Glance a Little Further Back to See the Future

Per­haps there is an inner his­tor­ian within me. The latest spate of reviews fea­tur­ing the iPhone versus this chal­lenger and that has me think­ing that at the pace that we move today we don’t take enough time to reach a little fur­ther back to con­sider our for­ward pro­gress. This case in point, every­one eval­u­at­ing the iPhone or the iPod Touch (here­after ITouch — as I am sure Apple would have rather called it) seems to be pitch­ing it against the Nokia N95, HTC Kaiser, or the latest Black­berry. All appro­pri­ate for being the cur­rent fla­vour of the mar­ket — and when it comes to cell phones, they have such a lim­ited shelf life. How long does the aver­age phone remain cur­rent these days? Des­pite Apple’s slight revamp of the iPhone, I will go out on a limb and sug­gest that it may have greater longev­ity than most. How­ever, not because for tech­nical prowess, but to Apple’s mar­ket­ing pan­ache. Non­ethe­less, as I look at the com­par­is­ons, I am struck that we might best be able to gauge how much of a tech­nical mar­vel it is by com­par­ing a little fur­ther back.

The new AT&T Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser) reminded me in pro­file of my ori­ginal Psion 5mx…and I got to think­ing that a com­par­ison between the the IPhone and a New­ton is not really that far a stretch. My New­tons (cul­min­at­ing in the mar­vel­lous 2100) and the Psion are still won­der­fully futur­istic devices that got rather short shrifts. The New­ton appar­ently for per­sonal Jobs-Sculley reas­ons and the PSion because it was one of those funny little Brit­ish things that just don’t get the mass expos­ure needed for viability.

As we pon­der the effect­ive­ness of the on screen vir­tual iPhone key­board, one can­not be left unim­pressed by the ver­sat­il­ity of the tech­no­logy. Tech­no­logy that guesses what key you meant to press rather than actu­ally pressed! Yet, for the great leap for­ward, I won­der why there isn’t a pref­er­ence that allows you to match the key­board to your fin­ger size — or whether you are ‘typ­ing’ with your fin­gers or oper­at­ing the key­board via your bug, clumsy thumbs. Mine have been too big and too clumsy every time I have tried the key­board on the iTouch. While there were some tech­nical flaws with the hinge mech­an­ism on the Psion, that key­board let one touch type on a tiny, yet power­ful key­board that fol­ded into the device when not needed.

The New­ton Key­board was a little more cum­ber­some as it was a sep­ar­ate device, but it was a respons­ive little thing and allowed you the lux­ury of carry or not car­ry­ing.
The inter­ac­tion with both these devices was sur­pris­ingly accom­mod­at­ing. You could be very screen driven very key­board driven, or find your own com­bin­a­tion of the two. With newer entrants I have found that you don’t have nearly the options of find­ing your best way of inter­act­ing with the device. You could hack the OS to your heart’s con­tent and the manufacturer’s worked closely with third parties to develop an array of peri­pher­als and soft­ware pack­ages to meet diverse users’ needs.

One of the great pluses of the ori­ginal Palm Pilot (name very delib­er­ately used) was that it only let you inter­act in one way — but that one way was simple and solid. You either adap­ted to the Pilot or you didn’t. I remem­ber exper­i­ment­ing with a paper based ver­sion (much in the same way it is legend­ized that Jeff Hawkins did with a wood block) to see if it would work for me. The reward from this lim­it­a­tion of inter­ac­tion was an instant-on, speedy address book with cal­en­dar. Over­time, the beauty of this simple approach was lost, but there was ini­tial value in the tradeoff of speed for flex­ib­il­ity. Without sound­ing like the old codger remem­ber­ing how things were done in his day, I won­der why it is as we have all the pro­cessing power of the iPhone run­ning OSX that it isn’t just a wee bit more accom­mod­at­ing of our indi­vidual pecu­li­ar­it­ies. Is it the hubris that smacks of omni­scient engin­eers that will teach us how we should use their devices?

How does an iPhone com­pare to a New­ton or a Psion? I would sug­gest that there are areas in which the older devices demon­strate that trade offs have been made over time that have taken us down a dif­fer­ent road. How­ever, rather than paus­ing as we pro­ceed down that road, and glance back to ensure that it was the right fork, we have moved along with little regard to where we came from. It like the mara­thon run­ners in a clump, tak­ing a cer­tain fork and con­tinu­ing along, only glan­cing to their com­pet­i­tion to the side to determ­ine that they have taken the right route and assum­ing that since every­one else is on that path, then it must be the right and there­fore best one.

This is all highly sub­ject­ive of course. As my eye con­tinue to fail, I am increas­ingly con­scious of con­trast and screen legib­il­ity. So, I come to be appre­ci­at­ive of the won­der­fully back­lit New­ton or Psion (the New­ton has served as a flash­light for me a couple times — you can light the room with that won­der­ful green glow). The screen on the New­ton was phe­nom­enal by the 2100 iter­a­tion. Unfor­tu­nately by the time it reached this pin­nacle, it had also become tagged with ridicule for the poor ini­tial per­form­ance of the text recog­ni­tion engine. The his­tory of com­put­ing is strewn with those that have rushed to mar­ket with under­powered devices to to gain the first mover advant­age, only to suc­cumb to harsh reviews that stall its sub­sequent momentum. Its obvi­ously a close run thing. The 128K Macin­tosh in 1984 was severely han­di­capped and it was only through some fancy foot­work with the Fat Mac and the sub­sequent Mac Plus that momentum was both sus­tained and even­tu­ally augmented.

The OS of the Psion was sim­il­arly impress­ive. Now it has evolved in to the Sym­bian OS of the Nokia phone and pos­sibly been the inspir­a­tion for the Nokia Com­mu­nic­ator series. The close-run thing is the thing — for­give the repe­ti­tion. In so many cases, screen bright­ness is sac­ri­ficed for bat­tery life, and we gain in small incre­ments. And in the next iter­a­tion we inch a little fur­ther in the same dir­ec­tion, often seem­ingly without regard for the decision that took us down that dir­ec­tion of com­prom­ise in the first place.

Len­ovo has made an inter­est­ing acknow­ledg­ment, if only semi-publicly. They had a win­ner in some of the early Think­Pad X series laptops. To my mind IBM reached a very solid plat­eau with the X32 and the length of time that this model sat on the price list was test­a­ment to the market’s affirm­a­tion of this. They reduced size and weight while sim­ul­tan­eously retain­ing pro­cessing power and the on-board graph­ics cap­ab­il­ity. Then they took a step too far. They decided that it was the small size and weight that was the cru­cial com­pon­ent in the bal­ance and they sac­ri­ficed machine per­form­ance for another pound. The X4X series was a mis­step. Small yes, but at too high a per­form­ance cost. They admit­ted there error and let the size of the newer X6X series creep back up and in exchange gave back some of the pro­cessing power and hard drive speed that had been lost. They caught their error, admit­ted their mis­take and rec­ti­fied it. They appear to be mon­it­or­ing the bal­ance and respond­ing to missteps…a great little busi­ness school case.

There is no doubt that in the vis­ion of the iPhone or the N95, one can glimpse the future of mobile com­put­ing and as we refine the notion of con­ver­gence between our mobile devices, these plat­forms give us room to grow, but I won­der how often those ever so crafty engin­eers look a little fur­ther back to see the future of mobile com­put­ing.