Do you instinctively reach into your pocket or bag to look for something hard when you are bored waiting for someone or inbetween meetings and errands. More often than not, in awkward silences between two people, the fingers start...well, fiddling. Get your mind out of the gutter. The hard object I am refering to is your mobile phone, PDA, i-devices or PSP.

So what did we do in the past before pagers, handphones and game devices and now mobile Internet devices were the norm?

Eileen Yu of ZDNet posted a great blog http://www.zdnetasia.com/blogs/btw/0,3800011236,63003341,00.htm. I agree with her. Every device has a place.

The fact that there are now so many small devices to distract us is an amazing technological feat. We are so connected today that people can contact us through more than one phone number, more than one email and more than one messenger application. I need one more brain just to keep up with my accounts, numbers and passwords!

Remember your first mobile phone? Game and Watch? Your first notebook? We were restless then; we're even more restless today! But it is different today. We want more. We want to access the Internet where we can log on to a hotspot. We want to be entertained. We want our devices to last as long as we do.

The joy is we don't have to lug clunky devices to connect on the move. Phones, gaming devices, Mobile Internet Devices and even notebooks have become smaller and they will continue to evolve in designs and form factors. Will they converge? Possibly. Is it critical? Probably not so for me.

So why did engineers decide to embark on making all things small and pocket-friendly. I bet they were bored :)