Half-baked ramble on technology

Tech complexity

Substitute “play MP3s” for “read email” and you’d have a description of the iPod, which has been a raging success even though it’s up against a bunch of multi-purpose gadgets that can read email (poorly, usually), surf the web (poorly, usually), place phone calls, take photographs (poorly), and so forth. I’m not saying an iPod-esque device that just did email would sell well for sure, but it might.

Compare this New Scientist back page blurb:

CELLPHONE companies have a problem on their hands: selling new phones to people who already have several old ones. They seem convinced that what we all want is a dinky little phone that looks pretty in pink, has a colour screen, takes pictures, shows video...and runs out of battery power just when you most need to make an old-fashioned phone call.

Nokia, the world leader in cellphones, used to sell a boring old phone with a black-and-white screen and no camera: the 6310i ran for a week on a single charge. But a couple of years ago Nokia stopped making it, declaring it obsolete.

Recently dealer Carphone Warehouse announced that it had second-hand 6310i phones to sell. They all went within days, at £100 each. There must surely be a moral here for any cellphone company with eyes to see.

So people do want to buy a cellphone that does nothing but hold a charge for a really long time and make phone calls well. I would buy a phone like that in a second. The only reason I own a fancy phone is that I wanted Bluetooth sync with my Mac address book. I hate everything about the Razr I own other than the slim size & the fact that syncing works. The software sucks, sucks, sucks. I don't give a damn about the crappy camera. I want it to sit in my pocket, run for ages on a charge, vibrate when phone calls come in, and make it trivial for me to call my husband.

My theory is that if the single function is important enough, people will prefer a device that does that single function beautifully. Make phone calls. Play MP3s. Take digital photos. When the function isn't crucial, people will put up with the usual artificial-convergence device mediocrity. People don't seem to be dying to read the web with a small device, so being mediocre at that is okay.

With some functions it's easier to design a device that does that function + several others well. That is, once you have a good design for email, doing SMS well is easy. The two tasks have similar hardware requirements: thumb keyboard, good text display on a readable screen. Convergence is natural.

The hardware requirements for a good phone experience are at odds with the requirements for a good email experience. Phones want phone keypads. Phone keypads suck for every task that is not dialing an actual phone number. (Consider the average crapulent voicemail interface.) So be clever: do you want to dial a number or call a particular person? Consider dialing the phone by typing the name of the person you want to call; the phone number itself is just an implementation detail, like an IP address. (Exactly an IP address, actually.) Bye-bye phone keypad. You were useful for thirty+ years, but now you join the dial.

This brings me to the device I work on, which I find simultaneously wonderful and frustrating. The hiptop reads email incredibly well, surfs the web acceptably (given the screen size constraints), places phone calls well, takes photographs poorly, and sends SMS messages really well. It's incredibly annoying that T-mobile chooses to market it as a fashion accessory for hiphop idiots, because it's a functional networked tool.

But then, what Steve Jobs calls the "orifices", the cell carriers, are nearly universally idiotic. Nokia sells crappy gimmick-laden cellphones partly because cell carriers are demanding phones like that. And what carriers demand, they get, even when it's moronic. I look forward to the day when a clever, adventurous NVNO puts its emphasis on delivering an excellent, well-integrated user experience on devices that regular carriers won't touch. The carrier lunches will be eaten.

In the future, the carriers won't exist anyway. Network will be a utility, too essential to public life to allow jackass corporations to screw up. (Instead we'll allow jackass governments to screw it up.) The game will belong to people who design the devices that live on the network, and the content providers.