Taking a different tack, instead of basing a full desktop in the cloud and providing a VNC-like window portal to lesser devices such as smartphones, do the reverse, and have an adaptable smartphone OS architectures that can offload the system as a whole or in part to a nearby cloud computing hosting facility to perform battery intensive operations. This ranges from opportunistic full cloning of the local device to execute on a more powerful server, to using the cloud for always-on external storage and execution of stuff that is too much for a smartphone. Android is a nice bridge here since it's all java either local or remote, so you can abstract a lot of the cloning and adapting pain away.

So apparently, The Economist magazine has a paid research organization. I guess these guys sorta compete with Gartner?

Because in japan, companies can now be fined for having overweight employees over the age of 40 (metabo), there are efforts by companies to increasing invade the life of employees "to incentivise" them to lose weight. DoCoMo is proposing retrieving pedometer data from cellphones and providing that directly to the company HR department, so they can "offer" health advise (aka lose weight or we ship you off to the countryside and drop your salary by shifting you to a lower position). Secondary usage could include human movement data for HR to determine if workers doing physically active jobs are slacking off. 1984 was only off in that Big Brother is an umbrella term for both corporate and government control of the people, which fits in great with the pseudo-fascist leadership trusting culture of japan. Though this is more an artifact of how the law was implemented. They could have made it as a personal income tax, with tax credits to healthy people, which can be easily corporate managed.