
Thin clients and the cloud: how ARM beat x86 to the punch - alexandros
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/01/thin-clients-and-the-cloud-how-arm-beat-x86-to-the-punch.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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davidw
> The first, most recent example, is Android 2.1's pervasive use of voice
> input, a compute- and storage-intensive task that the phone can simply
> offload to Google's servers. There's enough network bandwidth to make the
> turnaround time for voice recognition fairly snappy, so that a phone would
> never need the local storage or cycles to do this itself.

Really? I hadn't realized that...

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aristus
I wonder if we're heading for a split in computing devices: the hackers and
"content producers" will get stuck lugging laptops around while everyone else
uses pocket computerphones. That's kind of depressing.

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pavlov
The notion that smartphone and netbook users are merely passive consumers of
commercial content strikes me as somewhat elitist, or at least not fully
thought out.

Taking photos and videos is a major use case for phones, dumb and smart
variations alike. A substantial portion of that material ends up being
published one way or another, even if just to a circle of friends. That's
content originated on a phone.

Similarly, Windows netbooks quickly displaced the early Linux-based attempts
mainly because people wanted to run Office and other familiar apps. What is
writing a Word document if not content production?

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aristus
It's not elitist at all. I meant a split between people who cary non-
pocketable devices and those who cary pocket devices as their primary
computers. A netbook falls in the first category.

We already have a class of professionals who use Blackberrys as their primary
device. Presumably more professions will follow. But programmers, graphic
designers, modelers, etc, may not be able to make the jump if they require
more power/input speed/screen area than a pocket device can provide.

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zandorg
Doesn't mention Acorn or Archimedes or Psion or Symbian. Clueless.

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ajross
It's not a history article. What's you're point? Is an article about, say,
Intel's Beckton rollout this quarter similarly clueless because it doesn't
mention the PC/AT?

