The Linux ‘weakbook’ bites back
Submitted by srlinuxx on Tue, 11/18/2008 - 19:04.
I was pointed toward an interesting article recently that centered on a competitive battle of netbooks v. smartphones, indicating the latter will emerge victorious. However, will the smartphone really kill the netbook? Nah. Here’s why:
Keyboard - even if it’s a smaller or tiny keyboard, the netbook allows you to type with real fingers and real keys. I’m partial to this because I’m a writer, but I don’t see the capability to write more than a Twitter update or short message, much less a stack of email responses, on a smartphone. On the netbook, you can plug away at the keys and if you prefer, you can find netbook keyboards that are almost as large as standard notebook size.
Screen - Oh, come here, you’ve gotta see this video. Um, can you back off a little, please? Unless we want to knock heads when we share cool things we’ve found or see on our latest gadgets, aren’t we’re going to want a screen that is 7-10 inches, rather than 3-4 inches?
History of cellphone, smartphone and netphone ? Architecture ?
The trend is cloud computing, which changes all computer design to data download, not data calculations. This is best illustrated by the use of FPU and ALU, instead of 64 bit cpus. Decimal can be calculated much easier than binary arithmetic in higher mathematical solutions. Once you understand this, the sooner you understand the computer architecture of multitasking using ALU and FPU, sometimes even using only the risc in FPU twice or in multicore FPUs? Who needs super computers if you are a true mathematician?
Having said that, we can see that cellphone started with only microphone and speaker. Then smartphones are cpu, video processor and wireless Ethernet. Netphones will be telephone with bbs connection using email webpage(no browser); speech recognition to text inputting. Even Chinese characters assembled by pinyin can use voice input someday for text.
To think that today's smartphone will not be obsoleted is just near sighted, blinded by old technologies(speech recognition and Qwerty keyboard) not rehashed.
Have fun, speech input is much better for netphones than keyboard in netbook?
Footnote on speech recognition:
Speech recognition(spelling bee contest) started very poorly due to lack of memory for speech correction. Often the syllables are not recognized properly. It is more than voice frequencies and its envelope. It is the conversion of several sound to word by its spelling. Today, speech input must filter thru a spelling checker. And allow a person to correct each word. Google spell checker is still evolving and has artificial intelligence to guide the spell checker thru history of words used more often by each user. We expect that netphone will have the capability to speak like its owner with a library of owner's voices and words often used.