What will replace the laptop?

Michael Rogers Columnist • Profile • E-mail

Laptop computers now outsell desktops in stores; for the majority of consumers, the smaller devices serve perfectly well as their main computer.  That would have been hard to imagine back in the mid-Eighties, when IBM and Apple introduced their first primitive laptops, each weighing in at about twelve pounds. And for long after that, laptops remained either much less functional or much more expensive than the dominant desktops. But now, twenty years later, the laptop has truly become the “desktop replacement.”

A decade or two from now, will there be a laptop replacement?  Will an even smaller, more mobile device — perhaps something the size of today’s smartphone — replace the laptop in the lives of consumers? While it’s once again hard to imagine, in fact much of the technology already exists to make it so.

For starters, there is one very obvious problem: the keyboard. As any smartphone owner knows, keyboards keep shrinking — but fingers do not. Typing on a tiny keypad is no way to write even the shortest memo.

The problem, however, is already being addressed by “virtual keyboards”: devices that project the image of a keyboard onto any flat surface. Optical sensors watch where your fingers move on the projection and record each motion as a keystroke. Odd as it sounds, using one of these soon becomes quite natural: the device even produces a soft click each time you touch a key.

Virtual keyboards are already available as accessories: the I-Tech virtual laser keyboard was the first on the market, a $180 box about the size of a small cellphone that connects to your PDA or smartphone via Bluetooth. While the technology isn’t perfect, it’s improving quickly.  More importantly, several companies are racing to be the first to have their virtual keyboard technology directly embedded into a cellphone or PDA.

Another possible alternative input for handheld computers is voice recognition. Generally speaking, high-quality voice recognition requires substantial computing power, so handheld devices are still a few years away from being able to take dictation well enough to substitute for a keyboard — but sooner or later they will. The drawback to voice recognition, of course, is social: a planeload of business people simultaneously talking into their handheld computers is not a pleasant thought.

One dark-horse candidate in the field, however, may overcome that prospect. NASA is currently working on a technology called “subvocal speech recognition” in which electrodes taped to your neck recognize the signals your brain sends to your larynx. It turns out that those signals are sent even when you’re just thinking of words. The NASA researchers have conducted Web searches on a computer merely by thinking, but not saying aloud, the commands and search terms. Several laboratories are working on this technology but it’s still very delicate and—as its origin suggests — probably a bit too close to rocket science for near-term practical purposes.

MORE FROM PRACTICAL FUTURIST

Practical Futurist Section Front

Will the Internet transform storytelling? What evolutionary psychology says about social networking At this radio network, the audience is the star Is the Internet dumbing us down? Who will fix my wired (and wireless) home? Will road warriors choose electrons over airplanes? Who will be the TV Guide of the Internet? Why is U.S. always last for new phones? Weighing the risks of biotechnology What will make the laptop obsolete? Practical Futurist Section Front   Add Practical Futurist headlines to your news reader: