Simple Simon Met a Pie Man

Another case of an interesting thread and an interesting post (mine, of course).  And, once again, it's from Simple Talk; on this thread.

Since you mentioned it, I'll beat the drum, yet again, for the necessary paradigm shift (in many places, anyway) which small keyboardless (in practice, even when one exists) devices. 

- Mostly, it was seeing that the best existing tablet and smartphone apps do simple, intuitive things, using simple intuitive interfaces to solve single problems.

As I've said here and elsewhere for some time, by (re-)factoring databases to high normal form (narrow tables, specifically), one gains a number of advantages.

1) such schemas are inherently candidates for UI generation, due to DRI
2) they're inherently robust, due to DRI
3) they're likely most of the way to being "pickable", which is what tablets do
4) given the ability to host high normal form databases on SSD, then building them to such a UI is feasible

Tablets have a long history, in fact; the iPad is nothing new, except for its venue.  Those doing VAR systems that work in warehouses have been writing to RF tablets for a couple of decades, and designing to high normal form (or, as often, working around its absence).