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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."
This is already happening, as functions of the pc are co opted by smaller dedicated devices, mp3 players, pdas for contact storage and other devices. Its long been known that J6P doesn't need 512mb of video ram or a terabyte of disk storage and as the capabilities of "phones" increases this will become a viable option. Unfortunately this is probably what the content providers really want, a movement away from general purpose computers that give users too much control over the content that they buy. Os and device managers will be able to lock in proprietary file types and of course the OS themselves. No not the end of the personal computer just the end of the general computer.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
For the past year, 99% of my data needs have been met with my HP iPAQ h6315 PDA Phone.
All my
My news, weather, e-mail, VNC, ftp, Excel and Word apps are perfect -- no bloat.
My home TV-PC-PVR gets its e-program guide via Bluetooth to my phone to the net. No DSL needed.
When I'm at a customer's office, my WiFi kicks in, automatically.
I write articles, use the built in camera (VGA res only) every day, and even use GPS with it.
No more laptop, desktop or server anywhere. My home TV-PC is nothing but a Tivo made my way. No Internet or office apps.
FWIW, I type with my cokehead-style thumbnail on screen faster than 90% of people with normal keyboards.
A friend bought a new HipTop phone/PDA/camera device. It is amazing. The various functions are about 80% of what a laptop can do, but that 80% is done right and only the stuff you need. It could easily replace most of my phone, e-mail, web and photo needs plus it's always on and you can fit it in your pocket.
Let's strip the pc to the mobile phone. Keyboards will be obsolete as well from the moment speech recognition is a mature technology. So away with it. Than we still have the burden of the screen. No problem, my next glasses will strip them away as well.
So, glasses are the hardware of the future! They will replace the pc, phone, camera (just look & shoot), gps navigation, mp3 & video player, etc... Imagine the streets full of people talking to their glasses. Let's hope than the iGlasses are scratch proof.
For a summary of all the stories that would qualify for that section read here
Super brainy? check. Major contributor of code to the community? Check. Absurdly over-inflated sense of own intellectual superiority only offset partly by the fact that he's a professor at MIT? check... (dammit!) But let us not forget that this is the man who asserted that only fools would use a differnt technology stack than tcl (for programming) on AOLserver (for HTTP serving) and Oracle, all running on HP/UX (server O/S) for building database-driven websites. A shame, cos the book on the topic he wrote (and gave away for free) was very insightful, funny, and informative whilst being one of the first books to draw obvious-in-retrospect conclusions about the whole domain of rich applications running over HTTP. I certainly learnt a lot from it without ever using tcl, AOLserver or HP/UX. And I had enough exposure to Oracle to realise that life's too short for that, for at least 99% of users.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
My vision of the future is that "trusted platform" computing will allow things like phones to carry just enough intelligence to run small java (or other platform independent) programs that can authenticate back to the host computer that they have vetted the local hardware and trust it. Establish a secure channel, and then let me mount my desktop.
Computers can become sealed kiosks. Ideally sealed in clear epoxy with a laser etched holographic seal visible inside, for a modicum of mildly hard to defeat physical security (Yeah nothing's perfect--security is an onion).
Let IBM or whomever I want to be my Host service provider take care of keeping my applications up-to-date and conflict free, remotebacking up my data, and upgrading my hard drive space as I need it. I can even add in processors dynamically if I'm doing some real computing
When I need something faster locally, well it aint going to be my phone. Maybe it will be an Xbox or mac-mini with my movie editor and photoshop.
ideally my phone will just authenticate me to the server and validate any local hardware, then get out of the way. the local hard ware can negotiate with the server for how much data it get's trusted with and the ratio to local to remote processing.
So no my phone wont be my computer. and if I leave it in my jean's and wash it I wont care.
", so that when I get in my car I can have a dash-mounted mp3 device play streaming music off the net via a bluetooth connection to my phone."
That already exists. Sprint offers unlimited data access for $15 a month with the Treo 650. The data rate is only about a 100-150 Kb, but still, it works.
