It shows that we are much closer than you think to having a dumb screen connected to a smart phone, even for high end things like video.

I don’t think anything much will happen until the ‘dock’ is standardized though. Nobody is going to carry a smart phone and the cables needed to connect it to a keyboard/mouse/screen or TV.

To begin, the phone does not have to run the operating system, it can just store settings and data. It could even act as a one-time key for accessing web sites etc.

The Zune is probably not the device that will do it, but maybe the 4th or 5th gen iPhones will play 1080p high bitrate movies directly to your TV and act as a portable store for your desktop. At the moment your desktop backs up your phone, but maybe one day it will be the opposite.

For complex replies to email/sms the work-flow would be something like this. Get message and read it on phone. Find nearest dumb PC. Plug in your phone and authenticate, the email will automatically popup because that is the app you had open on the phone. You use the dumb PC’s keyboard and mouse to compose the message.

Want to play your latest game but are in a hotel? Simply rent their dumb PC and connect your phone. All your games will be there and will run on the full screen. Macs can already use 2 graphics cards and switch between them so it is possible that the phone can switch the graphics over to the dumb PC when it is connected.

Good points. I would point out, though, that word processing is content creation, and everybody does that when they send an email or when they perform any other composition. For example, I probably wouldn’t respond to your note on a smartphone – it would be too much hassle. Will we see a lessening of online participation, then, as users move to smartphones, simply because it’s too difficult? I hope not, but we’ll need something better than two-finger keypads to avoid it. Maybe voice recognition? Still a few years to go there.

The other point is that there is a lot of high-end content consumption that is inappropriate for a four-inch screen. The most common example is gaming. Another example is watching movies – I doubt Netflix will thrive on the mobile device. As the Internet improves, digital viewing online will become more common. Really, the only content consumption appropriate for today’s mobile format is reading and listening.

To speak to your specific point, then, I think most people will want to either game or compose or watch movies or do some other high-end interaction on their computing device. The mobile device is not to the point where it will fit that bill.

I kind of agree with you, but with one important change: A mobile device doesnt have to do everything a larger device can do, it only has to do want most people want to do.

And I think the big divide here could fall into these three categories;

- Content Creation
- Content Consumption
- Content Capture

Mobile devices are already pretty good at the last two. Let’s face it, the quintisential content capture device, the camera, have been very mobile for about 100 year now!

I suspect the devices people chose will reflect the relative usage of these three categories. “Content creation” is important to me (professionally I’m a software engineer, and I’m also an amateur recording musician). I do think that most people are significantly more oriented to content-consumption, though.

I’m talking about input/output that fits in your pocket. You can’t carry a full-size keyboard with you. Until you can, mobile computing will not be more than an adjunct.

One approach would be a set of glasses that displays video information. You could connect this to the mobile device via a future Bluetooth-like connection. You could even project a virtual keyboard in the glasses that you could hold your hands ‘over’. We’re tactile creatures, though, so we probably wouldn’t easily accept a ghostly image as a keyboard. You’d probably have to incorporate some kind of neural interface into the glasses in order to simulate the feel of a keyboard as you typed on it.

But none of this technology exists yet, or at least is any father than early prototype stage. That’s why I think it’ll take over a decade before Joe’s predictions regarding mobile computing come true.

If you want to run a banking system you will still today and into the future be running mainframes with parallel sysplex setups and such.

But shifting to PCs has allowed us to use computing power for personal uses and gaming.

Shifting to web connected PCs has allowed us to blog and swap pictures etc.

Shifting to web connected mobile computers like smartphones has allowed us to instantly microblog with things like facebook, twitter, and morbidly film someone in pain rather than do something about it.

Doesn’t mean we won’t still be going back to our PC for a round of Empire Total War (yes yes yes!!) and elaborate on what we have instantly microblogged earlier in the day on our smartphones / comment in length how terrible it was to witness the person’s hardship.

I think USB 3 will be needed but within 3-5 years we will have all of the pieces.

I can look up information in the Internet, check my email, write short messages, or perform other simple, mundane tasks on my smartphone. But if I want to do something heavier – use a spreadsheet, write a letter, play a FPS game – I fire up my laptop or my desktop. Why? Because I just can’t do these things on a small device.

The bottleneck is not computing power; we’re probably only a few years away from having mobile-grade processors that can provide enough processing power to routinely perform these heavy duty tasks. The problem is input and output. I would far rather have a full-size ergonomic keyboard for typing my three page letter than to fuss with a two-finger touchpad on a mobile device. Likewise, I don’t want to squint at a four-inch screen while trying to manipulate my columns or frag my opponent. I want my 27-inch LCD running at its beautiful 1920×1200 native resolution.

Until we see innovations that allow the mobile device to have the input/output comfort and flexibility of a desktop, the smartphone is going to hit a wall in its quest to supplant larger form factors. It will be an adjunct tool to be used to supplement our day-to-day functions, but it will not replace the desktop or the laptop until somebody figures out how to make it behave like a desktop or laptop.