Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

"Still, as I've said before, it'll be cellphones and not cheap laptops that shrink the Gap."

Txting and such will be as important or more-so than surfing the net. Txting is a way to build connections and civil society on a more personal basis than the net.

Remember this? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/24/AR2006082401379.html?nav=hcmodule

One of our most successful projects in Ramadi was buying computers for elemetary schools. There was also a womens college close by that had a computer lab. The cellphones aren't a bad choice but it's easy to knock down the towers, which happened.

I think that cell phones and laptops are going to merge, are merging already at the high end with smartphones sporting sophisticated hardware that would have been cutting edge in a 1990s laptop. It would be more accurate to call the key item "battery powered computing devices"

Your modern Blackberry runs on Java and the cell phone per se is just an application. Now when that smart phone capability is driven down to the "get em free with contract" level, the stage will be set for these sophisticated devices to contribute heavily to Gap shrinkage.

On the "laptop" side, VOIP technology and SMS gateways allow these machines to take advantage of the benefits of ubiquitous voice networks. There is little reason why you couldn't work up a USB peripheral in which you can put a SIM card and have your computer become a cell phone. In fact, there are companies that do this (with an ethernet interface) today.