You just need to look at the number of people who carry pagers to see that a device that is not a PC can proliferate.
I didn't say that non-PC devices wouldn't proliferate, or be successful, or be of many different kinds and configurations. I said (or at least intended to say) that I see the universal access device as evolving from the laptop rather than from the phone.
Pagers are small, cheap and have significant utility. They were also here first, and people have gotten used to carrying them. But as wireless gets cheaper (faster than Moore's law) and people's expectations rise, they are not likely, in my mind, to move to carrying a plethora of single function devices. For a true do-it-all device, I think a laptop is nearly there, and by the time wireless costs are low enough to make full web browsing practical economically, the remaining obstacles will have been overcome (weight, battery life) and required features added (video camera, usable speech recognition).
I agree with you that there will be many markets for lots of different devices with various combinations of features. My guess is that many tens or hundreds will be created and a few will survive, though I have no idea which ones will make the cut. But at the high end, I think having one device that integrates it all, will be the most attractive of all if cheap enough. And you know, they're giving PCs away today. Laptops may be just around the corner. |
