Like many facets of geek life, Randall has nailed it before most of us realized we did it.
Case in point: my BB woke me up at 6.45 to find a flurry of emails that had arrived on the Exchange Server mostly in the 5 hours time difference between the start of the day in the UK and here in NYC.
Not only has the BB allowed me to become even more responsive than ever, but it’s now become a literal block in my morning routine: wake up, roll over and answer work and (via Gmail) personal emails before I even greet the world. Possibly a contributor to my singledom - but that’s another story.
Now back to point:
If the future is in the cloud, then our connections to the cloud are all important. Mobile web browsers are great tools and with the right interface (looking at you touchscreens) very versatile. However, for a richer, more involved and rewarding interaction there really is little substitute for keys, a bigger screen and more power - enter netbooks.
Jeff Atwood’s article this morning made me smile in recognition - the amount of things we already do exclusively online is staggering, the options for doing even more there are amazing, and it’s only the interfaces that we need to get right. Thanks to the OLPC project, small low-powered laptops are being cranked out by a variety of manufacturers large and small. The netbooks are cheap, energy efficient, highly portable and do enough on the client side to act as a basic two-way portal for our eyes (and webcam), our typing and mousing fingertips, our ears to hear new music, our voice (via microphone), and our other equipment to upload our digital photos (our cameras) , sync contacts (our phones), sync music (our iPods) and all other trappings of a hyperconnected life.
I can very much see a future where increasing population densities reduce personal physical space, efficient mass transit and job market area specialisms encourage personal mobility even more than now, dwindling stocks of easy energy reduce our desire to burn unnecessary fuel, smaller markets and less easy credit all combine to make large home desktops a niche market for gamers and artists (music / graphic or otherwise) and expensive laptops for personal use lean towards being niche. For business of course, laptops will continue to become more of the norm - especially for knowledge workers - but there’ll always be need for desktop client processing power.
Edit: A Business Wire article today notes that US sales of laptops have now surpassd those of desktops. /Edit
All this points towards netbooks being a huge potential market. It may start with people buying them as an accompaniment to their home desktop, then progressively as a complement to their home laptop, and then possibly replacing that laptop altogether. Cheaper, more physically versatile, same rich web-browser interface to the rest of the world.
Thus home computing becomes truly commodity, using commodity cheap parts assembled according to good user centric design, relying on commodity fiber to link to commodity data centers where custom code can run quicker, cheaper and more reliably than it ever could on the client side.
Have a read of Nicholas Carr for more insight than I could ever impart.
In summary, I see our interaction with the world via the net becoming ever richer and ever more pervasive until one (glorious) morning soon no-one will even get out of bed…
Disclaimer: I only really want to justify my buying a Lenovo Ideapad S10 at the end of the month ;)
I’m listening to my personal traditional 
