I’ve been talking to various folks in California for a week about http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer . The reaction is almost entirely predictable based on the listener’s level of technical expertise. “Nobody will ever want that,” says the typical 50-year-old Silicon Valley veteran. “I would buy that right now. My Microsoft PocketPC Phone already does everything that I want and need. I just want a bigger screen and keyboard,” says a corporate lawyer (he charges about $600 per hour and presumably can buy whatever he wants). The teenage girls in the hotel hot tub, one of whom was actually talking on a cell phone while in the tub, were enthusiastic about the idea. Setting up and maintaining a home PC was for the losers and geeks.
6 thoughts on “SmartPhone + Dock idea reactions”
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I think the “if this becomes popular, we’re all screwed, because the machines that do the things WE want to do wouldn’t be mass-marketed anymore and would thus stop being cheap” notion is a large part of the reason techies would hate the idea.
I saw the PARC presentation and read the article. I would be interested in such a device IF:
-The computer is cheap enough (say $200 or effectively $200 due to subsidies from carrier) that I have no qualms chucking it when I switch service providers (most people probably hate their cell phone carrier more than Microsoft).
-I can take my data with me to the next phone (i.e. your mirroring mechanism is based on an industry standard and not crippled by phone vendors).
-Carrier does not cripple computer to maximize revenue (they like you to send things like photos and MP3 files over cell phone waves instead of direct to your computer, because they can charge you
On the other hand, a teenaged girl may be content to lose all her computer data every two years because her email is all on Gmail and her writing is already uploaded to MySpace and her music is on her iPod.
Philip, were you actually in a hot tub with a number of teenage girls? If so, we who are techies salute you!
How about giving the appliance a second ethernet port and, optionally, one or more DVI inputs?
I very much like the idea of phone+PIN (or similar) as a user’s portable, private home-directory and authentication slug.
The extra Appliance features would let us make little Appliance buses and bricks other than cell phones. I could have an iPod-like brick that provides fast NAS (this generalizes and could replace your swappable hard drives). If I’m a CAD-using engineer or video-editor, I might have one or more compute-server bricks that don’t or (or are slow) when not actually plugged in but that are very portable, solid-state commodities, and that can just jack into my appliance.
DVI input(s) on the Appliance, along with a windowing system that can mux them, let’s me have graphics engine bricks or digital-video receiver bricks.
Cheap bricks should mostly expose themselves on the net over port-80 and maybe that’s a way to bootstrap the idea through at least the “compelling demo” stage. On one end, configure a prototype appliance (not much more is needed than GNU/Linux running firefox on a stock PC). In the middle, a “fudge PC” that compensates for today’s phones not being quite ready for this. My impression is that at least *some* phones can be driven from a PC well enough for the PC to act as a proxy for the SmartPhone(tm) version of the same phone. Perhaps identify a couple of hackable phones that allow some kind of hackable storage (maybe MP3 downloads or something) and use the fudge to disguise that as storage for email. Demoable, at least.
-t
Hmm. I gather this blog-which-lacks-a-preview button wants HTML markup but doesn’t say so?
<tt>-t</tt>
Yep, like all “appliance computing” plays, this sucks for hobbyist, inventor hackers. Because what will we develop *new* stuff on? The reason that the computer industry thrives is *because* there are cheap *generic*, programmable computers so widely available.
A business where computers are appliances is the game-console one, where development kit is priced for professionals, and software has to be released through gatekeepers.