The other day I was unpacking a brand new N82, courtesy of Richard and Nokia. One of the most visible changes from the N95 model is the out-of-the-box behaviour of the N82 accelerometer - display switches from upright to landscape quite often. GPS got better too - advanced sensors in mobiles are clearly the new norm. It’s apparent that soon our devices will know a lot more about the mobile context than they ever did.

On the other end of device spectrum, my father just bought a brand new DSLR camera and he’s getting better and better at it. It takes great pictures if used properly. I can’t see the mobile ever completely eradicating the DLSR niche market. Or the portable media player market (screen size matters). Mobiles are becoming getting better at doing many things at once, but of course won’t ever be as good as dedicated devices.

That said, I am spoiled. I want all of my devices to be context sensitive. My mobile. My DSLR. My home theater. My fridge and even my microwave. Researchers in academia call this ubiquitous computing and place its arrival to some point decades in the future. However, it doesn’t have to be so complicated.

Mobiles should share the context information collected from all their sensors with every other personal device. The DSLR might not have a GPS, but if I carried a mobile it can derive the location based on the time when a photo was taken. My fridge should notice that I invited a bunch of friends over for pasta by SMS, but forgot to buy the sauce.

Who or what should be driving the specification for this kind of context-sharing standard?