http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer details an idea for giving a Joe Consumer the illusion that his smartphone is his only computer but still providing him with 99 percent of the function of a home PC that would otherwise need to be separately administered, upgraded, etc.
Comments would be appreciated as I’m going to talk about this at Xerox PARC in a month or so.
I’d suggest borrowing a few features from 3COM’s ill-fated Audrey (an object lesson in the fact that if something does less than a PC, it can’t cost more than one):
A big bright LED that blinks when you’ve received email, or when it’s the night before the third Tuesday of the month and you need to put the garbage out. Of course this would be synchronized with the phone when it’s not plugged in. Maybe even different colors for different household members or types of events.
A stylus or touchscreen interface, which seems to be less confusing to technophobes than a mouse.
Living-room-, or at least kitchen-compatible looks and form factor.
Also, why not connect wirelessly to a nearby phone with Bluetooth?Maybe you’d have to scribble your initials on the screen to assure your phone that you’re the one in front of the Appliance, but this would remove one step from the process.
For Joe Consumer, it might be better if the Appliance was some sort of definitely-not-a-PC apparatus, running something that looked absolutely nothing like Windows or GNU/KDE/whatever.
A few years ago, standalone email stations weren’t popular. They still aren’t. They were a total flop, as far as I have seen. But I think the base concept was good.
More successful are bank ATMs. Wells Fargo ATMs now run on some form of Windows (they have since earlier this year), but it looks nothing like Windows. The entire interface is custom-designed to function explicitly as an ATM. I imagine that some ATM technician may know how to turn this off and get back to the underlying Windows interface, but Joe Banker never needs to see that.
Much of the fundamental Windows interface seems to assume that you are using your computer for general purpose computing, want to install your own apps and search for files in the disks and what-not in a reasonably traditional way.
For the Appliance, either start afresh with a new OS, or totally cover it up with an interface designed to do explicitly what you want it to; no more, no less. If you need to add new functionality, then it’s a (free) OS upgrade at the hands of the service provider.
Trevis’s comparison of your PhoneTerm to ATMs makes no sense to me. An ATM has a numerical keypad and a few special function keys — of course it lacks a Start Menu button and other Windows accoutrements. The email machine was a horrible concept; it was built for a company to charge a monthly service fee (the Holy Grail for all right-thinking MBAs), and not for the consumer or from the perspective of the consumer.
I reject the notion that tablet interfaces work better. They take a beating and look like a ’76 Ford pickup driven down Chicago’s Edens every day of its life. Only, it has taken the Ford a decade or more for rust to show and the tablet’s screen will look like Ron Karkovice’s face inside 90 days. Also, they’re difficult to use if you don’t have steady hands.
Philip, I love the idea of a portable device as you have presented. I like the station as you have described: my data belongs to me in a physical form (hard drives) and my device can be used at any like station. It allows me to dump my provider and phone, and then switch to another carrier without much barrier.
I don’t know about you but I have switched carriers many times. For the most part, they are all equally mediocre. That’s the biggest issue for me and your term — the present providers use lawyers (hope you did a thorough patent search), political action committees, and laws to prevent innovations (read competition). These guys do not compete with designers and engineers. Would great designers and engineers ever work for telcos anymore?
I’m sure just about everyone would love to see a new GUI. A GUI with taste and functionality, a GUI that makes sense.
I’m an old Windows SysAdmin, and I know how frustrating XP can be to keep running. At the firm, we spend a lot of money on our firewall, virus protection, backups, and email protection. And, we re-install XP every spring. I don’t know how home users deal with Windows’ complexities and vulnerabilities — my family uses Macs so I don’t have to bring my work home.
I honestly wish you the best. A lot of us would like to have fun with computers again.
You might want to read this editorial by S. Keshav titled “Why Cell Phones Will Dominate the Future Internet,” published in ACM Computer Communications Review. Keshav is pretty convincing, and I think he is right: the cell phone will be the future of computing for most people.
http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/05/cellphonev3.pdf
If I understand this correctly, you’re talking about an appliance that sits at home plugged into a wall, not a portable notebook-ish thing. I think people would probably prefer not to give up the mobility which is the whole point of mobile phones. I don’t know what difficulties you would run into trying to fit 2 monster hard drives in a portable machine, but apparently they haven’t stopped laptops from outselling desktops in recent years.
