In the northernmost climes of the world where the Caucasian race originated it was a matter of evolutionary life and death, and even in the temperate zone cities of Australasia today the temperature can routinely fall into single digits — not much fun even if you can buy iPhone apps.

During a recent industry confab in Japan, Google bigwig Eric Schmidt said the future is not only in mobile (smartphone sales are set to outstrip PCs in 2012) but in the Asia Pacific region, which will see three billion mobile users within five years.

Forget space shuttles, nanobots and large hadron colliders, the yardstick for human technological development may just be the Star Trek tricorder. Convention geek jokes aside, a good deal of 20th century sci-fi reveals an innate desire for a platform- and information-agnostic device we can point at anything to learn all about it (for when we visit alien worlds).