Design

I really thought I’d be able to resist bloviating about the iPad. But then I read this tweet from Jared Spool:

Is nobody else talking about the iPad’s interesting facet? It brings the gap between phone & computer manufacturers closer together.

It got pushed to his Facebook as an update, where I flippantly responded:

And that’s a good thing why?? :-)

Graciously, Jared ignored my dumbass comment and persisted, writing this:

Seriously, I think there’s going to be some really interesting synthesis here. Nokia, LG, and Motorola really haven’t done anything scaled up before. The laptop & netbook players haven’t gone this small.

The competition will be interesting. Of course, there will be a lot of crap produced. (It’s Sturgeon’s Law.) But, there will be some really interesting innovations.

All because Apple had the balls to try something nobody else had done before. I think that’s the most significant part of all this….

(And here’s a question: How will Google respond? After all, they have Android on the low end and Chromium on the high end, but neither will really talk to each other.)

His follow-up got me to thinking. I didn’t respond point-by-point to his last comments, but his points helped me to suddenly sharpen my thinking and spin out a scenario in which tablets aren’t the wave of the future, but phones will continue to be.

So below I present to you my reasoning for why and how tablets are at best a diversion, and the real innovation will continue to happen with handsets. Read on for yet another opinion on the future of computing.

I agree with what you’re saying J. But my thinking is that until we have a truly convertible handheld-slash-desktop (and mobile computing) solution, the gap will continue to be a chasm into which product after product will fall into.

Now I’m not the most visionary person in the world, but it seems to me that the big, latent, unmet needs are this:

1. I need a mobile device that fits in my pocket, that allows me to do [pretty much what the iPhone, Android, and BB handsets do].
2. I need a computing device that gives me my familiar input devices (read: keyboard and pointing device), gives me access to my apps and content, and provides a large enough viewing area so I can work productively.

Notice that I didn’t say “contains my apps and content.” That was intentional. It doesn’t take a tech visionary to see that both our apps AND our content are migrating to the cloud.

Anecdotally, I can affirm that I am mighty tired of “curating” the content on my hard disks. I’d rather that stuff just lives in, is accessible from, and gets backed up in the cloud. And I WILL pay money for that. So, long story long, you’re right, the iPad comes close. But I think the real opportunity is this:

1. My phone-like mobile device does it’s thing while I’m mobile.
2. When I need to sit somewhere and work, I dock it. Then it pushes (at the VERY least) 1280×800 to an LCD, and automagically connects to my keyboard and mouse, to my suite of apps (wherever they may live – Office Live, Google Apps, whatever), and to my content. (And of course it brings up all my social interfaces.)

Obviously, handsets don’t have the horsepower to do this…yet. But they will. It’s clear that current PC architectures have massively oversolved for the computing horsepower problem, and if you’ve read any Clayton Christensen you know this is a scenario that’s ripe for disruption by a “good enough” solution that addresses the market’s new value dimensions.

Netbooks are an ongoing attempt to serve these new dimensions of value, but they’re constrained by having to run either bloated legacy OS’s or not-ready-for-primetime Linux distros. Plus, they don’t serve as  phones very well. Imagine holding one up to your ear… it’s like Maxwell Smart with a shoe to his head.

And you probably noticed I didn’t address the “how do I work productively when I’m mobile?” scenario. I’ll grant you that. But it’s certainly not an impossibility…I can envision a netbook form factor device with a big-@ss slot for receiving – you guessed it – my mobile phone-slash-computing engine.

So, to sum up:

1. You’re right, things are getting interesting, and
2. If product makers can make the phone the bearer of CPU horsepower, connectivity, and OS, then everything else becomes a terminal that the phone docks to or slides into.

And I’m adding here that this last point is what makes tablets superfluous.

Thoughts?

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