I was intrigued by Amazon’s announcement of the Fire Phone. This phone is a device with some new consumer technologies that makes easy to buy almost anything on Amazon – and oh – if you still make phone calls you can do that too.
I wonder if we are approaching a world where we have not just one mobile device but multiple mobile devices. The Fire phone seems optimized for shopping and exploration, and maybe a TV remote if you are in the Amazon Prime eco-system.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I would prefer to have a laptop and a tablet, rather than an all-in-one Microsoft Surface type solution. Maybe the same is true for phones. Maybe in the future, we have a phone optimized for when we are shopping, a phone for connecting to the office, and a portable device for home automation.
Blackberry is making a bit of a resurgence with its new operating system that allows it to run Android Apps. With Blackberry’s enterprise server software making it a good solution for VPN’ing to your office, maybe every office worker will have a device just for communicating to the office. And you can still play Android games on it when nobody is watching.
Most of my friends have more than one computing device – phone, tablet, laptop and / or desktop, each device that performs some tasks better than the others. Assuming the price of devices continue to fall, perhaps we are not too far off from even more specialized devices, rather than one mobile device that tries to do it all.