Nokia's New All-In-One Phone

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Nokia's new phone, introduced today and hitting the shelves in July. The N93, costing $660, will supposedly fill all of your needs for electronic equipment on the go. From the article: 'Should anyone miss the point, Nokia's press extravaganza in a spiffed-up Berlin warehouse ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau of dusty, discarded electronic equipment -- including digital cameras and a cobweb-covered iPod. The message: Nokia plans to make these products obsolete.'"

Comments

Re:Does anyone really like all-in-one devices?

[nile_list]

am I alone in prefering a few different devices that do what they are supposed to do well, rather than a single device that half asses everything.

Exactly! How long have humans had cameras and telephones and music? About as long as we've been able to enjoy using all of those things /without/ "converging" them into a single device.

It's pretty simple.

• A phone has certain interface requirements: 10 buttons for dialing, one for taking a call, a few directional keys for navigating menus, a microphone, a speaker, etc.
• A (non-trivial) camera requires other, /different/ things: a lens, buttons for adjusting shutter/aperature/exposure, white balance, etc.
• A music device requires headphone jacks, a way to navigate a music library, buttons to control playback, etc.

Rotary telephones, regular cameras, and iPods are examples of how devices with one dedicated function are extremely usable. The more you try to force "digital convergence" of disparate devices with completely different interface requirements, the more you end up with a clunky and hard-to-use gadget.

Sure, it'd be great to have something that could do everything and still be intuitively easy to use and still fit in your pocket... but I don't think it'll ever happen.