I Want A Phone With Average Intelligence

I'm heading back from a case competition at Boston University where several business schools competed around the topic of an all IP converged world. It led to some very interesting discussions surrounding how the future will unfold. And one thought that sticks with me from our discussions is the idea of an "average intelligence" phone.

We're all used to the idea of a smartphone and what it offers over a typical device. And yes, the lines between phone and smartphone are quickly blurring as the technology in our devices gets better and better. Email, texting, cameras, internet, bluetooth and all of the things that we need in our busy lives are becoming commonplace for all of us.

But we all know the problem. Five hours of use, and we need to scramble to find an outlet for more juice. Our phones are more and more powerful but require more and more power. What if we could offload the power intensive applications to the cloud. The idea of cloud computing is quickly becoming more popular, regardless of the multiple definitions people associate it with. Google docs, MobileMe and other services are allowing us to work more efficiently with our data and software running elsewhere.

I think our phones should do the same. With better connectivity and higher speed access, we can have devices that keep basic functionality in the phone, but send higher end processes out to be handled elsewhere. We definitely don't need to send basic tasks like a calculator or solitaire, but things like gaming, video processing and other media rich applications are perfectly suited for this. The resulting phones would send out the really "smart" functions and keep the "dumb" stuff local. Hence, the "average intelligence" device.

For a good example, the online gaming service OnLive does exactly this. They offer a gaming service that can run on almost any device. The processing is done on a server where there is capacity, while the frames are the only thing sent to your device. You are essentially watching a video of your game as it is being played on a cluster. I think this is a model that will hit PC's first, but I think mobile devices are the best place for this kind of technology.

I remember SGI working on a similar technology previously. Computationally intensive visualizations were handled by a supercomputer, while the resulting output was streamed to any kind of device.

The benefits? Better battery life, cheaper devices, backed up data in the cloud, software updated remotely, and the ability to move your applications seamlessly from one device to another.

The problem? It requires an operator to take the leap and instantiate this kind of service. And the infrastructure required is expensive. It's the chicken and egg kind of problem. However, in this case, most of our devices can likely already handle the output. The iPhone and Palm Pre are the beginnings of this kind of service. Hopefully it quickly becomes viable to the people who are in the position to offer it.