Wednesday's post (along with Enrique's comment) got me doing even more thinking about the future of the mobile internet. What we need is a courageous browser manufacturer to take a leap into the brave unknown like MS did with the XMLHttpRequest object and create a DeviceRequest object. This object should allow you to query local device features/functions via a standardized JavaScript API which returns either a XML document or a JSON object array by default. Something like the below code example. Now that would be *very* cool and it doesn't even sound that difficult!

var user_contacts;
var device_request = new DeviceRequest();
device_request.get("CONTACTS", "") = function () {
user_contacts = eval("(" + device_request.response + ")")
}
};