You could even have different interfaces for it for different purposes, like some wearable appliance that you plug your phone into, and a different appliance in your car. Imagine getting maps and updates on traffic and listening to music in the front while the kids play Gore Blood Wars XII in the backseat. That’s pretty far from your original idead, but it would appeal to geeky early adopters, helping solve one of your objections.
Also, it might be worth considering getting rid of the disks altogether and selling the customers on a 3G network. You would then get space on disks administered by professional geeks and never worry about backups again. This has three advantages – lower initial price of the appliance, getting into a new market (ISP), no backup hassles or disk failures for the users, and smaller, cooler, less bulky appliances (OK, that’s four). If they can get the price (currently $80/month at Verizon, I think) down to a reasonable level, it would be fast enough for anyone who isn’t a bittorrent-obsessed movie pirate (and upcoming 4G networks will be fast enough even for them, but that’ll be awhile). I wouldn’t like it, but I doubt that Joe LateAdopter has 400GB of pirated files that he doesn’t want to have to stream.
Finally, I don’t see the point of including a cable modem and a DSL modem – the cable or phone company gives you one anyway and they probably won’t want to support the one that comes with the appliance. In fact, judging from my experiences with SBC, I doubt support people would even talk to you if you didn’t run their modem.
There has to be at least one unique feature. I suggest some sort of projection display that allows you to project (for maybe 5 seconds at a time) what is on your screen to any reasonably flat surface like a wall. This would allow you to show your buddy or boss a document or a picture. An inexpensive LED bulb or two plus the ability to project 640×480 if that, is all that is needed.
rps: Replacing a laptop computer might be a good idea but it is a different idea than this proposal, which is to replace the desktop computer. The point of including the cable and DSL modems is so that the consumer doesn’t have to deal with unfamiliar cables and configuration. As for whether the phone company will support it, they ought to since they are the ones providing the mobile phone, the Appliance, and the DSL service (consider Verizon as a typical carrier for this product).
Trevis: We can run Linux or WinXP underneath without the consumer noticing. I think sticking to WinXP user interface conventions is a good idea for a lot of things, e.g., “click right to get options to apply to this object” because even people who don’t own computers have probably used Windows.
Evan: Thanks for the link to the Keshav article. I am basically saying the same thing except that I’d like people who are at home with their mobile phones to have the same capabilities of a standard PC (big screen, full-size keyboard, etc.).
PatrickG: The projector does seem like a good idea and the meta-idea also seems good (make it do one thing that existing mid-priced PCs cannot do).
I believe there are existing USB storage devices (eg key chains) that contain all your regular programs and files. The idea is that you carry this along with you and whenever you need access to your stuff, you plug it into a computer and it will ‘boot’ you into your own environment. The next stop might be to combine this with a cellphone.
You may appreciate my comment, for what it’s worth, because I’m coming more from a non-users perspective. As much as I love new technologies, etc., I have not been impressed with the Treo, Ipac, Palm, devices simply because I don’t think they perfom enough to warrant me going out and spending that kind of money only to have to buy a new one the next year.
My brother and dad are totally into these new devices and seems like they buy a newer, upgraded one every year. And I know more about and use more technology than both of them combined.
So my input for you is not so much hardware based, but more consumer based. I’m a businessman by nature and can’t help but think of things in those terms.
I like your idea, actually. I like the idea of making things simple. Plug and play is the key here. People don’t have time to learn a new technolgy and how something new works. They would prefer to build off of prior knowledge and just run with something. I love your idea of someone being able to plug their device into the Appliance in any location. When I go to my friend’s house and I need to use the phone (land line), I just pick it up and start dialing, I don’t ask how to use or wonder if the phone is going to allow me to make the call. I think that is the idea you’ve got with this concept. People should be able to just use this new device from any location and with very little restricttions.
That’s my take on it for now. I would love to give more input, if you think it valid. I play a good devil’s advocate.
-rwbana
Some things I am missing:
The phone talking to your Appliance over the wireless network and ADSL while you are out to pickup/sync things you might need.
802.11 (or Bluetooth) in the phone connecting to the appliance to do the above when you just have it at home, not plugged in.
Even though they exposed MORE of the file system with OS X than with “Classic”, I think the most likely company to be able to provide this kind of OS and software to go with it is Apple, not IBM or Microsoft. The problem with building it on open source is that a) Mac OS’s GUI or Windows are not open source and b) the open sore called X Windows sucks and should have been killed in the most horific way imaginable when people decided to put a GUI on Linux over a decade ago.
