As these services continue to expand and mature, the home desktop may start losing much of its relevance
Every couple of years, someone prophesises the death of the desktop PC. It hasn’t happened yet, and probably won’t happen anytime soon, at least not in the business world. However, the laptop PC may slowly be on its way out. When it does go the way of the floppy disc (remember those?) don’t immediately point the finger at the tablet. This will be a group effort.
Tablets on their own are great devices, but won’t get rid of the laptop. However, the rise of cloud storage and apps, alongside the tablet, it what threatens to change the portable computing landscape forever.
Let’s start with the cloud. One of the advantages a laptop holds over a tablet is the ability to have massive onboard storage, thanks to big, bulky, power-hungry hard discs. And with the average person having enough movies and music to clog up all but the most expansive drive, it has always been a major headache trying to select just a couple to put on a portable device.
However, the ability to store files in the cloud, and access it from anywhere on a mobile device negates the need for massive onboard storage capacity, at least as long as you are connected to the internet.
With the growth of 3G and 4G mobile networks globally, as well as in Cayman, as well as the ability to pair mobile phones with tablets to serve as modems, the cloud need never be out of reach.
Another important element of change brought about by tablets is how users interact with the internet. Many users are starting to connect through apps rather than through a traditional browser, with the app pulling content off the internet and storing some of it on the tablet itself, thereby creating a resource that can be utilised even when not connected to the internet. The ease of one-click access to the information you are looking for as well as access even when not connected is changing the browsing landscape as much as it is changing the computing landscape. What this means is that the relevance of the Web is slowly starting to slip as the proliferation of tablets and smart phones grows.
Some apps, like the very popular Flipboard, source content from the web, including your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and bring it together in one place, with a lot of content still usable when you are off line.
Apple, which has been at the forefront of the tablet and app revolution, looks set to integrate all of this even more successfully when iOS5 comes out later this year, alongside its cloud based service iCloud. This will finally break the bonds that Apple tablets and smart phones have had to desktop or laptop computers. Some of the features have already started making their way onto Apple devices, with the ability to download previously purchase iTunes content to a mobile device over the internet, without the need to update your content by connecting to your home computer.
As these services continue to expand and mature, the home desktop may start losing much of its relevance as well, along with the inevitable demise of the laptop for personal use. WH