Beyond the Smartphone: A General Framework for Intelligent, Autonomous, and Portable Computing and Communication
Abstract
Smartphones have become the dominant personal platforms for mobile computing and communication. However, the widespread use of smartphones does not necessarily imply that the smartphone itself is the ultimate form in which people want these capabilities to be delivered. Users may primarily require convenient access to computation, communication, information, and task execution rather than ownership of a particular handheld device. This paper proposes the Intelligent Portable Computing and Communication (IPCC) framework, a conceptual framework that shifts the design objective from optimizing a specific mobile device to autonomously providing portable computing and communication capabilities according to user needs, contextual conditions, resource availability, and task requirements. Under this framework, computational execution, network connectivity, user interaction, sensing, and intelligent decision-making may be distributed across wearable devices, ambient infrastructure, nearby computing resources, remote services, and other connected components. An intelligent orchestration mechanism selects and coordinates these resources while considering portability, response time, energy consumption, reliability, privacy, security, and interaction cost. The framework distinguishes device-centric portability from capability-centric portability and introduces a formal optimization model for adaptive resource selection. It further develops a reference architecture, operational principles, research propositions, and an empirical evaluation agenda. The proposed framework does not assume that smartphones will disappear or that distributed alternatives will always be superior. Instead, it establishes a research direction in which the objective is to provide the required computing and communication capabilities with the least unnecessary dependence on a particular physical device. The paper contributes a conceptual reframing, a system-level architecture, and a set of testable hypotheses for future mobile and ubiquitous intelligent systems.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026beyond,
title = {{Beyond the Smartphone: A General Framework for Intelligent, Autonomous, and Portable Computing and Communication}},
author = {Jincheng Zhang},
howpublished = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23591793},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/23591793},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Beyond the Smartphone: A General Framework for Intelligent, Autonomous, and Portable Computing and Communication
AU - Jincheng Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/23
PB - Zenodo
DO - 10.5281/zenodo.23591793
UR - https://zenodo.org/records/23591793
AB - Smartphones have become the dominant personal platforms for mobile computing and communication. However, the widespread use of smartphones does not necessarily imply that the smartphone itself is the ultimate form in which people want these capabilities to be delivered. Users may primarily require convenient access to computation, communication, information, and task execution rather than ownership of a particular handheld device. This paper proposes the Intelligent Portable Computing and Communication (IPCC) framework, a conceptual framework that shifts the design objective from optimizing a specific mobile device to autonomously providing portable computing and communication capabilities according to user needs, contextual conditions, resource availability, and task requirements. Under this framework, computational execution, network connectivity, user interaction, sensing, and intelligent decision-making may be distributed across wearable devices, ambient infrastructure, nearby computing resources, remote services, and other connected components. An intelligent orchestration mechanism selects and coordinates these resources while considering portability, response time, energy consumption, reliability, privacy, security, and interaction cost. The framework distinguishes device-centric portability from capability-centric portability and introduces a formal optimization model for adaptive resource selection. It further develops a reference architecture, operational principles, research propositions, and an empirical evaluation agenda. The proposed framework does not assume that smartphones will disappear or that distributed alternatives will always be superior. Instead, it establishes a research direction in which the objective is to provide the required computing and communication capabilities with the least unnecessary dependence on a particular physical device. The paper contributes a conceptual reframing, a system-level architecture, and a set of testable hypotheses for future mobile and ubiquitous intelligent systems.
ER -