I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that handhelds need WiFi to be
viable. I don’t think that’s true. (Big surprise.) But in thinking about
it, I came up with an idea that I can’t believe more people don’t champion.
Why is the iPod such a success? It wasn’t the first MP3 player on the
market. It wasn’t even the first to use a hard drive instead of flash
memory. In fact, there are lots of MP3 players out there that look better
on paper than the iPod. They have more storage for the price, support more
formats, have bigger screens capable of playing video, double as voice
recorders, have more features. So why do these devices lose to the iPod?
Because the iPod, like so much else from Apple, does what it does extremely
well, but no more.
The iPod is a perfect example of a divergent device. Instead of combining
more and more features into a do-everything box, the iPod specializes and
focuses on music storage, organization and playback. That’s all it does,
but Apple has put so much thought into the design of the iPod that it’s
easier and more pleasant to use than the more powerful, but more
complicated, competition.
So why is there so much outcry from the geek community towards convergent
solutions? Divergence works. Mobile devices work best when they focus on
one thing and do it really well. So why should a PDA have a GPS, or WiFi,
or a camera? It shouldn’t. A PDA should have a big screen, lots of memory,
a user interface designed for pen input, strong battery and Bluetooth.
Nothing else.
Why Bluetooth but not WiFi? Because Bluetoth is what makes divergence pay
off. You can have several devices that all do their own thing perfectly,
with no compromises, and they can still borrow each others’ resources when
they need them. I can use my handheld as my central “console”, doing
everything with it that I’d do with a laptop, only without lugging around
the laptop. But through Bluetooth on the PDA, I can pull GPS coordinates
from a Bluetooth GPS, I can pull in images from a Bluetooth-enabled
digicam, and I can connect to the internet through a Bluetooth cell phone.
None of that is new. But this is what occurred to me that really reframed
the concept. The phone in this scenario isn’t really a phone. It’s the
communications module of the PAN. Sure, it does voice (preferably through a
Bluetooth headset), but in this case its role is providing the connection
to the internet. Now here’s the interesting part. Some newer phones, like
the Motorola v600, support WiFi as well as cellular technology. Doesn’t it
make more sense to keep the communications technology in the communications
module? Why put WiFi in the handheld, increasing the cost and complexity
while reducing battery life, if you can use a Bluetooth connection to the
phone and use WiFi to access the internet from there?
Post a Comment