An interesting article about efforts to tie phones into keyboards and displays. This is something that has interested me for years, because I find so many use cases in my life for full keyboard and a display that's bigger than a 2×5" mobile.
My problem has always been, from a hardware/docking perspective, that phones and phone interfaces just can't drive monitors and keyboards fast enough. And while thin client "Internet as Mainframe" types of experiences (the Google ecosystem, for example) deal with a lot of the ills of having your data and apps on the hardware you have with you, they still assume a broad availability of wireless broadband that simply does not yet exist (at least not in my neck of the suburbs).
The ultimate goal is "Anywhere I go, my data is there. Any device I want to access it from can do it. If I need a keyboard, I have a keyboard. If I am in my car, that works, too. If I'm at a dinner party, or in the office, or at lunch, or on a train, I can get to what I want and interact with it as I need to." The particular hardware solution is less important than the goal; indeed, the goal is to render the hardware layer as a commodity — a critical but invisible part of the equation.
We're kinda-sorta there, or close enough to deal with most of the issues in some fashion or another the majority of the time. But it does mean a lot of hardware (phones and tablets and laptops / browserbooks / desktops). It's going to be very interesting to see where it all goes in the next 5-10 years.
The 10-Year Quest to Turn Phones Into All-Powerful Gadgets | WIRED
What if you could turn every screen, keyboard, and surface into exactly the gadget you need, for exactly as long as you need it?
I played with the Atrix at work for a while. One issue was that it switched operating systems in "laptop" mode–so the integration between the two was pretty poor.
When I was brainstorming this once a long while ago (when I had a Treo and an iPod) I thought the right solution was to do two models. In one your device is the computer and drives a display and keyboard. In the other it acts as a data server and provides APIs to access your info. Music to your car. Contacts to your phone…. of course at this point you also want the cloud to do the same thing. I'm
Not sure that this device is the phone though. I like having two separate compute devices with different UI strengths. And although Apple gives me the ability to switch between devices and preserve my app context, I find I use that very infrequently.