The Phone as Social Computer

I'm still at DemoMobile, and onstage at the moment is Trip Hawkins--the founder of Electronic Arts, and CEO of a mobile gaming startup called Digital Chocolate. (Fun, if cryptic, name!)

Hawkins is explaining why Digital Chocolate isn't so much a mobile gaming company as an inventor of new types of highly personal applications. From what I can tell, it still sounds like a mobile gaming company to me--not that there's anything wrong with that--but I like his description of the modern cell phone as a "social computer." A phone with decent Internet access, a usable UI, and the power to run real applications is a remarkably personal thing, but it's focused around reaching out to the rest of the world in the way that traditional computers aren't. (A disconnected PC is still a PC; a disconnected phone isn't anything at all.)

In parts of the world other than the US, we're already seeing smart phones become folks' primary computing machines, and (as much as I love the PC) there's evidence that could happen here someday, too. Most of the folks I know who own PalmOne's Treo sure seem to treat it as a little electronic companion that keeps them connected to the world in all sorts of places where a PC--even a notebook--can't go.

Hawkins says that the breakthrough phone applications won't be things like mobile TV broadcasting or miniature versions of big-computer games, but tools that are truly new and truly designed to take advantage of the platform that a Net-connected mobile computing device provides...in the same way that Google and EBay don't have any direct counterparts in the analog world. It doesn't sound like he's figured out exactly what those applications are (or if he is, he isn't spilling the beans yet). But he's a smart guy--with Electronic Arts, he invented the modern computer game company--and Digital Chocolate bears watching.