Well, maybe just a phone with a few accessories. At a press conference on the eve of the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Motorola piled on accessories in a way that reminded me of one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, when Steve Martin in “The Jerk” keeps adding random household objects to his list of "the only thing I need."
Motorola started with the Atrix phone, a very nice and powerful dual core processor phone with 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage. Of course, if you’re going to do real computing with it, you need to hook it up to a few things, so you’ll need a handy dandy little dock. And a keyboard. And a big screen—a monitor, or maybe a television, so you can watch streaming HD video if you get tired of working. But that won’t fit on your lap, so you’ll need a faux-laptop (a screen, keyboard, and dock in one package).
No word yet on what it all will cost.
Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.