[prunebeads]

That's interesting, but what would be the alternative?

Rob Pike's dream setup "is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours."

In this situation, there would be public phones, public computers available in sufficient quantity everywhere. Think of the necessary amount of work to install, maintain, and upgrade such a setup. In a capitalist society, there would be different brands providing access to their own solutions, and thus a lot of Blackberry, Apple, or <your favorite carrier> kiosks all over the place.

You could think that with such a scheme, costs would prohibit a rapid evolution of services, as we witness them in current business models. Would we get the iKiosks updated each year with new firmware, or the latest multitouch screens? In comparison, how much money is being poured by individuals in upgrades for their personal stuff? What is the overall cost (i.e. money that could be spent on something else).

There's the real estate issue also. How much space would be consumed by those kiosks, and how much would it cost?

It would be interesting to estimate all the pros and cons of that dream setup, and compare it with our current situation.

[deong]

The closest thing I can imagine to what he wants is something like a "t+15 years" version of the Motorola WebTop (and many other similar ideas). You carry a powerful processor with you and either use it "bare" or connect it to a standardized interface setup. You'll never get enough of those kiosks to completely get to what you described, but when your phone can be a perfectly capable standalone device as well, that becomes less important. You have the "docks" at home, work, and a few popular public places like airports, coffee shops, etc.

The idea of something like these dockable phones is almost certainly going to be a big part of where the industry is headed. It's just too obvious not to be. But it requires advances in both ubiquitous broadband availability and power and battery life available to mobile devices, so it's just not feasible right now.