{"id":2769,"date":"2013-02-25T14:32:39","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T21:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2769"},"modified":"2013-02-25T14:42:47","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T21:42:47","slug":"score-the-phone-inside-a-tablet-concept-now-from-asus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2769","title":{"rendered":"Score! The Phone-Inside-A-Tablet Concept, Now From ASUS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"asus-padfone-slot.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t know where my ideas come from, so don’t ask<\/a>. However, I do<\/em> get ideas. Most of them come to nothing. Every now and again, however, I score.<\/p>\n

Back at Clarion in 1973, I wrote an otherwise dorky novelette entitled “But Will They Come When You Do Call For Them?” in which I predicted something very like the World-Wide Web. It was over twenty years later that I realized I’d been scooped by H. G. Wells, who published his idea of the World Brain<\/a> in 1937. (I’d never heard of the World Brain until I read about it on…the Web.) Hey, if you’re gonna get scooped, get scooped by the best.<\/p>\n

In 1993, I got an idea for something I called The All Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything<\/a>. It came out of the Information Superhighway fever (remember that?) and did not postulate HTTP, which was a new and obscure protocol at the time I was doing my research. Functionally, however, it was Wikipedia, or at least Wikipedia minus its idiotic Not Notable fetish.<\/p>\n

Jim Strickland told me that I came very close to describing Second Life three years before it went live, with my “RAD Mars”<\/a> concept piece in the final issue of Visual Developer<\/a><\/em>. I think there were other stabs at that concept abroad at the time, so I don’t consider it as big a score. Still, it’s a score.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to a news item I ran across this morning while I was scanning the World Brain. (Or the Universal Data Engineering Project, as I had more humbly named it in 1973.) ASUS has unveiled the Padfone 2, a smartphone that plugs into a 10″ “dumb” tablet<\/a>. Pull that animation around–it’s very cool. The PadFone 2 is the newest rev of a product announced last spring that I missed somehow. (2012 was the second-worst year of my life. I missed a lot.) Here’s another detailed description<\/a> from Engadget. The ASUS PadFone product line is the first real-world stab at a concept I described here on Contra back in 2008<\/a>. That was in the thick of the netbook era, post-Kindle but pre-iPad, and the notion of a general-purpose touchscreen tablet was still obscure. What I wanted was a dockable display into which my smartphone plugged, with storage and network communications on the smartphone. And dayum if that isn’t more or less precisely what ASUS offers in the PadFone.<\/p>\n

So forgive me if I sound like I’m gloating. I’m gloating. This may be the most accurate technology prediction I’ve ever made, and I made it almost five years ago.<\/p>\n

Back in 2008 I considered patenting the idea, but only briefly. A patent would have cost me $10,000 and more time than I had to spare right then. Worse, I consider the idea only half a notch more than obvious, and when people patent the obvious it makes my blood boil.<\/p>\n

I am a big fan of ASUS, and I own a much-loved and much-used Transformer Prime. I wish them no ill, but guys, put that patent application down. I thought of it five years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know where my ideas come from, so don’t ask. However, I do get ideas. Most of them come to nothing. Every now and again, however, I score. Back at Clarion in 1973, I wrote an otherwise dorky novelette entitled “But Will They Come When You Do Call For Them?” in which I predicted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[15,43,18,20],"class_list":["post-2769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-sf","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2769"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2775,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769\/revisions\/2775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}