It’s been the clarion call for the technology industry for a few years now - “the future is mobile”.
It does indeed seem to be the case, with the stratospheric growth of smartphones, netbooks and mobile broadband, but there are still so many missing links. It seems none of these devices is really the “catch-all” that their makers want them to be. They’re close, and getting closer all the time, but still not quite there yet. This is a result of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at these devices and seeing what sticks.
Take the most fundamental usage of these devices - being a mobile phone. Does this new generation of smartphones do this better than the previous generation? Not really. Battery life is worse, call quality seems to have been sidelined and the user interface hasn’t been tailored to that application. It’s just one more thing these devices can do. My old Nokia 3310 that I used nearly 10 years ago had better call quality and far, far better battery life than an iPhone. The phone navigation was intuitive (you could easily operate it without even looking) and it had a tactile quality these multi-purpose devices lack.
What we have to bear in mind is that my old Nokia was a product of evolutionary development - as far removed from the likes of the old Motorola DynaTAC as the iPhone is from the Apple Newton, with multiple generations and innovations coming to fruition. The current generation of mobile über-devices is still at an early stage of evolutionary development, and, fantastic that they already are, still have a level of maturity to reach. With the advent of haptics, soon these devices will have the tactile feedback we’ve gotten used to with our old phones. New battery technology (possibly even fuel cell technology) will address battery life concerns, and 4G mobile broadband technologies should address concerns about call quality and data speed, not to mention other innovations that we haven’t even conceived of yet.
Sure, I could carry around a mobile phone, a netbook, a 3G USB modem, a GPS sat-nav, a portable video player, a digital radio and an iPod, but I’d rather not weigh my pockets down with so many gadgets. I’m all for just having the catch-all device, and the day will come when we look back on the iPhone the same way we look back at the DynaTAC now.