Mobiles in the Cloud

Mobile devices have been famously proliferating in the world of data transfer, through texting, email and many new apps that can do anything from playing Bookworm to showing movies to operating complete GPS systems. These are impressive accomplishments for such tiny devices, but yet they are limited as computing devices. They don't have much space for storing apps or the related data. Also their computing power, while impressive, pales against conventional computing devices like laptops and of course other bigger computers.

The cloud offers up the logical answer. Cloud apps run on remote servers and can run pretty well any application you can think of. The challenge for mobiles is to get the input-output interfaces working so the results of such powerful apps can be run from the limited mobile interfaces. it's a challenge but not impossible for a wide range of apps. Such apps are starting to come out in commercially viable scale and content, primarily at this point in the form of games. But then a lot of modern computing originated with games.

We'll soon see a large growth in the capabilities of mobile units. A person cruising in a boat on a lazy summer day out in the country will be able to run an app that utilizes the advanced analytical capabilities of a sophisticated ERP system and display the reports on the tiny screen of the mobile. It will open a whole range of services for the devices. And will cement their role as a focal point of the new computing environment. An article in Technology Review explains some of the new games coming on stream.