> because it's a consumption device rather than both consumption and production, is just silly.
Because it could be something else than just a consumption device (unlike a book or a photo album), as it's technically a general purpose computer. His point makes perfect sense.
It's still a silly distinction and pedantic. A modern car is a consumption device, but it also contains several computers, input and output devices, and significant computing power. But everyone is fine with just driving around in them. A smart phone is way more of a production device with camera and video shooting and editing than a car.
No, it's a crucial one, for a simple reason: you're not supposed to change the firmware of your car, but you change the software in your palmtop computer quite often. Car firmware is special purpose (let's ignore some high-end multimedia stuff), while your palmtop computer can and does run any program.
Nothing technically prevents you from tethering a keyboard, mouse, and big screen to your palmtop computer —just like you do with some laptops when you dock them. Heck, it would be damn useful, to centralise all your computing in the palm of your hand.
The fact that your computer fits in the palm of your hand and can hook up to a phone network is not a good reason to have its usage restricted. The only reason people got tricked into thinking this is somehow okay, is because those computers are misnamed "smartphones".
No. They're networked computers. "Phone" is a distant second by now.
If the Java compiler doesn't run on android phones then it's only because no-one actually cares enough to make it do so. There's no reason you couldn't run a full IDE on an android device with a keyboard, mouse and big screen tethered to it and use it to work on programs for that device (including updates to the IDE itself), except that it would be dumb; nothing technically prevents you from doing that.
And why would that be dumb? Because my phone doesn't have the CPU power?
Granted, doing this set us back a few years. Still, for my day to day computing (everything except 3D gaming and maybe HD movies), I would totally love to have my phone run GNU/Linux with my favourite window manager when tethered, and an Android-like touch-based shell when unplugged.
Phones are doomed by their UI restrictions to be primarily consumption devices. The primary restriction in computers has always been in how well they communicate with the user. Smartphone screens are limited to what will fit in our pocket so the bandwidth to the user is limited by that and halves once the on screen keyboard pops up. The situation is actually worse for user to computer bandwidth. You cannot do proper multi-finger touch typing on a smartphone. Your finger just can't approach the resolution of a mouse. Also you don't have multiple buttons like a mouse, the only action is touch. So the machine is stuck trying to separate a touch, swipe, and potentially a long touch. That's error prone so phones are often doing things people don't want them to.
That's not to say smart phones suck. I love mine. All the disadvantages have to be weighed against the value of having a network connected computer in your pocket wherever you go. There is quite a bit of latency involved in sitting down at computer compared with pulling a smartphone out of one's pocket.
Because it could be something else than just a consumption device (unlike a book or a photo album), as it's technically a general purpose computer. His point makes perfect sense.