Microsoft envisions mobile collaboration

In a recent patent application, Microsoft describes how multiple mobile phones (presumably running Windows Mobile, of course) can be brought together to form a single system which would pool the otherwise limited resources of individual phones. According to this patent, one could dynamically bring together several phone screens that would act as a single big screen. This type collaboration is not limited to just phone screens, but also to the CPU, memory, and other resources to form interesting collaborations. This type of collaboration will have several usage including video which is described in the patent as:

The collaborative architecture applies an adaptive video decoder so that each mobile device can participate in playing back a larger and higher-resolution video across combined display screens than any single mobile device could playback alone.

In addition to video display aggregation, Microsoft also envisages following scenarios:

• drag and drop file transfer
• microphone aggregation
• speaker aggregation
• camera aggregation
• antenna aggregation

Clearly, Microsoft is eyeing the future of mobile devices coming together to form ad-hoc network for collaboration at various levels. I certainly hope that this patent becomes a reality in some future version of Windows Mobile.