Just came back from a T-Mobile store with wifey. She was looking for a new phone and needed help. Unlike most techie, she doesn’t want more. Instead she wants a very specific set of features and would rather not have other features at the expense of additional weight. As is she carries a bar phone (nothing beyond the phone with a phone list) and a PDA. She uses the PDA in very specific ways and will leave it behind when not needed so as to not carry the extra weight.
For a person like me who look forward to device convergence, this is a strange twist. The short version of the story is that the phone she wants does not exist. On our way home, she said something interesting. She said, “Oh just wait a few years.” I laughed and told her not to keep her hope up. The world has gone beyond the separate devices. I don’t think anyone … well… I guess I should say almost no one will want to go back to having n devices to carry. So for now, she’s living with a newer bar phone and her trusty PDA.
As this merging of phone and PDA near completion, another parallel development is also well on its way: the downsizing of computer. With the Atom and the more recent Ion (and a few others on the radar), the netbook phenomenon only serves to highlight the demand for such devices. Actually that’s not quite right. I should say the netbook phenomenon serves to highlight the direction where the demand is and will be: miniaturization of computers. As netbooks gain 3G type capabilities and smart phones gain more power, it is quite obvious that those will converge eventually.
This is not exactly a new concept. The UMPC initiative some years ago is one form of this trend. Of course, in retrospect, the practical world wasn’t ready. There was no decent small foot print OS for the masses (Unix is not for the masses). There was no low cost high power CPU. There was no cheap solid state storage. There was no robust over the air networking infrastructure.
Now the supply side is finally ready. Apple has a new platform (the iPhone OS) that is relatively easy to develop for. Microsoft’s Windows 7 is almost fully baked and has accumulated a level of experience with Windows Mobile. Atom has built a good record. Ion is on the way. There are now 7 or 8 SSD makers in the market. On the flip side, social networking and cloud computing of recent years have shown that a lot of what people do day to day is not done on the computer but on the web. More and more new battery technologies are coming online. All these add up to one thing: a new UMPC class smaller than a netbook but with bigger screen than a phone that will do the work of a computer, a PDA, and a phone. It could just be around the corner.
…. and I bet the first of this new class of devices has a name starts with a lowercase “i”….
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: device convergence
