The perfect phone
For the last ten years, one of the electronic's industry's catch phrases is "convergence." This means the growing-together of gadgetry, presumably into some super-gizmo that does everything. To this end, we've seen untold numbers of hybrid devices. TVs, phones, digital music players, PDAs, laptop computing devices and cameras are all jumbled together. Somewhere you can find almost every possible combination. Want to watch TV on your phone? No problem. Want to talk on the phone from your TV? We can do that.
So where does it end? What would be the perfect gadget(s) that we'd carry?
Let's start by looking at what it needs to do:
- It should authenticate the user for financial transactions
- It should record multimedia (video, pictures and sound)
- It should be a communicator, whatever that might mean in the future (IM, phone, email, etc.)
- It should be a sensor like the old Star Trek tricorder, reading out temperature, humidity, Internet presence, whatever
- It should be a custodian of one's personal knowledge, containing photographs, resume, you know, personal stuff
- It should be an entertainment device, capable of playing games, movies, music
- It should be an electronic assistant, helping with scheduling and phone number look-ups
- It should a library, capable of answering any question from the mundane like movie times to the historic like Wikipedia
- It should be someone's digital skeleton key controlling all interaction with the digital world. This could include things like remote control functions as well as being a door pass.
There's a lot of stuff here, but if someone could build one, I"d buy it. I suspect that technology has arrived to do so. Display screens such as the video iPod's, coupled with a GSM phone and Palm pilot functionality could handle a lot of this.
Posted on April 13, 2006
