Future of Computing Arrives: Smartphone-Laptop Combo

The future of computing just arrived, and short of plugging a computer chip right into your brain, it is perhaps the most promising innovation since the smartphone, with all due respect to the iPad.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well. Yet.

The Motorola Atrix 4G is a dream phone, with a big screen and a superfast dual-core processor that rivals some low-end computers, such as netbooks. What’s brilliant is that it docks to a laptop that has no brains: The smartphone’s processor runs the laptop’s screen and keyboard. What you see on the phone, you see on the laptop when you dock the phone. And the laptop’s innards, devoid of any brains, are loaded up with battery life — around 10 hours. What’s more, the laptop charges the phone during docking. Motorola calls the laptop a Lapdock. History will sort out what this new class of gadget gets called. But history-making it may well be.

This first go at a one-device-fits-all phone/computer points to a future when we won’t need a desktop at home, a laptop for travel, a tablet computer for who-knows-exactly what (the iPad does not replace a phone, nor does it yet replace a laptop for many tasks), and smartphone, each running different software and holding different version of important files that requires too much synching. In combination with the rise in cloud computing — the ability to store your files “out there” — a powerful, fast, compact smartphone/Laptop will the only setup many people need. TechNews Daily