Device Convergence
The iPad has made me think a bit about device convergence. Conceptually, I have 8 main devices in my life:
- A phone. Receives calls (and occasionally makes them). Has to last a full day of battery at least, preferably a full weekend.
- A development box. Big keyboard, big screen, fair amount of computing power. Let’s me code.
- A home gaming machine. Big screen, good controller, good sound, lots of horsepower. Let’s me play full on modern games.
- A mobile gaming machine. Portable, good screen (for a portable), decent sound, decent input, decent horsepower. Lets me play games on the go. Battery life is not hugely important, as long as it can last a couple of hours.
- An ebook reader. High-rez screen, portable, good battery life, good sunlight visibility. Let’s me read books comfortably for long periods of time an on the go.
- A home diversion device. Decent screen, decent keyboard, decent horsepower, internet connection. This is used “at home” to browse the internet, read email, watch video, play small games, write blog posts, IM, and so on. It must be accessible where I spend most of my downtime.
- A mobile diversion device. Highly portable, good battery, always connected to the internet, reasonable screen, touchscreen, not impotent, preferably some kind of keyboard. This is used for the same kinds of things as the home diversion device, except for when I’m on the go.
- A music player. Stores and plays lots of music. Prefereably all my music. Preferably portable with really good battery life.
I pretty much use all 8 of these conceptual devices every day. Now, obviously, I don’t really want 8 different devices for this, so I make some compromises to reduce number and cost of these devices. This is not always possible; device 3 (home gaming device) is, in fact, a dedicated device. It’s my PS3. Full-on modern gaming, such as Fallout 3 (my current game) is demanding. It takes a lot of fairly specialized and expensive hardware to get that kind of game to play properly. You can game with a computer; and lots of people do. But the price of a decent gaming computer is 3 times the price of a console, for approximately the same experience. Unfortunately, consoles are pretty bad at most anything except gaming, so I end up with a dedicated gaming device. So, that’s one down. (Well, really more than one, because we have a Wii, a PS2, a PSOne, a dreamcast, a NES, and so on… but I don’t use them hardly at all, so I’m not counting them here.)
I have another dedicated device, my ebook reader. There’s a good reason for that: e-ink. Anyone who has tried to do any significant amount of pure reading on an LCD has discovered that they make horrible reading devices. I stare at a screens all day at work, and they’re about as good as screens get, but I still have to look away all the time to rest my eyes. Not so with e-ink. I can literally read for hours without looking up and be fine, just like paper. It’s awesome. Nothing else currently available comes close. However, for anything except reading books, e-ink is currenlty useless. It’s refresh rate is just fast enough to turn pages, but not fast enough for anything else. So, my ebook reader (a Sony PRS-600) is my other dedicated device.
Now the compromises start. First, my development machine. As much as I love my hoss workstation at work (quad-core, 4G, dual 24″ LCDs), it’s very big, very non-portable, takes up lots of desk space, and is very expensive. I spend most of my down-time at home in the living room sitting in a chair with my feet up. This means that getting access to a hoss dev box (which would presumably be on my desk in the computer room) would be difficult. I would need to either give up my living room time with my family or my dev box time. So, I use a laptop for personal development. This allows me to spend time in the living room with my family.
Once I have a laptop, I can compress a number of other pieces of functionality into it as well. My home diversion box, used primarly in the same downtime as I do my development, is also my laptop. It has all my music on it, so it ends up being my primary music player (I use it at work to listen to music). I even use it for some gaming, although admittedly not much. It’s not very powerful.
For portable gaming, I have a DS, but I don’t ever use it. I basically take it on flights, and that’s it. Why? Because my G1 is a decent mobile gaming device. There’s lots of games that are quite fun, and lots of them are games that don’t seem to end up on dedicated mobile gaming platforms, like sudoku and freecell. In addition, it has always-on internet, so it can use that to enhance the gaming.
