Those apps — which include Skype, Pinger, WhatsApp, Tango and Viber — are all great apps, said Julien Decot, the new VP of business development and monetization at TextMe. The problem, Decot claimed, is they’re five separate apps, each specializing in a different set of features. TextMe, however, has a plan to combine the best aspects of each of those services into a single multidimensional communications tool.

Decot spent the last five years at Skype tailoring the VoIP giant’s corporate strategy, and while he believes Skype has designed a juggernaut of a communication platform, it was one that was always optimized for a PC environment. The hole Skype left in mobile was filled led by numerous mobile over-the-top (OTT) communications apps like WhatsApp. What the market needed, Decot said, is a made-for-mobile Skype incorporating the new features of the emerging class of OTT apps.

Note: This story is just one in an occasional series of stories on important under-the-radar mobile startups.

Starting with a clean slate

Julien Decot

Microsoft obviously wasn’t going to rebuild Skype from scratch, but Decot found his new Skype in TextMe, a 2-year-old San Francisco bootstrapped startup, which has already seen 10 million installs in the last two years of its Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps.

TextMe provides a unified voice, messaging and video chat platform, but it can also reach beyond its own network of users to touch any phone number in the U.S. and more than 200 other countries. It’s designed a device-agnostic platform that can turn any tablet into a phone. And to top it all off it’s created a “freemium” charging platform that allows customers to earn credits for services they would normally pay for.

One of the most interesting aspects is how it has overcome one of biggest problems plaguing a new over-the-top app developer: cultivating the network effect. To become truly useful, a communication or social network needs a large number of users. TextMe has solved this problem by issuing every user a phone number just as Google Voice does in the PC world. That means any TextMe member can automatically send and receive text messages from any mobile device as well as place or receive calls from any phone — whether or not the person at the opposite end is a TextMe user.

Of course, not all of the services are free. As with its competitors’ apps, all in-network SMS, voice and video communications are gratis, but TextMe also doesn’t charge for out-of-network text messages to U.S. numbers or for any inbound call, no matter where it originates. TextMe charges for phone calls to non-TextMe numbers, both domestic and international, and this week TextMe this week also introduced a paid international SMS feature.

Customers start out with 10 free credits, which is enough for a 10 minute domestic or U.K. call or a two-and-a-half minute call to France. TextMe sells credits in buckets: $1 for 40 credits or $10 for a bundle of 500. But the startup also offers ways for customers to earn credits through promotions. If you watch video advertisements or download promoted apps from your devices app store, you’ll accrue credits in one-to 20-point increments.

“Most of our credits are earned not purchased, but that’s fine with us, as long as it keeps our customers happy,” Decot said. “We get revenue either way.”

Forget innovation. We need aggregation.

Like I said before, all of these features are available in one form or another in other OTT apps. Pinger assigns phone numbers to handle its voice messaging and out-of-network texts and calls. Skype and Tango offer in-network video chat, and Skype offers exposure to the wider telephone grid with SkypeIN and SkypeOut. WhatsApp is the king of rich-media mobile messaging. TextMe just wraps them all into a single service.

TextMe has so far focused its efforts on smartphones, tablets and iPod Touch (effectively turning the Wi-Fi device into a softphone), but the company is exploring PC clients — bringing it full circle back to Skype — and even WebRTC browser-based communications technologies, Decot said. TextMe will even let you make a mobile phone call without a mobile network connection, tapping into Open Garden’s ad hoc mesh network.

As for competition, take your pick. There is more OTT software in mobile app stores than you can shake a line of code at. The company closest to TextMe’s model, though, is the similarly named TextPlus (formerly named Gogii), which also issues a phone number to each and every user. Last time we checked, TextPlus had racked up 27 million users, and it is even showing signs of adopting an earned-credit charging model via a new partnership with FreedomPop.

TextMe, though, has stumbled onto an interesting idea. A quick look at my smartphone reveals a miasma of IM, chat and social communication apps. If I wanted to reach out to my wife there are literally 20 different services I could use to reach her. Each of those services offers some kind of compelling feature to recommend it — not only could I call, IM, text or video chat with her I could use an app like Sidecar or Glympse to let her know where I am or where I’m going.

What I really want is one service that does all of the above.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that TextMe was able to reach 40-plus countries with its international voice and SMS services. The company recently expanded its reach to over 200 countries.

