Darren Steadman

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.