A good portion of my foundational thinking about mobile computing comes from meetings that we had with Jeff Hawkins, back in the Palm Computing era.  Mr. Hawkins’ stories about carving a block of wood until it fit in his shirt pocket have stuck with me.  As the story goes, that block became the model for the early Palm Pilots.

That’s exactly the point.  Until we have some kind of implants that connect us directly to the data flow, I want the following things in my device (in order of priority, but these have pretty much all been show stoppers):

• It fits in my pocket — otherwise it won’t be with me enough to be effective.
• As a corollary to the above, it is light enough that I don’t mind packing it pretty much all of the time
• The software that I use runs on it
• It has a high bandwidth connection to the Net
• The UI is accessible for me
• It functionally replaces other things that I carry.  A few years ago my briefcase held a notebook computer, a cell phone, a PDA, a pager and a few kilograms of cords / chargers / cables.
• It lasts through, at least, a full day of normal use without recharging (my iPod touch can’t do this if the 802.11 radio is active)

My dream has always been to have one handheld device for most activities, along with, maybe, a netbook/ultra portable laptop that I could drag along if I planned to do heavy text entry (I’m fine with Graffiti, and I’ve come to quite like the soft keyboard on my iPod Touch).

Finally, getting around to my point, I’ll gladly spend whatever I have to in order to get a device that meets my criteria and runs on a reliable network.  I’m certainly not, however, going to spend several hundred dollars for something that’s inconvenient to carry, no matter how beautiful it is.  Beauty and functionality are useless to me if the device is sitting on my desk when I’m out and need to connect.  At that point, a tablet is about as useful as my first Mac 128K (long since recycled) would be.

As far as I’m concerned, the iPhone 3GS and the Google Nexus One are as close to my ideal device as we have right now.  Perhaps I’m just dense, but I don’t understand why the tablet is the subject of such breathless anticipation.  I’d much rather have Apple devote its considerable engineering talent to making the iPhone even better.  They’re almost there…

My thoughts follow along lines similar to the reasoning in John Boyd’s recent post:

“… the smartphone experience is rapidly becoming mass market and main stream and as that trend continues, people will want more choice, more hardware and performance. In short, in early cycles, Apple’s strategy of control is usually going to be superior but as a technology becomes mainstream, it fails.

We’ve seen the model for this in Apple’s early years, where people favored Apple over the PC. People thought Apple was unbeatable but they were eventually driven to the point where people started looking at the cash value on the balance sheet.

Eventually as people became comfortable with the PC World, they didn’t want to be controlled anymore. Even the least savvy technical users wanted more choice in hardware and applications as their comfort level rose.”

I love what Apple has accomplished with the iPhone, just like I loved my first Mac 128k (no hard drive, just the floppy).  However, I’m afraid that the challenge presented by the diverse teams contributing to the Android+hardware ecosystem will simply be overwhelming. 

The aforementioned HTC Passion, based on a 1 GHz Snapdragon, is just the latest example of how fast this juggernaut is moving.  With iPhone OS as a template, and the vast resources working on Android+hdw, the solutions will evolve quickly and will pass the “good enough” mark in very short order.  Given its relative carrier independence, Android+hdw will absolutely present a challenge to the iPhone hegemony.

As we’ve been pondering these imponderables, this “report” from Retrevo caught my attention.  From a business manager’s perspective, the money quote is:

… they [iPhone owners] use their smart phones more for activities like watching videos, checking sports scores, and texting and they even watch more adult material on their iPhones than BlackBerry owners.

That certainly sounds productive!  (I’m listening to Mötley Crüe on my iPod Touch as I write this.)

A cynic reading the Retrevo post might jump to the conclusion that iPhone owners are shallow, arrogant narcissists.  In fact, the post concludes with the following:

… sure paints a picture of a group of smartphone owners that “think different,” and another more down-to-earth, mainstream group of BlackBerry owners.

I was particularly struck by the final chart presented in the post.  Respondents were apparently asked to rank themselves with respect to several “coolness” characteristics.  I think that the self assessment is very telling:

… iPhone owners rated themselves higher as Intellectuals, Extroverts, and Media Buffs than BlackBerry owners

Source: Retrevo Blog: iPhone vs. BlackBerry Owners: Your Phone Tells All

With that in mind, I’m finally ready to get around to making a point.  The carefully crafted iPhone user experience is unparalleled for media consumption and gaming.  It’s in a class by itself.  The thing is, though, that Apple puts up a whole fortress of barriers to developers that want to build real solutions to business problems and make their software available on a range of mobile terminals.  Sure, you can hammer on your app to fit it into the Apple template (and you might even be able to get it approved), but why bother when you have so many more degrees of freedom and device choices with Android / Linux (unfortunately, I don’t know as much about developing for BlackBerry OS 5.0).  Until recently, the answer boiled down to 40M+ iPhones / iPod Touches, against pretty weak alternative hardware.  Perhaps this is starting to change.