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The new data-only plans, announced Monday, start at $30 a month for 4 GB and scale up to $335 for 50 GB a month. Consumers can add up to 10 devices to their plans – each tablet or gaming device costing $10 a month and each laptop or modem costing $20 – and small businesses can add up to 25. In addition to the new data-only tiers, AT&T plans to supersize all of its shared plans, offering 30 GB, 40 GB and 50 GB buckets to both consumers and small businesses.

When you compare the new data-only plans to its regular data share pricing plans, the differences are substantial. A 4 GB plan on a regular mobile share plan costs $70 a month, $40 more than the equivalent data-only plan. At higher tiers the discount is just as big: a 20 GB regular share plan costs $200, while the data-only version costs only $110.

AT&T justifies the differences in pricing through the inclusion of unlimited voice and SMS in its regular plans, while data-only plans, by definition, include no such benefits. But AT&T’s complex shared plan framework actually double-charges customers for those traditional telephony and messaging services. Connecting a smartphone or feature phone to the AT&T network costs anywhere from $30 to $45 a month, and you would assume that those premium rates reflect the cost of voice and SMS.

The good news is AT&T is encouraging the use of data-only devices on its network. It wants to usher in the tablet and mobile-connected revolution on its networks so it’s offering steep data discounts for those use cases. It’s a trend we’re likely to see throughout the U.S. mobile industry. The problem is AT&T seems to be inadvertently punishing the large majority of smartphone subscribers in the process.

Here’s an example: If you were a data-only customer with two tablets and a 4G mobile hotspot, you could get a data-only plan that would allow you pool 10 GB a month between your three devices for the very reasonable rate of $100 a month. Now if you were to add a single smartphone to the same plan you wouldn’t just be tacking on a $30-$40 standard connection charge. Instead, you would wind up paying $190 a month by moving to a mixed voice-and-data plan. Basically you wind up spending nearly double to add talk and text to single gadget in a four-device plan – that does not seem like a fair deal to me.

I applaud AT&T for offering cheaper data options and exploring the concept of a data-only mobile service. But in the process it’s also exposing the fundamental flaws of its regular shared plans. AT&T really needs to do away with the complex system of sliding connection fees, which ultimately charge different rates for data depending on the device you use. Instead, it should make it clear as day what it’s charging for voice, SMS and the cost of connecting a device. Then it should just sell us data at a set universal price.

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Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the signaling system used to manage IP-based voice and video calls and messaging capabilities in many carrier and enterprise networks, but it’s a protocol foreign to most developers. “What’s exciting about this news to the common geek is that Twilio is further establishing itself as the bridge between disparate forms of communication,” Twilio director of product management Thomas Schiavone told GigaOM.

Schiavone readily admits that no developer currently unfamiliar with the arcane ways of SIP is likely to pursue the protocol, but there are plenty of enterprises and enterprise developers that do, and they’re looking for easy ways to link their insular business networks to A broader range of public and private communications tools.

The idea is that Twilio can perform the complex translation of different kind of calls or messages in the cloud. A regular phone call from a landline, a VoIP call from softphone client or a WebRTC call from a browser could all pass through Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and connect as a SIP-based call on an office extension. “Twilio sits in the middle, allowing you to mix and match all these forms of communication,” Schiavone said.

Twilio’s SIP service, which launched as beta in October, aims to become more than just a translation service. Twilio claims that by connecting its cloud platform directly to legacy PBXs, companies can move the application logic of their communications platform into the cloud, where they can build new features without having to upgrade or reconfigure their hardware.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user 2 Much Caffeine

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According to a new report from Chetan Sharma Consulting, data accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. operators’ service revenue in the 4^th quarter, and the rapid transition from dumb phones to smartphones is driving that number upwards. Meanwhile, unlimited talk plans are proliferating even as voice plan pricing is falling. That’s causing average voice revenue per subscriber to drop.

Eventually the rising data line and falling voice line will intersect on the industry’s revenue graph. Sharma plots that meeting point in the 4^th quarter of 2013, at which point operators will start to look more like ISPs than phone companies.

I wouldn’t expect an overnight transformation once they pass that halfway mark, but it’s fair to say carriers will start behaving differently as the economics of the mobile market shift. Operators will most likely attempt to accelerate their gains in data, while de-emphasizing voice even more.

