Is the Single-Function Device Doomed?
I get the value proposal–how useful and space-efficient information technology is to personal a single device that can function as a headphone, a electronic messaging appliance, a web browser, a camera, a videocam, an e-reader, an MP3 player, a Global Positioning System unit, a tape recorder, a stopo watch, and so on. Today's smartphone is the last formulate in convergence devices, the electronic equivalent of the Swiss Army Stab earlier you've misplaced the tweezers and toothpick.
As if to underscore our headlong dash down the touring toward all-in-oneness, Cisco hold out week of a sudden (and kinda stunningly) announced its conclusion to pull the plug on the Flip videocam–the category-defining handheld that launched a million YouTube videos.
Any encounter we could put one over the brakes? While doh-it-all devices lav be keen, sometimes they wear't do anything especially competently. And so I promise we don't see the death of all of the exceeding devices that are dedicated to doing a individual job genuinely, very well.
Before you accuse me of hopeless fuddy-duddyism, LET me make information technology clear that I'm not slagging smartphones. I'd feel naked without my Droid Incredible. When I don't cause something better on hand, I routinely use it for quicky videos, pics, gaming, you name it. But for most activities beyond making phone calls, information technology's a second-class citizen–a highly compromised alternate to dedicated devices that answer a better job.
When One Is Enough
About those alternatives: For netmail, I continue to comport a BlackBerry–still the best portable e-mail appliance ever created. For fashioning phone calls, it can't match my Android phone, so I seldom use it for that purpose. Just I'm fain to lug the extra item approximately just to ensure that I can handle the every day e-mail outpouring As effectively as possible.
The Kindle and its e-reader kin really can't be pound for reading digital books. E-ink technology is far transcendent to an LCD screen for displaying gray-scale text, unless you're satisfied with graininess and substandard text edition interlingual rendition. Matchless matter I admire close to the iPhone 4 is its retina display–which actually does a great job of displaying the printed Holy Writ–but even off so, I find the small screen to a fault incommodious to permission a truly pleasurable reading experience.
For listening to music active, I swear on an old iPod. I have few MP3s on my smartphone and I've occasionally streamed Pandora on it equally well. But because the phone performs a host of background functions and sports a lovely color screen, it can't approach the battery life that my dumb, just-do-one-thing iPod delivers. So I avoid playing music on my phone because I want to make true that it has enough juice to make and receive phone calls when necessary. As a bonus, my iPod carries 56GB of hot tunes, far to a higher degree could fit on my phone's MicroSD card.
Cameras and videocams are perhaps the most threatened of the single-function devices. Today's phones, equipped with integrated 8-megapixel cameras and specced to handle HD video, are supremely convenient–lightweight and e'er on hand. Yet for all the impressive-full specs they offer, they still take up crappy pictures in anything less than nonesuch light. An SLR OR decent point-and-shoot camera produces well break images. It seems a shame that many people will be capturing their most precious memories happening their phone's inferior camera.
Then at that place's that old standby, the wristwatch. Many of my colleagues, especially those under 35, bu don't have one. When they want to eff the time, they get the picture into a pocket and extract a phone. That's great until they're sitting in a seemingly interminable meeting and want to know, discreetly of course, how much much they'll need to support. I can get along the indiscernible sleeve-tug wrist-roll move to arrive a time report. My spotter-free buddies undergo to suffer in shut up.
Power I recommend a watch to go with that smartphone?
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/490747/is_the_single_function_device_doomed.html
Posted by: cotecauseveras1987.blogspot.com
0 Response to "Is the Single-Function Device Doomed?"
Post a Comment