My wife and I just finished a week long camel trek in eastern Morocco with Berber nomads. While our hosts had no formal education, no running water, no grid electricity (just a little solar), no flush toilets and no floors in their homes, no land lines and no computers they did have mobile phones. Pretty much everyone seemed to have a low end (Series 40) Nokia. Their lack of education didn’t stop them texting madly. Perhaps more interesting was that they used their mobiles both as music players and for playing what we’d call viral videos. I’m not sure how they get content on their phones, probably an hour away at the super cheap internet cafes of Rissani. At Danger one of the key ideas that differentiated us from the Blackberry and later iPhone was that we were a standalone appliance, not a peripheral for your existing computer. We’ve seen some failure in this model recently but I think it’s ultimately a worthy goal.
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I still don’t understand why Apple and others haven’t figured this out. I suspect its organizational. But I don’t need to be in the Sahara to know that needing to dock my phone with the computer is done.
I hope Microsoft’s incompetent operations management doesn’t delay too much the adoption of good ideas.
We miss you guys. Hope ur having fun. I loved Cairo and Aswan when I visited, but never made it to Morroco.