Computing: The next big thing
I like to have a bit of a speculate every so often as to where the computing industry is going, so today I thought I’d put my ideas down in a blog post as a record and maybe see if what I predict ends up happening over the next 2-3 years.
We are currently at a point where mobile devices are getting more and more powerful and we are seeing phones and tablets and low level laptop style devices all starting to run the same operating systems and applications, in the future I can see the lines between these devices being blurred even more.
The main difference I see at the moment between all these devices is the screen size. They are all essentially as powerful as each other and they all run the same applications, apart from when screen size is the defining factor. In the not so distant future I see this distinguishing feature of screen size disappearing and instead we will have devices with resizeable or stretchable screens.
I believe being able to dynamically change the size of the screen on a device will be the next big computing revolution. Taking a device that is the size of a current phone and being able to stretch the screen to make it act more like a tablet and then even being able to stretch it larger than that to make it act like a desktop PC while all the time the software dynamically re-flowing the layout of applications and enabling and disabling functionality as the user changes the size of the screen. This is what I believe the next big leap will be.
This revolution could take the currently well defined categories of devices and essentially meld them into one single device.
High performance low power consumption CPUs are becoming more and more common to the point where they are beginning to step on the toes of desktop processors performance wise. We will soon be able to have as much processing power in a mobile device as we can on a traditional desktop machine and this combined with resizeable screens could be all that is required for us to only ever need a single device for all our computing needs.
Just the idea of a resizeable screen excites me. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any developments in this area.
Rather than physically re-sizable displays, the first steps are likely to be devices able to handle multiple different display technologies. The technologies are mostly already here, just not well productized or integrated into the devices yet. For instance: wireless connection to full sized HD displays. Intel WiDi can connect a laptop, why not a pocket device, where the entire pocket device screen becomes a touch input device with display switched to the external screen? Another alternative would be the high power LED pocket projector technology announced last year (but so far not effectively delivered).
May be closer to the idea you propose; flexible polymer displays OLED, PLED and e-ink might lead to fold out displays where the display area can be increased by unfolding or unreeling more display as required (a 5.5″ display folding out to an 11″ display for instance).
Whilst the idea of a more general purpose device with an adaptable re-sizable screen is an attractive ideal, commercial and legal influences mitigate against such devices. Single purpose devices enable more control of media markets and offer manufacturers guaranteed repeat sales of hardware in different formats. Current legislation driven by old-media interests and IT ignorant legislators (DEA, SOPA) also mitigate against multipurpose devices.
I think there will be a thrashing about of different partial solutions none of which quite meet the mark in usability terms, meanwhile processing power will become cheaper making it easier to deploy single function devices in attractively cheap packages, which have nice simple single function sales propositions that consumers can grasp. Ultimately the ubiquity of cheap devices might mean that the real money is in the services and media they access (I seem to have drifted off topic a bit there).