Onlive Technology + Portable Touch Screens + Wifi = What We Really Wanted in a Tablet?

Now that the dust has settled from the next round of Tablet PC announcements (ie. Slate from HP/Microsoft, the nefarious iPad from Apple and offerings from various others), I think that it is probably safe to post this idea that came to mind.

As someone who works in the game development industry, I have been quietly following the efforts of OnLive with curiousity. In case you do not know who they are, OnLive is a company whose goals are to provide a little micro-console that you plug your TV, gamepad and a network connection into (thats it). The system works by communicating with a big network of servers located in some other remote location of the world, this rack of servers handles all the processing that it takes to play game and send down each individual frame of resulting data down to the set-top box (mentioned previously). So far in tests the the OnLive system has had a mixed set of reviews on how well it works, which depends entirely on the network connection and your distance from the server farms. Regardless thought what I am trying to point out isn't whether or not OnLive is a going to succeed, but that the technique being used is actually feasible.

Which brings me to my next point, portable touch screen computing. Like I said previously, we have seen a multitude of offerings from various companies and the results have either been underpowered (Lenovo Ideapad U1), lackluster (Apple's iPad), or really cool but a bit out of the price range of most people (HP/Microsoft Slate). What we really seem to be lacking is something that provides the performance that people really want, along with the options to run what they want and at a price that makes it an affordable toy to put on your coffee table.

So here is my idea... back in the 80s, a lot of companies invested in what were known as "dumb terminal" computers, which were basicly monitors with attached keyboards and almost no processing power itself. These 'dumb terminals' were connected to a more powerful central computer in the office which did all the processing for them. The reason why this worked at the time was that computers were expensive and the idea of having one powerful master and a bunch of 'dumb terminals' made a lot of financial sense. The reason why this failed was two-fold: powerful desktop style computers became cheaper than a terminal solution over time, and eventually we found that the network technology at the time could only handle so many terminals connected to the machines (which means that the terminals didn't scale very well at all, so you had a limit on how many terminals you could have).

So going with the idea of terminals, what would happen if returned to that idea but in a much smaller scale using technology like OnLive and combined with a low cost, portable touch screen display?

The first step would be to take the technology that OnLive has created and make it into an application that you can setup and install on decently equipped home PC. This way the same PC that you use at home for your normal daily work, play or web surfing simply gets repurposed when needed to act as the mainframe (like it would with OnLive's system as it is right now, just for the home).

The second step simply involves finding a simple, portable touch screen display to act as the terminal. It wouldn't need a crazy amount of processing power, in fact very little, just enough to handle startup, power management, the display and of course a network connection via Wireless N (or similar connection).

The third and final step is simply powering on the portable touchs screen display and let it connect or sync up with your desktop PC at home. Thus allowing you to do your normal daily activities but in a more relax setting on your couch, at the bar, whereever really. Providing portable computing the way consumers actually want and need it to be, without also forcing the consumer to rebuy or find alternatives to the applications that they want to use on said portable device (and without upsetting companies by having users install multiple copies, break DRM or worse utilize a cracked copy of the software).

Well that's my idea in a nutshell and to be honest I do not quite get why no one has gone down this route with their portable computing options. Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply provide another option to utilize the wheels you already own?