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A tale of form factors
 I
had written in a recent editorial about how notebooks were getting slimmer but
PCs were still as boxy as ever. It turns out that I was wrong. The folks at
HCL wrote in that they have a product which compacts the traditional PC form
factor—the Beanstalk Nano. The Nano is 42 mm tall and weighs in at 1.3
kilos. It features what’s called Mobile on DeskTop technology to save electricity
and work quietly. Being a consumer PC, the Nano also comes with an on-off feature
that permits it to be powered off and on like any other piece of consumer electronics
equipment and, unlike most PCs, without data loss.
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There’s a device in almost
every conceivable shape, or is there?
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Talking of form factors, there seems to be a gadget in every
shape and form. That said the average device is quite predictable—phones
are mostly candy bars, clamshells or sliders. Notebooks all look basically the
same—the colours may vary but that’s about it. Of course you do have
the tablet PC which adds flexibility to the traditional notebook form factor
by letting you flip the screen and write on it and then there’s the Ultra
Mobile PC with its compact size and touch screen interface.
Last but not least, there’s the Microsoft Milan concept of a tabletop PC
with a projector and a bunch of cameras tracking objects and your fingers as
they tap away. Milan’s part of what’s called surface computing which
is expected to be a big thing. For now it’s too expensive for mainstream
computing but that could change.
I am a tad surprised that nobody’s taken the concept
of wearable computers further. You know, watches that do more than tell the
time—and I’m not talking about calculator watches either. Or a phone
that’s embedded in a headset and controlled by voice, you want to call
someone, just speak into the headset and tell the phone to make it so. Wearable
computing is an area that so far has been restricted to niche fields but I have
a feeling that eventually computers are going to be embedded in your clothes
and become so unobtrusive that you won’t even know that they are there.
But they will be there doing their job making everybody on the planet part of
a global uberNet that connects and binds us all.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com
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