On Telephones That Compute
The Oracle has read 17 documents on this subject, the most recent dated 19 November 1996.
Questions put to the Oracle
Q Will the telephone and the computer ever be the same machine?
It has been tried. The IBM Simon had a touch screen, weighed 510 grams and cost 899 dollars with a service contract; BellSouth stopped selling it after fifty thousand. Nokia’s Communicator opens like a clamshell and will send a facsimile from a moving train. Both were built. Neither sells.
The obstacle is not ambition; it is geometry. A telephone is a thing you hold against your ear; a computer is a thing you sit in front of. An object that does both must be too heavy for the ear and too small for the hands. The Oracle expects the two to remain separate, and expects people to go on holding the telephone up to the side of the head, because that is what a telephone is for.
Q Could one read the Web on such a thing?
On 160 pixels by 160, in black and white, you would not read the Web. You would read a second Web, prepared separately for small screens, with the pictures removed and the tables flattened.
This is the flaw in the scheme. No publisher will maintain two versions of everything for the sake of a few thousand subscribers carrying telephones about. The Oracle gives the small-screen Web five years at the outside.
Q What would a person do with it all day?
Nothing. This is the part the enthusiasts do not think through. There is only so much a person needs to know while walking down a street.
The Oracle can picture consulting a railway timetable, or the price of a share, and has exhausted the list. The rest of the day the device would sit in a pocket doing nothing, which is why it will stay a tool for business and never become a thing people carry for its own sake.