This leaves a phone and a mobile diversion device. Now historically, I had two devices for this: A moto flip phone and my 770/n810. However, for the last year and a half, I’ve had a G1. Initially, I carried my n810 as well (since I used it at the time as my ebook reader), but my G1 quickly usurped all the features of my n810, and it became my main portable device, with one exception: reading. It’s a poor ebook reader. Too small, too short battery life, and that everpresent LCD. In addition, I used to carry an actual mp3 player with me for portable music. However, my G1 has usurped that role as well. It doesn’t have enough storage to hold all my music, but it holds a good subset. It also docs in my car, so I can use it in there for music.
Now, there’s one device that I left out of the list: GPS. It’s a common dedicated device, and I do use Google Navigator (and before my G1 I used my n810) for GPS fairly often; however, I don’t use it anywhere near as often as the 8 use cases above, so I kinda left it off the list. In addition, I’ve never had a dedicated GPS device; I’ve always used another device as a GPS. All the entries on that list have, at one point or another in my life, been represented by a dedicated device. So, GPS is important to me, but not enough that I’ve ever actually bought a GPS unit.
On to the iPad, which brought this whole thing up. The iPad, as it stands, cannot fit into my life. It tries to be an ebook reader, but it has an LCD, so it fails. It isn’t a phone, so it can’t replace my phone. It would make a decent mobile diversion device, but it’s not enough better than my G1 (or, say, a Nexus One or an iPhone) that it’s worth carrying in addition to my G1, and I have to have my G1 because the iPad isn’t a phone. It is supposed to be a decent mobile gaming device, but again, not significantly better than N1/iPhone, which I have to carry anyway, so… It could be a decent home deversion device for most of those uses; however, it’s lack of a keyboard and lack of a real OS make it completley useless as a dev box, so I have to have my laptop anyway, which is much better in every home diversion category, so it won’t fill that niche either. It’s not powerful enough to be a home gaming box. It’s not any better as a music player than G1/N1/iPhone (and arguably worse because of it’s size). That leaves nothing. I need a laptop, I need a phone, and that covers everything that the iPad can do, and generally better.
So what would it take to get a tablet like the iPad to slot into my life? Well, first off, it has to be able to replace my phone for 95% of my uses. I’m willing to keep my old phone around on the charger so I can put my SIM in it for going to football games. And, don’t tell me a tablet would be a horrible phone. I know it. But lets face it: making actual phone calls is the least common thing I do with my G1. I actually make less than one call a day on average. So a crappy phone is fine, as long as it can work as a phone. I wear a headset for long calls anyway, so that’s not a problem. But, without being a phone, the tablet just cannot fit into my life; I won’t carry it.
The next thing it needs to be able to do is replace my ebook reader. This means it needs an extremely high DPI screen that is directly sunlight visible, and one that won’t hurt my eyes after hours of use. Currently, this is e-ink, which fails for other uses; but there’s some hybrid screens coming out that operate like e-ink or like an LCD. Hopefully something like that would be good enough for reading.
It would have to have great battery life. Like 12 operational hours, at least. I need to be able to actually use it all day without it going dead in the evening. This is actually my main gripe with my G1: it has horrible battery life. If I actually use it much, it fails in the evening. I actually keep it plugged in all day at work, just in case.
It would have to have an always-on internet connection (like my G1), and a decent app store (like my G1) or run a full OS like Linux (which, of course, has tons of apps).
It would have to be the right size. For me, that’s ~6-7″ diagonal. Much bigger than that and it becomes too big to carry or to use as GPS in the car. Much smaller than that, and it’s too small to be a decent ebook reader.
If I had such a device, then I could remove one of the two dedicated devices from my life: my ebook reader. I could consolidate down to a single device that I carry with me all the time. Would I actually do it? I’m not sure. I can think of situations when I’d rather have my current phone (like the afore metioned football game). But, at least there would be a chance. The iPad, as it currently stands, is completely useless.