But we’re still stuck in this stage of a lot of a good thinking. The iPhone could spawn enough knockoffs to fundamentally rethinking mobile device UI. The gPhone could change some business paradigms. Maybe this’ll mean a bunch of things. Consumers could be more interested in doing more than just making phone calls. A whole bunch of could/maybe/if stuff.

As to MMOs on cellphones, if you strip the game back to its basics of social character development, you can do most of the “Game” itself offline, with occasional server calls and encrypted SMS messages to central environments.

But I don’t think that’s the future. Rather, it’ll be the first big game to offer an integrated experience between PC, console and mobile that’ll justify followers.

In my opinion, anyway

Going on from there you can expect the “computer speaks” aspect to have a lot of platform development left to go through, the bandwitdh for interactively engaging data output from the phone is just too low still. The point that appears to be about fully developed is the output of sound, this matches the full bandwitdh of human ears already and is adequate. (If a phone sounds bad today its generally because the quality of the headphone earplugs.)

The least concerning stage becomes the “computer thinks”. But few seems to care a lot about that part anymore anyway.

When the interactive media suffer from bandwitdh shortage the experience will suck. But it will also drive the development of the platform to where it sucks less through iterative development over the years. The mobile industry will not go poof, so someday it will interface well enough to make quality interactive experiences.

I do however think its more likely that someday the Nintendo DS, or a competing ultra-cheap portable device will spearhead the development of interactive entertainment in Africa or inland China. If someone made a portable NES 8bit platform that can play the original game designs from the 80’s and sell if cheap enough you would have an interesting case. It would provide several orders of magnitude better entertainment for a lot less investment than what development of interactive entertainment “games” or whatever products the mobile industry is trying to provide for westerners currently.

The thing here is that those emerging markets dont have the specialist platform yet, so the generalist platform dosnt have much leverage or entry points to the market.

Mmm, now imagine a portable NES 8bit which can charge its battery on some solar power cell, with 10 of the greatest NES hits pre installed. The most important mechanical feature of that is probably robustness.

How many of those would sell in Africa?

However, if you squint, a Nintendo DS is a low-cost game-oriented UMPC. How many Nintendo DS’s have been sold? Could you create a MMORPG on a Nintendo DS (UMPC)?

Apple’s iPhone and a few other high-end largish phones aren’t far off from UMPCs.

So it’s unsurprising that programmability and therefore diversity of apps is going to burgeon on mobile, and it’s unsurprising that media companies want to use it as a distribution platform …

I think the U.S. Army held an event where attendees could use their mobile phones to snap photos of bar codes on displays that would instruct some server somewhere to send them files and more information on whatever was bar coded. That turned the event into a game with attendees running around trying to collect the most data. Mobile phones as bar code readers is considered an emerging technology for special events.

When I read that, I thought you were listening to a panel via your mobile phone. That would have been useful.

Richard