Several of you have pointed out to me that I’m not the only one who has noticed the resemblance between Apple’s impending device and Star Trek‘s ubiquitous portable data thingummies. Gizmodo points out there will be an app for that…
Star Trek is, of course, a world full of ubiquitous computing, although it’s rarely portrayed in those terms exactly. We see communicators, tricorders, flat-panel displays everywhere…and, for portable information access and messaging, the PADD.
Of course, these are really all just non-functional props. But the ideas behind them have long-since fired the imagination of real-world engineers. Communicators have already completely infiltrated our real-world lives–we call them cellphones. Flat panel displays are now so common it’s getting hard to remember when televisions took up significant cubic volume and not just rectangular area. Tricorders…well, we’ve got a way to go on that one, because we’re nowhere near the necessary technology for that kind of magical scanning. But they’re working on it.
PADDs, however, are in reach of our real-world technology, and the iPad seems to be consciously trying to make them a reality. The way PADDs have been portrayed, even as far back as Classic Trek1 gives us some insight, I believe, into how Apple envisions the iPad being used.
