THE unspoken agenda at this week's annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Florida, was the showcasing of more ways that phones can replace computers.
The mobile migration from desktop and laptop computers to smartphones is well underway.
We've already seen desktop computers take a backseat to laptops in terms of sales, especially in the consumer space.
Netbooks have since been introduced, scaling laptop-like computers to their smallest functional size ever.
The next step is for your mobile phone to become the centre of your computing universe. It's already replaced just about every other gadget.
First came the wristwatch, something you needed to tell the time with until primitive cellular phones enabled that functionality, shortly after making your desk phone theoretically defunct.
Since then the mobile smartphone has gone on to offer the functionality of alarm clocks, pagers, point-and-shoot pocket cameras, media players, GPS units, PDA devices and even portable gaming consoles.
Whereas before you would need separate gadgets for all these things, now all you need is your mobile phone. It may not do as good a job as the separate device yet, but it will.
And your computer is next.
Projection technology
The largest stumbling block is offering input and output functionality that requires physical size.
In particular; the screen on your phone is too small, for example, to replace your desk computer for spread-sheeting, and its keyboard will not allow for the speed and ease with which you type on a larger device.
But these problems are being solved in a variety of ways. For one, technology that will project a full-size screen onto the nearest surface and is small enough to fit into a large cellphone is already here. Even more impressive technology will project a full-sized keyboard onto the table in front of you, or other images that can be interacted with.
At the recent Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference held in California, Pattie Mae from MIT showed a device that can hang around your neck and uses projection technology for a variety of functions.
Make a square with your fingers and use it to frame something in front of you and the device will take a picture of the framed area.
Open up a book in front of you and it will project information on the title such as reviews and customer comments from Amazon.com onto the inside-front cover.
Draw a circle on your arm and the device will project a watch there. The list goes on.
In the shorter term, however, it is possible that people will simply connect their phones to monitor and input devices on their desks at home and work.
The point is that the phone is becoming the computer, irrespective of how you interface with it.
Smartphones now boast processors more capable than what was available in full-blown computers just five years ago.
With cloud computing they can be used to interface with large and resource-hungry applications, running on servers in a data centre somewhere.
LTE, the fourth generation mobile broadband standard, and other wireless technologies are bringing broadband internet connections to mobile phones that eclipse what you can currently install at home or in the office in South Africa.
Mobile migration race
And at the very front of the curve are companies like BlackBerry, Nokia and Apple, the latter of which is set to introduce a new product in the mobile migration race at its worldwide developer conference in June.
Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, is one of the spearheads of this movement, whether he admits it or not. His company is 25 years old this year and has sold 50 million BlackBerry devices, 26 million of which were sold in the last year.
Lazaridis had the foresight, even in the early days of mobile telephony, to see where this was all going and practically brought email to mobile devices with his company's early DataTAC products at the turn of the millennium.
It was IBM that is commonly held as the inventor of the smartphone, however, with a concept product called "Simon" (good name) that it showed off in 1992.
Steve Jobs is another stalwart in the race and did the mobile market one of its biggest favours ever by introducing Americans, who used to be strangely behind the rest of the world in mobile telephony, to smartphones with the iPhone.
Back at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium, Research in Motion has just unveiled version of 5.0 of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server - the software that connects their employees' BlackBerrys to the head office.
The new release integrates BlackBerry with even more email and personal information services and now offers access to Windows files shared on computers back at the home or office. Your BlackBerry can also be used as a presentation device with a new connecter that connects to boardroom projectors for powerpoint presentations.
And so the smartphone takes another step toward replacing your computer entirely.
- Fin24.com