Voice revenues are actually declining faster than data revenues are growing. For every 48 cents in new data revenue operators raked in the fourth quarter, they lost 64 cents in voice revenue, Sharma found. To make up for those losses, they will try to upsell their customers on data plan tiers and — in the case of AT&T and Verizon at least — try to force more of their customers off grandfathered unlimited data plans. They will also try to swing more of their customers toward smartphones and tablets and migrate more subscribers to new LTE networks — both of which will drive more data use.

Carriers won’t have to prod their customers too much. While the 4G-connected tablet market is still slow, smartphones accounted for 84 percent of fourth quarter handset sales in the U.S. In just two years, Verizon has moved 21.6 million subscribers over to its LTE network. Simultaneously the typical consumer’s hunger for mobile data is only increasing.

“The smartphone data consumption at some operators is averaging close to 1 GB/mo,” Sharma wrote in the report. “Some devices are averaging close to 2 GB/mo. As we move into 1GB range along with the family data plans kicking in, you can expect the data tiers to get bigger both in GBs and dollar amount.”

The swift decline in average voice revenue per subscriber will matter less and less to operators as data takes over, as voice will account for far less of their overall revenue. In fact, you’ll probably see a complete shift in the way operators treat voice and data in their pricing plans from what we saw five years ago. When voice and SMS were king and queen, operators had variety and sophistication in their pricing tiers, while data plans were a commodity — for an additional $15 to $30 a month you got as much as you wanted.

Now voice and SMS have become the commodity, increasingly available only in unlimited packages, while data plans have become more and more granular. Verizon and AT&T have taken the ultimate step toward commoditizing voice and SMS, making them unlimited-use features standard in their family plans, just like voicemail. I suspect that this trend will not only continue, but voice prices will drop further as carriers put all of their chips into selling data.

We won’t just see more and increasingly larger data tiers, but operators will begin creating specialty plans to differentiate between different types of data, just as they created nights-and-weekends and friends-and-family plans in the boomtown days of voice. Customers will be able to buy plans that give them unlimited access to IP communications services or social networking. They could choose to pay extra fees each month to access faster speeds than their neighbors.

If there is a way to slice and dice data into an appealing tiered plan, operators will figure out how to do it. Once they pass that halfway mark, there’s no looking back. They will become mobile ISPs with voice businesses on the side.

Eclipse photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Igor Kovalchuk; Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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Tests of MetroPCS’s new VoLTE service found that 4G calls drained twice as much as regular CDMA ones. At the time, however, Spirent Global Director of Insights Amit Malhotra predicted that VoLTE’s power efficiency would improve as both VoLTE network and handset technology progressed. Fast-forward four months and Malhotra’s prognostication appears to be coming true.

Spirent recently performed a new batch of tests using Metro’s newest generation VoLTE handset, the LG Spirit 4G, and found that the current drain from a VoLTE call had dropped by 35 percent compared to LG’s first-generation VoLTE smartphone, the Connect. Improving power efficiency by 35 percent is a tremendous number when it comes to cellular battery life, which tends to measure progress in tiny increments. But there is still one big qualification to that good news: 2G is still a more power-efficient technology.

With its latest generation handset, LG improved the overall radio performance of the phone by using an integrated CDMA-LTE radio, rather than the dual chips used in the older Connect (it also beefed up the Spirit with a much larger 2150 mAh battery). That resulted in an 18 percent current drain improvement for CDMA calls in addition to the improved performance in VoLTE. Even with its efficiency boost, VoLTE still ate up far more juice than a CDMA call on either the new Spirit or the old Connect.

Spirent’s tests concluded that the LG Spirit would support 875 minutes of talk time in CDMA mode, but only 575 minutes when solely making 4G calls. The Spirit’s bigger battery (with 38 percent more capacity than the Connect) gives the device a big boost in single-charge lifespan, but that 300-minute differential is still huge.

The bottom line is that while VoLTE’s battery drain is improving it still has a ways to go before it can match the power efficiency of 2G. CDMA and GSM technologies went through more than a decade of optimization to reach their current efficiency levels.  Hopefully VoLTE can close that gap in a much shorter interval. The big improvements LG and MetroPCS demonstrated in a single generation of handsets is a good sign that it can.

Correction: This post was updated at 11:30 AM, Tuesday, to correct a percentage. Spirent measured a 35 percent power drain improvement in VoLTE calls between the two generation of LG devices, not 33 percent.

