The smartphone is the computer

This post is a coredump of online and offline conversations that I had following Fred Lardieg article from Octopus Ventures about “Why Smartphones are the smart choice for Venture Capital”.

The title “the smartphone is the computer” is an obvious reference to “the network is the computer”, a famous sentence created in 1984, by John Gage from Sun Microsystems. Sun envisionned a future where computers would all become dumb and diskless Net computers connected to remote servers. With the Chomebook, Google is doing nothing else than a modern version of the Network Computers (not to be confused with Netbooks). In 1984, Sun already saw that the network was the future of computing.

To me, the smartphone is the future of computing.

Smartphones are becoming smarter than PCs

Why do I mean by Smart?

In Wikipedia, a smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile operating system, with more advanced computing capability and connectivity than a feature phone. According to this definition, a smart phone is a feature phone on steroïd with an open operating system allowing any third party applications to transform its function.

To me, smart doesn’t mean super, it means intelligent. A smart device should do more than just merely execute orders. It needs to be able to predict user request and to help its owner before she even thinks about it. Google Now is an example of intelligent service which is only possible on a Smart phone.

Smartphones are becoming smarter than PCs because they understand better their owner. Because they are always along with their owner. Because they are always connected. Because they can make sense of the user context.

By user context, I mean: * its own physical context: geo-location, proximity, ambiance (noise level, luminosity), motion (is it moving, shaking or static), its position in the hand of its owner (portrait, landscape), roaming status (home country or abroad) * its temporal context: date/time * its social context through personal data access: events, user profile and contacts

For a more exhaustive list, you can take a look at my presentation The rise of the mobile context on Slideshare. Context is a really hot topic currently, Scobelizer has declared that the context is the battleground between Android and iOS and that Qualcomm just showed the future when unveiling its contextual Android SDK. Forrester also says that the future of mobile is user context.

Context helps to understand the present but patterns help to understand the future. This is where the Smart phones can really become smart. When context snapshots are locally stored on the mobile and processed over time, the Smart phone can start correlating the context with meta information and personal data. By doing so, it can make patterns emerge and better understand its owner. It can become really smart. This is the future of Siri.

PCs cannot match Smart phones in understanding context and patterns. Even things like accessing personal data is not done through well defined API on a PC, user date are either stuck in silo apps or stored directly in the cloud.

The concept of computer as we know it will disappear eventually

Today, a computer is typically more powerful than a Smart phones because there is more room for RAM, disk space and CPUs. But soon, this will become irrelevant as Moore’s law keeps being validated which means more and more computing power on a given surface and as a consequence smaller and smaller CPUs.

In fact, components will be so small that the only remaining large parts on a computer will be the screen, the battery and the keyboard. There is already enough computing power on a Smart phone to meet a typical end-user needs. Motorola launched a “super phone”, the Motorola Atrix which can be decked into a Lapdock. The Lapdock is the body and the smartphone is the brain. A similar vision was developed by (no deadpooled) Modu. The Modu was a small smart phone which could connect to a series of hosting accessories.

In both cases, the vision is great but the execution is lacking. There are multiple problems with a physical connection between the smart phone and its host:

• The smartphone is replaced more regularly. The physical connectivity can change with the model. A famous example is the new dock connector of the iPhone 5.

• The smartphone is a mobile, it needs to be accessible the quickest possible to answer a phone call for instance. It cannot be plugged besides a screen. Anything which block access to it is a bad idea.

All this can be fixed if instead of a physical connection, the 2 devices pair via a near-field high-bandwidth wireless connection. Once done, the PC can just become a brainless assembly of a large screen, a full keyboard and a long-lasting battery.

The smartphone is the computer

Instead of dumb terminals connected physically to the network, I see dumb terminals wirelessly connected to smartphones connected to the network. The smartphone is the computer.