That means you will have to start from scratch, with a GUI API that works on both the phone and the Appliance, unlike todays solution where two completely different technologies are supposed to work together. It will take a long time to develop something like this.
Trevis: Most ATMs seem to run Windows these days. (like train station or cinema ticket machines) But not some unrecognizable version; the ATM is just a full screen app, most likely IE in “kiosk mode”, as you can tell every time you try to get money out but are greeted with a “VB Runtime Error” or even a Blue Screen of Death. Or when they all go down because they are infected with a virus.
The move to mobile is powerful, but your essay reminds me in many ways of a number of similar essays that seem to make sense but which turn out to be wrong in their predictions. For example, the network computer makes the same sort of sense in terms of cost of sysadmin, efficient use of resources, roamability etc. but no campaign by Larry Ellison and Sun and the rest ever got it to be more than a blip in the market. Video-on-demand streamed from the network has been a dream for decades, and some people have it, but it turned out having a dedicated computer like the Tivo at home was what people wanted, in spite of it being inferior in many ways.
Key problems here are the walled-garden business plans of mobile carriers. They provide everything the carrier thinks you want to buy. PCs do everything, they belong to the owner, not the ISP. If somebody decides to code Skype on the PC, they can do it, and millions can run it. Carriers on the other hand do everything they can to block it because it threatens their own plans. Worse than that, they simply take the “If we haven’t blessed it, it’s not permitted” approach, which goes far beyond the “If we don’t block it, it’s permitted” approach. People suspect stronly that IMS is going to result in one of these two nasty categories of platform, probably the former. (Though some feel IMS is the path to your vision.)
The carrier subsidy of cell phones has been a blessing and curse. The small blessing has been that people toss aside old cell phones faster, so you don’t have as much legacy stuff out there. But mostly it’s a curse, people don’t control their phones.
In the UK we have a device from Amstrad which is a home (wired) phone system which does email, video calling, etc. I mention it for a few reasons. Firstly, it is very cheap to buy
Philg, I imagine a machine having 1GB of static memory running something like PalmOS on steroids. I am not sure if you can ever get rid of the file menu in XP. I am not a big fan of PalmOS, pen-input, cell phones, small displays or tiny buttons in general, but I do like two things: 1) instant power-on and 2) no need to save.
I used a Treo on the sprint network for a few years. I enjoyed using it, but I eventually dropped it due to high data transfer fees and sprints pricing policies.
The great things about it were high functionality with a set of built in applications, a web browser, synchronization with a pc, downloadable games and plenty of third party applications.
The downsides were a small screen, incomplete browser functionality (just try finding directions on MapQuest), annoying thumbscript data entry, loss of data, short battery life and the high cost of data
transfer over the sprint network.
If a phone were to meet my requirements, without a pc to connect to, then it would need longer battery life, more stable memory, a large screen ability that I could access anywhere, convenient data entry, full web browser compatibility, connection to a source of secure data storage.
In addition this handheld would have to be completely independent of a single data transport provider to allow me to choose the least costly data transport in the location that I am in.
This last one is a killer. Cellular phone companies are pretty aggressive in locking out any means of data transport other than their own networks. My current provider doesn’t even provide cables and synchronization sotware because they want to accrue data charges for all transfers.
Oh yeah, and my selection of data tranport (WiFi, Bluetooth, 2g, 2.5g, 3g, etc…) should be secure and not allow any backdoor access to my handheld.
Good Luck!
The discussion of “folders” bothered me. Quote: “The mainframe had a hierarchical file system in which files were divided up into folders.” No, mainframes had “directories”, which were a way of looking up files, not a container for them. Thinking of such lists as “folders” that “contain” files was a PC-era improvement. On the flip side, mainframes had a concept of “current working directory” – when you logged in you were in a particular assigned directory without having to choose or locate one. If you saved a file you did /not/ have to pick a directory, you just had to give the file a name and by default it would go into your current working directory, which never changed unless /you/ changed it. So routinely losing track of where various programs are saving your files is a new problem of the Windows era, not an old problem ported from the mainframe era.
Regarding the overall paper, I would mostly rethink the “What must it do?” section and try to make it clearer exactly what problem you’re trying to solve. Here’s what I hear you saying:
(1) PCs are really complicated and flexible, able to do a great many things but hard to use.
(2) Consumers /currently/ tend to do tasks X,Y, and Z on PCs, but find PCs frustrating.
