#182 How small can computers go?

Since the advent of the netbook, I've stated to many customers that I believe the netbook will be the smallest computer you can actually use until speech recognition technology gets alot better. Why no smaller? Its the keyboard. Anything smaller then a netbook and you can't touch type. You can thumb it in or peck and poke, but not type. Now typing may become a thing of the past, but as of July 2010 speech recognition just doesn't' work.

Many of you have seen/heard the infuriating commercials with the person calling a service center and having their words garbled by a computer answering system. "Did you say you want to buy a compactor?" When you are looking for a laptop. Now when speech recognition actually works then you'll be able to have the computer a size of a button. It's the input (keyboard/mouse) and output (monitor & printer) that are the most limiting in computer size. I just set up an iMac desktop computer at a local office and the size of the keyboard was that same minimum size of a typical netbook.

I know I'm amazed at the ever decreasing size of phones and the tremendous amount of capability they have. They now have so many features that computers have and many that they don't! GPS, music player, camera, book reader, database, calendar and on and on. I was amazed the other day when a person with an iphone showed me how to use it as a bar code scanner. They picked up an item in a store, scanned the bar code and immediately could look up the product for reviews, pricing and more information then you possibly could use. I certainly use my phone for way more then a phone. It has my schedule, contacts and a couple of neat games. It can translate several languages and connect to the Internet for information searches.

A complete computer computational power can now be on one chip. The input/output devices are what makes the computer large. I've seen demostrations of computers built in to clothing, sunglasses, pet collars even a tiny surveilance camera. How small can they make them? I guess we will soon see (or not!).