The title sounds a bit technical but all it means is: whats the most technology functionality you can possibly have on the thoeretical device. The perfect ‘all-in-one’ device.

Check the date of this post becuase things could change very quickly.

Basically, its everything you use a PC for:
Writing (doc emails blogs websites)
Calculations
Real-time chat (electronic)
Talking (live phone)
Recording (storing voice/image)
Creating (imaging, music,)
Location Guidance (gps based routing and location/timetable information)
Reference (public and personal document access)
Connectivity – Access to common data/voice networks. Device control.
Syncronisation – If you cant do it on one device – you need to sync!

Thats a lot of categories that translate into the following common functions:

Mobile phone voice
Mobile phone IM (SMS/MMS)
Calendar
Contacts
Reminders/To-do
Digital Camera
Document creation (typing)
Document retrieval (doc reading)
Document storage (local)
Music playing/recording
Video playing/recording
GPS navigation
Web browsing
Email creation
IM Chat.

..and the following common connectivity methods:
GSM,GPRS (2G), UMTS (3G), Wifi variants, Bluetooth, IR
I’m going to leave out WiMax for the time being.

The simple fact is that you’ll never get everything on one device. It wont happen until we evolve better eyes and smaller fingers.

You cant watch a video for any length of time on anything under 3.5″ across.
You cant type at an efficient speed on anything less than a mini-qwerty keyboard.

So why bother trying to cram it all in to one device? i guess the marketing people can answer that question and its probably something to do with customer perception.
If you do buy the all-in-one device though, I can guarantee you wont get the best out of it.

I’ll go into a few details in the next post about what I consider the optimal convergence to be and what ‘all-in-one’ means. Some convergence is definately possible but becuase of device overlaps, physical constraints and a tendency for many technologies to evolve towards the smartphone, a new device segment is being created.