It's not very imaginative to conclude that the ultimate goal of technologies today is to achieve convergence between the various devices, to seamlessly use them all from either one of them.
My own short-term wishlist is:
- Store personal information, like the address book, possibly e-mail and other messages, etc. mirrored (synced in real time) between my mobile phone and a datacenter in a bunker somewhere safe. I carry my mobile phone around with me all the time, so every desktop should just pick up the data from it. OTOH, I also need a secure backup if I lose it. Encryption can solve most of the issues here.
- Have a high-speed low-range wireless link between my desktop and my phone when I put it on the desk (or are somewhere in the room). By "high-speed" here I mean "enough to transfer data such as the mentioned address book, e-mail, etc." in real-time back and forth. 54 Mbit/s looks "good enough" for this purpose. I imagine something like Bluetooth on steroids, only less sucky, probably using IPv6 rather than some internal ad-hoc packet formatting. I want the mobile phone to be a regular network node and that's where Bluetooth fails. I also don't want the phone batteries excessively drained from using the link, so WiFi is also a non-starter.
- If the mobile phone CPU is strong enough (and it looks like the new 500 MHz+ mobile phones are bordering "enough"), run some basic applications on the mobile phone but access it via "remote desktop" (e.g. VNC, RDP, whatever) from the desktop. Even better, use something like VMWare and similar applications do and make "seamless" integration between the windows of the mobile phone and the "real" desktop, with smart sharing of specific services like audio and phonecalls made from the desktop. Of course, I don't want to run big or CPU-intensive applications on the phone, but I imagine something with the capabilities of Word 95 (remember, it ran on 486 machines with 100 MHz and 4 MB of RAM) would be fine.
- Have a long-range
low-bandwidth connection for general Internet access (of course, with
fallback to the low-range high-bandwidth one when in range), capable of
relatively (from 2009 point of view) low-bandwidth tasks like
streaming standard-def YouTube videos, city-wide. I want to be always connected (ok, so this is not actually a wish since I am already "mostly connected" from my mobile phone, but can't make full use of the capability because the previous points are not done yet).
This is what I think I need, YMMV. Much of these points are very very near of being done already. The major thing that's holding the whole concept back is that the cell-phone manufacturers (or more likely, the telcos) insist that the phones don't run a general purpose OS that would make it all possible with custom applications.
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