Suddenly the lightweight handheld becomes a very real machine and not just a technology curiosity. Those two pound machines will actually weigh two pounds in your briefcase since you can leave all the external custom drives required to make the computer usable at home, or never buy or build them in the first place. The amazing thing about fundamental technology is the longer you think about it the more uses can be uncovered. Split-Bridge technology today takes a common PCI bus and serializes it so it can be sent across a very thin cable between two points. Once you have gone to the trouble to create a serial data stream it does not take much of a leap to put that stream across a wireless link and then, the connector and cable disappear.
Implementations can then get even smaller and more flexible.
Sub-notebooks and handhelds will become even easier to support. Final observations Split-Bridge technology is just now rolling out in the very basic form of docking and there are a host of other possibilities that can grow out of that basic technology. Originally implemented in PCI, there is nothing fundamental that ties the technology to PCI, so the technique can grow and migrate as bus architectures grow and migrate. NGIO that are currently under consideration in the industry are also straightforward transitions of the technology. Implementations with other protocols are also possible.