Any definition of just what constitutes a "mobile computer" inevitably remains both relative and subjective. For example, back in 1981 one of the very first portable computers was the Osborne 1. This weighed 11.8Kg, was larger than most modern desktop PCs, and only ran on mains power without an optional battery pack. At the other end of the scale, the Artigo Pico-ITX PCmeasures just 150mm x 110mm x 40mm, weigh only 520 grams, and yet is probably best categorised as very small desktop computer.

 

Mobile computing is probably an area best defined at any one point in time by those devices that are challenging paradigms and setting new consumer and business agendas. And right now this includes the latest tablets, ultrabooks, and even hardware like the Raspberry Pi.

 

Ultimately, whilst mobile computing is still barely out of its infancy, it is fairly certain to represent a larger and larger part of the future of computing development. Not least this is because desktop computers are now a relatively mature platform offering little scope for high-return market development for companies in the computing industry.

 

The rising green computing agenda will also mean that desktop computers are replaced far less regularly, in turn making new mobile computing market opportunities even more attractive. Mobile computing also offers the potential for what Apple once called "computing for the rest of us" -- or in other words, computing for those people who do not spend their working day at a desk, and/or those who do not want to spend their leisure time slaved to a desktop PC.

 

Mobile computing can also perhaps even be considered as more "natural" than those location-dependent forms that have gone before. As seekers, consumers, processors, hoarders and communicators of information, every human being is already a form of mobile computer. Increasingly smart devices that can travel with us to help in such seeking, consuming, processing, hoarding and communicating will hence perhaps inevitably be very widely adopted as soon as they become technically and economically mass-viable. Indeed, one only has to look at the uptake of mobile phones to consider the potential.

 

The science fiction of the last decade contained a great many robots to walk beside us in servitude. However, we are perhaps far more likely to want to seek assistance from a small device that we can carry with us or find lying around the home or office than from a lumbering mechanical clone.