Quote Originally Posted by Tanner_H View Post
To stick with OpenOffice as an example, on the desktop an install takes something like 400 mb, 390 of which is niche features that you use every once in a blue moon. On a phone, I'd much rather have a 10 mb version that emphasizes battery life and brevity over "everything and the kitchen sink", even when the phone is physically capable of running the full version. Same for everything from a media player to a photo editor to a web browser.

I agree with most of what you said, but this paragraph stands out. Why do you not want an "everything and the kitchen sink" application on the mobile? You mentioned three things: Size, battery life, and "brevity" (that last one might be size, though). This is the point I was making. You care about size and battery life because they are currently limiting factors on lots of mobile devices. These are externally imposed hardware limitations. I have long held that the greatest shift in technology would come if we could come up with a battery with radically better energy density. Whether or not this will happen remains to be seen, but the situation is certainly improving all the time. Furthermore, the power consumption is declining, which makes existing batteries last longer. We could reach a day when "everything and the kitchen sink" didn't mean sacrificing significant battery life, and we are very likely to reach a day when application size doesn't matter. After all, I thought I was stylin' when my first computer had a 44MB HD (most people only had 20 or 30 MB drives, at the time).

The point is that you are deciding on what to do with the phone at least in part because of the limitations imposed by the hardware. Those limitations are what I envision going away.