Is the iPhone the new laptop? The new digital camera?

A comment to my first post raised a great question. With the iPhone's extensive library of apps that can really do anything, will there be a need to lug around your laptop or digital camera? If you are driving and decide to get something to eat, there's an app to find a restaurant. If you are lost, your iPhone has GPS or you can mapquest. If you forgot your camera, you can use your iPhone to take a picture, edit it, and save it or send it. Your iPhone can send and receive email, allow you to read a book, and surf the web. So is there a need for your bulky laptop or your digital camera?

In my opinion, iPhone, as impressive its capabilities are, will not phase out laptops or cameras. While cameras are the closest to being replaced by iPhone, they have two saving graces. The first is that the camera quality on an iPhone does not quite match the quality of a digital camera. The second is that not everyone is an iPhone user who has the capabilities of taking pictures you can edit and email. Laptops are nowhere close to being pushed aside for the iPhone. The iPhone has all the capabilities of a laptop and is lighter and more compact. But there lies its flaw when compared to a laptop. If you had a five page paper due would you want to be typing it out on the tiny iPhone screen with a keyboard that is sometimes hard to just text with? Would you want to read all of your articles online by expanding the screen and moving it back and forth multiple times for each line you read? You cannot edit movies on an iPhone. Downloading things can get pretty difficult, especially if its a .zip file. There is no place to plug in your jump drive to transfer a document from your iPhone to your jump drive. The last saving grace for a laptop is simply not all laptop users have an iPhone.

So while that iPhone has an app for almost anything, it seems, I do not think it is anything for manufacturers of laptops and digital cameras to worry about. Are less people taking their laptop to Starbucks and to campus when they have an iPhone? Probably. But I would not start thinking of the iPhone as the omniscient, omnipotent piece of technology.