(keitai-l) Re: Bill Gates doesn't believe in MS Smartphone future?

From: Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net>
Date: 03/20/04
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0403201733150.482@angelic-vtfw.cvpn.cynic.net>
On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Giovanni Bertani wrote:

> Yes but we are not talking about geeks or power users but mass market.

Geeks and power users come first; mass market comes later. Or maybe not,
but it's reasonable to try. I'm sure many folks thought that the Sony
Walkman was a silly product at first.

> Why portable TVs have always been a very niche market?

Probably for the same reason that portable FM radios are a very small
market in comparison to portable tape/CD/MP3 players.

> Are those tiny displays acceptable for teh users?

Possibly not. On the other hand, people do browse the web on tiny
screens, even when at home and near their computers.

If this sort of thing becomes successful, we might during the course of
that see the small screens replaced by other display technology, such as
goggles. Or they might just make the darn things bigger. I don't have so
much interest in video, but I would certainly carry around something the
size of a trade paperback if it had a nice, high-resolution screen on it
and held the books I'm currently reading.

> Why not OTA? There will be several services accessible directly by a
> 3G device letting you do this without connecting to your wired PC at
> home for downloading.

If it's cheap enough, sure.

> I can't imagine me setting a sort of virtual digital recorder on my
> PC, syncing my portable media player and seeing it later... is just so
> unpractical...

If the PC is the complaint, don't do it on your PC; do it on your Tivo.
But people already sync their PDAs and their MP3 players.

> Planning is not something you usually do when you cosume video media on
> the go.

Ah, but this is the point of the iPod, isn't it? Put a big enough hard
drive in it, and you don't have to plan. You just load it up with all
the stuff you want.

If you had a 300 GB hard drive in the thing, which should be practical
in two or three years, you could easily store 50 DVDs on it.

> With music is different, you listen to songs several times something
> you never do with a video piece.

Au contraire. I own a hundred or so DVDs. I've watched a fair number of
them more than once, and I'd say there's only about 10% of them that I
never intend to watch again.

> This is why Newton as the first PDA. It was much more feature-rich, it
> had a bigger screen and faster processor (The first ARM) than the Palm
> Pilots but it was not the right form factor.

Right. They couldn't make it the right form factor with the technology
of the time, and many people dismissed it. Yet PDAs are now a
reasonable, if not huge, market.

Basically, I see the MS product as like the Newton. It's too big, too
heavy, and not capable enough. But all that will come with time, as
people practice making products like this.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs_at_cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC
Received on Sat Mar 20 10:42:19 2004