there have been many eras of thin clients, and we're going through one of them right now. there were dumb text terminals, then there were dumb graphical terminals, then there were netbooks, and now there are javascrippled web sites, often packaged as TRApps. the pocket computers people carry are the dumb terminals of yore, capable of computing fonts and even doing turing-complete postscript, but artificially constrained to serving a remote master