Pocket Supercomputing?

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Jan 31, 2008 7:54 AM, Jeffrey Thomas <eljefedelito at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/01/31/130245.shtml
>
> Basically, using a mobile phone as a thin client.  This would be great if one could enter a specific

Basically that project appears to be about image recognition, for
non-Asians to identify stuff at the Asian market.  :-)  Personally I
could use that feature sometimes but we don't have a camera on the
phone...   But more seriously Accenture appears to be a consulting
company so the solution is not likely to be very universal; they would
tend to look for specific business customers with specific narrow
needs right?

But yes the broader idea of using a phone as a thin client is
interesting.  Nowadays people tend to think the browser is the
ultimate platform for that (it has JavaScript and the ability to send
and receive chunks of XML over HTTP, and maybe even Flash... whoohoo!)
so there you go... thin client.   (Google and Apple think that's a
satisfying answer.)  There is Rebol; if only it were more free it
might have had a chance, but then again it's another language so that
raises the barrier to entry.  I wrote a generic Java thin-client
applet at one job a few years ago, but it's not free software
unfortunately (again, specific customer with specific needs and they
didn't let me release the code, despite its broader applicability) and
anyway it was a Java/XML thing... not as optimized as it can be.  My
goal is to have applications written in arbitrary languages, running
on app servers, using a terse UI meta-language to transfer the
user-interaction parts of the apps to the thin client (more or less,
depending on the processing power/bandwidth tradeoffs on the client
side).