(3) A device that was designed /only/ to do tasks X,Y, and Z might be simpler to use than a full computer.
One problem is that what people want to do on PCs changes over time, so your device will only be optimal for usage patterns as of one historical moment. (Unless it’s as flexible as a PC, in which case it’ll tend to get crufty like one.) Another problem is that what you’re proposing doesn’t seem simple /enough/. Although “consumers” as a group want to do tasks X, Y, and Z, any particular user only has a couple of things they want to do. A dedicated email device or a dedicated web browser is inherently simpler than a general-purpose computer. If you try to do everything a full computer does, it’ll be nearly as complex as a computer.
Looking at the “what must it do?” list, I repeatedly wondered “why?” Why must it do this /particular/ set of things? What’s driving those requirements? Why is “watch a DVD” a requirement given that most people have DVD players at home? Why is “write a CD” a requirement given the existence of iPods and music-playing cellphones? Why is playing DVD-based games a requirement given how cheap, convenient, ubiquitous, and functional console game machines are?
If you drop the CD/DVD-related requirements, the device gets much smaller, cheaper, and simpler. You can use an older video card, the video card doesn’t have to be upgradable, and you don’t need a CD/DVD writer/reader (perhaps it could be an optional accessory).
Even with that change, it’s not quite clear to me what you’re trying to do that you couldn’t do atop a standard Mac or PC laptop (Mac would be easier since it already solves the virus and user permission issues) with relatively minor modifications to the system software. Maybe this is a software project rather than a hardware project.
FYI-This idea is being discussed over at slashdot.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/25/1445212&tid=184
I have to agree that computers are too complex. I constantly have to adjust settings for my family. On vacation I had to tell one brother-in-law that his wireless settings were conflicting with the two other neighbors. One cousin of my wife’s I had to re-setup wireless because she could not get support from the school or Quest to get it right. Definitely I agree that 90%-99% of users are not system administrators.
Ditching the file and folder concept would be a big plus. I cannot believe that Microsoft Windows Xp/CE/.net will be able to cut it. Windows is know as a virus magnet and even windows ce has viruses already.
Microsoft has so much cash they can buy or destroy any commercial company that tries to take away the monopoly they have on the OS market and office software.
For the immediate issues I believe all home users should use Mac computers until a simpler appliance exists Linux is too complex unless the phone company simplifies it and makes the local machine an X terminal. If not X then some other efficient presentation manager.
Smart cards should be used more here in the states like they are used in Europe.
I think it is cool that the Japanese have a model similar to Philip’s idea. As a Windows Network administrator I do understand that this new idea could eliminate my job.
Check out the Bill Joy interview on NerdTV (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/), he mentions PC evolution at some point in the interview. I’m not a great fan of WinXP and the user interface must be made to work on the phone, which I feel is something that needs work. Basically if you think that you put Windows onto a phone and voila, you have the “new PC” then you’re thinking way too 90s 🙂
Incidentally, the sort of people who find it difficult to “administer and upgrade” a PC don’t tend to buy smartphones. If they buy a cellphone at all, they get one that’s just a phone. In fact, people often find it /harder/ to administer a cellphone (or a VCR, or any other limited-interface device) than a computer; the extra screen real estate, mouse, keyboard, and memory generally makes hard tasks easier. Recent anecdote: one of my best friends, age 37, can confidentally use a computer but has never figured out how to check his voicemail…
For this to be successful, the following pre-requisites would have to be met:
1. Ability to easily hook up to larger screen (be it TV or larger monitor). The mechanics/protocol not important other than it’s simple enough for the average owner to do without having to struggle with it.
2. Quality construction, a device that lasts several years. Unfortunately, most of the PDA and cellphone offerings (not all cellphones, I’ve had marvelous fortune with Nokia phone durability) fail miserably in this regard.
3. Simple UI, easy to use most of the common features. Again, something not true with most of the handheld devices in existence today.
4. Mistaken model to “replace desktop, not laptop”, as the trend of late has been lots of folks replacing desktops with laptops — especially considering the mobility and getting connected nature if one does any traveling.
“As far as the consumer is aware, the only computer that he or she owns is the handheld mobile phone. The Appliance is a means of driving the phone from a full-size keyboard and display.”
Interesting design, but it seems like overkill for the stated problem. Why bother with a PC at all, considering how powerful cell phones are becoming? Why not treat the cell phone as an ultra-small laptop–provide a docking station that you can plug a full-size monitor and keyboard into?
