“It’s a foregone conclusion that the personal computer of the future is this size,” said Huang, holding up his smartphone. “You could add wireless HDMI to it someday, and it could also be your set-top box.”

That day may not be too far away. With DLNA-equipped smartphones already able to control DLNA-equipped HDTVs, and with 4G technology maturing nicely, 1080o HD video streams will soon be able to be streamed directly onto your smartphone in a couple of years’ time.

All you’ll need then is for the phone to route the stream through to your TV, and you have the vision that Huang predicts.

Nvidia’s vision for the future

That wasn’t all Huang foresaw at his company’s annual conference, though. Recognizing the impact of the smartphone, he tipped ARM (the company ultimately responsible for nearly all the chips in current smartphones) to replace Intel as the “…most important CPU architecture of the future…”

I don’t think this is idle speculation, either, even though Nvidia in currently in a patent dispute with Intel. Think of all the different media devices we blog about here on MediaMentalism, and nearly all of them are getting mobile. Indeed, if you look at Samsung’s latest cameras, with their touchscreens, GPS and WiFi, and it’s hard to tell them apart from of their mobile phones!

As these gadgets adopt more and more of the same features and components as mobile phones, they’ll soon start using beefy CPUs – and most mobile CPUs use ARM’s architecture, not Intel’s.

So an increasingly mobile phones, driven ultimately by ARM not Intel. The world’s changing as ever, but the scale of this change could be huge!

[Source: EETimes]

However, it seems that mobile phones aren’t the limit of Google’s ambitions. According to new rumours, the search engine company is working on extending Android to all manner of devices, including Set Top Boxes, MP3 players, and any other device that could potentially connect to the Internet.

The rumour about Android being more than just mobile phones has been around for a while, but it was always seen as pure speculation. It stemmed from a talk that Vint Cerf (Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist) gave back in 2006, in which he said:

“In an internet enabled world, there is no reason that a projector could not be online and downloading images, maybe using the Blackberry as a control device.

Surrounded by networked equipment that is reachable anywhere, devices harnessed on a temporary basis to do something for you and then released. I am predicting that during this decade, we will see more systems interacting with other systems like this

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