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You can make that case for crowdsourced mesh-networking company Open Garden and over-the-top IP communications provider TextMe, which plan to announce an alliance on Friday.

Here’s the problem: TextMe turns devices that weren’t intended to be phones into phones. Its downloadable clients for the iPod touch, iPad and Android tablets bring text, voice and video chat capabilities — all linked to phone number — to what were previously data only devices. Those devices depend on an internet connection, but in most cases are only capable of receiving Wi-Fi signals: Being able to text and talk doesn’t do you much good if there’s no network connection to be found.

Open Garden has created an app that allows consumers to share their connections to the internet through a Wi-Fi mesh – sort of a utopian community that works together to ensure everyone gets the best possible connection. However, for Open Garden to really get going, it needs scale. The more devices its client is loaded into, the more broadband options are available to everyone.

So, TextMe and Open Garden have linked their apps. Starting this week anyone downloading the TextMe app to an Android device (it already has 8 million installs to its credit) will also be given the option to download the Open Garden software as well.

When the TextMe app is active — but there is no direct Wi-Fi connection to be found — it will activate the Open Garden client, which will seek to establish a peer-to-peer mesh connection with other nearby Open Garden-enabled devices. If successful, TextMe will be able to text and call freely using another device or PC’s cellular, Wi-Fi or wireline connection.

Open Garden Co-founder Micha Benoliel

Right now most people use Open Garden (it has 2 million installs to date) as a way to link  their own devices together, allowing their various gadgetry to take advantage of an optimal shared connection, but Open Garden founder Micha Benoliel said the goal is to achieve the scale necessary to create truly massive crowdsourced networked By partnering with company’s like TextMe, Open Garden can reach that scale.

This might sound terrible unfair if you’re a smartphone user suddenly giving up your 4G connection to a bunch of freeriding text-happy tablet users, but Benoliel said you have to change your mindset. No one is truly unconnected, so everyone will have the opportunity to share their connection at some point whether they’re logged into a coffee-shop Wi-Fi network or connected to a home broadband line. Eventually, though, Open Garden to plans to introduce controls that will allow users to limit how much bandwidth they give up.

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This will allow synchronous communication for gaming or social apps so users can talk app-to-app while they play came or share photos together. Or it could allow other apps to easily add support for free calls to customer support. That could make apps more engaging, potentially making more money for developers.

Rebtel’s SDK could also be used by developers to create their own branded mobile VoIP app without building their own back end. Messaging apps could easily add voice service using Rebtel, which also allows them to call fixed phone numbers.

The calls are carried over Wi-Fi or 3G and offer HD voice quality. Users don’t have to be Rebtel members, they just press a “talk” button in their app. The service is free for now, though Rebtel may look at charging later for apps that do a certain amount of volume.

Rebtel is starting slowly, testing the new platform with just three companies including VIVfone, which makes a mobile CRM app, and MobisleApps, which develops lifestyle, dating and productivity applications. Rebtel is looking at learning what developers want through its private beta before opening up the service next year.

Rebtel CEO Andreas Bernstrom believes there’s a big opportunity in connecting mobile apps via voice. He said developers have been looking for a way to add a voice layer to their apps without having to do a lot of the work. And he believes that can ultimately help Rebtel by introducing the service to a lot of new customers. Rebtel currently has more than 17 million users and is on pace to generate $80 million in revenue this year.

Rebtel faces some competition from services like Twilio, Skype and WebRTC, an emerging technology that will enable voice and video calling from any browser. Joyn, a rich communication technology from the GSMA that is backed by big carriers, can also be used for in-app communications. The rise of these services comes as mobile users spend less on voice and text messaging as they move to more over-the-top voice and messaging apps. The promise of Rebtel’s SDK hinges on the belief that people want to keep talking by voice, but they’d like to do so in the context of existing mobile apps. That might work in some situations though it’s unclear how many apps will really benefit from synchronous in-app voice calling.

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Metrico Wireless, a radio field testing company Spirent acquired in September, conducted voice trials on a commercial VoLTE-enabled network in two U.S. cities, comparing the power consumption of VoIP calls made over LTE against the power used by the same carrier’s CDMA systems. Spirent-Metrico didn’t name the carrier, but it’s not hard to guess.

