Paradigm, look up the word. Compromise is person specific, I find using non-ergo shaped keyboards a compromise, yet its still an adequate conduit from human to computer by way of fingers.
Yet many people are able to enter data on them for hours a day every day.
No-one works for 8 hours a day every day on an iPhone. Different people prefer different shapes of keyboard, but the presence of a keyboard remains. A 1.75" finger-touch screen is not a keyboard. Health&safety would beat down an employer who tried to make its employees think otherwise, and for good reason.
I for example, see the wave of MT smartphones as a HCI revolution.
OK. I don't. Maybe much HCI research is wrong and tactile feedback is unnecessary, but even then a 1.75" finger-touch screen is not an adequate replacement for something the size of two hands.
Bringing users away from the stale paradigm of the keyboard and mouse.
"Paradigm" needs a Godwin clause. What are you trying to achieve by replacing your keyboard with a tiny scratchpad?
The iphone is a computer running iPhone OS/Jailbreak/Linux/Android,
It has a CPU. So does my microwave. Feel free to argue that that's a computer too.
it still has a general purpose I/O,
It has very limited I/O. I'm going to hazard a guess that it has USB host support in the all-in-one but that the pins aren't physically connected. It lacks a suitable video connection. Even if you had the hardware, you'd still have to write the drivers.
the ability to remove iPhone OS/Jailbreak/Linux/Android
Only in the sense that any item has the "ability" to be changed into anything else with enough science, time and energy. Meanwhile I can install or write an alternative OS on an IBM-PC-descendant because it's full of hardware complying with open, published standards.
I don't think you know what ostensible means
I used precisely the word I meant. A "computer" is, to the public, one marketed as a general purpose electronic computing device. In principle the software and hardware are not tied together. In practice it might be quite hard for the average user to install a fully working Lunix onto a random computer unless the hardware is very mainsteam. But in theory there is nothing stopping him from doing so - it is ostensibly possible.
OTOH, on an iPhone it is ostensibly only possible to run an Apple OS and Apple Apps from the Apple App Store. This time, reality swings the other way - just as in reality I can reprogram a keyboard controller to act as a more general computing device but it's hard to do. And it's much harder to do on an iPhone than it could be in principle, even though others have made it fairly point'n'click to go some way to installing freely on it.
My grandad uses one of the massive trackballs on his computer, it doesn't have a mouse, does this make it not a computer?
Yeah, I used one of them for a few years. It is a viable mouse replacement. A 3.5" touchscreen isn't a viable mouse, keyboard and 24" LCD replacement.
Does a computer NEED a physical keyboard to be a computer?
From a layman's PoV, it will need to be usable as generally as today's desktop. If you can find a decent replacement for a physical keyboard, of course that's good enough.
People keep on going on how awesome it would be to have technologies like in Startrek, Stargate, Babylon 5 etc.
No, SF fanatics do. I'm fairly sure Star Trek didn't consider productivity, feedback mechanisms, RSI, etc when designing their interfaces. It's
fiction. I'm sure that we will find something to replace keyboards, but we haven't yet.
A microcontroller is a computer.
Lame. Why not just define anything as a computer. Pretty much everything has an input, a process and an output.
(relax, it's just a joke).
