MOBILE MAYHEM

Dick Pountain/16 January 2006/14:02/Idealog 138

I didn't find an iPod Nano in my Christmas stocking this year - but rather than scream and scream until I was sick I put a brave face on it, bit my trembling lower lip and reminded myself that I already have a 1GB MP3 player that's as small (if not as pretty) as a Nano and takes a single AAA battery instead of requiring a recharging cradle. And I still haven't managed to fill that up with music, despite cramming all the Goldbergs and the St Matthew Passion on top of a mess of jazz, blues, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven. Its only problem is a lousy, illegible, one-line LCD display that makes selection so tedious that I usually take pot luck (while dreaming about that lovely, bright white menu on the Nano). There's no doubt in my mind that I will succumb, and probably soon, though it may not be soon enough, because at the rate things are moving Apple may have done away with the Nano in favour of a video version before I get there...   

It feels to me as if the world of pocketable gadgets has gone stark staring mad over the last 12 months. A walk down Tottenham Court Road now exposes you to whole new shops with windows are crammed full of tiny silver (or black, or pink, orange, turquoise) boxes. The range of functions such devices can tackle has increased enormously, but no single device covers them all and the overlap between them now generates so many different permutations that rational choice is no longer possible. Even thinking about it too much makes your head hurt.

It's now possible to distinguish these main categories of function: PIM (that is, address/calendar/to-do/diary/calculator); voice communicator (that is, mobile phone); web browser; mail client; digital still camera; camcorder; FM radio; television receiver; games player; music player; video player; document viewer (including spreadsheets); USB data backup drive; reference applications (say maps or language dictionaries run from card); GPS/satnav; remote terminal; and universal remote control. I make that 17 functions but I'm sure I've missed a couple. In fact, on reflection, I've missed an infinite number because all PDAs, if not all phones, are universal programmable computing devices that can run any number of third-party applications: I personally use several including the Bonsai outliner and a VAT calculator I wrote myself in CASL. No device that I know of does all these jobs, some do only one or two of them, while the best like the Palm Treo and iMate smartphones models may manage seven or eight. If you actually needed all of these functions, working out what combination of devices to buy, what's the minimum number of boxes you need to carry and the least you need pay would be a problem on a par with scheduling a major airline fleet or allocating berths in a international cargo terminal.

People haven't yet really got their heads around exactly what you can do with these devices, and as they do so the boundaries between business and leisure equipment are crumbling. In the Real World Mobile Computing column this month, a reader in a video-related business tells Mark Needham that his firm might upgrade from Palm devices not to Windows Mobile but to Sony's PSP or the iPod Video! Podcasting is an application invented at street level that wasn't part of Apple's original design brief. And never forget that, while texting has become the dominant communication channel for the under-30s,  SMS wasn't originally invented for public consumption at all but was added to phones for the convenience of maintenance engineers. Digital gadgets are opening up so many new possibilities that one can no longer expect their manufacturers to spot or promote them all.  

This creative ferment has a downside, and that's the problem of interchange standards. To be sure the major data types have settled around well-defined standards - an MP3 will play on any device - but simple things like transferring contacts from phone to phone isn't as easy as it should be, while cables and connectors can become a nightmare even within the same manufacturer's range (to mention no Palms). We're still some way from being able to swap data painlessly by Bluetooth between any two devices.

My own mobile setup has changed minimally in the last year: I now have a Thinkpad T40, the same old Sony Clie, a plain-vanilla Sagem mobile (without Bluetooth) and a no-name MP3 player. That's four boxes, leaving aside my digital camera as the Clie takes pictures of a sort. What's improved my life most (apart from the Thinkpad's lightness) is a £16 cable from Proporta that both recharges and syncs the Clie from the USB port, rendering its power-brick redundant. Even so I'd really like to get down to just two boxes, the Thinkpad and some sort of smartphone/camera/MP3 combo. A Treo or an iMate might do, but I'm content to wait a few months while the flux is so strong. It did occur to me the other day though that what I really need is a pocketable phone/Terminal Server client, so I can just access all the data and services on my Thinkpad via GPRS. That must be getting pretty close, surely.