It won’t be able to play DVDs or video games, but you can use specialized equipment ($40 DVD players, $200 video game consoles) for that.
By the way, if the phone could act as a USB host, I presume it’d be possible to plug a CD or DVD burner into it. I don’t know of any phones which have this capability yet, but some handheld PDAs do–for example, the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 has a USB host port.
I like your concept, especially the part when you use someone else appliance pretty much as your own, with your phone. But I really don’t get the part about the 2 disks in mirroring.
Have you read Cringely article about back up being hard to do, in this articles http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040909.html he talks about Baxter, a hypothetic P2P backup system. If you extrapolate that this system is installed on the appliance, you get much better backup and easy operation. What I would see is a disks separated in two parts. The first part is the Baxter shared space where files from every appliance on the web are shared. The second part is a local cache for the content I’m working with and what I’ve used recently so I’m not too dependent of the web.
Now you could use your phone as the key and any appliance for editing all of your files, your backup would be safer and easier than USB storage.
Your description of the early/late adopter problem is good, but your solution is circular. How do we make users want an Appliance? We convince the cable/DSL/mobile providers to give them one for free! Why will the providers do this? Because it will help them attract more users! Why? Because users want an Appliance!
What is the incentive for the phone or cable company to provide Appliances? It’s hard to believe that there are very many people who would happily shell out $30 to $50 a month for an Internet connection, yet are unwilling to spend a few hundred bucks on a Dell or a Mac Mini. But, if these people do exist, the provider can always offer them standard, cheap, off-the-shelf PCs. It’s not as if the provider really cares whether its customers can find their files, or if their computers have viruses. All they want is the $30 per month, and an excuse to forward all the tech support requests to Microsoft or Apple. And the customer’s won’t demand an Appliance instead of a PC unless they know the advantage of Appliances, which requires solving the early/late adopter problem…
Meanwhile, the problem with the Appliance — like the network computer before it — is that the death of the general-purpose PC is greatly exaggerated. If I’d bought a network computer from Oracle back in the 1990s, I might still have a working Web browser, but I might not have an MP3 library, BitTorrent, or an RSS reader — these features might be missing, broken, two years late, or disabled until I pay an additional fee. Kazaa, Limewire, and eDonkey are overwhelmingly popular, even with neophytes — will the Appliance support them? Will the Appliance run Tivo’s Home Media server, so that I can share my TV programs around the house and burn any of my shows to DVD? Will it run the software that backs up DVD movies to video? Will its music software rip audio to open, DRM-free formats? Will it support the software that can turn my CD audio into ringtones? Will it run the Internet-telephony software of my choice, despite the wishes of the telephone company that is leasing it to me? And will the provider promise not to quietly remove existing features from my Appliance in the dead of night (as both Apple and Tivo have done in recent months)?
The general-purpose PC lives on because it is ultimately controlled by its user, not by some service provider with an agenda. Sooner or later, PCs will be replaced by Appliances, but I expect the process to take another decade or more, because the technology industry must first abandon its attempts to actively undermine the goals and desires of its customers. Articles like this one — about how Sprint and Verizon are refusing to support the iTunes phone, because they want to force their subscribers to pay for their music all over again in order to play it back through a phone — make me wonder if I’ll be dead before a Sprint- or Verizon-branded Appliance becomes a smart thing to buy.
Totally agree with Russil. I used to be a programmer that needed all that computing power but now that I’m a road warrior consultant, I basically use 5 apps (in order of importance): Outlook, Internet Explorer, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. I think that’s a very typical usage pattern for business people out there. The ability to plug a cell phone instead of a laptop in a standard ubiquitous workstation with screen and keyboard (i.e. airports, starbucks would have them) would free people from having to lug a big laptop through security (take it out of the bag, and put it in a bin). Business users, can’t (shouldn’t) have personal content on their work machine so the ability to play movies, music etc. is not relevant. That what personal ipods, dvdplayers are for.
You would be amazed at how many people prefer to send email from their blackberry even though they have a perfectly functioning pc.
Aargh, that’s “customers”, not “customer’s”. I apologize for that. Life without a preview button is painful for perfectionists like myself…
More thoughts:
It makes sense to believe that businesses, schools, and other entities who don’t care to support games, music, or Internet phones would buy an Appliance. But this argument also made sense the last time it was made, by Larry Ellison and the other people who tried to sell network computers to businesses and schools. They didn’t succeed.
