Sun, 30 November, 2008
Posted in General
at 10 pm
The issues with the ongoing miniaturization of electronic devices leads to a situation where if the device is to continue to evolve, it must make one of two leaps:
A) Integration: Integration is the path that we see the iPhone taking us down as many other tools are doing. You can’t hardly find a cell phone that is only a phone now. Your average digital camera has audio playback of MP3s. Your average MP3 player also plays videos. My phone is a combination address book, note pad, camera, photo album, movie player, music player, weather reporter, stock ticker, scoreboard, text messenger, pager, flashlight, and watch.
B) Wireless interfaces or control at a distance: voice-activated interfaces are the most common way of dealing with miniaturization or other situations that are hands free. Remember, operating hands free can be by choice, not dictated by the situation as with phones in automobiles. The advances in voice-activated dialing from cars has migrated to Bluetooth headsets. Once we get used to talking to our appliances, everything will be more easily controlled. Think of microwave ovens with an interface you can tell “cook this for 3 minutes” and you don’t have to figure out which particular combination of buttons that specific model uses.
Car keys are evolving into key fobs that simply unlock a car as you approach with the fob in your pocket or handbag. By why have a fob-sized device when you only need something large enough to hold a battery. Or take it a step further with an RFID-based sliver of silicon that uses radio wave itself to power the transmitter.
Every mainstream video game console today comes with wireless controllers. The next big leap in connecting home entertainment systems is wireless using W-USB or WiFi. Network Attached Storage like Apple’s TimeCapsule take the storage of digital information and put it in the back room, away from the physical interface elements entirely.
In my next post, I’ll run through some of the effects that these changes will have on some of our current devices and see what the future might bring to them as well as what additional devices may appear.
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Sat, 15 November, 2008
Posted in General
at 10 pm
Most electronic devices shrink until they reach one of two minimum sizes. 1) The size of the removable medium they play or 2) the size of the necessary physical interface.
Example #1: the Mac mini from Apple. The dimensions of the physical box are largely the size of a cigar box, squared-off. The width and depth of the device are largely dictated by the minimum size necessary to contain a CD/DVD removable optical disc. The height seems to be the minimum necessary to stack all of the ports and connections on the face opposite the slot-loading drive. The Nintendo Wii also is hardly larger than optical disc drive.
Example #2: the Apple iPhone and its clones is largely a screen with a phone, web browser, music player stuck behind it. The physical dimensions are largely dictated by the size of the screen. There’s a bit of room at the top and the bottom that’s not screen that could be removed, but there’s no room left to right. The depth of the phone is seriously minimal, but even that could be reduced—as Apple recognized when they brought out the second generation model where the only physical dimension that was changed way the average depth of the device.
Example #3: Televisions are largely the size of the display area. Some of them add more for speakers and control buttons, but they are nothing like the old ‘console televisions’ that have been gone a long time now. The vast majority of the human interface for these devices has been transferred to the remote controls (which are like a plague of locusts in our living room).
Example #4: The portability of a medium has been a factor in terms of it’s length of adoption. This is mostly driven home by the movement of 12” vinyl records and LaserDiscs out of the mainstream formats, replaced by the hand-sized optical disc. But going back even further we can look at hard drives (which started as 24-inch platters in the IBM 350) or floppy disks (starting at 8 inches). Even removable Flash RAM started out at at PCMCIA/PC Card size which is just larger than a credit card and are currently available as MicroSD cards the size of the fingernail on my pinkie finger. I don’t see a need for SD to get much smaller since after a certain point, it becomes too difficult to grasp onto, much less manipulate such a small piece of plastic into a slot.
William Gibson talked about ‘microsofts’ in his early fiction, which were essentially memory storage in the form factor of a toothpick. The smallest-volume item that is made for consumers that I can think of are Tic-Tacs. Can you think of something smaller?
For media, there is no minimum requirement for the size since the physical interaction is with the device that used the media, not the media itself.
So what does this tell us about upcoming electronics? What are the ways around this miniaturization limit? I’ll talk about that in my next entry.
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Sun, 2 November, 2008
Posted in General
at 12 am
All I’m asking is that if you’re going to vote, don’t vote based on the amount of melanin a candidate has. That’s not a very good method of predicting leadership ability.
Please Vote. Please Vote based on issues.
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