Large, Medium and Small

I am an extremely mobile and well-equipped executive. On a recent trip to South Korea, I carried an iPhone 4, two Android phones, an Apple Mac Book Pro, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, an iPad 2, a Microsoft Zune media player, an iPod Touch, a CLEAR WiMax modem, a Verizon 4G LTE modem, Sprint 3G hotspot and last but not least a Verizon/Motorola Zoom tablet and a Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

You might be asking yourself why would someone carry so many pieces that do similar things? Well my answer is you can never be too connected, informed or entertained when you are away from home. But I also carry all this gear to demonstrate the amazing diversity of form factors, interfaces and capability these devices represent.

On my trip I gave a speech that could have voice transcribed on my phone, typed out on a tablet or formatted on my notebook. And each might have been appropriate for what I had in mind. So with applications, and apps in particular, being launched on multiple hardware and software platforms simultaneously these days, mobility has really become a market of large, medium and small.

Notebooks represent the large, tablets the medium and phones the small. Large is better for creation and complexity; small is better for capture and simplicity. Medium is good for convenience and diversity. There is no one device or form factor to rule them all. Each of them might steal from each other at points where they overlap, but they will not eliminate each other either completely. People want the ability to move seamlessly from one device to the other.

Similar conventions for user experience in Android and Apple's iOS along with multi-touch has brought us this ability on tablets, phones or notebooks. And the accompanying app stores multiply the opportunity, offering a multi-platform, similar experience. Angry Birds and Tetris are the same in any language and on any platform. It all boils down to personal taste, preference and finding the combination that maximizes your productivity.