms plus a set of phonetic symbols. I think this may mean that the difference in input speed between a regular keyboard and the phone keypad is considerably less in Japanese than in a language that uses the [Western] alphabet. (If you have ever seen a Japanese word processor, I think you'll understand what I'm getting at.)

Re:We like to super size

[ag0ny]

I have heard that it's actually faster to type japanese words on a cell than english words on a keyboard. Can someone confirm or refute this?

Not true. Typing is always faster on a keyboard. Anyway, typing Japanese on a cell phone is WAY faster than typing English (or other roman-alphabet language).

I'm Spanish, living in Japan, and I have a Spanish friend who's living here too. When we send email to each other from our phones we mostly use Japanese instead of Spanish (even though Spanish is our mother tongue) because it's so fast to type.

The reason is that when you type Japanese on a phone's keypad you type syllabes (or phonemes) instead of individual letters. And most words are composed by 2-3 phonemes, so typing a full sentence in Japanese often takes as few keystrokes as a single word in English.

However, when typing Japanese on a keyboard you actually type the letters that compose each individual phoneme. Or at least on the standard input method that most people use. In Windows and many X-Windows input methods it is possible to switch to a mode where each key is assigned a phoneme instead of a single letter. In theory you should be able to type VERY fast in that mode, but in practice you have to learn another keyboard layout, so nobody cares.

HipTop development

[supersat]

My understanding of the Danger hiptop is this: To put programs you write yourself on a Danger hiptop, you must become a registered developer, and even then you can not share your programs with other users unless they are also registered developers, or unless Danger gives its official stamp of approval that your application will be THE representative application for its category (calculator, etc.) in their commercial catalog.

This is pretty much the way it is, but it wasn't always that way. You used to be able to freely sign up for a developer key as long as you waived your support rights (although they would provide support in most instances anyway). I'm pretty sure two things led to the demise of that program:

1. Many high profile sites and publications (like Popular Science) gave step-by-step instructions on unlocking your hiptop/Sidekick and where to get third-party apps.

2. An application called Hiptones allowed you to add your own ringtones and circumvent T-Mobile's catalog cash cow. T-Mobile is (or was) the only provider to intentionally disable loading external ringtones via email, so the only other way to get them was to purchase them. The author of Hiptones began selling it, and this made Danger and T-Mobile very unhappy. The author and Danger quickly reached an "agreement" where Hiptones would no longer be sold or available at all, and shortly thereafter, Danger was no longer freely giving out developer keys.

I'm really tempted to blame T-Mobile and the other carriers here. From my experiences with the Danger crew, it seems like they'd really like the hiptop to be as open as possible, but the carriers are insisting that they lock it down to pad their precious pockets.