As a fundamental innovation, the touchscreen display has moved far beyond the smartphone and wormed its way into tablets, notebook computers, and the emerging category of wearable computers.
And its reach will only grow greater as displays become more flexible and accurate, according to bunch of speakers at NPD DisplaySearch’s Emerging Display Technologies event today in San Jose, Calif.
The display is the computer. That’s a memorable twist on an old saying from tech guru Scott McNealy, who declared “the network is the computer.” But Shane Wall, chief strategy and technology officer in the mobility group at Hewlett-Packard and a keynote speaker at the event, said that the new twist on the saying is becoming true. Increasingly, the value in the computer is captured in the display, he said. And increasingly, that value will be manifested in mobile devices.
“In order to make the computing real, we had to make fundamental changes in the input and the output of a computer,” Wall said. “It’s a common saying, and it is becoming more true everyday, that the display is the computer.”
“The mobile phone and the tablet are a tiny part of what will be a huge revolution where computing will be carried on your body, embedded in your body, worn on your body, and embedded in your car, ” Wall said. “This is a very big economic trend.”