How I would like to interact with the Internet from a physical perspective

Don't ask me why, but lately I have been thinking about how I would like to physically interact with the Internet, both in terms of producing and consuming content. With the proliferation of Internet access I think people will begin to come across more and more ways to access the Internet in their daily lives. Just a few years ago no one had unlimited data plans on their cell phones or netbooks that cost hardly anything. But now we can carry the Internet around in our pocket or backpacks without issue. But just because we can carry the Internet around in our pocket does not mean it is the best form-factor to actually interact with the Internet.

To begin, I think online content needs to be classified in small and large sizes. Small content is things like posts to Twitter, typical emails, or blog posts. Another way to think of it is it is no longer than two screens full of text on your typical smartphone. It takes no effort to scroll from top to bottom on a cell phone such that if you have to reference something at the top of what you are reading you won't think twice about scrolling back to the top. Everything else is large content.

For small content I think reading it on your cell phone is fine. The content is short enough that you will not be staring at the small screen for very long. Plus small content tends to be very timely and thus consuming it while out on the town makes sense as the longer it is until you get to it the less relevant it will be.

As for producing small content, your cell phone can also be fine, albeit only for really small content. I have no problem writing a paragraph or so on my cell, but I wouldn't want to go past that.

The next step up from cell phones is a tablet. If Apple were to create a tablet, it would be great for consuming all online content regardless of size. Something about 9" in diameter would be large enough to display text at a comfortable size for long-term reading. But it would also be small enough to easily carry around to any place where you might want to read such as the living room, bedroom, the local coffee shop, some bench outside, etc.

But I would not want to use the tablet to produce large content. While the on-screen keyboard would most likely be large enough that I could type several paragraphs without many errors, I would most likely get frustrated by how slow it would be compared to a physical keyboard (I am a fast typist). And so the tablet only slightly alleviates the content creation limitation of a cell phone, but it greatly improves the consumption experience.

This leaves us with laptop for consuming and creating all content. While it is not as convenient as a phone or tablet, it is still portable enough to carry around as long as you are not going hiking.

So, I want my cell phone for reading and writing emails along with reading short blog posts. I want a tablet for writing short blog posts but reading anything online. And I want my laptop for creating large content. Here is to hoping the Apple tablet rumor is true so I can actually start browsing the web on a tablet instead of having to always pull my laptop out.