My phone is just a phone.  I'm not very attached to it and I've been known to forget about it for days at a time.  It has no net access, it can't take pictures, and its battery runs down very quickly.  I've drowned it twice by accident.

Four years ago, I was very attached to my Blackberry.  It was a small model and all it did was download and send email. I held onto it out of pure sentiment even after it became a dumb object incapable of doing anything but turning on and off. 

What if my phone had non-cellular wireless access, a keyboard, and a nice big screen? If mobile carriers weren't in charge of my access, I could do great things online using my phone. Looking over other peoples' shoulders, I can see that the user experience for internet-enabled phones isn't very satisfying. Many clicks, many steps, many waits.

I'm assuming that we'd have to get away from the mobile carriers because they have the highest walls of any walled gardens. Nothing new shows up unless a mobile carrier gives permission, and you have to pay a lot as a software provider to be admitted to a carrier's "stack" - their club of applications that users can access. Phooey. 

Couldn't a plain old wireless connection on a handset (we'd probably still call it a phone) do a better job?  Sure, we could hang onto the cellular connection for those times when we need to make a phone call and we're whizzing down a highway, but otherwise we could walk away from the control that mobile carriers exert.

If we did walk away, and walked towards wireless networks instead, how open and neutral would they be?  I have a lot to learn about the neutrality of municipal wireless networks as compared to what mobile carriers do. 

It seems to me that this is the future -- who wants to carry around a PC unnecessarily?  I'm looking forward to the day (I really am) when I have a gadget that inspires the same affection that my old Blackberry did.