Technology Challenges
If you were to add up all the technological stuff we have around our houses, it might be a bushel basket of wires and devices: the laptop computer, the mp3 player, the cell phone, the game system, the e-book reader; for a family, multiply by the number of family members because each person is likely to have this stuff. It would be nice to have one wireless device to take care of all our needs, however, there is a physical limitation.
While teens don’t seem to mind texting from their cell phones with their thumbs, for people who learned to touch type (on a typewriter, no less), having to use only two digits instead of ten seems to be a waste of time. Full-sized keyboards work really well for typists, but they are bulky to carry around. The whole point of a cell phone or PDA is to be small, so it can be carried everywhere conveniently.
A number of letter input systems have been tried, with mixed success. There is the itty bitty keyboard on some phones, which is a standard QWERTY keyboard in miniature. The positive side is that it is easy to find the letters. The negative side is that you have to be an elf in order to use the tiny keys efficiently.
Another input system has been the handwriting recognition system. Just learn the special alphabet and you can write your dates in on your PDA. It sounds great, especially for the people who never did learn to type, but in reality it is much slower than typing and somewhat more frustrating when the computer doesn’t recognize what you are trying to say.
There have been various folding keyboards, both wired and wireless. These have the advantage of being usable for people who need a full-sized keyboard, but their major disadvantage is that they add a considerable amount of bulk for an item that is supposed to be small and convenient to carry.
The net book seems to be heading in a productive direction for this dilemma. It is a smaller computer that simply gets on the internet. It has a small hard drive. Since there are plenty of web 2.0 services that allow you to create and even store your documents and other necessities online, the net book at this point is beginning to be a reasonable substitute for a larger notebook computer. One of many advantages to online storage is that getting a net book stolen no longer means losing all your important files.
The person who figures out how to have a small device with a truly workable keyboard for adult human-sized fingers is going to make a fortune. When this happens, we can roll our bushel basket of stuff into a single item that slips into a purse. We will be able to talk on it, write the great American novel on it, listen to music on it, read the most recent best seller on it, create presentations and spread sheets on it, play games on it, and do a lot of other things that our current technological limitations keep us from imagining.