Mobile access to e-mail is as old as the first generation Palm Pilot. Even those are perhaps pre-dated by clunky devices that harbor back to the Pager/Beeper days. (Remember those?) This was a golden age of application specific electronics, each doing one thing very well. Need to receive text, take a photo, check e-mail or, oh yes, look up a contact and make a phone call? Back then you needed to carry around four different devices.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Fast forward twelve years or so, and we see the wonders of device integration that combines a multitude of features, functions, and even networks, all interoperating wirelessly and connected to a ubiquitous data cloud we call the Internet.

But the Web too is changing with the growing trend toward moving the power of the desktop back to the mainframe where all the heavy processing, data storage and networking takes place - with the content then pushed to a data terminal. But this time, not the dumb screen attached to the network by a wire and keyboard, but a mobile terminal we lovingly call a cell phone, smart phone iPhone and the like.

The International .Net Association’s .Net Foundry (pronounced dot net) puts it this way: "In the cloud computing paradigm, software that is traditionally installed on personal computers is shifted or extended to be accessible via the Internet. These ‘cloud apps’ utilize massive data centers and powerful servers that host web applications and web services. They can be accessed by anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard web browser."

Enter Google. Driven by the quest for more advertising eyeballs, and funded not by application software sales or desk top operating system upgrades, (Can you say Microsoft?) Google took the concept of cloud computing to a new level. Starting first with that cool app Google Earth, the company now is offering a suite of free word-processing and spreadsheet software over a browser, freeing up the power of personal computing by removing the need for a dedicated PC.

While we may still have a PC at work, another at home, we won’t need either to get to our personal desktop. That will live in the cloud. In the meantime, we’ll continue to see this process migrate activities toward a mobile paradigm particularly since the trend in mobile is Internet access.

For example, at the recent CeBIT technology show in Hannover Germany Yahoo! (San Mateo, CA; www.yahoo.com) announced upcoming availability of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for a number of European countries. This is the European launch of the same service offered here in the US when Yahoo! re-launched Go 3.0 as a beta mobile portal in January. The news then was 3.0 included a new UI and broader support for mobile phones including Mobile Widget Platform, that grants access to third-party widgets.

And a widget is one powerful way to empower cloud computing for mobile devices. At the time of the US launch, widget partners included eBay, MySpace and MTV. Yahoo’s mobile widget platform includes a full-feature SDK for developers, and hundreds of companies are offering a plethora of services, from collaborative writing and spreadsheet tools to elaborate dating and social networking systems.

Other recent cloud developments come from Google, looking to host your calendar complete with Sync, to Microsoft Outlook on your desktop. You no longer need to refresh your data, simply log-on from any browser-enabled device and you are good to go.

So where is all this heading, mainstream computing on my cell phone? Well perhaps that idea is not as farfetched as it may seem at first blush. Someday, a cell-phone size device will come equipped with a built-in display whose size is de-coupled from the device. Think pocket projector, or a roll-able / fold-able e-Ink display like those Polymer Vision is now selling in Europe. We’ve even seen prototype laser projected keyboards from a pen-sized device standing on a tiny tri-pod you can carry in a shirt pocket. Since most processing, storage and networking is done in the cloud, all we really need are portable devices to display and interface with the internet.

Now the idea of a pocket projector is beginning to make a whole lot more sense. So like that famous tag line: "The Network Is The Computer…" our familiar desktop resides in the cloud and all we need are simple, low cost ways to access it whenever and where ever we choose.

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Note - An extended version of this article will be in the March issue of Mobile Display Report.