Should we think of the ubergadget as a sensor instead?

This interesting graphic brings to light a couple of really interesting points. The first is the fact that the key thing to remember about mobile is that you don’t need “everything”, you just need “enough”. That “enough” may be the ability to simply see content from an online source, other times you want to be able to edit or create that information when you are “out and about”. I think this is one of the ideas that was forgotten when the laptops first came out – they tried to do everything that the desktop system did and were not really successful for a while. One great thing the iPhone did was to break the paradigm of how people expected their mobile content to look. Apple made it “ok” to have a web version and a “full” version, but (and this is important), one that still looked good as opposed to the spartan wap versions that were available before iPhone brought webkit to the mobile environment.

The second thing this graphic reminds us about is that the phone is the best sensor/recorder that we have yet developed. It can collect the ambient data about just about anything and everything that we can detect with our own senses – and perhaps some we can’t. It does this well because it seems to be always with us (Google supposedly developed Latitude with the understanding that a phone is likely never -unless stolen or forgotten- more than a meter away from it’s user/owner). With that 1m radius, together with GPS, sensors that are not on the phone can relay information from other systems to the device, or that information can be cross referenced at a later date (making phone malware really quite dangerous).

So with these points, why is it again that education in North America seems to be ignoring mobile? Well, right now, I’m thinking it has something to do with the cost, but those costs are coming down (even in Canada) and usage is picking up as is speed, so the comfort level should also be on the upswing. Or is it that we haven’t really understood what the potential of this format is because we are trying to describe it in terms of other computing and communication devices rather than looking at is as a sensor.