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A few years from now the device you usually refer to as a phone may be laughed at as easily as a VCR is laughed at today. Super-Intelligent smart phones are on their way to consumers as early as next year as Apple and its competitors race to create the next shiny new toy we don’t know we need yet.

“Apple is coming out with a type of tablet. It seems most likely around the winter timeframe,” Daniel Dumas, Associate Editor of Wired Magazine, said.

The idea Apple has is to introduce a device that may or may not give users the ability to download and view books as well as offer all the functions that are currently available with the iPhone such as web browsing, music, and whatever else you can find that one of the coveted Apps will do for you.

“Maybe Apple introduces an item in January that kind of does that. It’s a tablet that is a little bit bigger than an iPhone,” Dumas said. “Maybe the Blackberry Storm 2 will show that the line between computer’s and phones is being blurred.”

Competition is not simply standing idly by to wait on what Apple has to offer. Google has made a big push in partnership with the Open Handset Alliance to develop Android phones. Through this alliance, Android phones are distributed across a wide range of companies like Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Motorola, Intel, HTC, LG and any other acronym you can think of.  Google has never confirmed they have a Google branded phone, Google is simply the oil that makes the Android engine run.

“Android is part of the Google Operating System and will be trickling into more and more handsets like Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola,” Dumas said. “ We’re finding that Android is more and more democratized, it’s spreading across more platforms and it’s getting in the hands of more and more people.”

“Android is fueling the heat of competition. The iPhone really hasn’t had too much competition and Android is poised to do that,” Dumas said.

Heated competition is what retailers, like Wireless Wave are witnessing with the launch of the iPhone across all carriers in Canada this past month. People now have the ability to choose between the fan-favourite iPhone and any other smart phone available to them in stores but the iPhone has remained at the head of the class for now.

Tony Harrar from Wireless Wave Market Mall shows off everybody's favourite the iPhone.

photo by: Cory Knibutat

“I think the Android phones are pretty competitive right now,” Tony Harrar, Sales Associate at Wireless Wave in Calgary’s Market Mall, said. “They’re both user-friendly, they’re both easy to use.”

This rush to develop the next great gadget-phone for the public has also helped blur the boundaries of what we might call a telephone and what we would call a computer. Nokia actually has a phone, called the M900, that can be classified a teleputer, you probably haven’t heard of it yet because it hasn’t been picked up by any carriers near you.

“It’s an unsubsidized device, meaning no carriers have picked it up, but it has specs that rival a NetBook, (laptop computer)” Dumas said.

“It’s on a Linux Operating System and it can do just about anything a full featured NetBook can do.”

Teleputers?

Roughly five years ago, it was rare for the average citizen to have internet capabilities interwoven into their cell phone. People got by leading productive and social lives by simply calling or texting the people important to them and you could rest your head on your pillow knowing you were paying no more than $50 dollars per month on even the most robust cell-phone contract.

Nokia's M900 appears to be the missing link bridging smart phones and teleputers.

photo by: Cory Knibutat

But you knew what was coming.

Picture phones were pretty cool, although crude, blurry and inebriated photos were typically the result.

MP3 players were cool as well but who wants to lug around two wallet-sized electronic shackles when one would be better, leaving one hand free to text your buddy just to tell them how much money you spent on your new music phone.

When the term Smart Phone started kicking around, consumers pictured e-mail and GPS-capable Smart Phones giving them a step-up on the next person’s ability to communicate and hopefully end any more map-reading fights for all time.

Blackberry and first generation iPhone users quickly found themselves anchoring their day around their smart phones for good and bad reasons.

For technology skeptics who want the old days to return, it won’t happen and you must try to catch up.

“If everyone went off the devices we would adjust and survive, it’s just very, very hard to do,” Daniel Dumas said.

In fact, the opposite is occurring. Teleputers is the buzzword being used when describing the next generation of smart phones and hand-held devices. These devices will be ‘smart’ enough to handle e-mails, music and phone duties but act as a mobile office, letting its user do any task they might have been able to do with a laptop and Wi-Fi access right now.

“Smart phone, teleputer or whatever you want to call it, it’s a device where you can edit word documents, you can listen to your music and you can make phone calls with it,” Dumas said. “It’s just as powerful as a computer.”

But we’re still in the present, and those devices are a few years away, right?

Not Really. It’s not too difficult to imagine businessmen and women with a smart device, slightly larger than current touch-screen phones like the Palm Pre or Blackberry Storm, strapped to their hip keeping them in touch with the office, family and friends. Wait, that’s what we have now!

Apple does Mac World every year in January as Steve Jobs rolls out the gadgets his company plans to release each year. You may be familiar with Mr. Jobs and his black turtleneck shirts giving his state of the union address to the tech-savvy and manages to fire off a warning shot across the bow of competitors for the rest of the fiscal year.

People generally love portability and to have the option of getting rid of a bulky computer entirely just might appeal to a large segment of consumers. The trick will be to have a smart device that won’t try to have people type up a word document on a flimsy touch screen.
 A lot of phones feature a QWERTY keyboard but whose to say we might not have a smart phone with speech recognition software that lets its user narrate a word document? The bridge species between smart phones and teleputers is starting to grow thumbs and stand up on its hind legs. The missing link between the present and future of mobile devices just might be around the corner.

Websites to Visit:

Does Apple have your eye? Check out the latest iPhones to keep ahead or the Droid armies.

A great article from the good people of Wired Magazine telling you what to look for when shopping for a smart phone.

Everything you need to know about the Android phones.