A good portion of my foundational thinking about mobile computing comes from meetings that we had with Jeff Hawkins, back in the Palm Computing era.  Mr. Hawkins’ stories about carving a block of wood until it fit in his shirt pocket have stuck with me.  As the story goes, that block became the model for the early Palm Pilots.

That’s exactly the point.  Until we have some kind of implants that connect us directly to the data flow, I want the following things in my device (in order of priority, but these have pretty much all been show stoppers):

• It fits in my pocket — otherwise it won’t be with me enough to be effective.
• As a corollary to the above, it is light enough that I don’t mind packing it pretty much all of the time
• The software that I use runs on it
• It has a high bandwidth connection to the Net
• The UI is accessible for me
• It functionally replaces other things that I carry.  A few years ago my briefcase held a notebook computer, a cell phone, a PDA, a pager and a few kilograms of cords / chargers / cables.
• It lasts through, at least, a full day of normal use without recharging (my iPod touch can’t do this if the 802.11 radio is active)

My dream has always been to have one handheld device for most activities, along with, maybe, a netbook/ultra portable laptop that I could drag along if I planned to do heavy text entry (I’m fine with Graffiti, and I’ve come to quite like the soft keyboard on my iPod Touch).

Finally, getting around to my point, I’ll gladly spend whatever I have to in order to get a device that meets my criteria and runs on a reliable network.  I’m certainly not, however, going to spend several hundred dollars for something that’s inconvenient to carry, no matter how beautiful it is.  Beauty and functionality are useless to me if the device is sitting on my desk when I’m out and need to connect.  At that point, a tablet is about as useful as my first Mac 128K (long since recycled) would be.

As far as I’m concerned, the iPhone 3GS and the Google Nexus One are as close to my ideal device as we have right now.  Perhaps I’m just dense, but I don’t understand why the tablet is the subject of such breathless anticipation.  I’d much rather have Apple devote its considerable engineering talent to making the iPhone even better.  They’re almost there…

Personally, I completely discount the attraction of sitting around looking at album art (even in an altered state) as the Wired story seemed to suggest.  A Financial Times article, that was the original source for the Wired piece, claims:

“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said one executive familiar with the plans

I guess that I’m not enough of a music lover, but that just sounds like a complete waste of time, compute cycles and bandwidth to me.  Further, I cannot imagine that there are large numbers of people with both $800 to spend and a burning desire to sit around in a circle staring at album art, even interactive album art.

I’m completely in agreement with the always entertaining John Paczkowski (I miss reading Mr. Paczkowski in Good Morning Silicon Valley, back in the days when there were these things called “newspapers.”) when he asks, in his inimitable snarky tone:

“Which begs the question: Can that heyday ever be recreated? Now that we’re accustomed to purchasing only the music we want via the thin-margin, 99-cent-song-by-song downloads that iTunes pioneered, can we ever be convinced to pay a premium for bundled music, cluttered up with a bunch of liner notes, wacky band photos and throw away filler songs?”

Maybe it’s just me, but the ten-inch form factor seems to be a little bit bulky for constant presence.  The beauty of the iPhone / iPod touch is that it’s always with me.  I don’t have to think about whether I want to lug it, and I try to be rational about the risk of scratching the screen.  Let me tell you, if I had an $800 10-inch unprotected screen, I’d worry about it a lot, and I’d constantly be trying to decide whether the benefit of having it with me justified the risk of carrying it.  This is especially the case if the device has enough battery capacity to let it operate with the 802.11 radio on and the screen lit whenever I want to use it through the course of a day.

Fortunately, the FT seems to be less certain about the actual dimensions of the screen:

“The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.”

…but many of the stories that report on the form factor seem to be trying to interpret the chicken bones from the Apple supply chain.

The FT does mention something about books:

“Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer.”

I’m not sure that I see a “Kindle Killer,” though.  Let’s not forget Walt Mossberg’s smackdown on the Kindle DX:

“Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading.”

For those that are sticklers about such things, the Kindle DX has a 9.7 inch screen.

Lest I venture too far into the forbidden territory of questioning Apple, I have to share Jason Schwarz’s assertion that,

“Apple’s iTouch Tablet Will Become Its Flagship Product”

Mr. Schwarz presents four rational reasons why he sees:

“… this device taking its place at the high end of the iPod family; it will be a larger version of the iPod Touch. This product won’t fall quietly into place however. The iTouch Tablet launch is primed to be the most significant in the history of Apple.”

Giving credit where credit is due, I borrowed the name for the mythical device from Mr. Schwarz.  I do hope that he’s right in his rather bold assertion.  Maybe we’ll see in a couple of months.

I wonder what kind of changes we’ll need to make to our apps to have them run on this thing.  Will we be able to use the same SDK that we use for the iPhone/iPod touch?

 
——–
Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, tablet