I’ve been on the internet for nearly 10 years now, age 11 to present, and my computing strategy has been consistent: ever faster, ever bigger, ever more expensive. It might be time for that to change.

Yes

For £50 per month you can get 125Mb of GPRS data transfer, which is plenty for text only communication. o2 don’t offer the Handspring Treo 600 as a phone, but if we overlook that as a minor difficulty, Orange will sell you one for £200 with a minimal £17 per month tariff, and then the Treo Portable Keyboard is $100. The SSH client is free, but the dedicated server at the other end will cost £15 per month.

So that’s a ~£250 setup fee, then ~£1000 per year running costs, 60% of that being bandwidth. Now the interesting part: a kilopound a year is a reasonable amount to fritter on a desktop computer. Does that sound like a lot? Consider the cost of a brand new top o’ the range machine every 3 years, plus ISP costs, plus software costs (er, speaking entirely theoretically here then…), and hey, that 300W power supply is going to cost you more than the Treo’s teensy 144Mhz ARM CPU: as the oil runs out, the price of this kind of electricity may become significant, and when it finally does run out, you can use the Treo’s tough pointy casing to fight off the other looters swamping the farmers’ ransom auctions. Here’s hoping the Treo 900 comes with a telescopic sword.

But anyway, is this mobile setup a viable replacement for a fixed desktop setup?

No

Although you gain always-on wireless net access from anywhere in the UK, and a full sized keyboard, you don’t really get to browse the web unless you have bandwidth to spare, which you soon won’t if browsing is what you do. The Treo only has 24Mb storage space, which is pathetic to the point of uselessness, and although it has a digital camera, the picture quality is rubbish, and uploading the photos will cut into your bandwidth again. Connecting up a real digital camera is not possible. Perhaps you could add £10 per month to the above fee to cover high-quality access from net cafes when required, but then you have to traipse around city-centres as a net-hobo. There’s no room for any reasonable amount of music, and streaming is out.

In fact the problem reduces to one of bandwidth. Compared to the dedicated server, GPRS bandwith is four hundred times more expensive, and 2000 times slower. That’s just not a price worth paying.

Here’s what would be worth it: A PDA phone with a CompactFlash slot (so I can use my camera), a USB cable (so I can up/download to other computers easily), an XScale CPU, and bandwidth at a penny per megabyte. Those Linux smartphones may eventually provide the right hardware, but that bandwidth thingy isn’t going to go away until someone does something really clever. Or perhaps until someone stops doing something really stupid.

Maybe in a few years UK mobile networks will have a compelling data service, but until then, they can go to hell, along with the car industry, which has similar levels of vendor lock-in and price gouging. Rah.