Fostering a Symbiotic Handheld Environment

A short walk through the Akihabara Electrical Town in Tokyo (www.akiba.or.jp) reveals the latest trends in handheld devices, including their tremendous variety. Such devices range from high-end PDAs to miniature cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS navigators, and devices that integrate all these capabilities into a single portable unit. Handheld devices, especially when endowed with a programmable computing engine and connectivity, let people work or entertain themselves while on the move. Their key advantages thus include portability, sole ownership, and privacy. However, handhelds face important limitations. They must be small and light enough for users to carry them. Size restrictions place a limit on their display and number of buttons or dials. Voice-based interfaces cannot always solve these problems because handheld use often occurs in public places. Further, from now through the near future, using powerful handhelds will be restricted by their relatively short battery life. Given these limitations, we can reasonably ask whether handhelds will become more common in the midterm future. For example, the widespread deployment of WiFi networks leads people to favor always-connected laptops over intermittently connected handhelds. It seems that connectivity, better I/O capabilities, and CPU power offset the larger size of these laptops. At the spectrum’s other end, wearable computers or even body-implanted computers could displace handhelds if these alternatives become easily available and safe. To predict the future of handhelds, we borrow some ideas and models from biology and look at our current computational environment as a jungle where multiple device types compete for market survival. As in nature, the fittest devices rapidly increase their presence and succeed. In this jungle, success is measured by how useful humans perceive a device to be. In nature, organisms pursue many different survival strategies, but we will explore only one survival mechanism that biological organisms use: symbiosis. Initially defined by Anton de Bary in 1879, symbiosis describes a mutually beneficial relationship between dissimilar organisms. Normally, we can distinguish three types of symbiotic relationships: