So I finally got a smart phone, and let me tell you, going from a phone that only does voice and text to the Galaxy Nexus is like being shotgunned into the next century. We call the Galaxy Nexus a mobile phone for historical reasons only. It’s really a mobile computer that happens to do voice and text messaging, among other things. I think there are enough reviews of the Galaxy Nexus that I don’t have to give another rundown of its features here, but I do have a few thoughts on the smart phone phenomenon.

First, my “phone” has 1 GB of RAM and 30 GB of storage. My laptop from five years ago had 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. My desktop computer from ten years ago had 128 MB of RAM and a PIII 133 MHz processor. I don’t know how that compares to the ARM Cortex 9 on standard benchmarks, but it’s not just hardware. Browsers today can render JavaScript 10 times faster than the same browsers just three years ago, and probably 50 times faster than Internet Explorer 6, on the same hardware.

So what will our “phones” be like in another five or ten years? In five years, they will probably have the computing power of today’s commodity desktops and laptops, and in ten years they will far surpass them. On top of that, protocol and software improvements like SPDY, Dart, NaCl, etc. (well, maybe), will push performance much farther than hardware improvements alone. I believe the future looks bright, at least from a purely technological perspective.

Of course, the changes we see are not just technological. My phone has GPS that can geolocate me to “within 30 meters” of my actual location. When I turned it on at home, the address that it gave me was my next door neighbor’s house, which is close enough. That’s really convenient when I want directions to the closest Chinese restaurant, but I’m also keenly aware that Google will never delete that data. Ever.

This always happens with technology — there’s always some catch, some unintended (or intended) side effect to our technological marvels. The combustion engine created the industrial revolution and allowed us to build cities (because it made rail and transport affordable), but it also pumped megatons of toxins and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. For all the problems we solve, we create many new ones, but we keep going because usually the marginal benefits outweigh the costs, all things considered.

It’s just another thing to keep in mind. Email allows you to communicate easily with other people, but that doesn’t mean you should use it for every conversation. Some conversations should be reserved for face to face communication, but that fact doesn’t mean we should abandon email either. Likewise, we don’t have to abandon smart phones because we have (valid) privacy concerns. We just have to remember sometimes to turn off the GPS.