I have to agree with Mike from The Feature. The idea of bringing Wi-Fi and cellular together is a little hard to wrap ones mind around. Having said this, I don’t think I would have been quite as hard on the idea as he was though. While there are undoubtly going to be some flaws with the concept, I am still curious to see how well BT makes a go of it.

Lots of people like to make fun of “convergence,” wondering when we’re going to start seeing microwave ovens included in our phones — but the truth is plenty of converged offerings make sense because they let people do something that was simply impossible without the merged features. For example, many have wondered about why it made sense to mix a camera and a phone, but that misses the point. Cameraphones aren’t about putting a camera in the same device as a phone and treating them as separate features, but the fact that it suddenly makes your camera connected in a way that’s never been possible before. That’s where the differentiator is, and that’s where the powerful applications will come from.

Bad or pointless convergence is what happens when the converged offering doesn’t actually let anyone do anything differently at all. It just combines two (or more) separate offerings into a single box. It may be gimmicky, but it’s hardly “convergence.” Take, for example, BT’s latest description of its Bluephone offering. The company had announced Bluephone nearly two years ago, with a promise that it would be out in spring of 2004. As the TechWorld article notes, BT still hasn’t updated the website making this claim — which seems a bit embarrassing. Even more embarrassing may be the context, where they note that the 12 months from announcement (April, 2003) to launch (April, 2004) “could be considered almost leisurely” since its being done by the same guy who built up BT Openzone in six months. Apparently, leisure got the best of him, because we’re now pushing 20 months.