I have previously complained about the about the amount of gadgets that seem to be piling by my bedside table charging quietly every night.. Laptops, Tablets, phones, kindle (yes the plural is not a typo).
On top of that I am growing frustrated with my DVR. Last week the new series of “The Mentalist” was broadcasted in the UK. I did set the record in advance but somehow it clashed and did not get recorded. Even with the missed show only one-click away, in the TV channel’s website, it turns out that my only options were to wait for a repeat on TV in 4 days or go upstairs and watch it in the office desktop. Why is it so complicated!?
All of this frustration got me thinking and I have come up to some conclusions of what the future of my home computing is going to look like.
Centralised Content & Specialised Consumption Devices
So it turns out that I am not going to give up my E-Ink screen for reading books. Why? Because it doesn’t hurt my eyes like an tablet screen does. Neither I am going to convince my son that watching Peppa Pig in the iPad is not any better than watching it on TV. Why? Dunno, he isn’t talking yet.
The future for me looks like it is going to involve a lot of different devices, and I am fine with that as long as:
- I don’t have to charge them too often – once a month would about right,
- They are flexible and powerful enough to get them to do what I need them to do when I need it done,
- I can get all my content in all of them!
The good news is that the technology to allow all of this to happen is already being designed. Point number 3, is the easy one! you just need an Ubuntu One account. Point 1&2, I have considered them incompatible for a long time, until I heard about big.LITTLE.
big.LITTLE is going to be BIG
How do you make a low powered device that gives you plenty of battery life, yet is capable of processing complex tasks? ARM seems to have a pretty good answer: big.LITTLE.
Big.LITTLE is a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that pairs up to four top notch dual-core A15 processors with four very low powered dual-core A7 processors. The beauty is that they have very similar feature-set and architecture. ARM expects to be able to switch between them depending on the tasks asked to performed without the operating systems noticing the difference.
In a nutshell, it’s like being able to choose between a Prius or a Ferrari engine without having to change cars! Just choose the one that suits your needs better for today’s journey.
This is one of the technologies that is going to ignite the next personal computing revolution. I’ll tell you all about the other ones soon 
