Code Blue! Cellphone!

Thursday evenings, it’s Gray’s Anatomy. Our living room suddenly converts into a breathless waiting room, inhabitants imbibing each nuance of dialogue with rapt attention. Will the patient miraculously recover and whisk Katherine Heigl away (if so, o Lord, let me get sick in Seattle), or croak at the very end of the episode?

Unlike the drama at the Seattle Grace hospital, the prognosis for the cellphone is certain, and it’s not good. As phones get smarter, data plans become cheaper, and consumer experience improves, the demise of the cellphone grows ever closer. People will still have phones, absolutely and always, but phones will have morphed into something else entirely.

Instead of a tool designed to support voice communications, it will become a digital jackknife – a device that does everything you want portable electronic devices to do. Not only take pictures, and voice, and text, but a storage center for files that can access the internet. Or act as your GPS unit complete with driving directions. Or act like a credit/debit card. Basically, the sky is the limit so long as people want new and better toys, and the way we use these devices will fundamentally change.

While Apple’s debacle last week was a bit of a pooch, the release of the app store is going to be gasoline on the fire of phone OS development. With a huge array of applications at the user’s disposal, the iPhone will be used less and less for talking, and more and more for other things. The iPhone is a platform, not a product, and it’s direction is oriented more towards compting than yapping.

This change will extend to other phones and applications, as well. Google is working on the Android platform, along with a host of other investments into the mobile computing space, to force the carrier’s grip off of network content. The software available to users, and the things that the systems will perform will mirror the functionality of our current laptops, not cellphones.

It’s truly exciting to watch the changes sweeping the mobile space. Almost as exciting as watching Katherine Heigl and the patient, but hey, I have yet to see a cellphone in scrubs.

oops, commercial’s over. bbl.