Fashioning the ultra-mobile

The truly portable computer is one of today’s most fascinating design challenges, with aspects ranging from high fashion to nanoscale electronics.

Fashion comes in because we may have to design bags or clothes around whatever turns out to be the most popular format: men’s pockets have hardly changed since Edwardian times, when their size was dictated by that of a cigarette case or wallet.

Fashion also influences the design of headsets, which allow you to listen to music or make calls via the computer and even control it, without taking it out of your pocket.

The style of the mobile is something else. What is the ideal size? What physical controls should it have? What kind of screen? Can it fold? Can it bend? Can it scroll in and out? What inputs and outputs?

My feeling is that it does not need an integral keyboard, although this may be a matter of taste. Careful use of handwriting recognition on the Origami interface is easier than texting using a mini-keyboard or number pad. It is good enough to answer emails on the move. Quicker still, you can email handwritten notes. For fast writing, you can always link in a separate keyboard.

This is true of other peripherals. A smart machine in a smart environment (see box, right) will be able to access drives, large screens and other devices via the network. It is already very easy to get a Windows portable to act as a front end to an XP desktop.

A small tablet is also an ideal control interface for home networks. Home networks will never go mainstream without a foolproof interface that hides their complexity and a tablet can provide this.

Every hardware feature a mobile carries will have to be audited for weight, size, cost and, above all, power drain.

But the trickiest and subtlest challenge of all will be the human interface and that will evolve as millions of us stab away at those screens. It will take time, but it is the one part of the design process that we will all be involved in.

* Origami has similarities to the ‘ultimate mobile’ or universal interface, I imagined five years ago in a PCW piece entitled Smart machine in a smart environment. This was just a set of ideas, but some of them are still relevant, and you can read it here . I’d be happy to hear how you imagine the ultimate mobile.