I’m normally very happy to see the Wall Street Journal and NYTimes and Washington Post make it to the leaderboard of Techmeme.com where tech-news is filtered via secret algorithm to form a lovely (not perfect) Page A1 TECH Section but today, I totally disagree with the WSJ’s article: Time To Leave The Laptop Behind

In yesterday’s article, I was proud of Johnny Chung Lee for re-inventing what’s already made to maximize usefulness, cost and impact as a brilliant exersize in the philosophy of economy. Today, we rush innovation and skip right ahead to the next “big thing” and forsake TONS of inventive and helpful technologies and could slow down the alienation process; geeks rule when normal folks can’t keep up – and it’s their money that’s supposed to help us move ahead.

The expression, “a race team can only be as fast as the slowest member,” is good to remember especially now with a bummer market. To avoid a Tech Bubble burst that the media is foaming at the mouth for, tech makers and early adopters must remember that it’s the current of normal people’s money that will keep Tech real and un-busted. Keeping the same money flowing in an ever-faster circle isn’t progress. We have to slow down a spell to let normal people keep up and touting Smartphones as the new Laptop is a piss-poor idea.

“Now road warriors are starting to realize that they can get even more portability — and lots of computing punch — from smart phones.” The smartest of the smart phones, the iPhone, is hopelessly tied to my Laptop for Syncronization, Restore copies and firmware updates too overwhelming for the phone alone. The phone’s API agreement refuses to allow one application to utilize the process of another. There’s hardly enough memory that counts as RAM to power applications that are useful in an office environment. Being a webmaster via the iPhone? No way! FTP access is downright infuriating, an eight browser-window maximum and no Flash or shockwave support make the iPhone a pocket toy. I cannot conceive of squeezing a dribble of “computing punch” from today’s smart phones.

I’m happy to say that the article is balanced and does give plenty of statistics (it is the Wall Street Journal afterall, not just some tech blog) to support that the smart phones will not replace laptops anytime soon. And for good reason. What the article comes close to hitting on, but doesn’t, is the “Lucy” of laptops to smartphones, the missing link, if you will. The UMPC’s which, hopefully, were not just a flash in the pan.

When considering advice for a laptop, smartphone or Ultra Mobile Personal Computer, I find myself recommending more and more laptops that resemble big, muscle-bound UMPC’s. Ultra Mobiles are what normal people need to gravitate to in order to transition from laptops to smartphones. Why, you ask.

Laptops forgot what they were made for: Mobility, basic function and routine usage of applications. They became hotter and more powerful than desktops and in some cases, bigger. The ideal UMPC would have a touchscreen about the size of a postcard making movie-watching easy; they can hide small physical keyboards including number pads, and; they’re still big enough to have USB ports and in some cases, disk drives.

In the mean time, smart phone makers can hone their craft, make their firmware updates more reliable (my iPhone has twice frozen completely during updates costing me 4 hours at a time to fix the problem), and help develop the Web’s next big step: Vector-based coding. It’s absolutely perfectly zoomable, WIKI is already using Shockwave vectors for detailed illustrations and it’s incredible. All smartphones will be astounding and pleasing once the content can shrink or zoom accordingly. For now, it can’t. So don’t skip over the UMPC.

If the tech bubble is to stay round and happy, I see a happy age of UMPC’s borrowing heavily from the smartphone innovations and surviving with gusto for the next four years. Once content is smartphone friendlier, then the UMPC’s will become the missing link between laptops and smartphones that they ought to be.