Someday, the All-In-1

I really liked the first few episodes of the show Robotics; Notes, before it went all dark and evil. I wanted it to be about an imaginative geocaching game with a fake mystery to solve, and how Augmented Reality would add both fun and function to the real world, but the creator was clearly insane and decided to go full violent paranoid and ruined the whole concept. I would say it was a similar screw up to what happened with that segway-motorcycle one, and how they clearly didn't learn from the success of Girls Und Panzer, which takes tank battles and turns them into a fun sport for cute little girls in high school. Those shows taught me that I actually have a soft spot for sports after all. Who knew?

Apparently, as you age, you outgrow violence entirely. That's what has happened to me. When I was into shooting rifles, I just wanted to show my accuracy, and possibly practice up to a club that did steel silhouette competitions. Those can be pretty interesting, since there are classes using black powder, or old cowboy guns, or various kinds of repro-vintage guns used by people curious about how tough it was for their great-grandfather out on the Plains. Why not? No animals are harmed. Its steel plates cut with a welding torch. These are usually Ham and Spam shoots, where you put in your $5 and either win a Virginia ham or a can of spam depending on if you're a best shot or the worst one. Vegetarians are too weak to lift the rifle so they never compete, thus no complaints about the prize.

Anyway, in Robotics; Notes, the ubiquitous smart phone has been replaced by a 7 inch tablet with wireless connectivity, camera, laptop processing power, and you do all your classwork and music etc using them. No more book-bag. You carry this thing and lunch. They're your data access tool. The island in the story actually exists, the base for Japan's space launch facility (which fails science being that far north), and is pretty big. So big that people ride scooters around because its too far to bicycle between the towns, and there's apparently only the one high school, at least in the story.

The tablets are tough, scratch resistant, have solar cells impregnated invisibly so they never have their batteries die, and all data access is wireless. Japan is on something like 7G right now, compared to the 4G still being installed in the USA, just to give you some idea. They have no Legacy in Japan. In the USA, its law. Different approaches to technology means we're lagging. Please imagine having a device like this so ubiquitous that people don't even try to steal them because the GPS tells you where it is and they're bio-locked. Just picture it. Wouldn't that be cool? Someday I think this will be reality. It will be so much cheaper to make a largely indestructible tablet than swapping cellphone, laptop, home PC, various TVs and stereo systems every 18 months. Just have this and chill. It will happen when the rate of change slows enough to justify building electronics more durably. For now, its a silly idea. But eventually...