Post-PC era: Connecting the Dots
During his stage appearance with Bill Gates at the D conference, Steve Jobs gave vision and agenda for the post-PC era. Jobs said the radical rethinking [of computing] will happen in post-PC devices, such as the iPod and its successor iPhone. Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, HTC, Samsung and many others have the same vision.
I am excited with the announcements in the first half of the year. And more importantly, they seems to be related to each other. At least from my perspective, we could “connect the dots”
First, the phenomenon of the iPhone, which brings many innovations that certainly will shape up the future of mobile device: the “Finger-Touch” interface; the “Gravity Sensor” and the use of third party Web-centric application; which can only be useful with some offline capabilities; that’s where technologies such Google Gears and Adobe Apollo can play. And if the iPhone 3.5″ screen is too small or the on-screen keyboard is not adequate for your needs then the Palm Foleo like technology can be used to address the shortfalls of using too small devices.
On the desktop & laptop side, technologies such Parallel; Bootcamp; cross platform apps such Firefox 3 will have some offline capabilities; Safari on Windows to provide development platform to mobile Web apps will blend harmoniously the OS platforms. As well as traditional application are making its way toward Web-based and that’s what we see with the 3rd party apps for iPhone.
The Apple TV; MS Media room; IPTV application such Joost, SlingBox will make its way to large screen TV in living room. Voice over IP will challenge both landline and cellular industries.
On the contents side; the announcement or DRM free contents is taking off as well as the proliferation of user generated video such YouTube start getting on the Mobile side.
While we see some progress of wirelessly charging the mobile device; thee battery-life is still a major hurdle. We are glad to see that Apple announces the battery-life of the iPhone is better that initially stated. However, In a world post-iPhone where everything changes, battery life becomes the arbiter of usage.
“The secret of the iPhone is that [Google] Gears and Dish [Network] and Google Reader, Docs, and Gmail and AppleTV are all peripherals for the iPhone. iPhone therefore I am.†Note that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board of directors, so it’s not too much of a stretch to count on tighter integration between the two companies over time. The same iPhonomic scenario could be applied, less elegantly, to a Windows-based solutions. [Steve Gillmore]
While things are still a bit confusing for the time being, the second half of the year could be equally exciting where we will find out if all the dots are connected solidly for the Post-PC era.
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