Quote - You still have the basic problem of getting information into your eyes and out of your fingertips.

Only if it's not hooked up to a monitor. How big that monitor will be will depend on whether its at home or how big a portable monitor a person wants to drag around on the road.

Quote - The CPU itself can fit inside a cell phone, but where do you put the big heat sink and big fan?

I'm seriously hoping that chips will get more energy efficient. Goodness knows humanity is sucking up fossil fuels in centuries that took nature millions of years to create. The first netbooks had a 2-3 hour operating time on battery. Today, a slightly faster chip uses much less energy and the netbook can get upwards to 14 hours runtime on battery. Netbooks don't need fans anymore because they don't run hot. Years ago, high end Pentiums ran with two chips. I'd imagine that the phone CPU will be underpowered and hooking it up to the desktop dock will couple it with a more powerful chip in the dock where both chips would operate together as an overall faster computer. Give it a few more decades and maybe that won't even be necessary.

I didn't realize that Windows 7 was such a hog. I won't be upgrading my computer for another 5-6 years, so I've been marginally paying attention to the new operating system. I cannot imagine why an operating system would be 15 gb. Is that the top of the line version with every possible bell and whistle? A cut-rate version of Win 7 already comes with netbooks.

Quote - And the software requirements of 10 years in the future will still require those fast machines just as they always have

That depends. The bulk of software used by most people, outside of games, doesn't tax even low end computers. Browsers, word processors, office suites, and even a high end program like Photoshop work fine on a netbook. Games and 3D rendering programs will need more power. That work will be offloaded to the desktop dock CPU/graphics cards. That would mean that the phone CPU won't be able to do everything that it can do on the desktop. We make compromises today with the laptops and netbooks we take on travel today. Skip a few more decades into the future and maybe the chip in the phone will be able to do what 99.9% of the population does. If that happens, the market may only have those devices and anybody that wants a powerful standalone desktop or laptop will be stuck paying big bucks for a workstation. Sam says he wants to stick with a CRT. I just did a quick search on Amazon and there aren't any new CRTs for sale. Either he's going to have to buy a used one, keep repairing what he has, or get assimilated in the consumer market and buy the monitors that are available. I haven't looked to see if anybody is making new CRTs, but I'd imagine that they would be very expensive.

We're all speculating based on our experiences with PCs. In the end, we'll have to wait and see what the future brings. If this happens and there is no compromise to the computing experience we want, we'll jump on board. If not, it'll be a passing fad. Based on the number of things phones have been doing in the last few years, it seems very possible that they'll be the most flexible and important electronics devices we own in the upcoming years.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon