Unified Smart Device.

Post Published on February 19, 2012.
Last Updated on April 28, 2016 by davemackey.

We have a problem on our hands – device proliferation. If you work in IT like me it is likely that you suffer from having a plethora of heterogeneous devices: a work laptop, a work desktop, a home desktop or laptop, a smartphone, an ebook reader, and a tablet…and that is just the short list. You might have a work phone and a home phone (cellular I mean), a separate GPS, and so on. Too many devices costing too much money with too many silos in which information is contained.

I’d like to suggest a Unified Smart Device (USD). There are some devices which are beginning to head down this road – but none which have gone nearly far enough or well enough. I’m thinking of the Motorola Atrix and the Asus Transformer for example. These devices allow one to integrate a smartphone and a computer or a tablet and a computer – but that’s it – leaving, still, far too many devices. Not to mention that the processing power in either of these devices isn’t going to be sufficient to replace one’s main laptop/workstation if you do much serious work.

So…here is my thoughts on a USD:

1. The smartphone seems the logical base product. It is what we carry with us absolutely everywhere.
2. Buying a smartphone should let one “transform” into any of the other devices – desktop, laptop, ebook reader, tablet.
3. The smartphone is smaller than any of the other devices and thus can fit inside of any of the other devices, all other devices thereby become shells (with a few exceptions).
   1. Want to walk and read or watch? Insert your smartphone into your tablet’s bay and you are up and running.
   2. Want to read for an extended period of time? Insert your smartphone into your ebook reader’s bay and experience eInk.
4. Now in the case of desktops and laptops we have traditionally faced another problem – the same problem that confronts most folks who work on both a desktop and a laptop – namely, the sheer performance power of a desktop cannot be matched at a reasonable price by more compact devices. How do we fix this?
   1. The smartphone slides into a bay in the desktop or laptop, just like in a ebook reader or tablet, BUT…
   2. The desktop or laptop has its own hardware, the smartphone becomes “dumb” providing access to the data on the phone, but using the primary device’s power or it takes a supplemental role in performance – picking up slack for the main desktop/laptop hardware.

This could provide a win-win situation for manufacturers and consumers. Manufacturers would reduce the costs of their hardware (due to less components) and increase sales (due to a tendency to purchase from the same manufacturer across devices). Meanwhile, consumers (including businesses) would benefit from a unified solution at a reduced price due to the simplification of components. For example:

• The eReader would no longer need any intelligence or storage, it would just relay the data on the smartphone to an eInk screen.
• The tablet would also require no intelligence or storage, resizing the display to the larger tablet screen.
• The laptop would not need a hard drive, or at most would need a smaller hard drive (probably SATA), as it would be able to utilize the smartphone’s internal capacities.
• The desktop would be able to utilize a slower (probably SATA) hard drive since the main OS would be contained on the smartphone.

I’m just saying… 🙂