Of course I can imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app. Perhaps not at this moment, but within 5 years? And what about technologies like NaCl? It is shortsighted to take such a view of applications that exist within a browser.
In 5 years? Well that is an eternity in the mobile space and you are probably right, there is likely going to be a shift to a standard approach to app (web or native) development. What if a virtual machine such as the JVM existed for both Android and iOS was standard/consistent enough to write cross platform apps?
This topic is very popular amongst hackers lately. I find the web developers in particular resist the native app trend, to avoid Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android). Typical web developer lives in Javascript and a chosen high level language (Ruby, Python) on the server side.
Yes, they'll be even faster; but the question is whether that performance will still be in demand in 5 years (over, time-to-market, say).
Native apps haven't been in demand on the desktop for a while, and smartphones are getting faster all the time. It seems that will be dual core, 1 GHz this year. How long before performance becomes a non-issue?
Quad core is inevitable, it's just a question of when. They say 2012 for the chips in that article; but not when for devices using it. Dual core devices are scheduled early this year.
They also mention 2.5GHz - the big issue is power usage. I guess you you can turn off 3, and underclock when not needed.
