Cellphones Are Servers and Servers Are Cellphones

The marriage of computing and cellphone technology is about to get a lot more interesting, with phones acting more like computer servers in a data center, and computers looking more like phones. The average smartphone has the processing power that the personal computer did only a few years back. It ably runs Angry Birds and keeps you up on Twitter feeds (and makes phone calls, if that is still your thing). But soon they will need to take on another chore: Distilling data from the world around us. The explosion of sensors, by one estimate 140 per person by 2013, up from five per person now, will create huge loads of data. Sending all the raw information they collect into big computing centers could cause a lot of unnecessary congestion.