Earlier today I had an idea, then I made a joke about the idea, and then Paul asked me what the hell I was talking about and then I wondered if it wasn’t a joke after all?

And, well, it’s a bit complicated for 140 characters so Paul: see below.

I was thinking about how I plug my MacBook into the TV and get my Boxee on, and then use my phone for IM and whatnot. We all do it – something to do with the waning attention span of today’s youth, the MTV generation and so on. When was the last time you just sat and actually watched TV, didn’t do anything else?

That’s actually pretty backwards: there’s a laptop, which is great at doing lots of things at once, sat there just playing video; and there’s a phone, trying to do lots of things at once and not being great at it, but it can play video pretty well.

At least, the 3GS can. Did you know that? It totally can. It won’t… but it can. I imagine it’s probably on a par with the Apple TV in terms of what it can actually handle.

So wouldn’t it be great if the media player was the phone, sat in a dock pushing just-good-enough-HD onto your TV, while your laptop was… well… on your lap?

Apple actually already make a cable for that (what, no HDMI?), and a dock with a little remote too, so we’re part-way there. Incidentally, has anyone actually used one of these? Does it give a special TV-sized interface to click through? I’m imagining has a kind of Front Row interface. It ought to, for my purposes.

But what if the phone rings while I’m watching a movie? There should be a preference not to bug me with messages, email and calls if I’m busy watching something. A slider switch or something. But what if I do want to be bugged? Should it come up on the screen? Should the dock have a nice mic so I can answer a call on speakerphone from the sofa?

And that got me thinking of all those old sci-fi shows in the 80s where people would have a “vid-phone” in their front-room – what if the phone docked with its back to us? You don’t need the phone’s screen now, since the interface is all on the TV, so what if its back is facing out and the camera is trained on you, supine and sipping your beer on the sofa?

You could get some proper retro-sci-fi video phone shit going on, is what!

So yeah. September the 9th. One more thing. Totally called it.