Over at The Feature Mike Masnick has a little piece asking whether mobile phones are a black hole for the chip industry. (This drawing passes for Mike's picture over at The Feature.)

On the surface the charge is silly. Chip makers make chips, phones use chips. Phones are quickly replaced, which means the industry sells more chips. If by "black hole" you mean something that sucks up all the industry's capacity, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

But there is danger here, and it's based on the nature of the phones now being produced.

As I have noted here before, today's cell phones suck. They are based on small kernel operating systems. They are not robust. They do what they do, that's all that they do. They are disposable.

Today's cell phones are not ready to become computer platforms. They're not ready to run real applications, or run broadband for that matter.

This means you should not trust them for meaningful data. You can't put anything on them -- and that includes applications -- you're going to become dependent on, for any length of time.

These are super-thin clients, Karen Carpenter clients. They're so thin they can't sustain themselves.

Worse, the network operators don't care. They only see phones as a way to sell minutes. They don't see phones as a platform.

Fortunately we have the market. We have devices like the Treo (that's it, to the right, from Palm's own online magazine) that can take serious business applications. We have Microsoft. We should have Apple. And, should their products gain any serious traction I'm sure the current cell phone companies will have something better.

Just be aware of the problem, keep out of trouble yourself, and you'll be creating the demand that keeps this black hole from forming.