I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the post-PC era. After Steve Jobs repeatedly described the iPad and other Apple products as post-PC devices at this month’s iPad 2 launch, I decided that the post-PC era is already well underway–and that it’s less about the PC going away and more about it being joined by a bevy of other gizmos, from phones to tablets to car-dashboard gadgetry. In other words, the PC is being replaced not by something but by everything. I wrote about that in this TIME.com column.

But after I finished that piece, I kept thinking about the whole subject. And I decided that the PC is, in some respects, going to be replaced by one thing, in a variety of versions.

Return with me now for a moment to, oh, let’s say 1975. A personal computer was a box with switches and lights–and, often, no screen. Phones never had screens. (They frequently had rotary dials, but that’s beside the point.)  TVs…had screens! But they were dumb screens which didn’t know how to do much more than pluck over-the-air broadcasts out of the sky. If you were very lucky, they knew how to play Pong.

Today, a personal computer is a screen. It has an Internet connection, runs apps, and uses a keyboard and pointing device for input. A phone is a screen. It has an Internet connection, runs apps, and uses a touchscreen and/or physical buttons for input. A TV is still a screen, and while many TVs don’t yet have internet connections and run apps, some do and all will soon enough. TVs also tend to have lousy remotes, but that situation is improving.

You can make phone calls on your PC. You can watch TV on your phone. You can run a word processor on your phone. Their emphases are different, but the basic tasks they’re capable of accomplishing are identical.

E-readers have screens, Internet connections, and apps. Cars have screens, Internet connections, and apps. Gizmos that haven’t quite been invented yet will have screens, Internet connections, and apps.

All these devices are now variations on one theme–just as a sporty coupe, a midsized sedan, a pickup truck, and an SUV are variations on a theme. We need a collective name for them.

I used to maintain that people would someday stop calling their phones “phones” and start referring to them as “PCs.” Maybe they will. But “personal computing” is too limiting a name for what all these machines are capable of. (If the PC was invented today, we’d never call it the PC, any more than we’d call a modern phone a phone if it didn’t have 135 years of history behind it.)

So how about just calling them all screens? It’s accurate. It’s unbiased. It’s comprehensive. And if it were common terminology, the debate about whether one sort of device was going to kill another sort of device would finally end.

Maybe I’ll start knowingly using it and see if anyone pays attention.

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The technology, called magnetic resonance, achieves power transfer by feeding energy from a power supply into a coil of wires to produce a magnetic field. A current is transferred when a secondary cool falls within that field. Sony used the technique to send 100 volts of electricity 50 centimeters to “plug in” a wireless 22-inch television set.

Other metallic devices that fall within the field will not become significantly electrified, according to the company. The range can be extended to 80 cm with passive relay units, according to IDG.

Sony’s power system is hardly unique. In 2007, a team of MIT researchers was able to power a light bulb from as far as 7 feet away by using magnetic resonance. But there was considerable energy loss with only 40 percent efficiency.

The research was spun off into company called WiTricity, and it is planning a commercial rollout of the technology – once it is refined. If Sony’s experiment is any indication, those refinements could take awhile.

Sony is also tackling the efficiency issue. While its prototype was 80 percent efficient, additional energy loss occurred after the transmission was made to the secondary coil. One quarter of the original 80 watts was lost.

With further improvements, the energy loss could become more acceptable, but I don’t believe in wasting electricity (and potentially increasing carbon emissions) for aesthetics. If the technology could be used to eliminate the need for toxic batteries to power portable devices, Sony could be onto something. For now, though, a power cord does the job just fine for televisions.

As far as I knew, the end game for the once proud domestic consumer electronics manufacturing industry came years ago; if I’d known I could still have bought a TV set made stateside, I would have tried to do so. (The Sony plant wasn’t even all that old–it was founded to build projection TVs in 1990, and later switched to LCDs.)

With the Sony plant’s shutdown next February, anyone know if there’s a single gadget left that will roll off an American assembly line? Buying stuff from icons of American industry like HP and Apple doesn’t help–not only do most of their products originate in Asia and elsewhere, but they’re generally made by contract manufacturers.

Then there are the ones that we can probably live without. A company called Galactic was showing off flat screens wrapped in interchangable cases made out of leather, a material you don’t see much in consumer electronics of any sort, and which I’ve never seen on a TV:

It’s a weird effect. And apparently, Galactic wants it to come off as, well, kinky. Witness the signage it had up with its leather set:

Creepy, no?

One exception: There’s plenty of hoopla about the first 200-Hz LCD TVs, which run at a faster frame rate to provide smoother action with less motion blur. The company that’s first to market with this breakthrough is justly proud about it. Here’s a snapshot I took in Sony’s booth:

..and here’s one from Samsung’s booth:

Yup–both companies are claiming credit for being the first. (Sony and Samsung share some LCD production, which might explain the synchronicity here.) The dualing firsts kind of point out the silliness of specsmanship in general: Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much which company was first and which one was second. Unless, of course, you’re talking about marketing campaigns. (“The World’s Second 200-Hz TV” just doesn’t have the same ring.)

Is 200-Hz worth getting excited about? The jury’s still out. Samsung has a demo that showed 50-Hz vs. 200-Hz, but it was so obviously rigged that it wasn’t a useful data point: The 50-Hz video was more flickery than a Charlie Chaplin film. I didn’t see any similar comparison at Sony’s both. Both 50-Hz TVs did, indeed, display extremely smooth imagery, but I learned a long time ago not to pay much attention to TV demos at trade shows, since they almost always look gorgeous. What will matter is how much better 200-Hz looks with real-world data sources like cable and satellite TV and standard-def DVDs and Blu-Ray discs almost nobody ever uses those sources when showing off sexy new technologies.

More IFA tidbits to come, and full disclosure: I’m attending the show as a paid speaker at several panels.