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In the future, will we carry only our phones?

• cbs 15y ago
  Probably not. Phones have been great at adding more functionality, and they're really good at serving use cases of people who wouldn't have ever carried around a dedicated device before the phones supported it. But for the kind of people who were serious enough about something to carry around a dedicated device to do it, I've seen that phones have a hard time replacing it outright. Think of pictures, phones are convenient and take good-enough pictures for most people, but they're still not a replacement for anything but the cheapest of digital cameras. Anyone goes somewhere planning to take pictures will bring a dedicated device. For me its music. I tried listened to music with my phone exclusively for a few months, and it hurt, I've gone back to my mp3 player. I wanted to like my phone for music, I really did. As much as I would like it to be true, the economics don't make me think there will be many fields where phones are going to be more than wide-breadth shallow-depth devices, especially when hardware is the limiting factor.