A remark about ‘reading the New York Times online,’ seems like a journalist’s rather wishful ideal of online reading habits. As I noted a couple of posts back, online reading habits (at least mine) do not show much brand loyalty, instead following links outward to other sites. If a site doesn’t have those outbound links, no problem: Google does.

And, says Manjoo, a decade ago ‘a computer was something you used at the office or for schoolwork, not to goof off.’ But one of the first surprises I had when I went online in the mid 90s was that forum traffic was highest during working hours, lower in the evenings and on weekends. People might have gotten their computers as business tools, but were goofing off on them plenty.

Really what Manjoo is arguing is that the way we goof off on computers is changing – that with YouTube and ebooks, computer goofing-off is becoming more like TV, a couch potato activity. (The TV marketing euphemism is ‘lean-back.’) So who needs a keyboard or mouse?

The flip side argument is made by Kathy Sharp in OMMA, writing about interactive TV ads. ‘Somehow it was always assumed,’ she writes, ‘or perhaps just fervently prayed for, that the Internet would simply turn into a TV with keyboard.’ Instead, as the wall sized screen gets an Internet connection, TV is becoming more like the Internet.

What does this mean for the future of notebooks, netbooks, and other devices bigger than a smartphone and smaller than a full laptop? Portable devices are always going to pose a tradeoff between two different meanings of ‘handy’ – easy to carry around versus easy to manipulate.

The classic desktop and the smartphone mark the two endpoints. What goes in between is still being worked out, and will depend less on technology than on user habits and preferences. But I suspect that we will want to interact with our toys, big or small, more rather than less, and the most successful design innovations will reflect this.

Suffering from tech news overload? Let TecTrends and TecTrends Reporters be your Sherpas as you climb the upper slopes. We read the tech press because you don’t have time.