Here's an interesting thing. More and more applications are being coded, and a number of new devices are coming to the market, with a built in assumption. That the device will always have an available connection to the internet.
This makes a lot of sense given the capabilities of the devices. A huge amount of the value in a modern smartphone is that connection. Nokia's Ovi service depends a huge deal on the handset being able to communicate with the wider internet.
So why are so many people not staying online and using all the tools they could be using?
It should be pointed out that the number of people who do go online and are doing the 'connected while mobile' thing is on the rise, but the handset manufacturers, network operators and companies providing these services would really like everyone else to catch up and join in.
Ask the regular user why they're not using these services and one of the top answers will be that it is too expensive, and you still don't know what the true cost will be till you get the statement at the end of the month. Data packages, at least in the UK, need to be both clear to the end user, and advertised, and with some common sense from the operators as well.
It is a lot better than a year ago - Orange, for example, will charge you a maximum of £1.50 per day for data on both 'pay as you go' and 'pay monthly' (but do make sure it's activated, if you are a monthly user). Other networks have similar packages that can give you control over the data part of the bill, but you will need to be pro-active about this.
Not everywhere is in good coverage for a 3G data signal. Los Angeles is a good example here, with only 30% of the city able to use 3G. There's a reason many iPhone users didn't switch up from the 2.5G version of the device. Even if you do have good 3G coverage outside the major population centres, the speed can still be slow, especially when thinking about upstream speeds from the handset.
And of course many smartphone users (especially business users) travel a lot, and the second you start roaming abroad that £3/MB your network quotes you at home jumps an order of magnitude. Bill shock is almost guaranteed.
From a more practical point of view, staying online takes battery power, and maintaining that connection is always going to drain this vital resource. Just thinking about normal activities, making sure your phone can get through both a working day and whatever evening events you might attend (especially in the festive season) is still something that engineers will spend a lot of development time on. Adding the requirement for always on connectivity might be asking too much, at least in early 2009.
And, of course, always on Internet is going to be generating more RF signals from your pocket, which may or may not be a health risk depending on whom you ask and who sponsors their studies. Other physical effects are more noticeable, such as a warming of the battery. I'm sure it's all inside the tolerances, but it has the potential to get disconcerting after eight hours.
Make no mistake, all of these problems are going to be overcome, either through the application of Moore's law in the case of technological problems; or by the marketplace looking for the next big thing to attract customers in the case of billing and coverage. We are not there yet, but perhaps 2009 can address many of these concerns?
But even having the goal of an always-connected device should not blind us to what happens when the device is not connected. I'm just back from the Le Web conference in Paris. For pricing reasons I wasn't going online over the air, and the Wi-fi at the conference was flooded with so many attendees that my N85 wasn't going online that way either. If all my work was in 'the cloud' of data, be it GMail, Google docs, Files on Ovi or one of many social networks, then I would have been stuffed. There's still a need for local as well as global data access.
It's important that our devices, software designers and coding gurus ensure that we can always operate our smartphones as individual devices. By all means ensure that they can connect to the outside world, and that when they do they are able to do everything with ease. But we don't always have that luxury, and we need to be able to do stuff without that connection. One of the great additions to Google's GMail client in its latest release is the ability to read and compose mails off-line, ready to send when a signal is found.
And there will always be personal circumstances and privacy concerns where we need to 'go dark' and not be broadcasting our location, or even how well we are doing at the latest N-Gage arcade game.
By all means make sure we have our smartphones online 100% without breaking the bank, but there must always be a valid way to work without that connection, even in the brave new world.
-- Ewan Spence, Dec 2008