Desktop, laptop or tablet: which form factor will win?

In the old days, when I was so much younger than today, computers used to be pretty easy to describe. A box, a keyboard and a screen. Often the box and keyboard were one and sometimes some extra boxes were added but the device on your desk was pretty unmistakably a computer.

Today it is different. The computer has thoroughly infiltrated our lives and even the timer chip in a microwave oven has more processing power than those expensive mastodons of my youth. The term computer has become a generic word describing a device that controls a multitude of processing tasks in our daily lives. Even when we narrow it down to the personal computer, the field is varied. Do we mean a desktop computer which still adheres to the classic set-up of box, keyboard and screen? Or do we mean an all-in-one device like the iMac or a laptop? Or is the personal computer a flat slab of electronics nestled behind a screen at which we furiously stab our fingers? At the moment the answer is of course: all of the above.

The question that fascinates me is: what will be the ultimate form of the personal computer? Will we keep having such a varied menagerie of form factors or will one prevail? There is no doubt that for some time to come, the diverse applications of the personal computer will garner diverse preferences in form factor as miniaturization has not come far enough yet to allow one tool for all jobs. Still, like with the car, one day one form factor may rule the roost. In other words: one form factor may be made to work in all area's of personal computing.

The main factor that is going to decide this I believe is the question of interfacing. The interface that is best in tune with our brain will decide which form factor will prevail. And looking at the rapid (not to say rabid) success of the touch interface, I believe the tablet computer has the best cards for becoming the dominant computer in the near future.

The intuitive action of touching something to make something happen is the easiest path our brain can take to accomplish a task. The sooner we can dispense with the extra thought processes of moving a mouse to move a pointer on the screen to click at a certain spot, the better our lazy brain will like it.

Many will say that the tactile experience of mouse and keyboard can never be replaced by a touch interface. But that is the same as saying that handwriting will never be replaced by typing. Or compressed digital music will never replace uncrompressed digital music on CD's. The masses will dictate the production lines and apart from some niche usage, the lesser used method will disappear. And technological development will gravitate towards incorporating as many disciplines into one production line as possible. It's cheaper.

The conclusion I can draw from observing the market and incorporating past industrial developments is that the tablet computer may well become the dominating form factor in all walks of computer life. Another conclusion I can draw is that I may be very wrong about this. After all, even Bill Gates thought that 640K of memory should be enough for anybody*.

• Other famously wrong predictions: http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/digest/pcquotes.html

* It appears Bill Gates never said this. See comments.

Computer revolution 4.0

The first computing devices were mechanical machines with lots of wheels, cogs, rods and levers moving to perform operations on data. Electricity revolutionised these machines and valves replaced the wheels, cogs, rods and levers. Then the transistor came along and by putting many of those on a silicon chip the path to miniaturisation became an interstate. But soon, as computers became smaller and more powerful, our demands grew with it. A terabyte of memory will hold a couple of HD movies but together with our photo's, home-movies and music it's hardly enough anymore. Two terabyte will only buy us a few months more. We need more. And to play those HD movies and to play our HD games we need all the processing power we can get. It is beginning to look as though silicon and copper is not going to cut it much longer. We have reached the end of what the humble grain of sand can deliver.

Enter the next generation of computers. What that computer will look like still needs a bit of a look in a crystal ball but one can already see a few possible candidates for the most important elements of the machine: the processor, storage and communication.

The candidate for the processor would be the quantum computer. Dutch scientists of the University of Delft and the University of Eindhoven have discovered a way to better control the building blocks of such a quantum computer. These building blocks, called qubits, used to be controlled by a magnetic field which is very difficult to generate within a chip. The Dutch scientists have managed to use an electrical field to manipulate the qubits. On top of that they have managed to enclose these qubits in a piece of nanowire which essentially gives them a real building block to construct a computer with.

