Interested to hear of others experiences and opinions re: tablets, smart
phones, smart TVs, etc.
I think the there is going to be increasing divergence: various
highly-specialized computerized single-purpose devices on the one hand, and
the ongoing use and development of general-puropose computers on the other.
As an example, medical devices. I'm pretty impressed by my dentist's xray
machine, which instantanously puts xray images of my teeth on a desktop
computer screen as soon as they are taken, and at much higher resolution
than any old-style days-to-completion chemical-process celluloid film xrays
were ever capable of. Still, it takes a horrendously large input device to
produce those images.
Stephen mentions doctors using tablets to snap images of ... skin lesions,
was it? Sure..but that's gonna seem way cumbersome in 20 years or so when
the first Star-Trek-style palm-size medical scanners are produced--devices
capable not only of producing images but of taking in and analyzing input
across a much wider swath of the electro-magnetic spectrum, along with,
perhaps, olfactory data. The device may also employ some sort of ultrasound
that can determine the texture and density of what it's looking at.
Probably such a scanner will need a (most-likely wireless) connection to a
much more powerful device to accomplish complete analysis. That device
won't be in the public "cloud"; it will be on the premises of a medical
office or facility.
People who have 60-inch flat-screen TVs are likely to tire of the novelty
of trying to watch movies on 3 or 4 or 5-inch screens that lose most of the
detail.
Remember the pocket transistor radio? Smart phones are good for that--not
for watching movies or analyzing medical data or for text-entry.
If one wants to be productive writing, filling out complex forms,
spread-sheet crunching or producing graphical art--that is, most of the
work that goes on in offices--one is going to need a screen at least as
large as a sheet of {American) legal-size paper in landscape mode, plus
more space for toolbars and reference windows, and input devices that
enable precise, rapid, error-free, unambiguous manipulation. In the case of
text, that device continues to be a mechanical-button keyboard with buttons
large enough, and spaced far enough from each other, to minimize
fumble-fingering, and not associated with a touch pad upon which the
slightest accidental pressure causes something unwanted to happen on the
screen. In other words, a big whomping keyboard and separate mouse. It
still doesn't get any better than that, and other devices get a whole lot
worse.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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