The cell phone is dead. Long live the cell phone.
At least in the US domestic market, the most popular cell phone is no longer primarily a cell phone. The iPhone is more properly classed as wireless handheld with an expandable suite of applications, one of which happens to be making phone calls. While the rash of me-too’s seems to be concentrating on the gesture-driven interface on a large touch-screen, that too isn’t really the point. Where the leverage is, and where the RIM Storm and the Google Android have certainly seen the vision, is the conversion of the handheld to be the sufficient computing platform for most daily use. This is certainly what Apple saw for the future when it turned the industry upside down. Note that this platform is not just trying to get as much of a laptop down to handheld size as possible. It is an entirely different platform that happens to do some of the things that laptops also do.
The true revolution, though, is that the core functions — media-playing, voice- and type-communication (both synchronous and asynchronous), and web browsing — are already commodities. This means that, as this class of device becomes ubiquitous, it will be assumable by content providers that everyone not only has access to those functions but prefers to use those functions through this class of device.
Suddenly, the one-to-one computing initiatives in school districts takes a whole different meaning, at least in investment plans 24 months out.