I’m guessing that the problem with the network computer concept was, and is, Microsoft Office. Companies are wedded to Office, and once you commit to supporting Office you’re committed to providing something that’s nearly identical to a generic Windows PC. At that point, the money you save by buying a machine and a support contract from the Appliance Corporation, instead of a generic Dell PC and a support contract from an independent sysadmin, may be too small to matter. It’s like the difference between the eighth and ninth circles of Hell.
But there may be some life in the educational market for Appliances. I don’t think Larry Ellison sold that many network computers to schools, either, but machines are cheaper now than they used to be, schools are notoriously bad at system administration, and educators have had more time to figure out that “educational” software on CD-ROM is a complete waste of time — all students need is a browser and email (which can be Web-based). Because they don’t need to exchange documents with lawyers, customers, or other divisions of their company, students can use simpler, open-source spreadsheets and word processors — which might even be equipped with an Alan Cooper-style interface. A machine which can’t play Minesweeper or Solitare might help keep kids focused on their schoolwork. And the mobile-phone providers might become excited by the prospect of selling phones to entire classes of fourth-graders at once…
I had a vaguely related idea, but more about divvying up laptop functionality than phone.
Given how much flash RAM Apple has been buying from Samsung recently, though, I would not be so surprised if they`re already thinking along these lines. But who knows…
I guess it’d be pretty hard to do a one-hour talk about a docking station….
If you’re looking for suggestions, I’d talk about three options, with each option assuming an increasing amount of computing power in the cell phone:
(1) Connect the cell phone to a standard PC (presumably using Bluetooth). The cell phone is just a peripheral.
(2) The Appliance idea. Customer doesn’t need to administer the PC.
(3) Get rid of the PC entirely, and just use a docking station.
LCD contact lenses and voice recognition, that’s the way to go 🙂
Oh and in response to Mr. Booth’s comment, OpenOffice is a MS Office clone and is 100% compatable and free 🙂
I just read an article by Peter Cofee in eweek.
It was striking that he felt being unable to continue a conversation while checking his phone directory was a major limitation on using a pda/phone…
Huh? Has he missed out on the whole ear-bud phenomenon, or is he unwilling to be seen as some nut case walking around talking to himself.
Anyhow, it and Jeremy’s comments get me to thinking about interface… Sure, the earbud is handy, but what about the whole implanted speaker/microphone? Or glasses with a heads-up display? I would have thought that these things would be widely available by now…
It would sure be dreamy to be able to stroll around, viewing a big-screen (tastefully overlaid on the ‘real’ scene in front of me), interacting with it by whispering to myself and transfering required information from remote servers to the local device while drifting from one available (maybe even lowest cost) network to another…
sigh…
I think cell phones are awful. This idea sounds good but until someone somewhere is able to develop a mobile with an ‘amazingly great’ UI concept it is useless to move beyond. Nokia does ok, but even their more advanced phones are terrible to use. I can’t even begin to imagine how many keystrokes and styles taps it would take to do something on a Motorola ‘appliance.’
I suppose that we are a ways off from having a handheld that provides all peripherials itself, contains adequate non-volatile ram for storage and performs all backups and updates over wireless service…
In that case I suppose that the best choise for a base station should be based on a common processor to help enable software compatability. My vote would be to go with an ARM based system, check out this offering based on xscale(arm core)
http://www.iyonix.com/
It uses both a proprietary (os5?) and Linux based operating system, has broad software support (even reads and writes MS files) and handles most of the hardware that Philip wants.
The system would have to be widely accepted, provide automatic updates, synchronize seamlessly and coordinate itself with many different cell phone networks… challenging to say the least…
I think that the greatest challenge would be to get the cell phone providers to adopt an architecture that would forsake their wireless networks when possible to conenct over a land line.
I doubt people would trust it as a primary computing device unless you abandoned the cell-service business model. People may not be attached to their hardware or software or even service providers, but they are very attached to their DATA. Your proposal sounds to me very much like changing cell phone providers would become equivalent to going into the Witness Protection Program…one’s entire identity is tied to a pair of devices which become useless and must be replaced the moment he wishes to stop renewing his contract with one carrier and switch to another.
Network Computers didn’t fail because people were in love with installing applications on their hard drives. NCs failed because people care too much about their data to leave it in the hands of a vendor.
I would honestly take greater risks with my life than with my data.