Integrated Netbooks-Some More Thoughts

If we ever arrive at a definition of an integrated device that does netbook functionality, can cover the smartphone features and be an eReader too, it'll make life so much easier for students in general! With Kindle like facilities they would never need to carry a school bag to carry books again. Whatever other books they need can get downloaded via wireless from the school library! All their communication needs, access to the internet as well as reading and researching books can be fulfilled by this one device! You just carry this handy unit in your shirt pocket( may be the jacket pocket) and you have everything you need!

If the claims like those from Nvidia that powerful graphics chips they are bringing out will beat the likes of Atom from Intel and make for truly powerful netbooks, they may continue to play games or view videos and other entertainment activities after school hours are over too.

Natural Language Processing

I was discussing a possible R&D programme with my colleagues. We did a litt brainstorming and top of the chart item came out to be natural language processing. No wonder it was top of the mind issue for many of my colleagues. It is such a complex area to investigate. Computer implementation of comprehension, learning and the synthesizing natuarl languge is so tough for computers. It is because we derive so much information from body language the tone and inflexions used by the speaker, a lot of contextual information. These contextual stuff may even be unspoken and lot of it is something we pick up on our way in growing up!

However, human babies pick up these skills so quickly and so well. I is the learning abilituies of us human being that makes it so easy to learn these skils. Same goes for writing comprehension as well as actual writing. Humans do it so easily all the time, yet it is so tough for machines. The CAPTCHA used everywhere beats a program most of the time. Yet, one look and you are able to read the CAPTCHA letter/ numbers presented to you!

Prduct Boundaries Blurring- revisited

In the last post I delibareted about netbooks, smart phones and may be ebook readers blurring. I had not considered the digital camera mainly because of the miserable resolution offered by the phones. But, looks likke even this product might get subsumed into this one hypothetical product that we'll be carrying around some time in the future.

Though the resolution uis still low, thwe new iPhone 3G S brings ibn a innovation in cameras that indicate, if only resolution reaches 7 to 8 MP levels, a smart phone might include good camera too.The biggest innovation is a macro focus mode in the camera of the latest iPhone. I do not know yet how good this is is but macro used to be offered only with bulky optical lenses only. And that used to be one problem in integrating a good camera into a phone. If such innovations are coming it may not be far when we could get a good camera in the phone.

The autofocus camera in the iPhone can adjust for color, light etc besides focusing. The focus can be changed by tapping and so on. The camer takes good video that an be dowbnloaded easily too. The time may not be far when I carry a device that is a phone of course but also can let me do productive work that I can do on a laptop, carry my entire book library ( beside the musiclibrary it can do already!) and let me read them anytime and let me take pictures and videos and edit them. Becaus of the high speed network access downloading a book, uploading video, doing my work and staying touch with other via the video conference is not going to be a problem at all! Is that where all this is heading. Let's watch and see!

Product Boundaries Blurring

In those earlier time products used to be very distinct. A TV was a TV, a PC was a coputer you used for computing and Internet use. A laptop was a laptop you lugged around when you hit the road and a cellphone was a phone you carried with you wherever you go!

Then things started getting complex. Cell phones started eveolving and email, net surfing became fairly common. A FM radio receiver, a digital camera, a music player are all sort of expected in a phone. What adds a new dimension is the capability to uncompress and play HD video on phone( see, TI OMAP 3430 Processor Handles Video For Smartphones). That takes a lot of processor power. It is also a short step to tag on some general computing tasks, run some applications. That's happening. In fact iPhone hyas a store dedicated to applications running on it.

Laptop meanwhile eveolved into netbooks. Smaller displays, less capabale processors, less power consumption and of course less costly applicaes came on the scene. This is the netbook category and being driven by the likes of Intel Atom processor. Can we not have a device then that is like a netbook and gives me the phone capability! Will it be any different than the smartphones! People have started promoting a category called smartbooks that fill this niche. So what is this device going to be like, going to eveolve into finally!

My own thoughts are it will be really nice to have a netbook, a little smaller, thinner format that is like a comuter, net surfer, a mobile phone of course. Otherwise it does not make sense to carry a phone, a netbook and such other multiplicity of devices. Ideally I should be able to carry one device and be able to take care of everything that we need to do on the road!