Smartphones

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you know what an iPhone or a BlackBerry is. Or at least you are familiar with the enhanced functionality of the latest models from some of the phone manufacturing companies in the market, the so called “smartphones”.

Wikipedia defines the smartphone as “a mobile phone offering advanced capabilities beyond a typical mobile phone, often with PC-like functionality”. That means the phone has a complete operating system on which a platform for applications runs (i.e. Java virtual machine/environment, allowing developers to write Java applications). Simply put, a smartphone is a phone with advanced features like e-mail and Internet capabilities, and/or a full keyboard.

vs. lap-phones?

Don’t bother looking into the English dictionary for lap-phone. It’s just something I made up trying to define the combination of a laptop and a mobile phone. If we would follow the same logic from Wikipedia’s definition, a lap-phone would be “a laptop offering advanced wireless communication capabilities similar with mobile phone-like functionality”.

Why would anyone want to build such a device? A simple answer will be: because there might be a market for it. Or if you want to answer it with another question: if mobile phones are embedding more and more PC-like functionality why shouldn’t PCs “borrow” phone-like functionality?

Well, I guess only time can tell if there will be a lap-phones market but in the meantime here are several PRO lap-phones arguments:

• The current trend in the mobile phones industry: phones resemble more and more with mini-PCs. Unless all the big phone companies are crazy or receive fake market research data, I strongly believe this kind of phone behaviour is what the consumers (will) want.
• The future of wireless communications is 4G – a fully IP-based integrated system capable of providing between 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s speeds both indoors and outdoors. It is so much easier for laptops to add wireless communication capabilities (i.e. add a radio module) than for phones to add a fully PC-like suite of applications.
• The size handicap. Just to be clear, the size handicap that I’m referring to is not the difference between a mobile phone and a 17″ laptop. A lap-phone size will be the size of a Nintendo DS or a PSP. In fact there are already a few mini laptops in the market that fit into that category (i.e. Acer Aspire One, Asus Eee PC). While the lap-phones will definitely not fit the back pocket of your jeans they will fit in a larger jacket pocket or a purse. Therefore, lap-phones can initially target the female segment of the market. Blue tooth devices can also be a great “ally” to overcome the size handicap.