Nick Wingfield (Wall Street Journal, October 27) asks if for many of us now is the Time to Leave the Laptop Behind thanks to the smaller, better, lighter Blackberries, I Phones and more recently the G1.
Since I switched from my very old Nokia to a Blackberry Curve earlier this year, I get my e-mail on the go of course.
I would not say that I read many news websites on it due to its lack of real estate (small screen).
I can write short stories as they happen and post it to this blog.
I can take pictures without carrying a digital camera.
I can Twitter.
It might not give me the same flexibility that a laptop or a desktop offers.
It does fit in my pocket and will not strain my back though.
Using a tool like a smart phone with some limitations might me a blessing in disguise.
It might even teach us one virtue: how to be concise?
Take Two, A Day with 2 Monday Work Etiquette, this one #61
Earlier, Take One: Furious Networking…Me and My 10.000 Friends
The premise of this article is a bit premature.
Laptops still serve a purpose, in that they have a larger screen and are easier to input data than the Blackberry sized devices.
However, when color flexible/rollable displays are commercially available,
(something like this: http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/resources/15055/flex1.jpg?id=543&file=flex1.jpg ) combined with a projection keyboard (http://www.alpern.org/weblog/stories/2003/01/09/Projection%20Keyboards_files/image001.jpg), we will see the current laptop design take it’s place alongside 8-track player.