If you asked a child in the 1960s and 70s to draw a computer, they’d most likely have scribbled out a large box with blink-able lights and tape reels on the front of it. A child of the 80s would most likely have drawn something that looked like a PC, with a CRT, keyboard and mouse. More recently, the PC has shrunk into what we today recognize as a laptop. I hardly noticed that it’s over ten years since I owned a mouse with a ball, I remember my first mouse because all my computers up to that point didn’t have one; the closest thing to a pointing device was the four arrow keys. Conversely our children may remember their last mouse, because as touch technology improves the need for an independent pointing device will drift away, and inputs are more likely to be accepted from multiple sources. It’s also several years since I waved goodbye to my last CRT, and around that time I also removed the redundant floppy drive from my machine. Technologies advance constantly, and over the last 30 years or so the form of desktop and laptop machines has been changing slowly and almost imperceptibly. Now, it looks as though the days of the mechanical keyboard are numbered and when that happens, the form factor of the computer as we know it will be changed for ever.

Touchable Devices Cometh

I’ve always been fascinated by alternative input devices and became interested in touch screens years ago when my manager told me about his patent for using strain gauges to create a touch sensitive screen. Whilst touch screens tend to work well in concept, historically, they’ve been plagued by problems of miscalibration, poor application performance, and (on public terminals) vandalism and uncleanliness. Touch screens have not necessarily got a bad press in the real world, they just didn’t get much press at all because until now they’ve appeared too inaccurate & slow, which are not particularly appealing or interesting attributes. In many environments however, e.g. point of sale terminals, they’ve been slowly taking over as the preferred means of input. Most recently the use of touch screens as a convenient and low-cost alternative to the restrictive miniature number-pads traditionally used on phones has increased their audience and given them a much needed perception boost.

Goodbye Keyboard

The logical progression beyond the form of the laptop is what will most likely drive the next generation of keyboards. Most laptops these days have a touch pad and a keyboard that have to vie with each other for what little finger space there is, so if the two could be combined it would make space and cost sense to do so. When OLED screens become cheap and large enough, the humble keyboard is finally doomed. The thing that convinces me that it’s likely to happen is a recent patent application from Apple which details a clamshell iPhone layout, with touch screen on both internal surfaces. If it can be done for a phone, it can be done for a laptop sized device.

Hello Book

So this laptop would have two screens, the normal one for displaying content, and the new one on which a keyboard is drawn. Both screens can be touch sensitive so two next steps might happen. Firstly, the physical QWERTY layout can start to die out, it’s survival thus far has been due to the dominance of the physical keyboard. As keys become purely software devices, experimentation with new key layouts will become commonplace. Slowly, but surely, QWERTY will start to look as curious and antiquated as the penny farthing. Secondly, once the physical orientation of the keyboard is eliminated, it can be displayed and used from any angle. We’ve already seen how the iPhone can go widescreen when rotated through 90 degrees, so the future laptop may also be held and used like a book.

There have been several forays into tablet computers, but none have really taken off. The perceived flaw with most of these tablet machines was their need to include a keyboard for any “serious” productivity work (i.e. typing). With the right hinges, a laptop with twin-touch screens and no keyboard could open out to have all the benefit of a large tablet. The laptop shape has a major advantage over the basic tablet format – when it’s closed, it halves the size of the device, and keeps the screen clean and protected, so it’s unlikely to die out, it’ll just vary in size. Plain flat tablets will probably exist and do well, but having carried an iPhone around for the last 3 years I can attest to the scratched mess that the surfaces have all become.

Interacting Bricks

Over the last three or four decades, technology has driven computation power from mainframes to desktops and now, partially, back to the modern equivalent of mainframes, servers, which are especially good for storing and managing the data we want to manipulate. Widely understood patterns, methodologies and protocols for working with servers and other connected devices have evolved: service oriented and peer-to-peer computing models for example, yet our interaction with these machines has been influenced immeasurably by the need to have a specially designed device on which to enter commands and information.

The emergence has begun of generic low-power mobile tablets, essentially not much more than a flattened brick in shape (sometimes with a hinge) that can take input and display output. Whilst they may eschew the familiar form factor of the three box PC, they’re more likely to subtly redefine it. A tablet acting as a keyboard, several tablets providing displays, several more doing processing. The removal of moving parts helps to protect these small gadgets from obsolescence, so a device that is good enough, and fast enough to display an interface today, is likely to have a very long lifespan.