The Road to Mobility & Computing Tomorrow

Everyday Media and the Markets churn out reams of information about the fact that the future of mobile phones is mobile computing.
Like many of us, I tend to believe that too.
However what is worth pausing and pondering over is “what do we mean by mobile computing?” Does it mean computing in the palm of your hand raised to the power of computing in your present day desktops or laptops? That’s a lot of computing power for a small device – it’s almost like having a small car with over 150 brake horse power (bhp) & coming with 4-wheel drive!
If this is what mobile computing means, then I am equally curious to know - what is the future of desktop & laptop computing? If mobile handheld devices of the future become all so competent, then would we still need desktop personal computing, the way we know it today?


To find answers to such questions about the future, it might worth looking into the past. Looking back into the history of innovation - more often than not – many of the new products have acquired a supplementary or complimentary role instead of completely replacing the older products.
• Personal Stereo vs. Home Stereo System
• Television/Broadcast Content vs. Internet Content
• Home Entertainment vs. Cinema Halls (a very interesting story indeed!)
• Desktops vs. Laptops
• Still Camera vs. Video Camera
• Camera Phone vs. Camera
• Gas Burners vs. Microwave Ovens
• Paper vs. Computer Screen
• Box Files Vs. Hard Disks
• Facsimile vs. e mail/Speed Post (yes, speed post is less of a technology but none the less something that competes, in some way, with facsimile!)

This by no measure is an exhaustive list of how new devices live with older ones. For example when we look at Mobile Phones vs. Fixed Line Phones or Film Roll Camera vs. Digital Camera - we immediately see how the number of examples mentioned above is not sufficient to make that point.
To know the future of desktop and laptop computing it might be worthwhile to look at what, in the first place, makes a mobile computing device mobile.
To me it is a smaller screen, smaller keyboard and lighter (and less powerful) battery.
(I am not saying connectivity because connectivity is not longer unique to classic mobile devices (like mobile phones). Even a notebook PC can be connected on the go!)
If this is what makes a mobile computing device – ‘mobile’, then I find it difficult to convince myself, that future mobile computing devices would be able to erase laptop or even desktop computing.

Mobile computing has some fundamental challenges that it needs to overcome before it can actually attempt to replace desktop computing. Some of these challenges have been briefly mentioned above, however it might be a good idea to look at these more closely now.

1. Display – small display makes it difficult to be able to everything on mobile handheld devise viz. watch videos/movies, write documents/presentations, read books etc among others (unless we do something with our eyes that makes it very easy to view anything big or small or we develop an embedded a projection device inside every mobile hand-held device. The latter might lead to new kind of challenges around need for privacy while watching content on the go, as we move around in public spaces!)
Please note that any attempt to make the present day mobile display larger, would tend to make the mobile computing device bigger and consequently ‘less mobile’. So a larger display leaves us with what we started with – just a computing device instead of a mobile computing device that we are actually trying to achieve!

2. Keyboard: So far we do not seem to have an idea as to how could we possibly make our fingers adjust to smaller keyboards. Keyboards cannot go smaller beyond a point. The way I look at it - we have already reached that point where the size of the keyboards in mobile devices can’t be shrunk much further. Even if the keyboard were of touch screen variety – the keys would require a minimum size.
In addition to this, the keyboard needs to be more comfortable to use than it is now in many of the present day mobile devices. This would be needed because unlike smart phones, when we begin to use mobile computing in its complete form, we would need to use the keyboard much more than the way we do now. We would be having our fingers pressing against those keys for much longer than we do writing short text messages or e mails.

3. People Mobility – I am not sure what percentage users of computing devices in the future would be always on the go. In other words “‘full’ computing capability on the go is perhaps not for everybody!”
So there would be a lot of people who would not want to do everything on the go. (This would perhaps hold true only as long we do not altogether become a different ‘animal’ in the next 3-5 years!)

So where does all this lead us? What could mobile computing actually mean and do in the future?
By stacking-up the events from the past and adding a little imagination to it, I can foresee a few things which I would like to share at this point.
To me Mobile Computing seems to be heading in a direction where we would still see and use it more as mobile & less as computing device.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
I can foresee (as long as we do not have a breakthrough innovation in display technology) that a mobile handheld device would have the capability to compute the way our desktops/laptops do today – and may be even better! However we might not engage the device to compute viz. write presentations, read analyst reports, process spreadsheets etc, while we are on the go* - walking, sitting in the subway, being driven to some place, sitting by the beach, or looking outside the window while sitting in an airplane.
Why would we not engage the device to compute?
Partly because the device neither has a great display to show us everything that we want to see, nor does it have a good enough input mechanism to key things in**.
Also, I am not sure if we would be prepared to think and DO so much, on the go! If we want to achieve this extent of productivity on the go – a lot of rest of the things - that we do to make our way around the physical space – would need to be on autopilot, so that we can free up our faculties to focus more on what we are thinking & doing and not as much on where we are going or if the coffee that we are holding is actually about to spill!
I foresee ourselves asking the mobile computing device to do small tasks for us viz. find some place/somebody, tell some fact etc. We can say that this is not the future because we have already heard that the mobile devices can do all this in the future and I would say well may be you are right!
That brings us to one of my favourite questions “So what would be the point of having a capable computing device in your pocket, when you are always going to be under-utilizing it?”
To me there would always be a big role for a mobile computing device because in the future it could almost be something like our external hard drive is today.
What do we do with the external hard drive today? Well, we carry it around and plug in when we need to go back to all that we have on your desktop or all that could not fit into our laptop. The difference/next stage could well be - in the future we could be carrying an external computing device which we plug into any larger or worthy display and keyboard wherever we find be it home or office or airport or anywhere in between.
I can foresee the internet zones of today morphing into display and keyboard (peripheral) zones of the future. Just plug and play!
To use a present day analogy it would be like pocket laptops without a display as big but they can match (if not better) the processing capability. Also, our desk or our wall or roof could well be the display that we plug our device into!
And we plug in with wires? Well, I am not sure..may be not!

Exciting times ahead!
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End Notes
*Assuming that in the future we would still need to physically move from one place to another and these travel modes still exist.

** I believe that the innovation timeline would pass through a plug and play mobile computing device much before it passes through a truly mobile computer because advancement in miniaturization of processing power is moving much faster than that of display or input technology. We do not need to see how the processing happens (so a microprocessor can become smaller and smaller up until it becomes invisible to the human eye and it would not bother us even one bit. However we need to control the input (keyboard/mouse/other touch sensitive input devices) and ‘see’ what the processor gives as output (display devices).