The future of Computing (in my eyes)

(just a quick rant about where I think com­put­ing is going)

As I’m sure most have seen with CES recently, a prover­bial mess of eRead­ers, mobile devices, tablets, and highly portable com­put­ers have been hit­ting the mar­ket of recent.  Soon too the iSlate (or what­ever it will be called) will be released into the wild, strik­ing another blow to the PC as we know it, any by PC I mean Per­sonal Com­puter (that includes Macs.)  What we know today as our PC, the box (beau­ti­fied or not) is slowly going the way of the buffalo.  

Granted, we’ll never be able to get away from hav­ing work­sta­tions at the office; but when you start think­ing of it, what do we really need at home?  A dvd player, a plat­form that will play games, do email, surf the web, lis­ten to music, and what? If you think about it, as an aver­age home user, we never really uti­lize some of the high end fea­tures our desk­top pc’s or lap­tops have avail­able, most of the time the box just sits there as we chat away or read what the intrawebs have to offer.  Couldn’t we do the same thing on our Droid/iPhone, or bet­ter yet on our Courier/iSlate/eDGe/etc?  What really has set off this rant is the real­iza­tion that the iPhone with a bit of hack­ing has a HID blue­tooth pro­file and a video out.  By itself that’s not rev­o­lu­tion­ary but if you were to add a dock to the mix, one that could add more stor­age space, per­haps a blu-ray burner, quick out­put to a speaker, net­work con­nec­tion, and maybe USB ports then what would/could you do?

I’m imag­in­ing that over the next 3 or 4 iter­a­tions of the Droid/Nexus/iPhone that there will be stan­dard dock­ing ports that can do full blown video, per­haps with a handed off video card (such as the one in my Dell Dock at work) that will allow us to hook up our devices to a full mon­i­tor, key­board, mouse, and stor­age media, if that’s the case then what’s the point of keep­ing an actual PC any­more?  I can already do 80% of the things I do on my lap­top on my Droid, the only dis­com­fort being that I can’t really type on it for long peri­ods of time and that it’s screen is too small.  Look­ing at the specs of the Nexus has caused me to real­ize that the com­puter I had only a few years ago now fits in the palm of my hand, the Nexus hav­ing a 1ghz proces­sor and 512mb of ram, as we keep scal­ing down the chip size (as I recall Intel just announced a new smaller proces­sor) it’s easy to think that those smaller devices will soon catch up to what we have now.  

So, I guess the big ques­tion now is what will hap­pen in com­put­ing next? I guess the new fight will be iPhone OSX vs. Android LINUX vs. Win­dows (mobile?) vs. WebOS but really is it that bad?  Drop me a com­ment if you have some input.

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