Mobile Phones Will Become The Primary Personal Computing Devices John J. Barton, Shumin Zhai, and Steve B. Cousins IBM Almaden Research Center 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA. 95120 Abstract A merger of the lowly USB memory stick and the mobile telephone provide a new platform for informa- tion solutions. Microscopic portable memory with ca- pacity similar to today’s PC disk drives will spark a transformation which will then be driven by new use models for mobile phones and a new class of “com- puter user”, one that has no “personal computer” at all. Since more people carry phones than laptops the PC will fade into a role similar to today’s view of the once mighty mainframe. Laptop-loving dinosaurs at the workshop will protest that phones will never re- place their favorite machines, in much same way the mainframe developers scoffed at PCs throughout the 1980s. We still have mainframe developers, but the PC created new categories of computer use. We need to understand what new uses will emerge with the computer-phone. 1. Mobile computing but not “Personal Com- puting” Imagine a mobile device with the shape of a modern cellular phone containing all of the functions we ex- pect in such a phone plus wireless Internet radio con- nection and a digital storage of one terabyte. Since it looks like a phone, we call it a phone. Such a phone would have all the capabilities of a typical PC laptop except for two major shortcomings: the display and the keyboard are tiny. (We will use “keyboard” as short- hand for input devices including pointing devices). In- deed if such a device were connected to a keyboard and screen, the entire user experience of a PC could be reproduced in principle. On the other hand, such a phone would be much easier to carry than a laptop, it would be easier to store, and it would be much more convenient to use for audio/video services like music, telephony and simple video. There in lies the funda- mental challenges - human control and visual output – and the opportunities - extreme portability and simpli- fied audio/video uses. If we can engineer solutions to the challenges we can unleash the potential. Let us further imagine a world where work and en- tertainment spaces routinely contain full sized displays and keyboards. If we had the technology to bind the phone to these devices, then we would have the capa- bility of a PC at work and home, but the portability of a phone in between or when traveling. This binding has been termed “opportunistic annexing” by Pierce and Mahaney [1]. Such a world, the combination of a mobile multi- network phone with vast digital storage and available displays and keyboards, would open up computing to different set of users, users that need visual output and keyboard input only intermittently. For example: Construction, maintenance, and service person- nel who need to maintain records of activity and consult documentation occasionally. Health care workers using electronic medical records. Sales and management workers requiring ap- pointment and background information on clients, but seeking personal interactions rather than laptop-focused interactions. Casual computer users with personal photos, mu- sic, video, and digital correspondence to share while mobile. Mobile office workers charged with person-to- person communications. 1