Voice (speech) recognition is the killer app for mobiles

And, it's a workable solution now, based on my experience with Google's Voice Search on the Android platform that I blogged about yesterday.

Once you can reliably use speech recognition on a mobile, the issues of small keyboard and small screen, even on a netpad computer, vanish.

The most important aspect of this is that it changes how you think about finding information. I was lying in bed, and for some reason I was thinking about my sister's wired haired terrier, and I remembered that her vet said the dog may have a form of Cushing's Syndrome. At that moment the term "canine cushing's syndrome" popped into my head. I did the voice search on the HTC Hero, and sure enough the first hit did come up with a Web page devoted to this subject. I quickly looked it over, and it seemed to be well research, so I chose to send the link to my sister via e-mail. All this was done within minutes.

If I had to type this search term using the Hero's virtual keypad, I wouldn't have done the search.

Besides performing Web searches, this potentially could be used by patients to record symptoms, or ask questions that could be sent via e-mail. Of course, you still have the issues of privacy and confidentiality, but encrypted e-mail is already available.

Another aspect of this is that more Web sites will have alternative mobile sites that render well on small screens. This is long overdue, perhaps because it limits the number of ads that can appear on the page.

Adobe Flash is another problem for the mobile Web. Eventually it will be universally supported, but here you run into the problem of overloaded cellular networks by power users watching videos.

I think all this points to the fact that soon smart phones will look and act very differently in the near future, as well as changing how people approach information management and communication.