MetroPCS is the only U.S. operator with a live VoLTE service and a commercially available handset. The 1540 milliamp hour (mAh)-battery on Metro’s sole VoLTE handset, the LG Connect 4G, also lines up with the battery capacity of the device Spirent tested.

The results of those tests should give carriers and consumers pause. The average power consumption for a 10-minute CDMA circuit-switched call was 680 milliwatts (mW) while the average consumption for a VoLTE call of the same duration was 1358 mW. That’s double the power drain. Spirent estimated that on a full charge, its test smartphone could support 502.6 minutes of talk time using CDMA only, but the same charge would only deliver 251.8 minutes of talk time using VoIP on the 4G network. And that’s with all other data communications turned off.

What it comes down to is that our old GSM and CDMA circuit-switched voice technologies — despite their limitations — have been optimized over the last two decadesto be energy efficient, Spirent Global Director of Insights Amit Malhotra told GigaOM in an email interview. It’s hard to replicate that kind of efficiency overnight in a generic data modem.

“The disadvantage in battery life of VoLTE compared to circuit-switched voice is driven by a few different factors,” Malhotra said. “One is the more strenuous exercise of the device, including conversion of voice to packet data, transmission and receipt over the data network, and reconversion back to voice. Another is the use of less power-efficient components such as data modems versus voice transceivers.”

If this proves to be typical for VoLTE handsets, it will be a big problem. The battery life of the first generation of LTE smartphones was atrocious, and handset vendors have tried to address the problem by slapping fat 3000+ mAh power cells onto their phones. Some carriers are already reluctant to embrace VoLTE since they can still squeeze plenty of life out of their 2G and 3G voice services. If VoLTE proves to be a battery killer, they will be even less inclined to move mobile voice into the IP age.

There is some good news in Spirent’s findings though. It found LTE performed better than CDMA when the phone is used to make simultaneous voice and data calls. When the phone was in 4G-only mode — i.e., using only the LTE network for both VoIP and data — it performed slightly more efficiently than when the 2G radio was used for voice while the 4G radio transmitted data, Spirent discovered. That makes sense since powering two radios simultaneously could take an enormous toll on battery life.

That would seem to indicate that if you tend to talk and consume data at the same time, then VoLTE is a more efficient technology. That’s true, but only to the tiniest degree. The study found that both in both scenarios the hyperactivity of the device drained tremendous amount of energy. Battery life estimates dropped below 120 minutes in both cases. No matter which radios you use, talking and surfing consumes a tremendous amount of power.

Malhotra, however, said LTE power efficiency is bound to improve as both data modem technology and network coverage gets better. Today’s LTE networks have limited footprints, forcing phones to continuously check for signals. Eventually the data modems in our handsets will be optimized for VoIP calling.

“These issues will be mitigated over time, especially as components continue to become more power efficient, and devices do not need to switch between different modes of voice call processing,” Malhotra said.

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In an interview with GigaOM, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray said that T-Mobile would continue supporting Metro’s VoLTE handsets and mobile VoIP service, but whether it would expand that service to its own network and handsets was still an open question. Ray stressed that T-Mobile eventually plans to migrate its voice traffic to its all-IP 4G networks, but the big issue is timing.

“VoLTE will come,” Ray said, but he pointed out it’s a relatively unproven technology that will take several years to mature into a commercially viable service. “We will certainly support the VoLTE services that MetroPCS has today,” he said. “But is that the VoLTE we want to populate the new network with? TBD.”

In its initial manifestation, VoLTE probably won’t have much of an impact on consumers. Carriers will transfer their voice services from one network to another and likely charge the same rates for the service. But as VoLTE evolves, carriers will be able to offer a range of multimedia and IP communications features. They will also be able to implement technical enhancements such as HD voice (subscription required) that they simply can’t support on circuit-switched voice networks today. For carriers, there is an even larger implication in VoLTE. Once they turn off their old voice network, they can phase out their 2G and 3G systems are repurpose that spectrum for LTE.

T-Mobile’s VoLTE decision will be based on both demand and logistics, Ray said. MetroPCS faces big capacity constraints — every megahertz of spectrum it devotes to 2G voice is one less megahertz it has to fuel its bandwidth constrained 4G mobile broadband network. T-Mobile, however, has a lot more breathing room in its airwaves. “The rush to get to VoLTE is less for T-Mobile because we have such underlying strength on GSM and HSPA+,” Ray said.

