Let me preface this by saying that I have much love for Pocketables and Jenn is one of the few people I think can legitimately claim to be an even greater gadget-hound than myself. So, I don’t mean any disrespect.
What caught my eye was an article called What is your ideal mobile internet device?
Blue-sky questions like this pop up frequently on gadget-related forums, and what I’ve never understood is why the answers are almost always bullet-point lists of hardware specs.
A certain size screen! An Atom CPU! 2 GB of memory!
What difference does any of that make? The Newton MessagePad 2100 is in my top 10 mobile devices of all time, and it ran on a 167 MHz ARM CPU and had about 1 MB of internal storage. There are aspects of it (particularly the Notepad) which remain unmatched in terms of usability.
Hardware is hardware. It’s cheap. It’s a commodity. It gets better every year, so calling a particular hardware configuration of all things “ideal” seems ridiculous, as it will all be obsolete within two years no matter how good it is.
What’s even weirder about these bulleted hardware wish-lists is they tend to be oddly pragmatic, often based on technology that is available now or very soon. Jenn throws out “5 hour battery life” — how is that ideal? Even if we’re trying to be down-to-earth, can’t we at least shoot for a full workday? Newtons could eke out a week or two on AA batteries with nominal use (in an era before the power demands of backlit color screens and internet connectivity, of course).
When I think about my “ideal” mobile device, it comes down to: what can I do with it? Will it let me have a full “desktop” internet experience, or close to it? Will it present that experience in a way that makes sense on a small form-factor, or is it bolted on top of a shoddy port of a desktop OS that’s totally inappropriate for the intended use? What forms of input will it handle and how? For input methods that are error-prone, what are the correction methods, and how easy are they to use?
Will I be able to install whatever software I like on it? Will I be able to access the internet from “anywhere”, or only in specific hotspots dictated by a particular technology that’s popular right now? Will it still be able to get on the internet if I go to another country?
Will I have to mess around with “syncing” my various forms of data, or has the manufacturer come up with a more elegant solution? Is the device meant to stand on its own, or be a counterpart to a desktop machine?
The one thing every “successful” (to my mind, if not the marketplace) mobile device has always had is custom software. I don’t mean a layer of gaudy icons, designed by the nephew of the head of the sub-department of the manufacturing plant that also oversees rubber gaskets and refrigeration who is pretty good with the Photoshop filters, sitting uneasily upon a substrate of Windows Mobile.
I’m talking about a software stack that considers, from day one of its existence: battery life, memory usage, bulk storage capacity, user interaction, responsiveness, real-world usage scenarios (not how well it demos), data accessibility. That sort of thing.
My “ideal” mobile device is designed from scratch for its form-factor, allows me to communicate wherever in the world I am, holds all my important data, allows me to search it, identify relationships between it, and interact with it in a consistent and human-friendly way, doesn’t “own” my data or lock it into a particular platform.
Beyond that, any CPU that is sufficiently responsive is fine.
