Newt Gingrich meets the smartphone
Lauren Weinstein annotates a particularly boneheaded speech where Newt ponders what to call this new computer-in-a-cellphone thingy.
Gingrich may not know what to call it but he has no qualms about suggesting it's an all-in-one device that could alter the way you live, work, and shop.
For any serious detailed work, though, whether it's art, music, video editing or spreadsheets, the "pros" are going to continue to use a large screen (or two), a keyboard, and a mouse (or stylus/tablet), supplemented with a phone for traveling around. This idea that your whole life is going to happen in a phone is a consumer fantasy being sold to the rubes.
It's not inconceivable that ten years from now every workplace will be re-tooled so that a new stockbroker, travel agent, bank employee, etc will be handed a phone or pad on the first day of work and shown to a cubicle half the size of present ones, to go quietly mad in eyestrain hell. Or that the same employees will "work from home" using these devices and go quietly mad there. Downsizing equipment would certainly benefit the ownership class and it's possible the present phone-for-everything bandwagon is taking us to this future. More likely big hardware will stick around longer than this time frame, however.