Hi kq4ym (Don).

I just replied to Mashka, saying that perhaps products like Google Glass could become popular!

I'd very much like to see displays in eyeglasses that could supplement or supplant a phone's screen. This has been under development for many years, but the technological problems are significant. I'm hoping for breakthroughs, though.

Hi Mashka,

I don't have any special powers to look into the future, unfortunately. However, I would like to see the implementation of augmented reality glasses, such as the Google Glass project, that can connected to phones, wired or wirelessly, so it's less important to look at a phone's screen. If these types of glasses become mainstream, the size of phones could decrease because the viewing would be done mostly by looking at the glasses.

Hi Kicheko,

BlackBerrys aren't doing well in the United States. Their market share is plummeting. Android phones and iPhones dominate, although many enterprises and government organizations still use BlackBerrys because of their excellent security controls.

The popularity of the first Samsung Galaxy Note with its 5.3-inch screen surprised many people. Now the Galaxy Note II with its 5.5-inch screen is available and also doing well. The Note II has gotten very good reviews.

Other phones with screens of five inches or more are available and more will be introduced. So perhaps these phones with larger screens will become more likely to replace or supplement laptops.

Alan, I was thinking of my own Thinkpad docking station just moments before reading your post.  I could see how phones move to that.

Beyond some of the other things raised here, though, one aspect of this is that phones are, um, phones.  I may need to talk on my phone while using it as a computer and even in cases where the technology supports that, I feel like I've moved to the technology edge, as though using it in this way will ruin the phone, or at least impact the battery life.

I think it's really the feeling that I'm so reliant on something I carry with me everywhere, which of course is another drawback to the docking station.

I've always thought--going back to my Sprint days--that users would like to have more than one device operating on the same phone number.  One could even override another--you'd turn on one and it would drop the signal to another.  My thinking on that goes differently than here in that phones are, essentially, jewelry and some days I might want to take my rugged outdoor phone and other days my spiffy, smartphone.

I digress, except that if that capability ever existed, I could see many more possibilities here.

Gadgets are getting smaller, but also more specialized perhaps as well. Docking a phone to a computer might just work, but as technical advances continue maybe in a dozen years, something we can't even imagine will take the place of even phones. Google's "glass" perhaps or something like it?

It sounds like phone transformers.Alan, do you have any ideas, how a cellphone will look like in 10 years, and would it be still called a cell phone? Right now it's turning into something completly different

Hi Alan,

I wonder how well Blackberry is doing on the ground in the united States. Out here android seems to have taken over much of what was blackberry's former glory.

That aside i still agree with them that cellphones will replace laptops for enterprise mobility. My own laptop is already converted into a desktop as home in favor of a more portable tab as when i'm mobile there's only so much i can do and the tab can handle it.

Hi Mr. Roques (Jorge),

Yes, docking stations for phones are possible. There already have been a few, although they aren't very popular.

Thorsten Heins is looking at the medium to long term, I think, such as five years or ten years. 

However, RIM has never developed a major hardware ecosystem. It has its phones, but not many tablets (which have been duds), a small tablet keyboard (which just about no one knows about) and that's about it. There may be a few other hardware odds and ends, but not much.

It will be interesting to see if RIM does much with this concept, such as tight integration between its BlackBerry 10 tablets and phones or even docking stations for peripherals.

Hi hounhosp,

BlackBerrys have a loyal audience because the phones serve a very useful purpose -- the best physical keyboards on the planet, and physical keyboards are the best for entering large amounts of text. There certainly are reasons for touch screens, including the fact that physical keyboards like the BlackBerry take up valuable space that results in a smaller screen.

The lack of good alternatives for entering lots of data is one of the reasons phones won't replace laptops for all purposes. But as I noted, based on a variety of capabilities, phones already are as powerful in some ways as laptops were only a few years ago. Quad-core processors? 1080p screen resolutions? Cloud storage? These were -- and still are -- laptop features.

@Michael,

I also have probem editing text on phones, that is why I am not ready to trade my laptops for cellphones just yet. But as computing is not about text editing, cellphones might rightly be as efficient as laptops for other routine tasks.