This was the big question in a discussion i had yesterday with an IT manager working for vodafone-live. He gave a presentation about the j2ee intrastructure used for vodafone-live at an IT-eye seminar yesterday. Vodafone-live is a portal for internet phones, and he demoed it on a panasonic gprs phone. This panasonic phone is a small clamshell phone, with a tiny color screen, just big enough to do some basic web browsing. Info about trafic jams, restaurants etc. His vision for the future was something called a PAP, personal access point. PAP phones would be as small as possible, i.e., smaller than the panasonic he demoed, and for people requiring a larger screen, public screens will be available everywhere. All your data and applications would be available through this phone. Sounds like a miniature x-terminal.
My reaction was, why not pda sized? I’ve tried one of those new sony clie’s, with the 320x320 color screen, and that’s a lot better than the tiny phone screen. So i’m waiting for sony to integrate a phone into their newest pda, you know the one with a keyboard, 480x320 screen, 2 megapixel camera. Seems like the perfect combination of usable screen size and portability. I really don’t like the idea of having to find a public screen when i need more screen real estate. Feels like a return to the kermit phones (anybody in the netherlands remember?). This was a mobile phone system, where you had network access only on certain points near an antenna. Big mistake.
And with the power of todays pda’s (400 Mhz) i feel it’s almost time to throw out the notebook. Just take your pda to work, plugin it into a docking-station, connect it to a screen and keyboard, and you don’t need a real pc or laptop anymore.
Another interesting thing mentioned yesterday was that j2me is really doing well on mobile phones. Guess it’s time to try it out. The big hit now is a formula one racing game. Total size 37Kb. About the size of the old commodore 64 games. Maybe we can convert all those to j2me. Any takers for hero and delta?