There are two schools of thought when it comes to mobile devices.
First is the popular one right now, though it’s limitations are becoming apparent. This is the Apple School of thought. This consists of a three tiered solution beginning with your semi-portable laptop or desktop home/office computer as your hub. You have a tablet as your around the house/office portable. Finally you have your smartphone mobile device.
The devices start very powerful and slowly get more utilitarian as you go. Data is owned by you whether this means created by you on your powerful machine or purchased by you from Apple. Data is moved about by a means of a file shuffle from one machine to another as your context changes.
The downfall is that creation of content is very limited away from your main machine and you need to plan ahead for all the data you will need while away from your main machine. Yes, they have a fledgling solution for this, but it’s expensive for what you get and not very elegant.
The second school of thought is that of Google. It centers around an old Sun Microsystems white whale of platform independence. Your data is in the “cloud” and you are always connected to the Internet. You can access your data from any platform with the goal being content creation from any platform. A vision that won’t be realized until their Chrome OS tablets arrive on the market.
The Google system is all about getting things done. It’s about collaboration. It’s about access to any of your data whenever you need it.
It’s a lofty goal, but they are well on their way to accomplishing it.
Despite it’s current lack of refinement and total elegance, Google’s method will inevitably win.
Mobile computing is rapidly overtaking desktop computing. It’s a matter of time before this happens. When it does the Apple model will break down and need to be changed.
One player that just doesn’t seem to have down either of these methods is Microsoft. If Microsoft was to get it’s game together and develop a “cloud” based transition that is both elegant, like Apple, and task oriented with collaboration built in, they could once again become market dominant. If not there market share losses are going to rapidly hit the elbow (or in this case the knee) of the logarithmic graph and in ten years they will be a niche player trying to survive. They need to take the hunger they have in Bing and get the whole company behind it.
In the meantime, I am totally in the Google camp.
