Max: Charlie Stross Contemplates The Future

The class of gadgets that the iPhone leads — I want you to imagine the gadget class that is the PC today, in relation to the original Macintosh 128K back in 1984 — is something we don't really have a name for yet. Calling it a "smart phone" seems somehow inadequate. For one thing, we're used to our mobile phones being switched on, or off (at least, in standby mode). This gadget is never off — it is in constant communication with the internet. It knows where it is, and it knows which way up it is (it's orientation sensitive). It can see things you point it at, and it can show you pictures. (Oh, and it does the smartphone thing as well, when you want it to.)

Let me give you a handle on this device, the gadget, circa 2020, which has replaced our mobile phones. It's handheld, but about as powerful as a fully loaded workstation today. At it's heart is a multicore CPU delivering probably about the same performance as a quad-core Nehalem, but on under one percent of the power. It'll have several gigabytes of RAM and somewhere between 256Gb and 2Tb of Flash SSD storage. It'll be coupled to a very smart radio chipset: probably a true software-directed radio stack, where encoding and decoding is basically done in real time by a very fast digital signal processor, and it can switch radio protocols entirely in software. It'll be a GPS and digital terrestrial radio receiver and digital TV receiver as well as doing 802.whatever and whatever 4G standard emerges as victor in the upcoming war for WWAN preeminance.

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