Headed toward the future (but taking the scenic route)

There's a strange phenomenon going on in the world these days.

The smaller the screen that you pipe in audio, video, and animation, the bigger the thrill.

Not that you can't have a party and show off the game on your new 50-inch plasma screen. That still gets you some points.

But if a friend at the party pulls out his new smart phone, where the same game can be viewed, only many times smaller, grainier, and with sporadic dropouts...people will get really excited.

It's kind of like when instant messaging came around, and a friend exclaimed to me "now I can talk to anyone in the country at any time." His excitement level did not decrease when I mentioned that he could already do that with a device known as the "telephone". Remember that thing?

What's next? Maybe instead of discs, devices that play music miraculously on recorded tape. Now that would be different.