IEEE Future Directions
Related Articles
It was just a matter of time and it would have arrived. Actually I remember presenting it in a book I wrote several years ago (1999, the disappearance of telecommunications) as a natural evolution of computers.
We have seen few years ago the use of flash pen to take your data space with you ready to be plugged in into any computer to make that become, as long as the dongle was plugged in, your computer.
Now Google has announced a flash pen sized processing device, Chromebit, that can be plugged in into a screen, like a television. Just to avoid possible confusion it was not announced on April 1st but on March 31st.
It should be available this Summer at a price point lower than a hundred dollars.
It comes with 16GB of memory and a HDMI port for high definition display. It is more powerful than the Chromecast stick, that lets your television receive streaming television programs, so it can run normal applications, like office. It has a Google Chrome OS and you can run whatever runs on that OS.
Interestingly, in the presentation Google said that given the decrease in price of television screens and the low cost of the Chromebit it may turn out that it would be the same to print a 42" ads to hang in a shop or to hang a video screen and display images with Chromebit!
Amazing the progress we have seen, and are seeing, in processing. Of course, the price of microprocessor is so low that one may wonder if the future will see any object embedding a computer, just in case. No more need for dongles by the end of this decade….