The companies expect the deal to close in the first half of 2013, but T-Mobile’s own LTE network won’t go online until the latter half of the year. You can’t offer a VoLTE service with the LTE component. If it added VoLTE clients to the new HSPA+ handsets it plans to sell existing Metro customers, it would still be sometime before they could access a nationwide LTE network.

In addition, T-Mobile isn’t planning to integrate Metro’s LTE systems into its own. Instead, it plans to shut down Metro’s radio and core networks as soon as the last CDMA phone goes offline. Ray said T-Mobile will keep about 1000 cell sites, and 6000 antenna nodes, but otherwise it will replace all of Metro’s gear with its own base stations and core. That includes the service delivery architecture – in telco parlance is called IP Multimedia System or IMS – that hosts Metro’s VoLTE applications.

If T-Mobile decides to hold off on VoLTE, what we’ll likely see is a large-scale phasing out of VoLTE handsets as MetroPCS customers switch to HSPA handsets (Considering nearly two-thirds of MetroPCS customers switch out phones every year, that migration could happen quite quickly). That phase out would then be followed several years later by a gradual reintroduction of VoLTE, after T-Mobile’s nationwide LTE network goes online and the VoIP technology has cut its teeth in the market.

But Ray held out hope for another possibility. Depending on the states of the VoLTE technology and T-Mobile’s network, the carrier could jump into VoLTE whole hog as soon as the merger closes. That would mean the new T-Metro would start VoLTE-HSPA hands shortly after the closing, utilizing the VoIP capabilities of Metro’s 4G footprint initially and expanding to T-Mobile’s new LTE network as it comes online.

There are few technical barriers standing in T-Mobile’s way, Ray said. Both MetroPCS and T-Mobile share the same IMS core architecture, supplied by Mavenir Systems (see disclosure). Even when the T-Mobile shuts down the Metro network, VoLTE handsets could theoretical transition straight onto the T-Mobile core. The question T-Mobile has to weigh, Ray said, is whether it sees the need to launch a large-scale VoLTE service so soon.

Disclosure: Mavenir Systems is backed by Alloy Ventures, which also backs GigaOmni Media, the parent company of GigaOM. Alloy’s Ammar Hanafi is on the board of both companies.

Tower Image courtesy of Flickr user Nikhil Verma

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Hopefully you’re either done laughing at me or you’ve refrained from the “no way, you idiot!” comment and are still reading. Cool. Now I get a chance to explain my thoughts so we can have a useful conversation on the topic. We can agree to disagree, but there are a few reasons I see this happening.

Our dependence on mobile media consumption is growing

This won’t surprise anyone, but now that traditional video — think movies and TV shows in addition to YouTube content and the Olympic Games — is more readily accessible on mobile devices, screen size and video quality become more important. Why watch the content on a small, low-resolution screen when you can watch it on a high-definition screen that’s still easily portable? There’s just no point in doing so, nor is it likely to be preferred.

I believe this reason has already been driving the desire for larger smartphone screens, not the need for more components in the devices nor bigger batteries, although that’s a nice side benefit. People want to have a not only mobile but also immersive experience. Don’t take just my opinion on that: See T-Mobile’s recent survey showing that 77 percent of the respondents want larger smartphones. And I may be reaching on this, but I’m not surprised that Amazon rolled out its Instant Video app for the iPad before bringing it to the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod touch.

Voice on a tablet isn’t as bad as you’d think

I know this because I’ve done it. I took my Galaxy Tab 3G with a data-only SIM card and used it as my primary phone for a few months and later did the same with my Galaxy Nexus phone. To do this, I had to set up Google Voice and Skype forwarding, but in the future it won’t be a difficult prospect. In fact, the original Galaxy Tab actually has cellular voice capabilities, but the U.S. carriers stripped it out. In Europe, I know several people who used the Tab as their main phone.

Sure, you’re not going to hold up the tablet to your ear. I have done that before just for fun and I deserved to be laughed at. Not because it looked stupid, however, but because I wasn’t taking advantage of simple options such as the speakerphone, wired headphones or Bluetooth headsets. These solutions have been around on phones for years, and guess what? They still work. Additionally, our use of video chat continues to grow, which brings me back to the immersive experience: Why see just a small, low-res picture of who you’re chatting with when you can see a larger, high-res video?

