Cellphones in third world.

First, a little article excerpt I got from the nokiablog.

"The iPhone may be the smartphone homecoming queen, but for years Nokia has been offering us the cute girl in the library. You know, the one who’s actually getting stuff done."

Of course, there are a lot of wonderful apps and utilities for iphone out there, like the papers app which is an absolute necessity for the scholarly types out there (including me. I'm practically drooling over the thing). Even so, when you take all the trimmings away, it is only true that iPhone really plays second fiddle compared to the level of the higher end phones from nokia. iPhone, for all its bells and whistles, is a heavily locked in product with first rate interface and second rate functionality. It will get better with time, but I'm not sure if even Apple can handle messed up corporate swamp that is the world of Cellular provider services. Now if only Nokia can get around to having a decent SDK for the Symbian platform as well...

I read an interesting tweet from Cory Doctorow this morning. Here it is.


Theory: ppl who say mobiles will replace laptops don't do much w laptops, esp context-switching, intense data entry or grfx



Mobiles will be poor world's laptops = poor world will be second class netizens, fenced off from generative power of network and pc


Both of which are only true, some portion of which we can already glimpse through the recent troubles at the Apple appstore selection processes. Cellphones are ideal for simple transmission of relatively simple information, but they aren't so great at doing anything long and complex (there are quite a few cases that argue to the contrary, like the keitai novel from Japan, but they are more of a result of culture rather than machines/interfaces, meaning that you need a full lifestyle change in order to be able to use the cellphone interface to pull such a feat off, which is not really my definition of usability.

Now, cellphone themselves are not the bottleneck here. If it's the full sized keyboard you need you can link up a bluetooth keyboard to most smartphones these days (except iPhone). Bigger screen? I'm sure some external monitor will come along someday. More processing power? If someone's interested, it can be built. When you think about it, it's the cellphone service provider companies that create most of the hurdles in designing and using cellphones in the world. Deliberately crippled functionalities, machine lock-ins, draconian service charges and commitments that spread out across multiple years of time, after which the phone becomes obsolete and you repeat the cycle of getting another handset with another multiple year contracts. And why do we let service providers get away with this? It is because of the infrastructure needed to run cellular networks. They built it, they own it, and there's nothing to be done about it.

So why don't we remove reliance on cellular infrastructure in the first place? OLPC experimented with a very interesting technology called mesh-networking. Why can't we apply the same to cellphones? Mesh network of cellular signals, wherein you'd only need someone else using a cellphone within certain area to be able to connect to a network. There will still be a need for corporate controlled gateway but the user's reliance on it will fall dramatically, and it would mean less infrastructure load for the cellular service providers themselves.

Such network can expand across vast landscapes and cover areas that are normally impervious to cellphone signals as long as there are chain of users leading to the location. This would mean an incredible range of financial and technical freedom for third world cellphone users, and combined with the advent of opensource mobile platforms like Android OS, it would mean the beginning of truly free information exchange and content creation.

This reminds me, will future mobile OSes resemble a huge web browser covering all sorts of libraries and functionalities?