91Èȱ¬

On Tech Brief today plenty of questions: is the web dead? Are Google planning an iPad competitor? And could a fish-shaped musical instrument be the future of computing?

• . In a piece that is currently Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff argue that the rise of apps on smartphone's is gradually displacing the web.

"Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible."

• But not everyone agrees. and remodels the articles main graph, which appears to show the slowing of web growth.

"Without commenting on the article's argument, I nonetheless found this graph immediately suspect, because it doesn't account for the increase in internet traffic over the same period. The use of proportion of the total as the vertical axis instead of the actual total is a interesting editorial choice."

• :

"Anderson is right in a technical sense when he says that the web is "just one of many applications that exist on the Internet, which uses the IP and TCP protocols to move packets around." But he also gets it wrong when he conflates the demise of the web browser with the demise of the web itself. "

• In May this year, Google announced that it would stop selling its own brand Nexus One phone. However, its failure doesn't seem to have put them off developing new hardware. powered by its Chrome operating system.

"Our source tells us that Google is building a Chrome OS tablet. It's real, and it's being built by HTC. No surprise there, since HTC churned out the Nexus One for Google."

• Finally, , a fish-shaped musical instrument that, its inventors say, could one day influence computer interfaces.

"The instrument resembles a large flute, except with water flowing through it instead of air. It has 12 holes, each of which spews out a water jet. The chords are played by blocking one or more of the water jet holes with the fingers."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.