Good-Bye Desktop PC, Hello iPhone

The Apple iPhone SDK marks the beginning of the end for the venerable deskbound PC.

My generation's concept of what it means to compute is so quaint and firmly rooted in the 20th century. Young people and teens computing 10 or 20 years from now will look back and laugh at people like me (and, most likely, their own parents and grandparents) who sat down at desks and worked on 20-pound boxes.

The decline of the deskbound PC has been under way for years, but recent events convince me that the transition to desktopless computing is accelerating at a breakneck pace. What's next? I have a feeling that mainstream laptops could someday meet the same fate.

What precipitated these changes? The arrival of the Apple iPhone , of course. It's an okay phone and an excellent multimedia device, but now, with the promise the Apple SDK holds and the introduction of the Exchange ActiveSync software, it's about to become much, much more.

I know I railed against the iPhone's lack of physical keys and what I saw as a nearly impossible-to-use virtual keyboard. My shortsighted evaluation, however, failed to take into account that Apple couldn't care less if I could use the keyboard. Its target market (young, hip 20-somethings) adopted the iPhone immediately and figured out how best to use the virtual keyboard to message, text, and search in the Safari browser, and so on. So what if I couldn't figure it out.

The addition of business-class tools, such as synchronized e-mail and contacts, and the promise of a whole new world of other apps will transform this product from a really smart phone to a pocket-size PC.

Yes, there are countless smartphones and ultraportable laptops (and even mid-size UMPCs) out there, but the iPhone is special.

One of the reasons Apple's iPhone stands to be a game changer is because people lust after it. Young people buy it because it's something of a passport to coolness, acceptance, and good times among their demographic. Businesspeople who like to appear hip want it, too, but many have held off. Without synchronized e-mail, they'd still have to carry their BlackBerrys. Sure, the BlackBerry Pearl is sexy, but it doesn't have the iPhone's cachet.—Next: The Most Important Product of the 21st Century >