The Future and Portable Computing
Boing Boing recently pointed me to a Scientific American article, What Web Celebs Want. I'm totally on the same page as Ray Kurzweil. He wants a Nokia N82 phone. I am a big fan of the Nokia N series, and just today bought a Nokia N800.
I haven't played with it much yet--I'll install the newest OS before I do--but I'm excited. I believe that smaller, cheaper portable devices are the future of computing. Although most of us still run relatively powerful desktop systems, you likely don't need to unless you're a gamer or doing a lot of image editing. These days, an Asus Eee ($400 laptop) is more than adequate, you can do image editing online with it using Picnik or other tools.
This Picnik example is important, because it's indicative of the trend that will make cheaper portable hardware not only viable, but preferable: processes requiring significant resources increasingly live on servers, not end-users' terminals. What people usually need is access to the Internet, and all the better if it's cheep and portable.
A side effect of this will also be the end of Microsoft's (already crumbling) hegemony. Microsoft products are expensive to buy, expensive to run (think of the silly amount of computing power it takes to run Vista), and use DRM to reduce functionality. With my Nokia N800 or with the Asus Eee I can edit photos with Picnic, create documents, presentations, or spread-sheets with Google Docs, share my pictures with Flickr, send email via POP3 or webmail, check my RSS feeds, listen to podcasts, update my blog, watch YouTube, all from anywhere with Wi-Fi...
...which brings me back round to Ray Kurzweil's other Christmas wish, VR glasses:
I haven't played with it much yet--I'll install the newest OS before I do--but I'm excited. I believe that smaller, cheaper portable devices are the future of computing. Although most of us still run relatively powerful desktop systems, you likely don't need to unless you're a gamer or doing a lot of image editing. These days, an Asus Eee ($400 laptop) is more than adequate, you can do image editing online with it using Picnik or other tools.
This Picnik example is important, because it's indicative of the trend that will make cheaper portable hardware not only viable, but preferable: processes requiring significant resources increasingly live on servers, not end-users' terminals. What people usually need is access to the Internet, and all the better if it's cheep and portable.
A side effect of this will also be the end of Microsoft's (already crumbling) hegemony. Microsoft products are expensive to buy, expensive to run (think of the silly amount of computing power it takes to run Vista), and use DRM to reduce functionality. With my Nokia N800 or with the Asus Eee I can edit photos with Picnic, create documents, presentations, or spread-sheets with Google Docs, share my pictures with Flickr, send email via POP3 or webmail, check my RSS feeds, listen to podcasts, update my blog, watch YouTube, all from anywhere with Wi-Fi...
...which brings me back round to Ray Kurzweil's other Christmas wish, VR glasses:
Virtual displays using devices in our eyeglasses that beam images directly to the retina. Prototypes of these already exist. So my vision of computing and communicating in the future includes retina-mounted devices that can create stationary virtual displays even as we move our heads, and full-immersion visual-auditory virtual reality and augmented real reality. We'll be online all the time with very high-bandwidth wireless communication. Computing and communication will be a self-organizing mesh of nodes, so if you need a million computers for a second, it will be available to you. We'll live in a blend of real and virtual reality, and it won't always be clear where one stops and the other begins.Maybe I read too much Sci-Fi, but I believe we can extrapolate the emergence of this kind of device from current trends, and in the not too distant future. Our N800s, Eees and other portable devices indicate we're well on our way.
Labels: Nokia N800
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