I've been fascinated by all the new mobile devices that are available new. This includes the iPhone, iPad, Droid, Windows 7 phone, and the Galaxy S phones and tablets. I'm wondering which set of devices will integrate together to form what is becoming my home/small business cloud. I have computers, laptops, a NAS, this hosted website, and four social media sites. I can see a smart phone, tablet/pad, web TV, home theater pre-amp, flat panel TV being integrated into this network in the future. How do I get my email, access my social networks from each one of these devices, or make them share data nicely. Will all these devices support some level of design tools like OrCAD, PSPICE, Mathematica, LabView, MatLab, Materials Studio, ChemSketch, Eclipe IDE, SolidWorks, and similar tools? I asked Phil McKinney from HP how to share my just my email between all these devices and he said it was a difficult problem to solve.

So then, the new issue of Electronic Design magazine arrived in the mail. The issue has the article Google’s Android Versus Apple’s iOS: And The Winner Is? that describes the architecture of the two mobile OS's plus MeeGo's architecture. Each OS is unique and offers a rich set of features but creating a common code set for an application that runs on all phones is not possible due to the architectural differences. Now, I wonder if I could run an email client like Thunderbird on all my devices, could I find a way to sync the mailboxes together to access my mail from anywhere using any device in a distributed system architecture? Syncing to me implies that a master database exists somewhere so this would seem to be "a make it work solution for now" and not a true distributed solution.