When I walk Kismo my thoughts often start wandering. Yesterday I was listening to a podcast where they discussed the new Microsoft Courier tablet concept and the Apple tablet rumour, and my thoughts started wandering again – here’s the result.

The basic idea here is that the iPhone itself will still be about the same as it is today, but with 3 docking ports where 2 are on the side. What are these two ports for? Connecting an iPod touch that also has two connectors on the side by means of a small cheap accessory that acts as a hinge and a data transfer medium. An ipod touch is now $199, which frankly doesn’t make it that big an investment considering what you could do with such a setup, and the extra storage space it would give you.

Extra hardware

To connect the devices you could use WiFi Ad-Hoc (device-to-device WiFi) but you need a way to clip them together anyways, so might as well use dock connectors or something of the sort. I’m sure that a way of making this work isn’t a big problem for any hardware engineer.

Extended screens

One of the most obvious uses for this would be extended screen. Double the main menu icons, double the screen space for web browsing etc. It’s a simple thing to do that could really improve usability with the extra resolution.

Multitasking

Multitasking is a touchy (pardon the pun) subject on the iphone/touch. Not only would this setup give twice the RAM, CPU, GPU etc if they could work together – it would also double the screen real-estate as to letting you have two open apps at once. Imagine Spotify open while reading a book like the example below!

Keyboard

Two screens gives you a LOT of space for the keyboard- you can have it on the bottom screen while doing stuff on the top screen, or you could even split it between the two screens in portrait mode and get a 640 pixel wide keyboard- up from the 480 pixel wide landscape keyboard we have now.

Gaming

The iPhone is a nice gaming platform, but the lack of controls is an issue- you can put controls on the screen, but that means you block a lot of it as well! When you have two screens, that’s no issue – show the game on the top screen, controls on the bottom.

Seperating the devices – WiFi Ad-Hoc

Not to be overlooked is what you can do with two such devices even if they’re not physically connected. Imagine if the phone rings- you answer it on the iPhone part, while the ipod touch is taken off and show information about the caller (like the caller screen does today, but you’d have it right there without having to take the phone off your ear), take notes, look up stuff etc.

Furthermore, WiFi Ad Hoc would allow you to connect one device to a TV or a stereo system and use the other device to control it. This would not only give you perfect quality on everything you play back (vs f.ex Bluetooth audio streaming) but it would also solve the problem of interference from the iPhone GSM services if the touch was the device being docked.

There are plenty of uses for this – remote control for the camera, stereo audio recording, dual-angle video recording (once the touch gets a camera) etc etc. The possibilities are endless.

Probability of happening

This idea isn’t farfetched. It’s fully possibly with the hardware already in the devices out today if you used WiFi instead of the physical connectors. All that is needed is software – software that frankly isn’t all that complicated. Still, this is Apple. Despite the innovation they often do, they aren’t really used to thinking this much outside the box. Still, a person can dream.