A simpler future?

Electronic life seems very complicated. I own a desktop PC, a Macintosh laptop, an iPad and an Android smartphone. Each has its place in my electronic life, but there is also an incredible amount of overlap among these various devices.

Much of my work at home is done on the desktop computer as it has a large screen and a full keyboard. I can move the keyboard around for comfort. I can add and replace components easily.

My laptop is a great device for traveling when needing full computing power. It also can be kept in sleep mode using very little power and awakened quickly for small tasks at home or on the road.

The iPad is a fine device for limited activities like browsing the Web, reading e-mails or reading books and documents. The screen resolution and speed are both considerable steps down from the desktop or laptop, and there is no real keyboard.

My phone is very portable and has a lot of memory. I have applications that do many very useful tasks and the device is surprisingly fast. The screen is tiny so, although I can read documents on it, I tend to use one of the other devices when possible.

A trend in all of these devices is that the processors are getting faster and more capable, memory is larger and less expensive, storage in “the cloud” is an option allowing access to even more memory/disk space and relatively easy sharing of files among all of the devices. Several current smartphones now have dual core processors with more power than my desktop PC of 15 years ago.

In the early laptop era, these devices lacked the power of desktop PCs and were not useable as a desktop replacement. In the intervening years, this has changed markedly with many laptops having processing power, disk storage, memory and graphics capability on a par with most desktop devices. Docking stations allowing a user to plug the laptop into a full keyboard, monitor, mouse and possibly other devices are now in common use. It does not seem surprising given these improvements that laptop devices began outselling desktops this year. This is also a way to simplify the number of devices one needs to deal with.

The tablet and netbook fields have also been experiencing increases in processor power, memory and disk storage although it certainly is not yet to the point where one could replace a laptop entirely with one of these, except in very limited circumstances. There is no reason to think that this will not be possible in the future. Likewise the processors and memory for smartphones are improving.

A real possibility is that we will be able to eventually use a portable device similar to a smartphone as the center of a system using a docking station with a full keyboard and large display and using mostly cloud-based storage to replace the desktop/laptop computers and also possibly a smaller add on device to use the smartphone as a tablet equivalent. Obvious advantages of this approach are a single user interface and no need to copy files between multiple devices.

One speed bump standing in the way of this change is the current manufacturers of these various devices. Most actually have offerings in all of the categories mentioned with their business plan being to sell you components from all of them. As an example, Apple ties the upgrades and backups of iPhone/iPad/iPod devices to a desktop or laptop PC. There is no incentive to their having you use a single device for everything.

There is now a so far single claim that this integration will come from a surprising company. No hints yet as to who this will be but these could be exciting times. Stay tuned.