The day when a phone became just another application..

For me that day was 11th of July 2008.

For a long time, there has been talk about phone becoming "just another application". Talks about this begun to increase when VoIP started to move towards mainstream, as an application in PC's. Before that, we had seen phones primarily as devices and still majority of people do.

In past years, mobile phones have been "sucking in" new functions from other devices, like Radio, PDA, Camera, Camcorder, Voice Recorder, Music Player and lately as Navigators and Media players, including video. While "phones" continue in this path, at the same time Internet is starting to present bigger part of overall use with IM, Email & Web Browsing.

Now when "phones" are trying to go as far as swallowing TV (could end up to be too big) to be included in these small extensions of our persona, it's becoming clear that we really should start seeing the "phone" part of these devices, as just another application. And if you look at the iPhone, it could not be more obvious (can you spot the phone in my apps).

So what's an iPhone? - From users point of view, it's just a great Media Player with innovative web browsing capabilities and with a simple Phone application included. So it's something totally new and different "that also includes phone as well"

It's very interesting to look at this setup between Apple, Google, Microsoft versus Nokia, from the view point that when Nokia (and other traditional mobile phone makers too) have been including these other features to phones before (like Camera or Music player etc.), those manufacturers that have been doing "just" cameras (or other features) have been saying that "those dont compare to real thing"

So why could it be hard for Nokia to be leading the next generation of handheld devices, even if they are calling their new devices as "Multimedia Computers"? - Simply because they are "phone centric", and in overall communications in future, actual phone features will become "less important", while other forms of communication overtakes simple calling. Sure it's not going to happen overnight, but as a huge company set on their ways, it's going to be really hard to adjust and drop their legacy "thinking" - ie. that things are build around phone features. Even if they know all this, it's still hard to adjust to this new mindset as an organization.

If you can you hear Nokia saying that iPhone is not as good as "real Mobile Phones" are? - does this sound familiar from what others have been saying from the other features in past, that have been merged to mobile phones of today....?

Will phones as we have learn to know them, die like PDA's?