Among all the topics that I have covered in my journals, one of the lesser covered areas has been that dealing with mobile phones. There is a simple explanation for this - until recently, the age of my cellphone was 2 years! I lived frozen in time when it came to my mobile phone. For me, it was a useful communications tool - but just that. I used it to make and receive voice calls - few and far between. I found sending SMS to be major pain, somehow. (I may be a two-finger typist on a keyboard, but I am a fast one at that! The cellphone keypad (especially my SonyEricsson W880i)- well, I just couldn't find myself writing shorthand English or doing it fast enough).
When I accessed the Web recently on my mobile phone and configured my google mail application to access my personal email account, I could not but feel the same sense of exhilaration that I had sensed when I first browsed the Internet more than a decade ago using Mosaic from a friend's house in the Indonesia. This is another new world that is emerging, and for all that has been talked and written about the world of mobility, we are at the start of a revolution which will have far-reaching implications.
This is not just about voice and communications, and the freedom to do talk and SMS from anywhere. Just like the functionality and use of PCs was completely transformed with the emergence of the Internet, so it will be with mobile phones. Until now, for the vast majority, the phone has been a communications device. In fact, even more than the 'personal' computer, it is the mobile phone that is the truly personal device. There is nary a place that owners go without their phone. I have seen people walk into my office for meetings carrying only a phone and nothing else (not even a pen or a watch, leave alone a writing pad).
From a time when I was barely connected (a computer at home and office; no notebook) to now when I have become arguably one of the most connected people has been a short ride. I have a Sony Vaio UX Series UMPC notebook running Windows XP. It has three forms of in-built connectivity: Ethernet, dial-up and Wi-Fi...cool gadget!
Now, the question is - will the mobile phone become the next platform - like the computer? This, according to me, is a narrow question and focuses only on the device. What is important is to consider a view of the world that is based around services rather than devices. In that context, I don't think it is possible to think of the mobile phone in isolation from the rest of the computing, communications and content world.
What is inside today's desktop computer will move to the server and what is inside a cell phone will power tomorrow's network computer. The networks will be IP-based. Voice will become yet another service over these digital networks. The mobile phone will be our constant companion, and will be complemented by the availability of network computers with large screens.
Services will occupy centre-stage. From commPuting to computainment to communicontent, it will be a world that will converge at the back-end (server-side) but will diverge at the front-end (multiple devices). While there will be no convergence across these screens, the convergence will happen at the back-end with respect to the data store. We will have different views to the same set of data across these devices. Today, this is not the case - all three devices have their own private worlds they operate on.
What I see happening is integrated access to our data and desktop across the three screens that are present in our life. The future will be about data on servers accessible across multiple devices. In developed markets, the screens will be those of the TV or Game Console or PC or mobile phone. In emerging markets (especially for the next users), I think it will just two screens - a multimedia-enabled network computer on desktops at home and work, and the mobile phone. What matters are the services that are delivered to the users.
Service-centric computing is a form of computing (used in a broad sense - like information processing) which is focused more around the user's real world rather than the cyberspace. It has a common back-end store to store the user's context (time, place, information, people). It allows a user to do five actions independent of device on the same data store: publish (write), subscribe (read), search, alerts and share. It thus breaks the artificial barriers which separate the user from his data - by actually separating data store from the service functions, we make the data more accessible.
While the mobile phone is likely to have a much larger user base than computers in emerging markets for some time to come, there are tasks for which the computer is ideally suited and the inherent limitations of the cellphone become obvious. But that in no way diminishes its use or capability as a personal device. Thus, even as the computer provides access to the world outside, the mobile phone provides us a view of our world. Both are needed and important in their own place.
Now what will be next? For me, I just can't go without my mobile phones...
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