The other night, I watched Charlie Rose, an intellectual rarity of a television personality, interview palmOne CEO Ed Colligan.

U.S.-based Rose and Colligan talked about the feature set of palmOne's new LifeDrive, as well as the somewhat older but still spiffy Treo 650.

Although Colligan was obviously on the "Charlie Rose Show" to score points with the daily production's well-educated viewership, he did make a point that the mainstream media, technical press and even bloggers don't make often enough.

His point: handsets are becoming robust and feature-rich to the point that they are not only augmenting laptops. They are replacing laptops.

Think about it. Today's full-bore PDAs have functional (if smaller) QWERTY keyboards, can do email, have the ability to run spreadsheet applications, and, of course, are phones as well. In just a few years, they've come a long way from simple hand-held organizers that you had to synch up to your PC. Heck, now devices such as the Treo, the Nokia 9110 and the BlackBerry are PCs.

What we're waiting on now is for 3G networks to arrive in force. Colligan told Rose this may take place next year. I say that given the massive investment, it will be more like two. But when this happens - in simultaneous time with steadily improving processors - we as a mobile society will get to the point where more and more of us will realize that we have all the computer power we need right on our handset.

And if that happens, we'll go for the $350 handset before the $1700 notebook.