In 2003, I had an
MP3 player, a
cell phone with a camera, and a
PalmOS PDA that I used as an
eBook reader and an offline web browser. At home, I had a desktop PC with a broadband connection.
It's now 2007. I have exactly the same devices in front of me, and they still do the same things, except that the desktop has been replaced by a laptop-- one of those $450 Best Buy loss leaders-- you know, where you stand in line on a Sunday morning to buy one, and they immediately walk you off into a separate part of the store and try to convince/coerce you into buying the full suite of service contract, memory upgrades, anti-virus, peripherals, and Home Office software to bring your initial costs up to $900+, or the point where they make money.
So the laptop is the new desktop, where I hook up the MP3 player, the Palm PDA via their 90's era HotSync program (as opposed to just treating the damn thing like a flash drive), and just glare ever-so-slightly at the cell phone whose non-standard memory card and buggy operating system pretty much prohibit data transfers by any other means than just emailing each one via their pay-per-byte data plan.
So what would sticking everything on the same device do? Hopefully the combined device would be smaller than the separate ones. But aside from having one battery to be run down considerably faster than three separate ones, it's hard to see the overlap. The data plan gets a lot more expensive when you put a PDA on your cell phone (from $4 a month to $60). The stakes get higher when you drop your MP3 player. (I've dropped my MP3 player many many times and it still works, though looks like crap. I've checked in a PDA once in my luggage
on the way back from Japan, and now have a box full of useless peripherals. The one I carried did fine. Yes, I took 2 separate PDA's on a trip.)
So what's the solution? I'm wondering lately about just replacing them with ones that use an
SD card. Put the SD card in the computer to upload/download data, put it in the cell phone for photos, move it to the MP3 player for music, move it to the PDA to use as an eBook / offline web reader. Rinse, repeat.
Kind of reminds me of the last time I moved a diskette around between multiple computers and multiple programs. It was 1991. Bill Clinton was running for President that year, with the following directives to his campaign staffers: Keep it Simple, Stupid (to become: It's the Economy, Stupid.)
That kind of connectivity used to be called "
Sneakernet", but was a useful stopgap before networking became affordable, while allowing different applications to start talking to each other, and leverage each other in new and interesting ways. What would any of that buy you? Maybe you'd get to customize your media with pics, music, and podcasts while you're wasting time in line, driving, or something even less productive. Maybe you can capture your photos from your cell, work with them on your PDA and then copy them to your computer or web accounts. You'd just have to keep moving around a little memory card. Eventually, you'd get tired of it and just buy the whole thing in Bluetooth or whatever replaced it by the time the industry finally caught up.
The fact that you can get interface-free Bluetooth GPS receivers should be interesting, too.
But in the meantime, here's one semi-useful convergent device I'd like to see: a Bluetooth (or IrDA) USB adapter with a U3 flash drive. Why? U3 is a platform for making portable apps- ones that run off the USB drive. It'd be nice if they could drive an additional device, like directly interact with IrDA or Bluetooth. then you'd have a very standard way to write a portable communication device-- plug it in to any PC, talk to your cell phone/pda/mp3 player.
Hey, it'd be a start. There's no telling what kind of new applications you could put together if you could get them talking...
