Post PC Era?

There’s absolutely no doubt that especially in the last 5 years, people are accessing the Internet in much different ways than before. Whether it’s checking your email on your smart-phone while on the subway, or catching up on the latest tweets on your tablet while lounging on your couch, viewing online content is definitely not restricted to sitting at a computer. In the last little while, you may have heard the term ‘Post PC Era’ where people like Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, declared that we pretty much don’t need workstations or notebooks because their nifty tablet or handheld is all you need. It’s clear that smart-phones and tablets are changing how online content is being consumed, but could it really be that we don’t need traditional workstations and notebooks?

Before we examine the current situation, lets look at how we got here. No doubt that old people like me (38yrs old) remember the only online content available was a BBS (that’s bulletin board systems to all the young folk out there). Years later we were accessing the Internet through dial-up modems, followed by high-speed Internet which for most of us go down in history as one of the happiest days of our lives when we finally got it! Life was good on our clunky workstations and old school CRT monitors. Then, especially with the advent of wireless networking, households started using notebooks to free themselves from being tied to a desk to access online content. All throughout this time, we accessed online content such as email, web pages, Facebook and YouTube, with a mouse and keyboard. Sure, there were silly touchscreen monitors and hybrid notebook/tablet concoctions, but they were always clunky and never offered a good enough user experience for the mass market to adopt. It was common place to see people sitting at cafes or other places that offered Wifi-Internet access with their notebooks, happily working away or taking in online content.

Then the phone got smart...

I still remember the first time I saw someone getting their email on their smart phone. Yes, it was amazing that such a small device could retrieve what we then considered instant messages, but man was it hard to read and use! Especially with the first generation devices, user interface and overall functionality was limited to put it politely. Most of us just used the devices to read email but wouldn’t bother replying until we got back to our desktop computer. Then, devices like Blackberries really changed that. Smartly designed keyboards and groovy roller-balls for pointing made things very easy for obsessive business people to be wired into their email at all times. Life was good again. We could brag to our friends that we could go on vacation, sit on a beach and stay up to date with everything going on at the office. Viewing a website was possible, but man was it slow and ugly. Unless you were viewing special websites that were coded in WML (Wireless Markup Language), the download times to view a standard web page just made it too frustrating to bother. It wasn’t long after that when devices like iPhone came out that finally gave us decent web browsing capabilities which really increased peoples use of their smart-phones. Granted, it was more of a convenience to view websites on our handheld but things were really shaping up to allow us to do most of our viewing of content on our smart-phones and leaving the heavy interaction tasks for when we got to our PC.

Then Came the Apps...

After the 2007 release of the iPhone, Apple made available to developers the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) which paved the way for developers to create apps that run within the iPhone platform. Other device platforms such as Android and Windows Mobile also followed suit and now we have a plethora of apps and games that we can run on our smart phones and tablets. These apps are often device specific versions of software that we run on our desktop machines such as Gmail and Skype. Even boring accounting software companies have made apps so that users can perform certain functions that will interact with their main installation of the software. For example, you can load up your accounting app on your phone/tablet to check the balance for a client when you are visiting them. Heavy lifting tasks like exporting reports or printing cheques still need to be done on the desktop version but apps like these are huge conveniences for users looking to have access to information while they are on the go. Even things that are traditionally done only on a desktop/notebook such as writing or editing a document in Word can now be done on newer smart-phones and tablets with a word processing app.

So, if we can do so much with apps, why bother ever using a notebook or a desktop? Surely with the hundreds of thousands of apps available on the various stores or marketplaces that devices have, we never need to ever use a mouse and keyboard right? I think we all know the answer to this , for now anyway, is no. While apps are great, and handheld devices like smart-phones and tablets are nothing short of amazing, you just can’t match the productivity that working on a desktop or notebook can allow. I can keep up to most teenagers when it comes to typing on my android onscreen keyboard, but it’s no where near as fast as I can type with my keyboard on my workstation. Now a smarty pants may say, get an external keyboard for the handheld then! Been there, done that, the processor, at the time anyway, couldn’t keep up to my typing speed and it lagged horribly. Not to mention there is no word processor app that can offer the same rich editing experience as Word, from what I’ve seen anyway. Plus, I am addicted to dual 24” monitors sitting side by side (I’m actually trying to justify a 3rd one!), working on even the largest tablet seems dinky to do any ‘real’ work. I guess that’s the real point here; a lot of what I am doing is work when it comes to my online usage. Of course I go on Facebook to keep up with friends, or tweet my rants on Twitter, but when it comes to things like that, taking an extra minute or two really doesn’t matter to me. If it takes me an extra minute or two to type out each email, that means I have to work a bit later to keep up with emails. Given the choice of working on a desktop or a handheld, the desktop/notebook wins every time. Now, if I am embarrassing myself on a golf course and I need to check or respond to any incoming email, clearly my handheld wins in this situation.

The Truck and the Car

I think where we are right now is that no one device is right for all tasks yet. I think it was Steve Jobs of Apple who in a keynote speech said that when vehicles first came out, they were all trucks because they were needed for work. Then, as things progressed, cars came because for most people, it was all they needed. I guess growing up in the automotive capital of Canada, I should know whether good old Steve was right, but clearly he was trying to draw the parallel to workstations and handheld devices. He was trying to convince people that they only need tablets (iPad ones no doubt!), and only certain people who needed heavy lifting needed a full size truck (notebook/desktops). I guess on the surface, I tend to agree with him. Let’s face it, there are people who have very simple and predicable tasks that they need to perform online. Check their email, read Facebook, do a tweet or twelve, check YouTube for the latest viral video, then maybe Skype a friend who lives overseas. All of these can be done on current smart-phones and tablets. The problem here is while most people’s needs start out as simple, as they get accustomed to technology, they begin to yearn for more. It’s when a user wants to do more that current handheld devices begin to stutter. For example, taking and viewing pictures is easy as pie on a handheld. It’s when you want to do something like batch editing or optimization of the images, it becomes very cumbersome. Skyping is great on my Android device but I have to go back to my desktop if I want to do a video call. Viewing a PDF on a handheld is simple, but what about if I want to print it? To rip off the whole car and truck analogy, I guess sometimes I can get to point A and B with a slick sports car but depending on where those points are or how much I need to carry, I may need the full size SUV instead.

Now, undoubtedly there are people who are going to say that their tablet is all they need, and hats off to them. Like I said, if your needs are predictable and for lack of a better word ‘simple’, a handheld may be all you need. If you need to do any type of work, whether it’s for your job or for school, I don’t think we are at the point yet where we can get rid of our desktop or notebooks. Will I eat those words in the next year? My bet is no, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in two or three years we begin seeing serious tablets that can act as the ‘brains’ of your desktop machine, and simply unplug when you need it as a handheld. Many of us do this with our notebooks now and I don’t think its unreasonable to assume this will be the case with our smart-phones and tablets in the near future.

We aren’t there yet

Access to online content no longer requires a computer. We as users now have choices as to which device we want to use that best serves the task we are trying to accomplish. While some device manufactures may try to convince us that their device is all we need, I tend to disagree right now. I think at this point we will continue to use certain devices for certain tasks until we get to a point where handheld devices can be docked and used as desktops similar to how we now dock notebooks. We are starting to see devices like this now, for example the Motorola Atrix which docks into a netbook. While it’s a start, it’s not yet powerful enough for anything more than casual needs. In time, I sure hope that we can have just one device that serves all our needs but right now we are not quite in a post-PC era.

* Sharbel Lutfallah is the founder of Wired Solutions, and has been a web-developer since 1998.