The personal computer is being reinvented. Phones and pads are replacing laptops and some desktops. Apple has become the tech-company with the highest market-cap, second only to Exxon in the entire market. In the first month of its introduction, sales of Apple’s iPad tablets have reached a million units; that is half the time it took to sell a million iPhones.
Many think of iPad not as a laptop, but as the world’s first ‘couchtop’. Much of what people do with computers these days – casually checking e-mail, grazing around the Web, reading the news – is done while sitting on a couch, sometimes with a smartphone. For these types of interactions the iPad works well – fast and easy, with a bright colour screen; it is something to snuggle up with. Of course, if you need to do some real work, you will still need a ‘real’ computer.
This is what computing is going to be like for millions of people in the future. With ‘old’ computers, the emphasis was on freedom to do anything. But that made computers too complex, hard to use and susceptible to virus infections and other problems. With the iPhone and iPad, you push a button and it works, just like a kitchen appliance. On an iPad, you do not ‘launch’ an application; you ‘go to it’. For a long time, people have been wishing for computers to be like that.
The iPad will likely take a chunk out of sales of dedicated e-book readers, like Amazon’s Kindle. The iPad offers many more features like full-colour, plus playing video and listening to music. Amazon sold 2,2 million Kindles in 2009 and will now need to lower the price to compete. Or, they will have to introduce new features like a colour screen and touch (instead of buttons).
I have both a Kindle and an iPad in my living room, and I must confess to using my iPad much more often. For just eReading, Amazon has a much larger choice of eBooks, but iPad books are more pleasing to the eye, especially with colour.
iPad has lots of other uses – I check the stock-market and the weather, and read the news on NPR and the NY Times. Plus when I am travelling, there are lots of choices of games, including checkers, chess, solitaire and more. But most of all, I love showing off my photos and videos on my iPad. I cannot do that on my Kindle.
2020 technology dreams
The first decade of the new century has already changed the world. Now get ready for much, much more. Accelerating high tech will drive even further and faster. Broadband will be pervasive, and Moore’s Law will keep crunching the price of computation, communication, transmission and storage to produce more and more cutting-edge commodities to transform everyday living. Cheap sensors will be in everything, providing machine-to-machine sensing, communications and control. Innovations once considered science fiction will become real for millions.
Because of pervasive communications, countries will not ‘own’ their people as they did in the past. Closed societies will break open, and new kinds of trans-national political organisations will evolve to change the way political leaders behave.
National control of language, currency and communications will be undermined by simultaneous translation systems, cross-border mobile payments, and easy access exchange systems. Open societies will struggle to adapt to loss of control; closed societies will fail outright.
Portable computing devices will start being integrated into our clothing. ‘Smartphones’ will do more and more, with voice activation and high-resolution displays as eyewear. Virtual displays will be capable of putting us into a 3D full immersion virtual reality environment. We will watch movies virtually and read virtual books. A lot of our personal and business meetings will take place in 3D virtual worlds. The design of new virtual environments will become an art form. We will even have ways to ‘touch’ one another virtually.
These things present hard engineering challenges, and some will need big scientific leaps in synthetic or genetically engineered materials. Accelerating technologies will be the game-changers. If this does not take a decade, it may take two – but there is very little doubt that technology will turn these dreams into reality.
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. His popular e-mail newsletter, JimPinto.com eNews, is widely read (with direct circulation of about 7000 and web-readership of two to three times that number). His areas of interest are technology futures, marketing and business strategies for a fast-changing environment, and industrial automation with a slant towards technology trends.
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