As I look around at so many smart phones and super light weight and thin laptops of today’s world, I can’t help but imagine the desktop computer fading out of the picture. For the longest time, it was said that laptops just don’t have enough power to do everything a desktop can.
Aside from making calls, mobile devices at best were used for mini-games, calculating a tip or text messaging. As our chips have become smaller and our wireless networks more advanced, we see our world becoming more connected while at the same time we become less connected, that is, in a wireless sense. I can do just about anything I need from my laptop and heck just about anything I need with my smart phone. Let’s not forget about the in between products like tablets, these things are great for handling day to day business and if I’m feeling bored at lunch I can open up my favorite game and update my achievements from anywhere.
To go even deeper, our devices look to become a nothing but a shell, a shell that connects to the cloud. The cloud won’t just be for storage either. Cloud computers may soon handle our processing needs. There is talk of cloud gaming in which our televisions connect to remote hardware to play our favorite titles. Cloud gaming would be a dream come true for developers who will no longer need to port from system to system or wonder how well the game will look and perform on a given machine. Why make thousands of small somewhat powerful devices when you can have everyone just plug into one massively powerful and connected “mega device”. It really can get hard to wrap your head around such a future.
There is however something that bothers me about this change. Perhaps it is the geek in me, but building my own machine is just the kind of weekend project I look forward to. Maybe there will be a market for custom built mobile devices with different CPU architectures for the same phones, a kind of a-la carte mobile experience for the uber geek in some of us or perhaps we focus our efforts elsewhere with the cloud. Mobile is guiding our future in computing faster than ever before and I can’t wait to see how this all evolves.