The next element of our fictitious future computer would be storage. It is great to have a super fast computer that spurts out data at a rate we can only dream of but where would we store all that data? At the rate we are consuming data storage now we are literally filling warehouses with bits and real estate is expensive which makes storage expensive. Enter the humble bacterium. Students of the Chinese University in Hong Kong are making headway in the technique of storing data in bacteria. They extract DNA from E. Coli bacteria - found in the lower intestine of nearly every warm blooded animal - make a small change to the DNA and put it back. Data stored. In this way 1 gram of bacteria can store the same amount of data as 900 terabyte drives. And it will last because every new generation of bacteria will carry the new, modified DNA. That way data can be stored for thousands of years. The students even built in encryption of the data. How about carrying your data in your belly? Pretty safe place to keep stuff, right? Only take care when you're taking anti-biotics, it may wipe your family photo's.

Then there is the sending of your ultra-HD family snaps to grandma on the other side of the globe. At the moment this is done with fibre-optics and satellites. But again thanks to quantum physics this can be done differently. Researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada have discovered a way to contain a quirk that has puzzled scientists for almost a hundred years. The entangled quantum state of photons can be reflected in two photons even while the photons are very far apart. In some mysterious way they communicate with each other. That communication we can use of course to transmit ones and zeroes over long distances. Until now though it had been impossible to garner any predictable success with this phenomenon. The researchers at the University of Calgary have now been able to contain this quirk and use it to our advantage. The beauty of this system is that there is no physical link between the photons and thus no way to tap into the data being transmitted. No snooping on your next Facebook chat then!

With these three elements it should be possible to build one heck of a computer. It will be fast and safe from prying eyes that wish to keep taps on your online activity. The overwhelming question though that is on any geek's lips will be: "But can it run Crysis?" I hazard a guess that the folks at Crytek will do their damnest to bring even this monster computer to its knees. And they will probably succeed. Which is a good thing: there's no sense in resting on one's laurels. On to computer revolution 5.0!

Desktop, laptop, handheld: a liberating tech evolution

I am old enough to call a Sinclair ZX81 my first computer. It was a small, flat, black slab of plastic with a membrane keyboard and a weird piggybacked block sticking out of its rear. This block was the memory extension that gave the 8bit computer a whopping memory capacity of 16Kb.

How things have changed. And they are about to change again: we're moving into the handheld age. Computers are becoming truly pocket-portable while remaining fully functional. Add screen agnostic connectivity and the work and play computing device can be carried in our pocket anywhere we go. The one remaining issue would be the input device. It is hard to keep a device truly portable and make it so that typing a 1500 word piece on it can be done comfortably. But I have no doubt that out of the box thinkers are already working on that. Input systems like Swype are an indication of that.

Processor speed is also lagging a little still. But remember the early laptops? They were hardly more than a pocket calculator in a barely portable box with a screen the size of a postage stamp and a whopping big battery. Not anymore, they are sleek and run as fast and as smoothly as all but the fastest desktop monsters. Monsters that only 1% of the population really needs anyway. Already 1GHz snapdragon processors are the norm in smart phones. Multi cores are coming and so are GHz bumps. Count on it: within 5 years a handheld computer is as fast as the average laptop is now.

What will this enable us to do? Will it change our world?

You bet it will. Where laptops and desktop computers are still something of a special item which the average person has to switch on with a degree of conscious choice, the handheld device, i.e. mobile phone, is switched on and used almost without thinking about it. It is much more an extension of our body.

Also: for the average person buying a desktop or laptop computer is a once in a couple of years occurrence. Again a much more conscious decision. Mobile phones are replaced much more often and easier, especially when contracts are involved. This is going to become even more noticeable when the cheaper strata of the mobile phone market becomes populated with smart phone like devices. Something that is already happening. The 'trow away' or 'burner' phone will become powerful enough to do much more than just call and SMS.

The phone is with us at all times and it has penetrated every demographic layer of the populace. These devices becoming more powerful will have a much greater impact than making the desktop or laptop computer more powerful.

Mobile phones, excuse me, handheld super-computers, will detach us from wires attached to walls, wires that keep us in our seats all day. Where the smart phone is still an 'also have' device the handheld computer will become the only computing device we need, freeing us from our desks at the same time.