So I am one of the many waiting for the next iPhone - though, I have my doubts if I will really like it and am ready to go towards the Bold as well. Doesn’t matter - I have and will always have a smart phone.
I am going away for July 4th and since I am a workaholic I figure I will be taking my laptop. But then I got to thinking about how having a computer in my pocket could really help. Through this, my prediction of computing in general.
Best case scenario (and I know the iPhone won’t be out by then), I could bring an iPhone (type device) use a bluetooth keyboard (collapsible), wand with an HDMI plug, connect my from iPhone to a TV. Of course the iPhone would be smart enough to know I was using alternative inputs (possibly even use a mouse) and a different output and would adjust my experience appropriately. When I travel, all I need is quality email, Internet and some light word processing and spreadsheet work. I don’t need a laptop and this solution would give me everything I need when I travel.
Take this a little further, and this is my prediction for the future of computing. We will start seeing this in the next 3-5 years. My ‘phone’ will be my computer. It will house a combination of local storage, a processor and the ‘guts’ of my computing experience. It will have a service (like Apple’s mobileme service) that has access to all my data where ever I am with no fear of ‘losing my data’. My phone will have biometric security so losing it is irrelevant. now here is the kicker. When I drop my phone into my car dock, it will know where it is and it will act as my GPS, my entertainment center, etc.. When I drop it into my office environment it will know that I am focused on work productivity and when I bring it home it will manage my home entertainment center. With 3G (and 4g and wimax coming), local data storage is becoming far less important. Processor speeds for non bloated applications are pretty much already here in phones (notice how much faster your blackberry is in looking up names then outlook is), and people are comfortable with ‘portable computing’.
When you think of it this way, Apple getting into the phone business is not so much that they are getting into the phone business as them extending the mobile computing business in a way we have not yet thought of. I wonder if Apple (and others) are already building this???
