The Automated Test Blog

In February, I wrote about the new mobile internet and how our online behavior would radically change based on the ubiquity of mobile devices with internet connectivity.  I recently read a column on MarketWatch by John Dvorak that also spoke on this subject.  In his commentary, Dvorak asserts that there will be four critical trends in the computer industry in the coming decade:

• There will be a major platform shift away from the current Wintel machine
• Mobile devices will become more and more important
• Internet connectivity will be done mostly on mobile devices, primarily the cell phone
• Cloud computing will dominate the century

Those of you that have a mobile device with elegant internet connectivity (I’m an unabashed iPhone fan myself) have no doubt witnessed this change first hand.  My PC is no longer my primary portal to the internet – I read most of my news and do nearly all my google-ing, ebay-ing, Wikipedia-ing, and now, even FaceBook-ing, on my mobile device.  I’m actually more accustomed to interacting with the internet on my phone now than I am on my computer.  And we’re really only in the second generation of the mobile internet.  Add better user interface through brighter OLED displays, more sensors, haptics so you can ‘feel’ objects on the screen (Blackberry announced one attempt at this today with their new touchscreen ‘Storm’), and broadband connection speeds through WIMAX and LTE, and imagine the capability that will be delivered on a mobile device.

Of course, since I work in the test and measurement industry, I can’t help but think about what effect this change in the consumer industry will have on ours.  For one, there is a lot of sophisticated technology on these devices to test, and the pace of innovation is only increasing.  So, design and test engineers need rapid development platforms that can adapt to these changes faster than ever.  I believe that this trend will affect our industry in an even more profound way as well.  Today, the PC is the primary business machine – it is our data storage hub, our desktop publisher, our presentation aid, our engineering design workstation, and our business dashboard.  As mobile computing and internet devices become pervasive in everyday life, how is this likely to change?  What will cloud computing mean to the engineering community?  This is a subject I’ll be thinking a lot about and plan to share some thoughts on in a later blog. 

But for now, I need to get back to the internet to do some research on wireless standards.  And, since I’m writing this on my laptop, that means time to shut down my PC and pick up my iPhone!