Automobile gasoline prices will probably hit $5/gallon in a few weeks were I live. This is high compared to most of the US. Many developed nations are already over the $5/gallon mark (see this CNN Global Gas Prices page). It is not unimaginable that gas will be at $10/gallon or more by the end of this decade. This affects more than just those of us who drive cars. Any fuel intensive industry (airlines, trucking, taxi, delivery services, etc.) is already hard hit and in for a lot more pain going forward.
I wonder what this means from a mobile technology perspective? We are already seeing people changing their vacation plans to be closer to home. Some local governments are switching to 4-day work-weeks. Businesses are curtailing business travel. And, we can guess that conferences will see attendance drops as flying becomes prohibitively expensive and increasingly annoying.
On a local level, we are seeing less drive-to-homebase (office or home) behavior. This means that we need to be more productive away from our office or home-office since we returning to home base less during the day if we have multiple stops. One can imagine that long distance business trips might become longer too as we try to combine what would have been multiple trips to/from homebase to reduce multiple long flights. We will, as the late great George Carlin might have said, have to made better decisions about the stuff we carry. As travel weight restrictions become more severe, those giant 17 inch LCD notebooks will probably go the way of the Dodo bird for travel that requires flying. The combination of a really smart phone with a good web browser and an Asus Eee PC class mini-notebook will probably become the norm. Microsoft hasn’t released anything new (XP doesn’t count) for this class of machines. And, even Apple doesn’t have a mini-notebook product in the market. Does this mean that Linux will become the defacto standard for frequent travelers with mini-notebooks? And, what about the smart phone? Windows Mobile’s browser clearly is not sufficient for many web-based tasks (especially AJAX ones). The iPhone has a great browser but is hampered by the lack of a physical keyboard. The Blackberry has not made its mark as a browser phone. Nokia’s phones with Opera are pretty good but not mainstream in the US (although it is mainstream everywhere else). That leaves the Google Android as a contender in the new travel challenged world.
I know I’m thinking a lot about not only how I work away from home but how I get to and from my destination these days. And, one thing I know for sure is that as great as my 13″ Macbook is, I need something smaller, lighter, and easier to carry around even for local travel in and around my home area.