The future of computing (contd.)

As Quentin says, who would have thought ten years ago that Unix machines would look like this? The most interesting thing about the iPod Touch is not that it’s a music player, but that it’s the best portable browsing machine we have yet seen. Its capacity to render web pages and make them readable is simply astounding. The touch interface plus the software’s rendering ability also suggests that the newspaper industry has been looking in the wrong place all the time. It always supposed that its electronic salvation lay in display hardware — in the form of ‘e-paper’, i.e. lightweight foldable, flexible, high-resolution displays. The effectiveness of the iPod Touch suggests that the combination of clever software and even a small high-res display can do the trick.