Amazon phone?

According to CNet, Amazon plans to make its own smartphones in 2013. Just what we needed: another device designed to guide you to the proper content to consume (Amazon's of course) and the proper way to interact with friends and family (with Amazon's cloud services, of course).

Cloud services give users omnipresence, but they are not personal. Without exception, they are designed to hook you and apply friction so that you stay.

It's a shame that nascent technologies that form the path to personal application omnipresence are generally so abandoned by consumer-oriented R&D. Take virtual private networks (VPNs), for instance. What a usability disaster. Users clamored for omnipresence but technology failed to deliver personal applications available anywhere.

So now, to enjoy omnipresence, users are happy to dismiss the personal side of personal computing. Gradually, it seems, people are realizing this concession has downsides.