GigaOM

Apple just reported its fiscal second-quarter 2008 earnings, and well, the declines from the fiscal first quarter (ended Dec. 29, 2007) are remarkably obvious. From a revenue perspective, the year-over-year comparisons are pretty solid, but in other categories the slowdown is rather stark.

These results compare to quarterly net earnings of $770 million, or 87 cents a diluted share, on revenue of $5.26 billion in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 32.9 percent, down from 35.1 percent in the year-ago quarter.

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Are we entering the golden era of handheld computing, with tablets connected to the Internet that make web services do the heavy lifting and let us leave our energy-guzzling, back-breaking notebooks at home?

Given some of the products being launched — or readied for launch — recently, we seem to be heading in that direction, moving one step further into the connected age. Nicholas Carr is also thinking along those lines, and sums it up best:

At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google’s “supercomputer,” will define how we use computers in the future.

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