With all technology getting smaller and smaller, it should seem obvious that everything should fit in the palm of our hands.  But that just isn’t a reality just yet.

Cellphones are getting smaller and more powerful, but yet most of the more powerful ones are still larger than ideal.  The chief factors for this are that certain elements of our tech interaction simply cannot be miniaturized without loss of true usefulness.  At least not yet.

Take my cellphone (please).  It’s a T-Mobile MDA, which is a Windows Mobile Smartphone.  Basically, it’s a PocketPC with phone functionality.  I love it because it allows me to do a multitude of productivity things all in itself.  It has a full QWERTY keyboard and a decent-sized screen… for a cellphone.  But the keyboard isn’t near large enough for full-fledged typing.  Sure, I can jot off quick responses, but anything more than a few hundred characters and it’s just not viable.

My Sony Vaio UX280P UMPC is the same way.  It also has a hidden QWERTY keyboard, but it’s just not functional for anything more than a few words here or there.  There are ways around this, of course.  The MDA can accept a Bluetooth keyboard and the Vaio can accept either a Blutooth keyboard or a USB keyboard.  But how portable are those?

For the MDA, I have the fold-out Bluetooth keyboard from ThinkOutside, which works prety well, except for a few minor nits.  But even still, I wouldn’t want to try and carry it with me at all times.

There are those laser-projected keyboards that I would love to try (if I can find one that works with my hardware that doesn’t cost an arm and three legs), but I am not sure how well they really work.  And still, they are extra to carry around everywhere.  Until cellphones and UMPCs have them built-in, they won’t garner much usefulness.

I think you see where I’m going with this.  To be truly useful, our portable devices need to be able to fold out, Go-Go-Gadget style, to give us what we need.  The display is the second thing that is needed to be large.  The screen on my MDA is less than 3″ on the diagonal, usable for some things, but not too many and not too complex.  The Vaio’s screen is 4.5″, which is larger, but actually even less functional since it is the entire PC’s screen.  Usable, but in any increments greater than 5 minutes, eyestrain turns into a headache.

About the best answer to the small display problem so far has been the goggles that we can wear that makes it seem like the image is projected in space about 10′ in front of us.  Perfect.  But no one wants to be that guy!  You know, the one that is so nerdy, so geeky, that he’s just begging for a beat-down.  iPod: cool.  Sweet cellphone: cool.  Goofy goggles: uncool!

I just read that TI has developed a projector that can fit inside a cellphone.  That is awesome.  The resolution isn’t anything to write home about, and I’ll bet the luminence isn’t as bright as we would like, but it is a definite start.  At last, all we would need is a blank wall or piece of paper to have a functional display that we can use for a good amount of time.

The next thing is battery life.  Currently, it seems like the low-end acceptible standard is 2 hours of usefulness for most PC-type gadgets.  That’s pitiful.  Cellphones seem to last a lot longer, with some phones having days of standby time.  But the cellphones that have greater functionality appear to need charging daily.  As well, one big complaint about the iPhone is the idea that using it as an iPod runs the battery down on your cellphone.  If we are to experience true miniaturization and convergence, battery life needs to cease to be an issue.  I really don’t know what the answer is here, but new technology is definitely required.  Some combination of solar power plus induction plus pulling power from our own personal motion (like the watches that wind themselves that way) plus teeny-tiny batteries that can last hours and hours and don’t get memories (or are at least cheap and easy to replace).

Finally there is storage.  For true usefulness, we either need to be able to store everything on our portable device, or at least be able to access it quickly and wirelessly (and seemlessly).  Essentially, until we can store 100GB on media the size of a pinky nail, we won’t see any true usefulness out of our portable gadgets.  I for one would like to store all of my important documents and emails on my portable device (phone) so that I can access anything I need to whenever and wherever I am.  As it is, however, I have to limit my phone to only storing the most recent week’s worth of emails.  And since my documents are useless on my cellphone anyway, they aren’t available.

In the end, I think the goal should be a single device that can be used on a plane to edit spreadsheets, watch movies, listen to music, view photos, all without squinting or getting carpal tunnel, for a long plane trip.  And hopefully without having to carry twenty pounds of accessories.

Surely we are getting close to being able to do this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Gadget, Microsoft, Zune, iPhone, iPod.