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Gadgets of 2002
oo7tushar writes "CNN has this article on some of the new gadgets we can expect to see in 2002. We can expect smaller MP3 players, more powerful cell phones. The biggest barrier remains the cost of the multifunction gadgets (quote - But until consumers -- and not just gearheads -- show a liking to these technologies, and their prices become affordable, some companies are focusing on devices that serve one function well. ")
We can also expect evolution rather than revolution. The article has much more info."
I like my bag phone just fine, thanks
--- Do you believe in the day?
Revolutions, particularly ones that can happen in a span as narrow as a year, are rarely predictable. It seems like a silly claim to say that they will not happen. Evolution, of course, will continue.
The whole article is pretty empty to me. The technologies that were big the past year will continue to get smaller and more powerful. Wow, I've never seen electronic devices go through that before.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Does "gadget" mean something different in North America? There's nothing which screams "gadget" to me more than a Segway.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I currently have everything I need going through my computer. Cable TV, local Radio, internet TV, internet radio, movies, audio, games, phone calls. Why would I want more boxes?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
...great, walking around with a headphone cord running from my wrist to my ears... looking good...
i already look weird, this would just be the nail in the coffin...
Those cool Japanese phones all have a problem - the are very low power and have tiny antennas, and they wont work away from builtup urban centers with *tons* of cell towers. They don't even work on some Japanese college campuses due to the fact that they don't allow cell towers, and yet the phone can't use the tower just a few blocks away. They are a lot of fun, but they just wont work in the American market.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I wouldn't say the article is empty, here's what I got out of it...
I'd say we're in discovery mode... all sorts of things are possible, technically, and companies are just trying to hit upon the right combinations and forms that will fit the utlity or entertainment needs of consumer close enough that they will buy it.
I'm still baffled that we don't have a simple device with a LCD that can be hooked to broadband and (with a subscription service) play every song ever recorded. I would pay money for that. The RIAA really has dropped the ball.
this article on some of the new gadgets we can expect to see in 2002
Or rather the article tells us the gadgets we already had and lets us in on the secret that some of these will be improved. It is full of informative advice like:
MP3 players will shrink in size but hold more songs
DVD players will be able to play audio DVDs
Tablets will be slimmer and lighter
Seriously this article doesn't discuss the cool new toys we will have; all it says is the technology we already have is likely to evolve to the next stage.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
>"Consumers don't want to figure out hardware or software.
>They're so jaded by how hard it is to set up a computer that
>anything that smells like it scares them to death," said Rob
>Enderle, analyst with the Giga Information Group.
In a related story, the US Government has started issuing grants to researchers looking to genetically modify the housecat. "Children no longer wish to clean up their pets' litter boxes. Anything resembling cat poop scares them to death, so we must tailor the cat to suit their needs." The funding for the research grant was gathered by closing down a number of pet care education programmes.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
In their mad craze to make cellphones and other portable hardware smaller and lighter, manufacturers have forgotten two very critical things: (1), A great many of their potential users don't have fingers the size of Tinkerbell's, and (2); The vast majority of their potential users don't have eyes like an eagle's.
As it stands now, my own cellphone (a Motorola 'StarTac' 7868) is small enough that I keep hitting multiple keys when I'm trying to use it. Yes, I looked around for something bigger, with buttons and body sized to fit a guy with big hands, but noooooo -- everything else I found was so light and flimsy that I think even a midget would sneer at them.
Don't even get me started on functionality vs. fluff. When you start demanding that equipment do things that are not part of its intended basic purpose, then quality and durability of the device invariably suffer.
A good example of this is web-enabled cellphones. Who the frell wants to surf the web on a low-resolution dot-matrix LCD screen that's not even an inch and a half across? For that matter, why would anyone want to be so "wired" as to have a need to get to the web from their handheld in any case? The phones are enough of a distraction now without being 'net-ready. How many car accidents have been (rightfully) blamed on them to date?
Just because a manufacturer can do something with technology does not always mean that they should. Smaller, lighter, and more features that you'll never use does NOT mean "better." I think the manufacturers would do well to provide a lot less fluff and a lot more practicality and durability in their products.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
FTA:
/.'ers) can't accept that.
the industry is at a crossroads, switching from analog to digital technologies, and consumers need time to fully grasp the advantages of the fancy new devices now available.
Wasn't this same thing being said like 15+ years ago when the CD Player was a new and hip thing?
Hmmm... Actually, they were even saying this in the 70's when my Dad was on the R&D team for Zenith that developed the first Video Disk (Yes, he still has the very first Video Disk framed and hanging on his wall in his home office).
My point, you may ask? When the hell are people (on the whole) going to be able to accept things are changing? I mena not 100 years ago, whom ever at Mercades-Benz (sp) was building the firrt internal combustion engine. Even less long ago people started flying. The 50's then the 60's then the... well, you get the idea. These same things have been being said for generations now, but it still seems people (on the whole, not geeks like us
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Just the sort of bigoted ignorance of HCI/Human-Factors that are holding back computers (and Linux particularly).
