I was sitting at a restaurant this past weekend, reading a book on my Kindle when my phone beeped to tell me that I'd just received an email at my Google account. Popping open my phone, I noticed that it had connected to the restaurants WiFi network for me, enabling faster browsing. I opened up the Gmail app and started to read the email. It was from a friend of mine who recommended a book that I might enjoy. Being a spur of the moment guy, I flipped the switch on my Kindle that enables wireless networking and proceeding to surf the Amazon Kindle store, quickly finding the book in question and purchasing it. In under 30 seconds, the book had downloaded to my Kindle and was available for my reading pleasure.

Later I reflected on this moment and marveled at how technology is transforming our lives. Sitting in a restaurant while eating, I was able to catch up on my email, watch some YouTube videos, play a game of PacMan and shop for a purchase a book that I could immediately enjoy. What an amazing world we live in. The availability of, and access to, information is staggering.

We now have at our fingertips access to the great minds of history, the hi-jinks of the neighbor-kid down the block, and a stage upon which every moment of our life can be played out. The problem is one I addressed a few weeks ago, that is getting the information into and out of our gadgets easily. My phone has a tiny little keyboard, which while fine for a short email, would never have served Tolstoy. The display, while sharp and fast, requires a bit of squinting. What we need is a neural implant, so we can just think and have our thoughts translated into action. Imaging that kind of world, now think of everyone who wanders around with their little Bluetooth headsets; with such a leap, we'd have virtual telepathy for everyone.

A company called Microvision is working on a system called PicoP which aims to create fashionable glasses that can be worn that double as display devices for your mobile computing device. The technology, still in the development phase though prototypes have been created and work, will display high resolution image in the glasses. The image can be either transparent or opaque, allowing a movie-like view experience, or a virtual overlay on reality where you could call up information about the person you are talking and have it "hover" around them, or providing information about nearby events or stores as you walk past. It's a cool technology, and one that I hope gets here soon.

We're still stuck with a poor input, but I don't really see a solution to that until there is some sort of brain scanner/thought reader gadget.

Still, I am amazed at just how much computer and storage power one can walk around with. Between my Android G1 phone, Kindle, and my keychain USB storage, I have access to 34gb of space. That's just amazing. I even have a keychain device configured as a bootable Linux operating system. And I walk around with a phone with the processing speed of a 7 year old desktop, though with better graphics and 16x the storage capacity!