I’m still not sold on iPhones and Eee PCs. That sounds like a bizarre thing to say, considering the early financial and social success of the two products, so let me clarify. I’d love an Eee PC, and I use a smartphone every day. What I’m skeptical about is the belief that the future will rely on portability and ease over performance.

Since at least the early 1900’s, audio production has focused on producing the high fidelity sound quality faithful to artists’ original performances. Improved technology brought us from AM radio to FM, from phonographs to records and through to compact discs. The introduction of online downloadable music and the iPod is one of the few changes in technology that actually decreased sound quality in favor of portability, but is taking a very similar path to the tape cassette.* Over the past few years, torrent sites have encoded music files at 256 kb/s or higher, and even Apple instituted iTunes Plus on all new songs, increasing sound quality.
*The cassette tape also reduced quality from the 8-track tape, but later increased its quality dramatically to make it nearly, if not as good.

Cloud computing, mobile technologies and netbooks have been not only popular, but heavily hyped over the past few years. They face a similar quandary, though: does the internet’s increase in portability and usability outweigh its decrease in performance when compared to an operating system? I’m not sure it does at this point. At All Things Digital in 2007, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were asked about cloud computing and future technology, but both pointed out that netbook and internet (cloud) capabilities are still nowhere near the operating system in terms of performance. Steve Jobs gave a concrete example:

“When we were doing the iPhone, we thought: wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? So we called up Google… We ended [creating] a client app [that]… when we showed it to [Google], they’re just blown away by how good it is, and you can’t do that stuff in a browser. People are figuring out how to do more in a browser… but it’s happening fairly slowly, and there’s still a lot that you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to which you can run a rich client on [lower cost or lower power] devices. The marriage of great client apps with great cloud services… can be more powerful than just having a browser on the client.”

And Bill Gates noted that:

“The 5 inch screen does not compete with the 20 inch screen, [which] does not compete with the big living room screen… [It is important that] locally you have the responsiveness of immediate interaction without the latency or bandwidth limitations that you get if you try to do it [online].”

Granted, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have their own biases, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Will netbooks and smartphones eventually reach the point that their hardware is powerful enough to do what a personal computer does today? Absolutely. However, I don’t think that a smartphone will ever replace a personal computer and I believe it will still take years for netbooks to truly replace the functionality and performance of a full computing system. Take Google Docs, for example. The things that can be done with Google Spreadsheets are much more limited than what can be done with Microsoft Excel.* The differences in form factors and screen sizes only exacerbate the issue, too. I can’t even imagine trying to operate a spreadsheet on a touch screen iPhone.
*I’m a power user of Excel and have dabbled with Google Spreadsheets, and I don’t believe that the functionality is even close to there yet.

So every time I see a new Eee PC, or the next smartphone that will change my world, I can’t stop but think that we’re still not there yet. Touch screens (even with virtual keyboards) just don’t offer the computing or performance capabilities that I need every day, and there is absolutely zero chance that I would ever do 100% of my work from a mobile phone. Netbooks have the most attractive form factor, but most times I still prefer a larger monitor* to the ones featured on netbooks. Unfortunately at this point, my only option is to carry an iPhone-type device (smartphone + music player), netbook (small form factor PC for word processing, simple web browsing), desktop/laptop computer (heavier computing technology & gaming). As I said, I’m not sold. Yet.
*Or two monitors when I’m crunching numbers in Excel.