For those of you who have any doubt, digital convergence has finally arrived. We have known for years that it was bound to arrive, but we didn't quite know when or in what form it would take. However, we now know the form and it is the cell phone.

This week, I bought the Audiovox SMT 5600 smartphone. It is a truly kick ass device with the ability to sync to Outlook over Bluetooth, surf the web and stream or play MP3 or Windows media content. This device does everything that we've been waiting for in a device.

The only barriers to make it a remarkable media experience are bandwidth, storage and battery life. However, these are relatively predictable problems, which is to say that we can forcast their steady improvement. The wireless carriers have schedules for the deployment of higher and higher capacity data services in their international networks. Batteries will continue to improve, but more importantly, semiconductors will continue to require less and less power to operate. And finally, storage has typically marched along at a pace that has far outstripped semiconductors.

On the subject of storage, the current batch of portable audio devices range from 5GB of storage in the small form factor devices (i.e. the iPod mini and the Rio Carbon) to 40GB in the larger devices (i.e. the iPod). The SMT 5600 comes with only 32MB of storage, but also has a miniSD slot. Currently, the largest miniSD card I could find was 1GB [Flash Memory Store]. That's certainly nothing to sneeze at. But, you can be sure that the capacity of these cards will quickly grow to the 10's of Gigabytes range.

It's been a long time in coming, but it is finally here. The SMT 5600 is a sweet phone and I would highly recommend it. That said, there will be some really incredible devices coming out in the next few years, so keep your eyes open. The future in devices is bright.
 12:25:14 PM    comment []