It Won't Be Long Until We See Multifunction Handheld predicting the future

[neuspadrin 0]

I bet you in a few years you can easily have a "cell phone" media center with the ability to play hours of movies, read some high tech small disk that holds like 100x more then todays dvds... and it all fits in your palm. Not to mention it will have the gaming power of like some high tech rig these days.It's really just amazing how fast technology can develop to allow all sorts of pretty sweet stuff.And really, it was just a matter of time until the cell phone got intergrated with media player. I mean, lets see.. first you had your cell phones, then mp3 players came along, and portable dvd/movie players... then mp3 players morphed into more media related, allowing both movies/pictures/and mp3s to be used on them... and now they are adding cell phones in... and they are working on putting in heavy duty computer power next

[Moolkye 0]

I have to agree with whoever said it, that combining into one device is annoying at times. If you break the camera part then you are out of a camera, but still have an mp3 player, phone and gaming system, till one of those breaks.It's like having an all in one fax machine, copier, scanner, coffee maker.If one thing breaks, then you are out of all of them until it gets repaired.The best option is to have separate items, just smaller in size so you can carry around all of them.

[diJenerate 0]

You have all forgotten one vital fact... The objective of the exercise is to make money.The mobile phone industry reached its pinnacle in 2001 when the manufacturers realized there was nothing more to be done to innovate Cellular Technology. The smallest phone (a tooth implant) had been made, the smallest power plant for a phone had been made and the smallest phone could be powered indefinately from the users' central nervous system. Now these multibillion dollar giants had to find some new source of income. With 3G and 4G networks too far off for them to release that tech, they turned to their marketing departments to keep them afloat. They decided that phones would be sold by gimmick eg. hardware gimmicks such as cameras, audio players, web access tools etc. and software gimmicks like wallpaper and ringtones offered by service providers. Far from keeping the industry afloat, the manufacturers would have succeeded in making more cellphones available by 2010 than there are people on the planet. Good money for them! They ensure this by developing a concept phone, and then releasing the said phone 5~10 times in 18 months as an improved version each time touting some smart new feature. In reality, before the phone was released, the prototype carried all of these 'new' features, it just won't make as much money if released with them the first time. I call it creating your market, then milking that synthetic market.The other issue is this. The iPod is the world's most popular MP3 player. It is however far from the first hardware MP3 player and furthermore definately not the first HDD based MP3 player. That title belongs to Creative. Yes the company that seems to be competing with apple and some consumers even go as far as saying '...that new company from Korea...' (I overheard this in a Best Buy store) is the original manufacturer of the HDD based MP3 player. The Creative Nomad Jukebox was released in June of 1999 and contained a 6GB HDD long before Apple decided to cash in.So the convergence of the media to one device is only logical and we were capable of making this all-in-one device years ago. However, businesses need to make money and some want to make more than others so the industry places these artificial delays in to maximize the earnings that can be made from the consumer product at the expense of progress... this is the nature of our capitalist world.

Edited August 23, 2006 by diJenerate (see edit history)

[s2k6 0]

Uhm there is an ipod camera cellphone. I have one, samsung B600, 8 gig HD, 10 MP camera. It pwns you