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Hmm, may I suggest then, that you're perhaps the demographic that would appreciate Motorola's current “modular” approach, especially if extended to it's logical extent.
So, for your music player, you have some form of “dock” when the phone is merely providing the storage of MP3, ACC, FLAC, etc to be performed by some more elaborate hifi component. Likewise, the phone could be hooked up via HDMI to supply MP4's to be viewed on that large screen plasma.
Similarly, the tablet - downgrade it to a dumb touch screen that a phone docks into. There's already the Atrix's “laptop” dock.
What I'm getting at is that if someone puts their mind to it then there's a real possibility of “convergence”. In fact, the only exception I can think of so far is digital cameras, unless someone's going to come up with some Heath Robinson arrangement where a phone provides the processing power, storage and display/control for a “proper” camera, complete with decent optics?
And no, I don't work for Motorola!
It's an approach, sure, but if you're going to start having all sorts of ancillary devices, then it's not so much the phone that's the solution, but the mix.
Right now, phones are dominant, but we could argue that that's because they've got a hell of a head-start over, say, tablets.
What's to say that in, say 20 years, the tablet won't be the central device and the phone relegated to a “mobile” add-on? It'll still do all the things it does now, and no doubt, some we haven't done yet. But does it make sense to have the phone as the central hub of “personal infotech”, or does it make more sense to have it possessing only a limited sub-set of personal information, and perhaps, functions?
After all, any mobile device you carry around with you implies at least a couple of significant security risks, and the smaller it is, the bigger those risks. One such risk is losing it, another is simply leaving it laying about and losing data on it, and a third is getting mugged and having it taken from you. If it's a central point for personal infotech, that implies compromising data that needed be exposed to those risks, but it'd be smart to keep that to such stuff as is necessary to expose to such risks.
A sensible strategy might suggest that anything the phone has on it is because you
need the phone to have it on it, and anything that doesn't need to be on it isn't kept on it, but on something else. Maybe that's the tablet, because as a much bigger device it's more likely to be less useful mobile, so more exposed to those risks. And yeah, sure, people carry them in briefcases and use them on a train, but how many people will take a 7“ (let alone a 10”) tablet down to the pub for a boozy night, much less to a party? And if they do, it meeds to be pointed out to such sad individuals that their chances of pulling are likely to increase significantly if they leave the damn thing at home. ;)
At least part of my reservation is that some of the things that make a mobile phone so useful are also the things that compromise it so much, and one of then is screen-size.
I said earlier I'm not interested in watching movies on a mobile phone, and I'm not. Personally, I
will not do that. The screen is too small. If a movie is worth watching, I want it on a decent screen, and to be honest, I'm not interested in watching it on the average computer monitor, much less tablet and certainly not mobile phone. I want to be sat back in a comfortable chair, decent-sized screen, surround sound system on, and enjoy the full ambience. Otherwise, I'm not making the most of the movie. And if it's a movie that isn't worth watching, why bother watching it at all? I'll use my 90 minutes (or whatever) in other ways.
Maybe some people are happy to watch a movie on a phone. Not me. It's a waste of a good movie for me. I've been able to do that on portable devices I own for years, and never have, never will.
Similarly, SatNav. Yeah, you can get SatNav on phones, but I prefer a decent, dedicated unit, whether built-in to car (or car stereo), or a third-party device. Why? Mainly, screen size. I prefer a decent screen because I find it far easier to glimpse at a map schematic if it's on a large screen.
Cameras in phones? Well, they've come a long way, and can certainly give decent results in good light. But I've yet to see one that will give results up to a decent compact camera in low light, let alone an SLR. So as a keen photographer, the only benefit a camera in a phone has is for times when I don't have a proper camera with me. Useful? Yes. Essential? Nope.
My point? Convergence isn't
necessarily either always a good thing, or desirable. A phone with a screen large enough to be optimal, for me at least, for several of this type of function is compromised in it's most essential feature, that being portability.
And we need to bear in mind that this whole area, this whole arena, is still, well, if not a child then no better than a teenager. Markets, applications
and users mature over time. The fact that smart phones are so dominant, in their current form, right now, doesn't mean that that's what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years time. I'm old enough to remember when CDs first came out, and we thought that was the be-all and end-all, the ultimate. I remember replacing a car 8-track device with cassette tapes, and that was a revolution. I remember buying one of the first ever programmable calculators, and writing programs for it. This was many years before Apple released their first computer, much less i-anything. And home computers were, in those days, the realm of sci-fi movies and Tim Berners Lee was, like me, barely out of short trousers.
If there is a tendency to large levels of convergence (and my bet is that there will be), then it remains to be seen just how central the phone is. Maybe it'll be the very core, but it's too early to say. And regardless of what big companies say or think, the market has a habit of being …. unpredictable. ;) :D
