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.