Let me tell you about my views on the smartphone five years ago. Five years ago I was carrying around a rucksack everywhere I went that held my mobile, my palm pilot, my digital camera, my mp3 player, my TI-89 calculator, plus a paper agenda with my to-do lists, important documents, and maps, a 3.5″ hard drive and enclosure, a spindle of CDs for my car and a bundle of charging cables. Five years ago I toted around eight different objects on a daily basis with a combined weight of 8.5kg and still eschewed the idea of an all-in-one device.

Why? There were devices of that variety on the market, including the Blackberry and Palm Treo which dropped two years prior, many of which could have lightened my load, yet I was convinced none of them could do a series of combined tasks successfully. I required that the quality of my pictures, the features of my PDA, the speed of my data transfer, were maintained to the point that I ran the risk of back problems from a heavy bag in order to accommodate my digital needs.

It’s fairly insane to consider carrying around so many devices today, especially given my travel-heavy lifestyle, but at the time it was considered normal for tech-heads like me. It’s not because I was so gadget-lusty that I needed to try everything, and it’s not because I was so tight-fisted I wouldn’t go out and give the Treo a go, but it was that five years ago you couldn’t find a mobile device that did everything I needed it to. There was no device on the market that could give me cellular service, keep my calendar and contacts, take decent pictures, play most of my music, calculate differential equations, hold copies of my presentation, or store my data, let alone play videos, back itself up, or sync to my email account. Heck, there were hardly any internet-ready devices in the market at all five years ago.

Now there are numerous devices that perform multiple functions, and not only do them, but do them well. The camera on the Droid is better than my point and shoot camera was five years ago. 16GB of storage has never been so light or so sturdy as it is today. Cellular data coverage has become so popular you can use it as your primary source of the internet. These are equally insane times, but in a different way. People have finally jumped on the smartphone bandwagon, everyone keeps talking about digital convergence, and the projections that everything will move up to the cloud are in unanimous agreement.

Today, while rumours about the Apple tablet closing the gap into a single, everything device, I think people are too optimistic. It could be done, but the reality is that what I want in a device and what you want are going to be different, and both of us aren’t going to want a whole bunch of extras taking up system resources, adding bulk to the thing, and cluttering the interface. I still agree with my opinion five years ago: the all-in-one quality device will never exist. Just as you’ll never be able to grill steaks in a soup pot, the iPhone will never take pictures or videos as well a DSLR or an EX1 without ceasing to be an iPhone. The Nexus’s 3G coverage will not be as high-performing as a cable modem anytime soon. You still can’t watch TV on your phone on the bus. The Kindle can’t adequately display vivid National Geographic images. So yeah, devices are still specialised, but it’s okay. As much as I’d like it to be, my smartphone is not my computer, but it can do almost everything I need my computer for yet fits in my pocket and has a longer battery life. I can take pictures, edit them, and upload them to flickr. I can ad-hoc a live video broadcast that is automatically geotagged. I can ask this piece of metal for directions to “Roy’s Donut World” and it’ll get me there. I can play football with my mates or answer my work email from Amsterdam or write my own app for something that can fit in my pocket. That’s really incredible, and what’s more incredible is that none of it existed in a pretty, little, usable package five years ago.

The technology might have existed, but what’s really changed is the overlap between devices. Phones used to have atrocious calendar functions that didn’t sync to your desktop, but have you tried to get a PDA that doesn’t come with a network carrier contract? The old-school palm pilot of yesteryear has long since been swallowed up by more advanced smartphones. It’s not just smartphones that have evolved either. Canon’s new line of cameras can shoot full-size 1080p HD video and still function like the kind of quality still SLR camera you’d expect from the company. You can control your Sonos music system from your iPod touch and stream Netflix to your and your friend in a different city’s XBoxes.

It’s not just the devices that have evolved, but the way we use them. The ability to link up your social networks, to have the websites you read pushed to one location, to automate everything from file storage to television viewing is widely accessible. You can take a device that has great capability and customise it to meet your exact needs, without having to pull a linux and hand-code everything yourself. The idea isn’t to make one device to rule them all, because a gamer will never want the same things in a device that a business executive will. The idea is to increase the overlap and make everything play nice, so that instead of carrying around eight devices, you only need to carry one or two light, energy efficient, globally connected objects. If I’ve gone from a back-breaking rucksack to a single pocket’s worth of space and weight in five years, just think of where we’ll be in 2015.