With phones such as the HTC Vigor in the pipeline for release in the next few months, we’re starting to see hardware specifications that are up to par with the computers of yesteryear. The abilities of smartphones seem to be hampered by their size however, current interfaces (touch, keypads) make it difficult to use any applications that would harvest the computing speed available in these small devices.

Around this time last year, when my HTC HD2 was the only mobile computing device I had available at college, I started wondering if smartphones would ever be used as dockable personal computers. The processing power, internal memory and storage capacity seemed well up to the task of running office applications, even in a non-mobile format.

Now take the docks and cradles we currently have available to perform simple syncing tasks and to show off our mobile phone as a cool desktop clock. Imagine having a workstation that can detect a mobile device during boot, and is able to load the programs and desktop environment straight off the mobile phone? And with heating problems in mind, what if the workstation can work together with the mobile phone to lighten up the stress on the phone’s hardware?

Projects such as Android@Home place your mobile phone in touch with your house, your agenda and contacts are synchronised across a variety of platforms ‘in the cloud’. Communication by email, text messages, push notification etc, all at your fingertips. The smartphone has partially replaced many of our appliances and continues to combine everything seamlessly. Adding the right tools to add data to our ‘life management device’ would be the next, biggest step forward.