Tablet-ma-phones. The next big thing or a flash back to the 80s?

Recently at Macadamian we've been doing a ton of mobile work. Specifically Android development. One of the really interesting things we've gotten to see is a huge slew of devices coming in the door. More recently, at the 2011 CES there was a slew of Android tablets (most of them horrible) and phones, so I'm sure this year we will see even more strange permutations of mobile devices.

However, after experiencing a few of these devices I feel that the size and scale of mobile phones these days has trended back towards this:

Image: Motorola 8500x

But I find myself missing a term for these phones and tablets, so I'm going to invent one... "tablet-ma-phones". These tablet-ma-phones are big phones and medium size tablets (5-7"). And what I've noticed is that many of tablet-ma-phones are... well... ridiculously big to be a phone, just look at this photo of the dell streak:

Image: Dell Streak tablet-ma-phone modeled by fellow Macadamian Faraz - who is well over 6' tall

This is where I think the iPad had it right. Imagine if they tried to make the iPad similar into one of these tablet-ma-phones? Seriously, why do you want a medium sized tablet-ma-phones that feels like an old 80s mobile phone that won't fit in any of your pockets except your laptop bag! It's not a phone, and really, it's not a very good tablet.

In the few occasions that I've found myself using my iPad as a soft phone, let me tell you, walking down the street yelling into the top of an iPad gets you plenty of stares... but seriously would you want to walk around looking like this:

Image: Apple iPad, sported like a tablet-ma-phone - seriously who would want to try and talk on it?

I don't think so.

So c'mon world lets keep our cell phones in our pockets and our tablets in our bags... and lets throw away these tablet-ma-phones.

A new year, a new era, or an echo of the past?

I've been thinking mobile allot lately. And I keep thinking we are seeing a cycle of trends of past days. Maybe this is just history repeating itself.

At Macadamian we have many customers asking us Native vs Web for mobile apps. And right now, no question native offers a much richer experience. But this sounds like the exact same argument that was used for desktop vs web apps circa 1999. But the web slowly chipped away at native. Ease of upgrade, cross platform (yes even with the NN, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc... browser CSS/JavaScript incompatibilities), single development stack all beat the native argument. Will it happen again?

I think so... However, maybe not as explicit as we've seen in the past. There is talk of 'hybrid' mobile apps. We are seeing these in the form of explicit embedded browser controls inside a native application. This solves the distribution problem of the application (note: this still upsets people who paid for the application strangely enough, though they are fine to pay for a native front end that consumes the same data and has the same laggy interface) which helps companies understand distribution and monatization. We are also seeing this in cross platform development tools like Titanium, PhoneGap etc... These are very cool development environments that lean very heavily on JavaScript and browser controls while providing the necessary hardware hooks that native applications get (location, microphone, gyroscope etc...)

But really these are just fancy web applications, wrapped in pretty wrapping paper and distributed as 'apps' to the mass market. So does that mean the web app was just re-invented for the mobile platform and has already started it's climb to winning this battle again (this by no means the death of local apps)? Time will tell.