| I agree that the limitation is the hardware not the
software.
About ten
years ago I was part of team working on
understanding, developing, and testing
the very new 3G
cellular (UMTS) standard.
The problem was, at that time,
nothing existed except the
standards. So, we had to build the infrastructure.
To
test it, we needed a 3G smartphone we could control at all
levels. However,
no 3G phones at all existed, so
we had to make our own "mobile" phone. How did
we know it
was a mobile? Because it had wheels. (That's a joke. Being
over-engineered to also be used as test equipment, the
"mobile"
lived in a
"portable"
steel rack the size of small household refrigerator and
weighed 600
pounds). The
mobile consisted of radio hardware (based on re-purposed
test
equipment) and of two physically identical, built from
stock parts, PC's with
1GHz Pentium III CPU's, 1GB ram, and
1GB (maybe 2GB) HD storage. The only
difference between the
PC's was one ran Window's 95 (later XP), other Red Hat
Linux.
The linux box, controlled the radios and the call processing
stack, the win box was along for ride for those who couldn't
see past what
would become a long line of failed Windows
phones (i.e., "if it doesn't run
windows, what can it do?").
Together both boxes could make voice and data
calls,
stream video, surf the web, etc., basically everything
smartphones do
today. I would often just fire up the linux
box and run the mobile that way.
And since boxes were
general purpose, I could run any program or application I
wanted.
Fast forward to today. Why can't smartphones run anything a
laptop
can? Well, a lot of it's hardware, though I pretty
sure today's ARM processors
could match our 1 GHz P-III
based boxes. On the other hand, while our mobile
used LCD
screen(s) near equivalent in resolution (1024x768) to today
smartphones, the screen was also 14" diag. (closer to laptop
size) and not 4".
Also, we had real keyboards, not virtual
touch screen version (which eat into
half of the smartphone
screen real-estate). I can't imagine working on a
multi-page
spreadsheet or document on a smartphone, I could (did) on
our
mobile. In that case it's certainly the form factor, not
the software holding
us back.
Now I did leave a little wiggle room as to why software
could be
the limiting factor on why we can't do everything
on a smartphone we could on a
laptop. The reason is split
between lock-out and laziness. On one hand, the
smartphone
vendors don't want us to be able to anything/everything with
our
phones and so lock us out with proprietary, closed, or
limited OSes. On the
other hand, the vendors are too lazy
(and have no desire, see lockout) to put
an OS on a
smartphone that would be fully capable of running any
application a
laptop could.
Actually, one could ask exactly the same question of "stuff
I
can do on 'X' that I just can't do on my laptop" where 'X'
is a generic
desktop PC, high-end gaming PC, workstation,
mainframe, server, supercomputer,
etc. and you'll find that
the limiting factor is the hardware (speed, capacity,
form
factor), and not the software. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
