Yesterday I read a blog post of Fabrizio Capobianco where he stated that your tablet will never be a laptop. While I sincerely do agree with this, and since it is of course very clearly true (tablet is not a laptop, obviously), I think there should still be more to this topic than meets the eye.

Let us try to be more forward-looking than just looking at the form factor and to state that this is the way things are and are meant to be (as was once also stated by Winnie the Pooh, one of the wisest bears to ever exist).

I don't think that a tablet computer will turn into a laptop any more than a laptop will turn into a tablet or a man will turn into a woman, but these things will become one nevertheless. It's more like they will combine and they will become something completely new (amazingly, this seems perfectly analogous to a man and a woman becoming one).

With the marriage of different kinds of devices, they become something greater than they were when they were just single machines. Only with computing devices, unlike with humans, polygamy is very much OK, allowing us to bring together a laptop, desktop, mobile phones, tablets and whatever. Together, when they become one, they will become something more than what they were before.

Getting married goes somewhere much beyond synchronization. Synchronizing data between devices is something more like dating; you meet every now and then and update each other on what you've been up to, but at the end of the day you go your separate ways and have your own, individual lives apart from each other. True integration of computing devices brings a stronger connection, allowing one to extend your "computer" to any device that you can use, thereby allowing a seamless experience with "your computer" wherever you are and whatever you might be holding at any given time.

To put all this into a short statement, lately with the Igelle team we've started saying this:

"The world is your computer"

(Semi-consciously also elevating the old slogan of Sun Microsystems to a whole new modern level)

I think in this case Winnie the Pooh's comment was not applicable: Things may be a certain way now, but they should (and they can) be something so much more.