Mobile computing moves beyond the smartphone

If you talk about mobile these days, the conversation almost always turns — without anyone really thinking about it — to smartphones. For many, smartphones have become the end-all and be-all of mobile devices. I didn’t realize how common that switch has become until recently, when I had a conversation with Ari Virtanen, executive VP of wireless solutions at EB, a Finnish embedded systems company that designs and builds wireless infrastructure and devices.

Virtanen pointed out that in the United States, people think of smartphones — iPhones and BlackBerrys — when they think of mobile. That’s not the case in his native Scandinavia, where so-called mobile Internet devices from Nokia and others are more common. They don’t have phones, but instead are designed to work with information and applications.

What triggered his comment was my asking him about the fractured nature of Google Android and the potential fissures introduced by the forthcoming MeeGo operating system that will merge Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo (the successor to Symbian). He had mentioned that some schisms made sense given the variety of devices that could be created, including smartbooks, “smart” PDAs (like the Apple iPod Touch), tablets (like the Apple iPad and Nokia N800 series), and devices yet to be invented.

A world with a variety of mobile devices can benefit from the “let a thousand flowers bloom” culture of open source (which includes both Android and MeeGo), Virtnanen says. Yes, he concedes, the open source way can be chaotic and lead to so much fragmentation that a focused alternative — that is, a platform directed by a single entity in a forceful, compelling way — but that result is not a foregone conclusion.

Virtanen’s point has stayed with me, and I was reminded of it last week when I saw that Microsoft has decided to forgo copy and paste in its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS. What’s the connection? One thing I like about Windows Phone 7, based on a short hands-on look at a very early version, is that it’s taking a very specific approach in its OS and UI. Instead of following the standard set by the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 is about monitoring the important activities, people, and tasks in your life.

The decision to not have a clipboard that supports copy and paste furthers that distinction between the more computer-like iPhone (as well as WebOS and Android, which are based on the same paradigm as the iPhone) and Windows Phone 7. And when you look at the landscape of mobile devices even in the phone-centric United States, you begin to see a world of multiple kinds of mobile devices:

• The iPhone is a media device with some computational capabilities that also happens to be a phone. In addition, the iPod Touch and the forthcoming iPad are simply portable media devices and with some computational capabilities.
• The forthcoming Windows Phone 7 units look to be “keep up to date” devices that also play media and run apps as secondary capabilities.
• Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS are essentially the same type of device as the iPhone, but without the equivalent of an iTunes hub, they lack the same media-centricity.
• The BlackBerry and the Nokia N800 “microtablet” series are primarily messaging devices, for voice and text communications, with navigation added.
• Windows Mobile was a shrunken computer that also supported telephony.
• The PDA — the original Palm Pilot and early devices such as the Windows Mobile-based iPaq — used to be a separate class of devce, but has now been folded into the other types. If anything, the iPod Touch is the last remaining PDA, yet it’s so much more.
• Smartbooks could be portable computers, or they could be something else. It’s not clear what these are or could become yet.

Of course, there will be overlap. Few people will carry multiple devices, so expect these devices to have secondary capabilities that are “good enough” for most people. For example, the iPhone is a so-so phone. The BlackBerry is a so-so apps and Web device. The Android and WebOS devcies are so-so media devices. The Windows Phone 7 devices look to be so-so apps devices; the lack of copy and paste — which I do believe is a mistake, as Apple discovered — is a strong indication that even though Microsoft plans on offering a version of Office for the new OS, you won’t really want to use it for manipulating text. The list goes on, yet they all have their place and their fans.

That’s a very different world than the desktop PC environment we all know. There, the platform is essentially the same, and what distinguished one PC from the next is what the user does with it. Even the persistent Windows/Mac divide is not about capabilities as much as it is about user interaction. A PC is a virtual machine, becoming whatever you need based on the software you run. The PC can essentially morph from one device to another. Mobile may not offer that amazing flexibility.

Is that good, bad, or just different? I’m not sure, but it may explain the high degree of tribal loyalty engendered by the various mobile platforms. These groups of people are different, and so are their devices.

Maybe I’m wrong that few people will carry more than a single device — that tribalism isn’t what this is all about. It may be that at some point we think no more about having several mobile devices than we do about having a bunch of tools in our toolbelt — that the useful specialization is what will matter.

Even though mobile devices have been around for more than a decade in varius forms, we’re still clearly at the beginning of its evolution, and we’re not likely to end up in the same place as what has come before.

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This article, “Mobile computing moves beyond the smartphone,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile computing at InfoWorld.com.