Convergence is what happens when two or more devices are merged into one. For example, a phone and a camera become a camera phone. In and by itself, this means that you have to carry only one device instead of two. But what’s even more interesting is when new applications get invented for it. Then 1 + 1 is greater than 2, and nothing is more exciting than beating maths.

One example of such a new application is scanR. The idea is pretty simple: use your camera phone to take a shot of a document you want to scan, send the picture to yourself or someone else as an email attachment, and let scanR do the rest. You can even fax documents by simply entering a fax number in the email’s subject or body. This is such a neat application that I had to create a new category for it into the Office 2.0 Database.

An other example is TomTom NAVIGATOR 5. This portable GPS device connects to your Pocket PC smartphone via Bluetooth. It’s tiny, weights almost nothing, and lets you upload maps for the United States and Canada in a single 2GB Mini-SD card. Even though it is not certified for my Cingular 8125 yet, I had no problem installing it and making it work, as soon as I remembered that reception from GPS satellites is much better outdoor than indoor. Where convergence gets interesting in this particular example is in the ability to display a map of any adress from an entry into your contact database, then select it as destination or waypoint for navigation. At this point, I only wish that my phone would actually embed the GPS receiver as well, so that I would have to carry a single device and a single charger for it, but I am sure that HTC Corporation — maker of the Cingular 8125 — is already working on it.