The Future of Mobile is starting to emerge

In eWeek:

Ahh, I love my modern digital lifestyle, especially when it comes to being out, whether traveling or just moving around the city. It's great that I can walk around with a music collection that dwarfs my old college record collection, that I can have several books in my pocket ready to read whenever I want and that I can snap a picture or video of anything I see.

So what am I doing? Am I walking around with an MP3 player, an ebook reader, a digital camera and a digital camcorder?

Nope, just one device, my Blackberry smartphone, which lets me listen to music, read books, take pictures and video and, oh yeah, make calls, play games, manage contacts, etc.

Or an iPhone, or any other of the emerging smartphones, really. And not just these devices - don'tknow about you, but I used my laptop a lot less once I had a 3G iPhone.

What's very interesting is that for the longest time (ie in the Days Before iPhone) the view was that consumers didn't want one device as a phone/music player/pocket calculator/etc whereas the above implies they do now. In fact there is a counter trend towards very simple phones, but if you look at where the money is - and where people with the money are going - it's towards the smartphone.

And if you take it to its logical extension as an augmented reality, multimedia playing, health monitoring, life managing device, M2M interface, and book - and then hit it with 5 cycles of Moore's Law (1/32 of size and price for same power) and make it wearable.......... well, check out the TED video above for where this can all go.

Pity for Planet Mobile that it took a hardware company to show us the way....