Laptop Thoughts: One Device, Many Form Factors

"Remember the Touch Book from last year? The netbook with a detachable screen that can double as a tablet? No? I didn’t either. But sure enough, we did a post on the device and it actually shipped to consumers. Well, the company is back with the next generation that takes the multipurpose theme up a notch. The Smart Book is the swiss knife of mobile devices as the demo video shows."

Ever since I heard of the Metapad from IBM, I loved the concept. A single device that would hook up into various different shells to allow different ways to compute. While the Metapad never saw production, there have been many attempts to follow that concept. There is the Palm Foleo which also never really saw the light of day but the Celio Redfly is still around. Always Innovating seems to be taking the next step, adding a tablet form factor into the mix. As they provide their own hardware, including for the phone, I am unsure as to how popular this could be though running Ubuntu or Android does give it some clout. Of course, the biggest challenge will be competing against cloud computing. Why have one device that you have to snap into different shells, when you can have multiple devices that all hook into the same data backend and give you an optimized interface?