I'm patching a new installation of Linux tonight, after Dennis (who still enjoys playing with hardware) dropped a new motherboard into the desktop case to deal with a flamed-out hard drive controller. After over a week of computing on my second-hand laptop, I honestly don't grok the prediction that the desktop dinosaur will be superceded by fuzzy mammals small enough to hitch a ride in a backpack, pocket or man-purse.
As much as the laptop's keyboard feels natural, my problem-child wrist is a bit grouchy, my lap is quite warm, and most importantly, I frankly haven't done much "work" since losing the desktop that hasn't been word processing or web browsing. Mainly because I'm too spoiled with screen real estate--something that's at a premium, even on a battery-pig like this.
If the work of the future is all about creativity and collaboration, that pretty well guarantees multi-tasking. We have a number of different jobs at my office, but none of us has anything less than either two monitors or one honkin' big one. Why? Because collaboration means email and IM at a minimum. Folks on leaner budgets may also live & die by Skype for communication as well. Then there's the need for research and corroboration: Enter the web browser. Finally, there's whatever tool-set is appropriate to the job. (In my case, you can pretty much count on an integrated development environment, at least one database window, and probably at least one other tool for file comparison, search, or transfer.) I'd happily take a third monitor if I could.
The point is that only something with that physical real estate (plus text input and ready access to all the user interface elements available) allows for information to flow between people and between applications and eyeballs without the cost of interruption. Single-tasking--that darling of the "curated computing" simply won't cut it for anything but specialized applications and recreation. But the cross-disciplinary work that creates those applications and amusements? Trying to build those on a gadget could be the short road to flying lessons for the gadget in question--or at least to bankruptcy for the company that tried to make a profit that way.