One more related aspect: Voice calling has moved far beyond the traditional phone. As Nimbuzz hitting 100 million users this week shows, we want communications to come to us, regardless of the device we use. These days I make and receive more phone calls from my computer than I do from my phone. Google Voice routes the calls to where I’m working and the device I’m working on, and I simply take the calls from my Mac, PC or Chromebook. When not working, those calls can be routed through any number of VoIP services to other phones or my tablets. The same applies to video. Thinking of the phone as the central method for communication is like thinking today’s living room is the central place to consume entertainment content.

The user interface is moving beyond pocketable screens

Look at how voice interaction is starting to become part of our digital world. We’re in the early stages — from an end-user consumer view, that is — of speaking to our devices and having them follow our commands or look up information. This trend is going to pick up steam, and I’ve even gone on record that audio-control platforms such as Siri could become the invisible interface of the future. Instead of different visual platforms, icons to tap and pages to navigate, the common denominator can be speech.

It’s actually happening today in automobiles, and that’s a key example. Why? Because although we shouldn’t be using our smartphones or our tablets while driving, cars are using the apps and connectivity of these devices for in-car entertainment, directions, social networking and more. All of a sudden, the screen size matters less because we’re not looking at the screen. So we won’t need a smaller device to tote when driving or doing other activities.

Tablets can do the same things as smartphones, only better

I always turn to my tablet before my smartphone if possible. Why? The tablet experience is simply better for browsing, apps, email and nearly everything else I can think of. Much like we’re shifting computer tasks to mobile apps on devices, our smartphone activities can easily shift over to tablets for this reason. My podcast co-host Matt Miller noted this in a post illustrating what smartphone activities he has migrated over to the Nexus 7 tablet, and I suspect that list will grow in the future.

In fact, I can’t think of a single digital activity that’s better on a smartphone than on a tablet. You could reasonably argue that voice calling is, but my suspicion is that most who say that haven’t yet tried to use a tablet for such communication. But GPS navigation? Web browsing? Gaming? Reading? With few exceptions — say, capturing photos or video — I think most will say these are better on tablets. And they are activities that are likely to improve even more; the tablet market is in a far earlier stage of its maturity than smartphones are.

Naysayers are still judging based on today’s use cases, not tomorrow’s

So the obvious main retort to my thought process is surely going to be, “But you can’t put a tablet in your pocket! Who’s going to carry a tablet everywhere?” And my answers are, “So what?” and “You will, and if you don’t your kids will.” Simply put, we can’t think about today’s constraint of needing to put a mobile device in a pocket. We only put phones in our pockets when we’re not using them. Guess what? We’re using them more and more, which means they’re in our pockets less and less. Another observation? I’ve read comment after comment of people saying “I take it everywhere” after buying a 7-inch or comparably sized tablet, even if they were never interested in the form factor before. And on a nontechnical note, I remember carrying the old DayTimer paper organizers; think of a personal digital assistant that wasn’t digital at all. It couldn’t fit in a pocket and yet it went everywhere.

Think about tomorrow’s world: As the demand for apps, the mobile web and cloud-stored data increase — something that’s already skyrocketing — we will be connected more and more in the future. Will we be constantly staring a mobile device? Probably not, as we’ll still need to walk around without bumping into things or getting run over, but that’s what Google’s Project Glass is all about: Staying connected while on the go. My point is that in the future, we will surely be relying on our mobile devices more than we do today. And just five years ago, the “take everywhere” device for most people was a laptop. Now we’re gaining laptop-like features on tablets that are easier to carry around and last all day on a single charge.

So when will this happen for you?

It’s possible you have read this far and still think I’m whacked. No problem; I don’t take it personally. My goal is to consider the future, get the conversation started, and have you help me consider this possibility. And this isn’t about the iPad versus the Nexus 7 or any other tablets on the market. Buy what you want and use it how it best suits you. But I urge you to see what I think is the writing on the wall. It may not be our current generation that can get past the pocketability of a phone, but I suspect it will be the next one at the latest. After all, you couldn’t pocket the first phones either, and look how that turned out. And if you need another example, just look at how well the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note is selling alongside rumors of an even larger follow-up product.

How will we know when the tablet begins to replace the phone? I’ll be keeping any eye on the sales of both devices. Once tablet sales approach those of smartphones, we’ll see the inflection point of change. I give it five years.

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