Imagine this.
You're standing in line at Starbucks and you hear the new Bob Dylan album playing over the commanding bark of the barista and the throaty whine of foaming milk. You decide that you want to buy the whole Dylan album on the spot. You pull out your mobile phone and the free Wi-Fi gateway provided by Starbucks greets you and asks if you'd like to purchase the album. You browse the online music store with a few clicks and buy the songs.
Latte in hand, you walk outside and head to the office. Your download isn't finished but you're out of Wi-Fi range, so your phone automatically switches to your carrier's data network. Your download resumes with only the slightest pause while you go over your digital slide presentation one more time. By the time you arrive at your office, Bob is already on the third song.
When you sit down at your desk, the phone detects your wireless 30-inch cinema display, mouse and keyboard. In an instant, you're connected to your desktop peripherals via Bluetooth. Your mobile browser session shows up on the cinema display and Bob starts piping over the surround sound speakers suspended in the corners of your office. You pull out your ear buds, drop the phone in your pocket and fire up Photoshop -- served over the web, of course -- which instantly launches. All of your preferences and files are stored online, so you start working on the same image you last tweaked from your breakfast table.
When Steve Jobs stood on stage Tuesday at Macworld and showed off the iPhone for the gathered masses, he wasn't just selling a phone. He was selling us the future -- mobile, broadband-connected and ubiquitous.
It's a well-worn vision, in fact, but one that suddenly seems tantalizingly close. His sleek little device runs an operating system born from Mac's OS X. This gives the handheld the potential it needs to run real applications, not just widgets and "lite" versions of desktop apps, as is the case with so-called smart phones powered by Microsoft's Windows CE and PalmSource's Palm OS.
The iPhone then is not just a phone, or a combo MP3-video player, but rather a portable computer. And, like a magician, Jobs has performed a sleight of hand in which the computer itself seems to disappear, just as the word has disappeared from Apple's corporate name, leaving only its function behind.
"I think this is a very big deal," says Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo. "Cyberspace was a wonderful thing, but the only place you could enter cyberspace from was your desktop. We've had some brain damaged ways of accessing it from the places where we actually live our lives, but until now, they've all been compromised. If the iPhone works as advertised, it's a no compromises node, and that's a huge deal."
"This isn't the next computer," Saffo continues. "This is the next home for the mind. Computers have had a nice long run, and laptops will always play at least some role. But the center of gravity is now slowly shifting from the desk to the device in your pocket."
To be sure, the computer hasn't literally disappeared with the advent of the iPhone, and it likely never will. It'll just continue to get smaller and more powerful. How small and how powerful is now the subject of furious debate among software developers who really want to know: Is the iPhone in essence a slimmed down Mac?
The answer for now quite clearly is no. One of the salient features of a genuine computing platform is the ability to run third party applications, and currently the betting money says Apple won't be opening its mobile platform to outsiders, at least for the foreseeable future.
An Apple representative declined to discuss whether or not any sort of access to the iPhone's application or widget platform will be offered to outside developers. An open software development environment would be nice, but don't hold your breath.
That only makes sense, says Jupitermedia analyst Michael Gartenberg, given the current constraints of the mobile environment.
"It's advantageous to have one party exercise control over every piece of software on a device," he says. "There's a negative aspect in that it limits what the device is capable of, but the positive is that it lets them control the experience. A mobile device has to run with a far higher degree of liability than a PC -- you really don't want it crashing or rebooting."
Assuming Apple sticks to its closed approach, support for things like the latest video codecs, VOIP and Microsoft Office document standards will have to come courtesy of Apple. If the dream of a pocket PC for the future is to be realized, we'll have wait for more partnerships like those Apple has with Google and Yahoo.
Running through a checklist of baseline performance and function requirements to support our dream scenario described at the start of this article shows that we still have long way to go.
Does the iPhone's version of the Safari browser have the necessary muscle to run web-based software built with Flash, Ajax and Apollo?
Since the iPhone is running a slimmed-down version of OS X, that remains to be seen. Either way, the processing requirements for web software are still high. Mobile hardware needs a year or two to catch up.
What about the user experience? Is a mobile's tiny screen good enough and familiar enough to get people to switch for good?
Of course not. Support for optional peripherals is essential for mass adoption. Some folks will get by with just the handheld, but everyone else will miss their 30-inch display.
Does the current wireless ecosystem have enough bandwidth to sustain this vision of a fully wireless environment?
Another no. Devices are ready for "everything over the air," but the air isn't. HD video from online stores is here now, and Photoshop as a web service is around the corner. But the gigabit web streaming from a satellite? Give it ten more years.
What about wireless synching?
Not yet. The iPhone announced Tuesday has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities but must be placed in a physical dock to connect to a PC.
Are the batteries powerful enough to sustain extended mobile usage of demanding applications?
No. Apple promises 5 hours of talk time and 16 hours playing music, about average for a cell phone and MP3 player respectively. Hook up to a wireless streaming web app, however, and we're probably talking minutes instead of hours.
One thing seems certain. As software moves from the desktop to the web and as handheld devices get more powerful, it becomes more likely that we'll see these little touch-screen communicators ruling our lives one day.
Within the reality distortion field surrounding Macworld, we're free to dream. Step away from the fanboys at San Francisco's Moscone Center, however, and you'll see that this crystal-clear vision of tomorrow is just a hologram.
"There's no doubt that Apple understands that more and more ... services are going to be cloud-based and they need different devices to be able to access them," says Gartenberg. "Maybe that's what we're seeing (with) the beginning of in the iPhone. But I don't think that in five years there will be no Macintosh."