How hard is it to operate a Gameboy? Cart in, switch flicked. That's it!
CD player - CD in, button pressed. Music!
I don't want to have to drop to a command line to do play my mp3s on my digital hifi. I don't want to even *see* my VCR flashing <blink>12:00</blink> at me - let alone figure out a poorly translated Japanese user manual and try and set the damn thing.
That's what they are talking about. People don't want to have to fight with their toys just to get them to work. Flick a switch and off they go.
Terry
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
I don't own a cell phone or a pager, my trusty PDA is a pad of 3x3 post-it notes, and I've never listened to an MP3 file. Yes, I do own a very nice CD player, but I still prefer my turntable; and my stereo amplifier and preamplifier use vacuum tubes.
Seriously, how many people really *want* to have and carry around all these gadgets? I sure don't.
Merry Christmas to all my Slashdot friends!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Hell, you'd have to be a complete moron to not understand the clock setting instructions on my 5 year old Sony VCR.
Sony, to their credit invest as much beleif in HF as Microsoft.
The trouble is getting Joe Dipshit to actually READ the friggin manual, it's not like it's particularly hard...
(emphasis added)
There's the rub - it shouldn't be hard at all. Infact, why should I need to use a manual to do something as set the time. On my cheap watch I turn the bezel forward - the time moves forward. I turn the bezel back - the time moves backwards.
Why can't a VCR be that simple?
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
I don't want a smaller mp3 player. Current ones are just about the right size. I want a digital music player with at least 128MB, *BIG* display, Ogg Vorbis support, fast USB connection, and an open interface that can be easily accessed from non-Windows systems as a block device. I also want good sound quality. Will there be such a thing? I highly doubt it. Why is it that manufacturers of portable devices think that smaller automatically equals better? Cell phones suffer the same problem. Why does nobody care about the factors that actually make up quality anymore?
The biggest barrier remains the cost of the multifunction gadgets (quote - But until consumers -- and not just gearheads -- show a liking to these technologies,
No, no, no, no, no. Multi-function devices are not good. I had a nokia 9110 mobile phone that allowed access to the internet(proper internet, not just wap). It was too big to be carried, and too small to do any proper surfing. I had a 200 cd changer. It didn't play cds as well as a single cd player, and it changed them considerably worse than me (tended to get white goo all over them when it dropped them in the wrong place, and then scratch them to death). Shoes and lightbulbs are individually good devices, but the shoe lightbulb is unlikely to take off, because generally it is better to keep devices with seperate functions seperate.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
I work as a engineer in the cellphone industry, and from the price of our stock I can tell you that no one in the US at least wants overbloated feature rich cellphones. They just want to talk and have great battery times.
I know its different in Japan, but that technology doesn't seem to be getting here very quickly. There's no spectrum space for it here.
The problem with a lot of new technology is that it's only better by the numbers, whether that be storage space, physical size, image size, etc. They're not often better by quality though.
Observe this: a Canon Rebel 2000 35mm camera and any decent lens takes pictures of a MAGNITUDE higher quality than most any sub-$2000 digital camera. The lens is interchangeable, you can choose focus points, aperture settings, shutter speed, etc. Sure, a $1000 digicam takes 4 megapixel pictures and burns them onto a CD-R, but you still can't tweak camera settings as well as a fairly basic 35mm camera, and often things like sharpness and color depth aren't nearly as good as film.
Same with MP3 players. You can make them tiny, but do they sound good? I don't have audiophile golden ears, but on my Sony DJ headphones, I can hear the difference between CDs on a portable CD player and most MP3 players, which either use a cheesy DAC or have a horrible headphone output.
And, as other have noted, size is a big consideration. You can get a 14.1" screen on laptops that displays 1600x1200 resolution, but unless you're of the 20% of Americans that has good eyesight, you won't be able to read it. Ditto tiny keys on cell phones, watches, etc. User interface is waaaaaay behind technology in most areas.
So basically, we have some amazing technology, but it's being hindered by oversight in basic areas. It would be like using $5 Radio Shack speaker cable to power a $20,000 stereo system. The devil is in the details, but too often, they seem to be overlooked...
I want the web on a handheld... for public transport.
but I also don't want an internet connected toaster or a psychic fridge or half the other crap that's around.
before you build it... stop and think... does it fill a need?
What I think is that there should be an "open-source design" project that functions in the traditional open-source manner, but produces a design instead of code. Then another project could be started to implement this design. How's that for solving the problem of starting a project in the Bazaar style? Does anyone else want to take part in a project to design a new interface for computers?
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Also, I'd like to note that the rewards of a task have no effect on the difficulty of the task. I do agree that a focus on asthetics is ruining quite a few interfaces these days. BTW, thanks for the pointer to Trillian, it looks neat. I just hope that the skinned interface is useful and not just eye-candy.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}