So here’s a theory: the reliability of any device’s network connection is directly proportionate to the device’s size. Think about it… desktop computer/big/always connected; mobile phone/small/network constantly interrupted; laptop/medium/usually connected for most people these days; slate or tablet (does my time at Microsoft show yet in that I didn’t say iPad?)/mid-sized/who knows…
It’s hardly Moore’s Law, but an interesting anecdotal observation nonetheless when it comes to continuing the discussion about when to build a locally installed application.
I was mentioning all of this to a member of my team yesterday, and he talked about the emerging concept of CAC- context-aware computing. CAC is another occasion when a locally-deployed app might be necessary as hardware detects and software reacts to the nature of the environment in which the device is being used. Take your mobile into a car, and the UI switches to voice activation, for example.
Is there a limit to the size of device for which CAC will be appropriate, I wonder? In some ways it feels like it will head towards a set of micro-networking standards like Bluetooth on steroids. Yet more evidence of the way that our expectations of computing are changing at such a rapid pace, though…
mmitII 