Back in the mists of history -- probably the late '90s or early '00s -- I remember reading a blog post. I'm afraid I have been unable to find it again, so you'll have to take my reminiscing on faith (but please leave a comment if you know what I'm talking about). This post dissected and analyzed a collection of freshly granted IBM patents which, taken together, painted a picture of the future of personal computing that has stayed with me ever since.
In essence, they called for each person to be carrying around a personal "computing core" -- a device we'd recognize today as a modern smartphone, although it was close to science fiction back then -- that could be docked into a variety of shells to become other devices, such as a laptop or a desktop. While Apple's PowerBook Duo subnotebooks were designed to transform into desktop computers when docked with their base units, they didn't quite meet the 'computing core' definition
I was reminded of this recently when reading Anandtech's review of the clumsily-named Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101. If you're unfamiliar with it, the Eee Pad looks, at first glance, like Yet Another Identikit Android Tablet, as it has very similar specs to the rest of them -- Android Honeycomb software, dual core NVidia Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip processor, 1 GB RAM and so forth.
The Asus, however, has two key things in its favor. Firstly, for the baseline Wi-Fi/16 GB configuration, it's $100 cheaper than the iPad. Secondly, it works with a $150 laptop dock accessory that turns it into a netbook.
Continue reading Docks, transformers, computing cores and taking it all with you
Docks, transformers, computing cores and taking it all with you originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 05 May 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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