On Oct 20, 2004, at 12:13 AM, Benjamin Joffe wrote:
> A solution for iPod is to include rapidly some network connectivity, as
> people are unlikely
> to carry two devices with the same capabilities...
Many people already carry 2 devices one of which has a subset of the
capabilities of the other. They have a keitai and wear a watch.
By "people", I take it we are talking mostly about men - whose main
receptacle for carrying things (in many cases) is their shirt pocket. A
lot of women (not all, of course) carry bags in which everything bar
the kitchen sink already lives. So the odd extra half kilo concerns
them less. (It is always worth having a quick root through a
wife/girlfriends handbag before getting too fixed on the idea of the
importance of avoiding redundancy. It's another world in there...)
There has been a lot of discussion on the Reg recently about the
Microsoft strategy for a home media hub - it is basically 'throw away
all your single function devices and buy one device from us that does
it all, that costs a fortune and is DRM'd to the gills"... The Reg
suggests some reasons why this won't work.
And we are being offered pretty much the same proposition with keitai.
I am all in favour of one box that does all jobs "well enough" but the
truth is that most keitai DON'T do all jobs "well enough". It may be an
MP3 player, but it has limited storage. It may store files, but it
won't mount my "home" directory. It may download songs directly, but I
very, very rarely want to do that - and you can bet it will have enough
DRM on it to make it difficult to play on another device... I want a
decent interface to manipulate what I have downloaded - most keitai are
pretty horrid in the user interface department. Microsoft's recent
crack that all ipod owners are thieves is the best advertising for the
ipod one can imagine. "Hey - buy OUR product and you won't be able to
steal music!" is hardly good catch copy....
And any function use of which that means I can't simultaneously accept
phone calls is not implemented "well enough".... So no plugging it in
to the stereo when I get home....
Nick
Received on Wed Oct 20 04:47:18 2004