I am a gadget enthusiast! In these summer holidays I have been wondering about some features of some popular smart phones.

IPhone is the stylish teaser, has an awesome user interface and usability, maybe the largest display available, (still not big enough in this large-screen/display era) but incredibly poor hardware feature set compared to other phones, and fair/poor camera quality.

Nokia phones shine on the hardware side, sporting avant-garde features, plus in the symbian world you can find almost any software. User interface isn’t so appealing, and Nokia-crafted software applications seem to be perpetually in the “experimental” phase. Small display sizes here: the long awaited N97 is on pair with N96 display width, only just a bit longer.

Sony has some nice phones, but no model shines particularly, apart from the “specialized” functions in each phone family (music player phones, camera phones).

Now what I believe it will get more relevant in this gadget-convergence era (mobile phone + Internet Browsing/Computing + camera + music player + game console), is display size.

We want bigger displays, we need bigger ones. How can we actually browse the internet, or edit a dcoument on current displays?

Of course, what has kept us away from dreaming of larger screens, is: “would a put in my pocket that brick?”

Looking at my son’s PSP I started believing: “Yes, I would”; no wonder, kids are already carrying with them everywhere that brick…. And wouldn’t you do the same? Geeks would carry it in a computer case, ladies in a Prada handbag, business men in a leather case, youngsters in a backpack. Of course not, while swimming.

So, Sony has already a good platform to start with, a huge display, and excellent gaming capability. They have the technology for cameras so why not adding a 8/12MP, Xenon based, camera, plus a touch screen, bluetooth and…. a keyboard; there you are, you’ve got the all-in-wonder gadget for the next decade.

Mat Brady’s mockup gives the right perspective of what’s the potential edge.

Of course, XMB is not the best out of an ideal world: Sony should deeply reshape it and encourage application development on it. It seems quite a close-world environment at the moment.

An important detail, I’ve forgot to mention: while doing so, Sony should remember to pull out, that bulky, slow, space-eater and higly-defective UMD. Use solid state memory instead.

This topic is widespread on many gadget blogs, however the idea is topical,  more than ever.