One Convergence Problem Down, One To GoOne Convergence Problem Down, One To Go

Smartphones are rapidly becoming popular, but true device convergence won't occur until displays and input improve dramatically. The good news: It looks like the display problem is being solved.

As good as smartphones are becoming, we still need the larger screens and keyboards of laptops for anything more than basic computing tasks. Using thumb keyboards and looking at small screens for too long leads to hand cramps and headaches.

That's why I was heartened to see a scoop by my colleague Mike Elgan, who is editor of Personal Tech Pipeline. He learned that Philips expects to be selling a five-inch flexible screen for mobile devices in two years. The idea is that you'll pull the screen out of a device like a scroll. A five-inch scrollable display would be far superior, at least in terms of size, to current mobile device displays.

But the input problem will be much harder to solve. Most of us know how unpleasant it is to write more than a sentence or two with a thumb keyboard. There already are lots of mobile input alternatives but none I've seen is likely to be widely accepted or usable in every situation.

Speech recognition, for example, is good but who will want to dictate a sensitive memo sitting in a packed airplane? Over the years, I've dabbled with a variety of new types of keypads but, while these alternatives are inevitably clever, they just as inevitably require learning a new way of typing. Some hard-core road warriors will take the time and trouble to learn to use new data entry methods, but it's highly unlikely such solutions will ever gain widespread adoption. Predictive text is another clever solution that works well for short bursts of writing but it isn't sufficient for creating and editing long documents. Foldable keyboards also are great, but only if you have a flat surface.

There are two problems that must be solved before mobile input improves: the constantly-changing context in which mobile devices are used and the natural resistance to learning new ways of inputting data. That explains why finding an ideal mobile data input method is such a difficult, perhaps unsolvable problem. But until that's done, laptops will continue to be a fact of life.