Dining Technology

I guess this was always going to happen but seeing it for the first time really blew me away:

It is a wireless touch screen tablet pc that sits on each table in a restaurant (the entire menu, and some limited explanations, can be viewed via this).

The tablet can come off its docking station and be passed around (no wires/locks) and means that the only staff that need to walk the floor are the ones carrying orders. Better yet, it is easy to review what you have ordered and how much you have spent - I think there was even a price per person calculator (with more options than simply divide by n) but has taken me a while to get this photo off my phone and so my memory may be a bit fuzzy [correction: my memory is fuzzy but my feeling is it did have a bill-split calculator].

Next time I will have to take my laptop and run a network scanner and packet sniffer to see how robust their solution is: "Table#7, I know you ordered this but there is no garlic bread beer set...?!"