The Next Web

Sans hardware:

Try OnLive, an Internet-gaming service that I've praised a couple times. OnLive lets you run high-def gamesthe kind that once required a monster PC or consoleon rinky-dink hardware. OnLive does this by processing all of the video on very fast computers, then shuttling the images back to your machine over the Internet. This doesn't sound as if it should work, but it does, and very well, too. Now imagine the same process happening for other apps: You'd could edit video, crunch data sets, create music, or do other computationally complex tasks on your tablet or netbookall the processing would take place far away, so seamlessly that you wouldn't notice anything amiss. This sounds fantastical. It's not. It's closer than you think.