HellaFrank

Yesterday at PRWeek’s NEXT Conference, Steve Rubel talked about how the mobile phone will be the new computer. This is not a groundbreaking statement, in Japan for example it is very common for a businessperson to take only their mobile phone into a meeting for note-taking and other purposes. But Steve said something else that made me look at the mobile phone in a new way — we’re not just going to use it as a computer when we’re away from our laptop or desktop, it may very well replace what we know as a computer today.

In the near future, processor speeds in phones will undoubtedly improve dramatically, hard-disk space is already skyrocketing, and as more and more of our data lives online (Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, etc…) we won’t even need to store it on a computer anymore, we’ll just need internet to access it.

Wherever you go, the phone can be hooked up to a monitor and you will be able to do work, listen to music, watch YouTube — pretty much anything you can do today on a computer. Want to leave work and finish up at home? Just put the phone in your pocket and you’re all set.

And I’m now trying to figure out why I’m calling it a phone. It’s not.

I remember when I was younger and we would learn in school about the first computers — they were the “size of a house” and people put punch cards through them to make them work. We would laugh and try to imagine what kind of mouse went with a computer that big. A few years from now, kids will be doing the same thing, but they’ll be laughing at those 2 or 3 foot tall towers we hooked up to monitors as they plug their playing-card-deck-sized computer into the flatscreen to watch some TV.