I've been looking at a Nokia N8XX for a few months, along with lots of other stuff including smartphones and mp3 players, trying to figure out what is the right combination of functionality without so much feature duplication that leads to carrying around 80 gadgets and chargers in a big man-purse. As it stands, I've got a SE W600i phone (phone, crappy organizer, crappy internet, crappy camera, crappy media player), a Palm Lifedrive (better organizer, better net, better media player, Wi-fi), a Sansa media player (best media player), a point and shoot digital camera (best camera), and I'm thinking about getting a GPS. This sucks!

I'm beginning to think that the phone should be the accessory to the internet tablet, instead of a multi-function device all it's own . That way we can all use whatever tablet/pda thingy we want (carrier independent), and just tether it to a bare-bones phone on the cell carrier of our choosing.

All these smartphones are just plamtop computers, anyway, that in the end have to make significant compromises in functionality and form-factor in order to support one feature - the cell phone itself. I'm starting to think that removing the cell phone from the multifunction computer would allow both things to be better.

The N810 seems like an ideal platform for this concept. It has everything I need (organizer, media player, net, camera, GPS, WIFI), except the phone. Pairing a bare-bones phone with this device would be the ideal solution. In this case, since the n8XX can provide all the user interface for controlling the phone - address book, dialing, text messages, etc - the phone could be very, very small, have *no* interface of it's own except a button to answer or hang up, and of course have bluetooth so the n8XX (or any other tablet with BT) can control it.

In fact, it could be so small and interface-less, that it could basically look and act like a Bluetooth earpiece. That way we can initiate calls with our multifunction tablet (and be able to put down the tablet and walk away from it because the earpiece IS the phone, not just channeling BT audio from another source) and we can answer calls just by pressing a button on the earpiece.

So the earpiece would contain a battery, cell phone antenna/bluetooth related chips, and a sim card. That's it. No more holding that giant smart phone up to your ear, where it both looks ridiculous, and you can't see it to multi-task with it.

What do you guys think? Anything on the horizon? I've seen a couple of really small phones, but they are still trying to be multi-function devices, rather than a bare-bones phone, which makes them both ridiculously crippled, and way too expensive...

Jerimiah