Mobile data and devices
Don’t get me wrong, i really hold Russell Beattie in high esteem, i mean he’s about as far ahead of the curve wrt cellphones as you can be in the us of a and reading him for almost two years now i’m thoroughly convinced that he’s one of the good guys, but reading this post i can’t but wonder whether he drank too much of the convergence/rich-mobile-media kool aid.
I’ve been there, i’ve picked up a 7650 when it was the only mass-market cam-/smartphone available in europe and i kept running around and i showed people how cool it was and that it could take pictures and they said “these pictures look like crap!” and they were right. And when the 3650 was about to come to market i told people that it supported mmc and you could watch whole movies or tv-episodes on it, and they said “who wants to watch a movie on such a miserable, tiny screen?” and again they were right. They even dismissed the idea before they knew how much time and work it takes to get a video into the right format for phone consumption.
I’ve been as big a believer in convergence as it gets, but nowadays i just don’t buy it anymore. Basically, i want the same as Tim Bray: a capable, lightweight laptop and ubiquitous always-on connectivity. Guess what? That’s exactly what i got: a 12″ ibook, a crappy 3g phone with an absurdly fast connection speed and a 500mb data package.
That’s not to say that mobile data won’t be big, i just think that people have very different demands and that it’s a little rash to declare mobitv or j2me games the next mobile killer-app. Ubiquitous always-on connectivity will profoundly change the way we live, but it’s a little short-sighted to draw the conclusion that mobile phones (of all devices) will be the next breakthrough in mobile media/computing. Imho it makes more sense to focus on the services, not the devices - nothing wrong with the desire for a simple mobile phone/modem without bells and whistles. Of course it’s also entirely possible that i’ll eat my own words a year from now.
Btw: why exactly am i listening to 80s pop on web radio? Could someone whack me hard, please?