More news about the Internet appliance cum computer: the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe sports a mini-OS called Splashtop, similar to the Phoenix Hyperspace Mini OS which I mentioned previously. The writer seems to be missing the bigger picture, which is that your primary OS resides on the Web. (Specifically, Google OS)

But I wonder if you could stuff a hypervisor into the firmware. This would be ideal. While Vista, XP, or Mac OS X loads up, you can continue to browse the web/run webapps with Splashtop or Hyperspace. The full OS would only be necessary when you needed that hefty app that doesn’t have an AJAX equivalent, like, perhaps, Adobe Photoshop, or Apple Final Cut Pro, or Apple Logic Pro. (Or perhaps Counterstrike or World of Warcraft.)

Considering that both Open Firmware and the Extensible Firmware Interface has direct access to the hardware without having to load up the full OS, I think it’s only a matter of time until the big Steve stuffs a stripped-down version of Mac OS X into the firmware.

But face it, even though the critics were wrong a decade ago, I think this is really finally the harbinger of the end of the desktop computer. Ubiquitous computing is the road into the future.