Of all the possible future of computing devices, one that seems so appealing—superficially, at least—is a single converged gadget that does it all. A pocketable thing that gives you computing and Internet connectivity when you're out and about, but is equally capable of driving a big-screen monitor, mouse, and keyboard when you're sitting at a desk doing some work, watching streaming media, or playing a game on your TV.

This is, I would argue, the future that Microsoft is driving at. Microsoft has long maintained that tablets are PCs: that a computing device is a computing device, and that it should support many different kinds of input devices and applications. A device's role should be defined by how it's being used at any moment in time, rather than its role being an essential characteristic of the device.

Microsoft's convergence, however, is still some way off. Although Windows 8 makes a credible argument that tablets and PCs can be one and the same, Microsoft's smartphone ecosystem is still rather separate. There is commonality in the kernel and in some aspects of the development model and APIs, but other parts remain unique to the phone.

Long-term, Microsoft tells me that the goal is to have the phone and desktop operating system offer the same APIs and so on, but they're not there yet. Once that converged platform is in place, converged hardware becomes the logical next step.

Microsoft has been banging the "everything's a PC" drum for a long time, but the full materialization of that goal is still some way off. On the other hand, Canonical hasn't been so vocal in its advocacy for this concept—but it's tantalizingly close to making the idea a reality.

A dream in the distance

Canonical's Ubuntu Edge smartphone didn't get funded. The $32 million goal was missed by a country mile, left needing a last-minute $20 million reprieve that never came.

The design of the Edge is striking, and its hardware specs, though not actually finalized, would have put it near the high end of the market. But the most forward-looking part of the Edge was not the hardware per se, but rather what it was used for.

128 GB of storage and 4GB RAM are probably overkill on a phone. That's not to say that, in the race for spec-sheet superiority, storage of that size won't materialize sooner or later on high-end handsets. Most of us just don't actually need to store that much stuff on our phone.

However, the Edge concept isn't only a phone. It's a converged device: it's a phone that's also a PC. Plug it into an HDMI screen and pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and you can run PC software on it (albeit only Linux software which, regardless of its merits, has thus far failed to conquer the desktop).

Though Canonical hasn't finished the software yet, the ambition is for the phone software and the desktop software to be separate but in some sense integrated. For example, the phone mail client and the desktop mail client share accounts, and music apps see the same files (and indeed, the same filesystem).

On the touchscreen of a phone or a tablet, Ubuntu OS has an interface that relies heavily on learned navigation. Core operations, such as switching between applications, are invoked by swiping from the edges of the screen. It's a design that will feel eerily familiar to Windows 8 users.

The Edge was not supposed to be the first converged device. Motorola has experimented in this domain. The Atrix's laptop dock was a bit ungainly with the phone inserted into the back of the thing, but the result was a device that could more or less be used as a smartphone or as a laptop. However, it didn't really have the hardware power to serve as a true computer. Even basic operations like scrolling were slow.

But the Edge, with its somewhat hypothetical specification, was the first device with enough power to be both a phone and a PC. The first device that would let you take your compute power and your stuff with you wherever you go and let you use it however you wanted.

That the Edge didn't get funded is a setback for those who want to embrace, or at least experiment with, this particular vision of the future. For backers, it's a bit disappointing. They were hoping to get a shiny new toy, and now they won't. They'll have to make do with some other shiny new toy instead.

For Canonical, it's a mixed bag. The company has tried to put a positive spin on the crowdfunding effort, noting that it (prospectively) raised more money than almost any other crowdfunded project (in less time, too). The $32 million goal was always wildly optimistic, far in excess of any other product funded in such a way, and asking people to stump up $6-800 for a smartphone with an unknown specification, running unfinished software, that they won't receive for a year, was always a big ask. In many ways, it's incredible that as much was pledged as it was.

But positive spin aside, the attempt to raise funds was a failure, and the Ubuntu Edge is unlikely to materialize. Canonical certainly won't abandon the mobile market, but without the Edge, it'll have to get other people to do the hardware. The company might well have to make some specification or aesthetic compromises as a result.

This doesn't mean that the converged device idea is dead. Canonical says that on any Ubuntu phone with a sufficient spec—enough RAM, CPU, and storage—you'll be able to run desktop software when connected to desktop input and display devices. But without hardware designed explicitly for desktop support, as the Edge was to be, it's plausible that this desktop experience will be slow and unsatisfying. The Edge's RAM and local storage were important parts of filling that desktop role.

The level of support for the Edge is, I think, tentative support for the converged concept. Raising $32 million would, of course, have been much stronger support, but given the relatively high outlay ($6-800) and the still rather speculative nature of the project, to get as much pledged as the Edge received shows that there are plenty of people who'd like to give this idea a go even with a high cost of entry.

This kind of converged device isn't the only possible future we have. We might continue to have a plethora of different, specialized devices—a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, an e-reader—and certainly Apple has argued for just that. But we're now almost in the position to at least try. Until now, neither hardware nor software was up to the challenge. Before too long, both will be.

Listing image by Canonical