Taking care of business
Reading mobile-device.biz this week, it struck me just how much smartphones are taking over. On Tuesday HTC launched a new phone that looks like the upgrade of the Desire HD, which was only launched in September of last year.
There were a few improvements, but the one that really jumped out at me was the processor, which not only goes up to 1.2 GHz, but is dual-core. Man, I'm old enough to remember when it was a big deal that PCs could have dual-core chips, in fact that was only about six years ago wasn't it? So it's pretty mad that phones have already caught up.
Actually Scott reminded me that the first dual-core chip handset was launched at the end of last year, but as I moaned about last week, it's only just hitting the shops now. Another thing that I thought was cool about the HTC Sensation launch was that it will be available next month - not a quarter of a year after it was first announced.
I was already thinking about all the things I now do on my smartphone that I would previously have done on a PC - like surfing the net, doing emails, watching video clips, social networking, and so on, and that got me wondering if I could completely give up my PC.
One area where I'd obviously struggle is things like writing this article. I know those soft keyboards are getting better, but writing much more than short messages can give you the kind of RSI that makes you feel like the Spanish Inquisition has been in town.
But another dual-core handset - the Motorola Atrix - offers a sign of where things are headed. It has a dock that you can use to connect it to a bunch of peripherals such as, I assume, a keyboard, mouse and screen. Problem solved. Also, things like voice recognition are bound to get better, so one day maybe I won't have to type at all. Which would be nice coz I suck at it.
On the same day the Sensation was launched Cisco announced it was scrapping its Flip video unit. Most people reckon this was because of smartphones, coz you can now record just as high quality video - and stick it on the Internet - just as easily as on your phone.
That got me thinking about the other stuff that's been made obsolete by smartphones. For me the list includes MP3-players, cameras and satnav devices, but judging by a story earlier today, I should be adding gaming devices to that too. Smartphones already account for a third of portable gaming in the US, and who's to say they won't eventually eat into console gaming with Atrix-like docks?
The thing that worries me though is how precious my smartphone has become. I rely on it for so much kin stuff man, and I haven't even started using technology like NFC to pay for stuff yet. It kind of reminds me of that 80s film in which some bloke had his whole life in a Filofax (remember them?) and then lost it.
Someone has stuck the whole film on YouTube in bits, so I'll leave you with the first part to remind you how far we've come. Laters.
