This concept from RISD student René Lee is circling the interbutts today, and I think it’s a gorgeous idea: The Bento Book looks like a laptop, but you can remove each of the compartments to use as separate devices. There’s a solar-powered battery pack, a hard drive, a tablet, and a phone. It looks like the future:
Of course, it’s just a concept, and you’re not going to see it anytime soon (probably ever). I can already think of one major problem with the design: Touchscreen keyboards still fucking suck, and I can’t imagine typing on one as my primary keyboard for the majority of a day. Plus, the tablet is too narrow. But the Bento Book definitely stacks up with the Courier and the Seabird as technology that I’m using in my dreams.
It seems kind of backwards to me. “Consume content” should be a tablet that doubles as the laptop display, and “create content” should be the dock/wrapper with the built in awesome-o keyboard and trackpad that you drop the tablet into. “Communicate” gets in the way of your typing and mousing entirely.
I like the general idea of merging the old PowerBook Duo Dock days with the iPad, and having a tablet that can become a tablet and/or have cellphone capabilities. But then I’m reminded of all of the awesome attachments the Handspring had for things like turning it into a cell phone and GPS, way back in 2002, and how it still failed.