If your only use for a computer was checking email, browing websites, and basic time management stuff. For those of use to do actual work on our PC's, with larger programs, a la matlab, etc etc, a cell phone just doesn't have the same functionality of a pc. To have comparable speed, screen size, and input capability, a PC is still unmatched. I've seen tons of nifty apps for the treo and hiptop platforms, but for the large part, I still need to sit in front of a full size screen and get work done. If I want to check the news, weather, email, etc, I could use a phone and that would work just fine, but I'll stick with my monolithic pc for when I need to do some work.
If that worries you then buy two identical phones; they're cheap. That way you have an automatic backup for your phone, your mp3 player, your camera, etc. Sure, you'd have to carry two devices around, but that's still fewer devices than you would have to carry if you had a separate device for each function.
As far as data loss goes, I agree with previous posters that it would be unacceptable if losing/breaking your phone meant losing all your data. The solution for that is to make sure that the phone's local storage is merely a local cache for a more reliable storage system located elsewhere, and that the off-site storage is transparently synchronized to the phone's storage whenever possible (e.g. whenever wireless connectivity is present and/or whenever the user "docks" his phone to its keyboard/monitor/hard-drive base-station). That way if you drop your phone into the ocean, you might lose a few hours of recently entered data, but not your entire life's work.
I think the only real challenge to this concept is political: current cell phone companies have much too much of the "lock in the consumer, make him do things our way, charge him up the ass" mindset. A more promising evolution would be to see a motherboard manufacturer come out with a radical new motherboard form factor which allows a phone handset to contain the CPU/memory/etc of the PC. The advantage of this would be that the resulting phone/PCs would be an open, standard platform and anyone could develop their own OS/software for them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This is an excellent idea, if I don't say so myself. Especially since I told Sharp about this years ago when the SL5000 was out to developers. My idea was that they design the Zaurus so that it can slip into a sled on the back of a custom LCD( with keyboard/mouse ). There, it would get power, drive the LCD, have a fullsize keyboard/mouse, and networking. Hey, my mom still uses the IOpener for email, browsing and games, surely the power in a handheld or "smartphone" can provide these features... With a 3G phone, the network is already there.
It goes with the fact that it makes more sense for iPod users to have the ability to play their music, automatically, to audio devices( car, home stereo, etc ) when in proximity to those devices, instead of having totally different input sources everywhere you go. That's starting to happen in the auto industry with builtin iPod interfaces but a more generic interface is needed. A lowend capability is available with that FM addon and so playback happens in both locations( home and auto ) with just a tuning change. This concept of a handheld also being your computer follows in that concept. The concept of taking YOUR data/information and access personality( applications ) with you. I like it.
This seems to be is a step toward the STNG( Star Trek: Next Gen ) communicators, only instead of centralized computational capabilies, the computer comes with the wearer. Just a beefed up pendant. Actually, the STNG system could be somewhat emulated with a Bluetooth pendant, with the voice profile, combined with a central voice command system and an office full of SunRays. The SunRay system would have to be using Bluetooth instead of the physical ID system they deploy with now.
I like the idea and hope it gains backing, though I see the Microsoft / PC sector fighting this like they did the network computer concept. It means fewer Windows PCs being sold, the PC no longer is the holder of YOUR data/information. Also, the idea of SIMPLIFIED computer features instead of more more more is not the one Microsoft way. But, the phone companies are quite large and would love to be THE network, and this would provide another revenue stream in sales of more devices and add-ons for them. This will be fun to watch.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Odd, my samsung i730 makes an excellent phone, excellent mp3 player (with pocket music), excellent medical reference system (merck manual, epocrates, isilo PDA), a good movie player (the screen is slightly small), and an ok gaming system (it's good enough so that I don't have to carry anything else around: age of empires, pinball, skyforce, and warfare incorp are decent games).
The only thing it doesn't have is a crappy camera, but wake me up when 3 megapixel high-quality cameras start being put into these devices, which likely won't be for a good amount of time.