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IT Systems You Wear Around Your Neck: Not Just For SciFi Anymore
4/27/2005
But nowadays the high-end machines are more than laptops. I’ve been reading about young folks using them as their multimedia centers to control their audio and visual entertainment and a whole lot more. Since I have for years been ending up going high end, that makes sense to me and the VaioVGN-A290 I eventually got d'es have a nifty “dock” with about 80 different ports on it. Why don’t laptops yet have good, high res still and video cameras built into the top, and why don’t we see them yet with the data projectors built in that I have been expecting for years? I decided on the Vaio, because I decided that since I really do a lot of personal work on my office’s laptop, it was time for me to spend the money to buy the machine. Also, I could go to CompUSA and get instant satisfaction. So I spent a couple of hours there, browsing CNET.com and other referral sources and looking closely at the 5-6 really big laptops they had in stock. Why can’t every laptop screen be a touch pad? Is there a real reason why it can only be in the so-called ‘tablet PCs’ that have not exploded in popularity? I think I would find it very useful. (By the the way, for those of you who are the type of people–like many of my friends, who recoil in horror when I touch their screen: The screen on my Inspiron 8500, which is now my old machine, was manhandled by me for two years of touching, poking, wiping, and scratching, and it still comes as clean and as nice as the day I got it. I really don’t think people have to be quite that touchy.) So, I spent $2,222.75 of my own money for my next business laptop. And my decision was, in the end, based on the fact that the Vaio had the brightest, sharpest screen of all the other computers I looked at. It really is superb. And, it has several levels of brightness, the top one of which is brighter than I have ever seen in a laptop. I love it. But why can’t it and my Inspiron ‘talk’ to each other? Why can’t I just put a firewire cable between them and copy over my old stuff? What I think is going to start happening next is more and more modular laptops. I expect that before long (and I mean while I am still working, not retired) we’ll be able to carry all the data and computing power that we need in that crystal hanging from our neck and just plug it into to whatever "shell" we want to use it for. And what about that "heads-up" display in my eyeglasses? We’ve got tiny little headphones now, why can’t I plug my glasses into my Treo and just glance up in the corner of my glasses to read it? Can’t you see it now? You’re packing for a trip and you are already wearing your data and processing power. You go to the shelf and have a choice of half a dozen "shells" consisting of keyboard, monitor, and port combinations. Everything ranging from as small as a PDA to as large (or larger!) than my new Vaio. You pick the one (or two) you want to travel with, and off you go. Like the poor guy who, post 9/11 was stripped of his face-worn videocam and felt like he was operating in a different world, we are, like it or not, becoming dependent (and I do not mean that negatively) on the information, functionality, and connectivity that these things provide for us–whether for you right now it’s a smart phone, a laptop, or a television.Recommended Reading
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