S60 Open to new features

I was listening to Episode 127 of Mobile Tech Roundup on my Nokia N95 today and they were discussing a device that has some interesting applications. The device in question essentially provides a full-sized screen and keyboard for your mobile phone. Suddenly, your entire computing environment can reside on your mobile phone. When you need the big screen and keyboard, just hook it to your phone.

Over the years, I've heard one of the "dreams" of network computing is that you can sit down and work at one location and easily pick up right where you left off at a different computer without skipping a beat. This can be accomplished with tools like VNC or Windows Remote Desktop.

If you can carry the "brains" of your computing environment in your pocket, why would you mess around with things like VNC or Remote Desktop? Plug your phone into your large screen and keyboard, do your work, unplug your mobile phone, take it somewhere else. Plug it into a different screen and keyboard, and you have your full environment right there. And, of course, you can also interact with it from the mobile handset itself!

For the most part, I already do a fair amount of computing from my S60 device. Lack of a full-sized screen and keyboard are certainly factors that limit my ability to do more. There's a lot of issues to work out with this idea, but it has quite a lot of appeal to me.

What do the rest of you think?

I got a pocket knife today as a thank-you gift for a project I've been working on. It does 11 things: it's a straight blade knife, has a couple of cerated edged blades, two different church keys (a.k.a. bottle openers), a pair of scissors, a corkscrew, a letter opener, a Phillips-head screwdriver, and a mystery thing that I have no idea what is for. It's bigger than the pocket knife I had before. Of course it is--it does more than the old one did.

Pocket knifes are a bit like a mobile phone these days. Depending on the model, they can do a lot. How well can it do those things? It depends.

Let's take the screwdriver on this pocket knife. If I happen to be somewhere where I need a Phillips-head screwdriver, having one in my pocket is quite handy. However, if I'm at home, the form factor of the screwdriver on the pocket knife makes it much less desirable than the screwdriver in my toolbox.

A pocket knife can only have so many functions before the knife itself becomes too unwieldy to carry. Each blade takes up a certain amount of physical space and must be a minimum size to be useful, yet not to big.

Kind of reminds me of mobile phones. Given the relatively small size of a mobile phone, there's only so much room for buttons. Or display size. Or battery. Or number of megapixels that can be captured.

The overall size of the device plays a huge role in the quality of features that will be available on it. For example, the thinness of the Nokia N76 dictated you weren't going to get a huge battery or a 5mp camera. Conversely, the E90 gives you a full QWERTY keyboard and a huge screen. It's much bigger, so it can offer a much better experience. However, the E90 is much larger than the N76.

I have no doubt our R&D folks are increasing the amount of functions available on the mobile device while keeping them a reasonable size and making them as easy to use as possible. It's quite a balancing act, and unfortunately, compromises will have to be made.

My solution to the compromise is to carry two devices. This bears a size penalty. I look forward to the day when I can have it all in one device that's a reasonable size.