The Singularity  

Do you remember when cell phones didn't have loudspeakers? Or cameras? Or colour screens? How about touchscreens, do you remember when cell phones didn't have those? Hopefully, you do. Afterall it's been less than a decade since the first one hit the market. I remember my first mobile phone. It was a green Alcatel, i forget which model. Bought at Woolworths (may they rest in peace) for £35. It was so retro, it had an external antenna. This was circa 2000. it's screen was about 1.5cm tall, and it could only send text messages in all caps, and could only store 10 of them. I loved it to bits. Where am I going with this? Well the thing is, given the rate at which new technology is incorporated into everything, soon enough a time is gonna come when you won't be able to walk down the street without a cell phone advertising itself to you, via your phone.

A phone isn't just a phone anymore. Yes yes, old news but take a look at where this phenomenon is leading us to. The Alcatel phone i was talking about could only make calls. It could not record music, or play music, and forget about anything to do with image capture. But now, for a phone to even have a hope of competing in the market, it's got to have all these "features", that at least half of us will never use. The hard drives get bigger, the phones get smaller, the camera megapixel counts go up, and nobody seems to wonder, where will it stop? Take a modern-ish laptop. it's got the hard drive, it probably has a webcam built into the lid and of course, it'll have a media player installed with the OS. At a glance, it already does exactly what the cell phone's offering, and probably does it better. It's screen is bigger than the entire cell phone, it's hdd is bigger, and you can do other things on a laptop. Forgetting the professional uses- programming, image processing/design, etc, - it can play full length movies without worrying about a dying battery. It's a much better prospect for whatever the cell phone wants to do and with the availability of skype it even manages to encroach on the telephony skills of the phone

So... where will the two meet? Will phones get more like computers, or will computers get more like phones? Given the difference in usage, the former seems more likely, but does that mean phones will become obsolete? I don't know, but I do know i spend a hell of a lot more time at my computer (on the order of several hours a day) than on my phone and if my computer could make telephone calls that could be billed to my phone contract (as opposed to taking another contract with skype), with my contacts list seamlessly updated from phone to pc... I wouldn't ever use my phone for anything. Unless I was away from the computer... Heh, I can hear you say, "that's the point!". Except, it's not.

A mobile phone is not a mobile computer, (that's a laptop) or an extension of a computer (that's a pda) but it sure looks like they're going that way. The newest phones currently exist in an ill-defined niche of their own making. They're only called phones because they possess telephony capabilities (which computers, and hell, even the humble psp also do), and they make use of traditional telephone network systems.

This is just an observation on the nature of things... So no one will be surprised when their phones want to dock with the pc so they can get all the latest data from wherever. And yes, I know they already can. I'm talking about when they start wanting to.