[Pony99CA]

Originally Posted by getdonovan

But back to my point and to sum up: many small, sporadic and specific mobile tasks and applications, spread over a whole lifestyle will take over the the model of stationary, "do it all your tasks or leisure consumption while you have a laptop or desktop in front of you". Know what I mean?

Sure, but I was taking issue with the "only" part of the statement "the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world". Mobile connections may become the primary ones in the developed world, but I doubt they'll become the only ones -- unless companies start embracing universal telecommuting.

Even then, unless reseearchers stop developing wired communications method because wireless has essentially caught up in speed, there will still be a need for faster connections in some places.

There will also be a need for large viewing areas. For example, viewing a spreadsheet with even moderate complexity is best done on a large monitor, not a PDA or phone screen. Similarly, unless our storage media make quantum leaps and our desire to store things doesn't, there will be the need for larger storage devices. SD cards have only gone from 2 GB in 2005 or so to 16 GB in 2008, a factor of 8. By 2020, that means SD cards might get to 64 TB (4096 times larger), but we'll likely also want to store full-length HD movies (or maybe holomovies) on those (so about 1,000 movies). Will that be enough?

Those issues don't invalidate the original point, of course, because the mobile phone could be the primary or only connection for a majority of the world. It just won't be for the whole world, I don't think.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

Originally Posted by getdonovan

But back to my point and to sum up: many small, sporadic and specific mobile tasks and applications, spread over a whole lifestyle will take over the the model of stationary, "do it all your tasks or leisure consumption while you have a laptop or desktop in front of you". Know what I mean?

Sure, but I was taking issue with the "only" part of the statement "the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world". Mobile connections may become the primary ones in the developed world, but I doubt they'll become the only ones -- unless companies start embracing universal telecommuting.

Even then, unless reseearchers stop developing wired communications method because wireless has essentially caught up in speed, there will still be a need for faster connections in some places.

There will also be a need for large viewing areas. For example, viewing a spreadsheet with even moderate complexity is best done on a large monitor, not a PDA or phone screen. Similarly, unless our storage media make quantum leaps and our desire to store things doesn't, there will be the need for larger storage devices. SD cards have only gone from 2 GB in 2005 or so to 16 GB in 2008, a factor of 8. By 2020, that means SD cards might get to 64 TB (4096 times larger), but we'll likely also want to store full-length HD movies (or maybe holomovies) on those (so about 1,000 movies). Will that be enough?

Those issues don't invalidate the original point, of course, because the mobile phone could be the primary or only connection for a majority of the world. It just won't be for the whole world, I don't think.

Steve

[Macguy59]

I seem to be moving more in that direction myself. My entire family seems to think I have the keys to Google magic. More often than not I only have my smartphone with me when they call and ask me to do a search. In the past when I used WM based devices I would usually wait until I got back to a computer to do the search. It's not that they weren't capable of the search but mobile IE was painfully slow and the screen too small. With the 3G I don't hesitate to do the search immediately. When at home most of my email is done via the 3G (via sudo push). For it to become my primary way of being on the net, broadband like speed needs to be a 24/7 anywhere anytime thing.

[Kirkaiya]

Originally Posted by David Tucker

2020? Well that's a really non-aggressive prediction

Sure...11 years from now I can see a phone sized device having so much power that it could act as essential a truly portable computer that you just can dock or use where ever you are. Desktops will still be pretty pervasive I think though since for true power you'll want one. Mobile tech still lags behind desktops and probably will unless we start using an entirely new technology.

Yah, they really went out on a limb there with the 2020 prediction

But I disagree about desktops being pervasive through 2020; given the incredible increases in bandwidth, and the trend towards having the heavy-lifting processing done by servers (lately virtualized in "clouds"), I don't think that most, or even many people will have much need for intensive local processing.

In the next 12 - 18 months, we'll see mobiles with 1080p rendering ability, and 3D graphics acceleration in mobile hardware is already going quickly. I can imagine scenarios like Rocco said - where people pop their mobile device into a "media dock" at home, which has advanced multi-media hardware for 3D gaming and so on. Even more likely, it won't need a HW dock at all, but will be able to use whatever screen/keyboard/mouse it's near.

For apps like word-processing, spreadsheets, email, LOB apps, even software development evironments (thing "Bungee"), there won't be any noticable difference running it remotely, not when Verizon's FiOS is already slated to go 100 Mbps by 2010. By 2020, I'm guessing that we'll have at least 1 - 10 Gbps residential speeds. Hell, Google Docs is already pretty responsive even for me, in Thailand, on my 2.5 Mbps connection. At 1 Gbps, I could play any of today's FPS games, with all the rendering done remotely, and the video just streamed to my local display (there have been demos of this tech done already).

So anyway - I think most desktops will go the way of the CRT monitor. Laptops will be very thin and light, and given the ability to off-load processing to the cloud, their CPUs will be power-optimized (as in, optimized for long battery-life).

That's my prognostication, anyway ;-)