Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
Not quite smartphone form factor, but Microsoft Surface 3 (and increasingly a number of others) do that in a tablet form factor now.
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Yep, and there will be more of that.
My point was simply that it wouldn't just be in a smartphone form factor: it would
be a smartphone, which you could carry in a pocket and
use as a phone, but would also have the horsepower to plug into a dock and become the hub of a full system.
A tablet, viewed from that perspective, is a smaller, portable "All In One" computer. There are an assortment sold now as desktops where what you have is a large monitor, with all of the other stuff, like CPU, RAM, and hard drive incorporated in it. They even have touch screens. You plug in keyboard, mouse, and the like, and away you go.
Shrink that down to a portable device, and you have a tablet.
Shrinkage is possible because components get smaller, faster, and cheaper. Instead of a hard drive, you have a solid state drive using flash memory instead of spinning disks. We aren't yet at the point where flash memory will replace hard drives, because of costs. I just got a 32GB USB thumb drive to create a portable Calibre library installation, so that my eBook library wasn't tied to a specific machine. The thumb drive cost $15 plus tax, and worked out to about 50 cents a GB. But really large SSDs with the required performance and size to fully replace hard drives in a system are still expensive enough that they haven't replaced hard drives in most systems. Most systems I've seen using SSDs are hybrid designs, with an SSD for the OS to boot from, and a hard drive for user data, because an entirely SSD based system would cost too much.
One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen (though I'm told it exists), is a smartphone and tablet combo package from the same vendor. Each works stand alone, but work together when paired (like the tablet automatically using the phone to connect if you don't happen to be near a wifi hot spot.)
Another factor is increasingly pervasive broadband.
One thing I was fascinated by back when was AT&T/Bell Laboratories "Plan 9" OS, a research effort designed as the next step beyond Unix. In Plan 9, the user's workstation was the center of the universe. The user had access to compute servers, data servers, printers and the like, all of which were mounted off of the user's workstation, with a special communications protocol to tie everything together. The user could access any mounted resource without having to know or care precisely what it was or where it was located. All the user was concerned about was what it could do.
We are beginning to approach that with cloud storage and cloud computing. The user's machine doesn't have to
be powerful enough to do many things that require lots of computing power. It just needs to be able to reach a machine that
does, and have the work done on that machine. All that is required is the network bandwidth to make the needed communication possible.
We're getting there.
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Dennis