Replace your laptop, desktop with your phone

Five years ago the future to mobile computing to me was a stone. I wanted a small pebble that I would carry with me between work and home, as well as on the road. Keyboards, displays, mice: these were all replicable and easily obtained. The stone would carry everything required to access your local and cloud-stored files as well as the OS. Everything would just work: it was a dream of interoperability.

It strikes me that Canonical has done something very elegant with their port of Ubuntu’s desktop environment to Android. If you haven’t seen the marketing site, then I’ll summarize: the idea is that Ubuntu linux and Android run together on your phone. When you dock your phone, your desktop is displayed through HDMI out and you can use all USB peripherals like you would with a laptop or desktop.

What’s elegant about the solution is that not only have Canonical one upped my five year old dream of the future by including a phone in the stone when you undock it (genius) but that this kind of dual functionality will drive demand for increased hardware spec (e.g. multicore processors) and advanced smartphone functionality as well as continue to drive peripheral channel sales. Most of the time, I only need a display, keyboard and mouse so the acronym the Mac Mini pioneered will continue to gather steam: BYOKDM (bring your own keyboard, display and mouse).

The move also helps Canonical (and Android) capture a series of new markets: from cost-cutting enterprises willing to replace laptops and phones with a single phone, to emerging markets where cost pressures continue to drive convergence. Large-scale flexibility of the solution is dependent on the development of a standard dock type, similar to the iPhone, so that devices can easily move between work areas as well as transition to car and living space environments.

The demand for the desktop app isn’t dead. Ubuntu for Android captures a period in time where keyboards and mice still continue to be the dominant input method and gracefully marries them into the next generation of touch.

I just hailed a taxi using NFC

By touching my phone and accepting a dialog box, I hailed a cab. The cab knew where to pick me up and was there in minutes.

What’s the big deal? I could have texted that information myself. Possibly had I a) known the taxi company’s text number, b) known the full address of where I was and c) understood the local language. The NFC tag obviated these needs in a relatively painless way.

Yes, I could have just asked the receptionist to call me a cab but I can’t help but get excited about the potential to extend the functionality of something that we all carry around all day in such a useful manner.

I follow a lot of NFC press. There’s a lot of emphasis on NFC as a way to help make transactions seamless. I feel that it’s about a lot more than transactions. NFC can act as a lubricant in our environments. It’s about making things less hard: doing things, learning things, playing games, exploring.

Are you asking, what the hell is NFC? Well near field communication is pretty well defined at Wikipedia, so I suggest you check there first although Nokia has a pretty simple-to-understand page also available for more information.

Phantom emails and the loss of a little trust.

Mail. It’s still the number one app that I use day in and day out. An upgrade to Mac OS X Lion caused a little corruption to Mail and this is the story of little trust lost.

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Mapping the news: a story of personal failure

I have a secret: I’m a closet taxonomist. I love mapping relationships and understanding how things came to be from the information that we have at our hands. Must be the biology training that I never got over. One of the projects that I am not so happy about the results was a simple idea: I tried to take news and map it.

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What every product manager needs to know about designing adaptively for mobile

I’ve been reading up on Skeleton over the past few days and the ideas behind adaptive design. Created by Dave Gamache, Skeleton is a boilerplate framework for creating pages that look great when viewed on any device or any size — so your website’s design looks different whether viewed on an iPhone, iPad or desktop. It helps you focus on the differences of content: what should be hidden, removed, downgraded in important as the screen size diminishes.

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