| Wednesday, March 1, 2006 |
13:57 - Do everything; do it weird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV1WGDW37c0&search=project%20origami
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The Origami Project, huh?
I don't mean for it to sound like my reaction to such a thing is required by the Law of Brian to be knee-jerk negative; but I'm just trying to picture any of the things shown in the video actually happening in real life.
Photo-editing outdoors in the glaring sun? Drawing kooky faces in MS Paint? Playing twitchy, immersive video games on a giant and eminently thievable PSP-esque device in a crowded and crime-ridden subway?
I mean, yes, it's such an obvious extension of our existing technologies—small screen, portable, handwriting recognition, wireless Internet, dockable. Yet it's not like nobody has tried coming up with a device that embodies these qualities yet, is it? Tablet PCs are now like five years old, and I still don't know anyone who has one (though I know lots of people who say they'll buy one if only Apple makes it—not that I believe them, and I doubt Steve does either).
But what's the message with this thing? That it can do everything all your existing devices do—your desktop, your laptop, your game system, your iPod, your PDA? That's been tried before. It hasn't sold. And unless I'm seriously missing some major feature, I don't see why this device has anything going for it than all the preceding generations of tablets didn't.
They say it's a computer for high-end creativity, but it's inevitably going to be far slower than a comparable desktop.
They say it's a PDA, but it's overkill for such a purpose.
They say it's a music player, but it's too damn big.
They say it's a laptop, but it's too damn small.
They say it's a portable Internet device, but there's no keyboard, and I'm certainly not about to write e-mails and blog entries and URLs by hand. (I can barely read my own handwriting as it is.)
In short, do people want a single device that handles all of their technological needs? You inevitably have to sort of average out all your disparate devices, making compromises in each one's functionality in order to make it coexist with the rest, and the furthest outliers are the ones that get altered the most. I'm surprised they didn't show someone "sidetalkin'" on it like on the old N-Gage; but at least that means they found something they couldn't fit into the mishmash: a cellphone.
Here's a hint, Microsoft: the reason the iPod succeeded, I feel, is not so much its cool-ass rotary interface as the fact that when it was first announced, it was tiny compared to its competition, and yet still had a 5GB capacity. (Not much has changed.) People jumped at the chance to keep all their music on something small, not just a big heavy paperweight with a two-line screen and a full-size hard drive inside.
People are going to each individually have a different reason to want to buy something like the Origami; and I have to think that each such person is going to find it lacking. People who want it as an iPod-plus-more are going to find it way too big and clunky to carry around. People who want it as a laptop will find it too small and limited by the input options. People who want it as a computer will find it too inflexible and slow. It combines all the worst features of all its various antecedents, and those tend to pile up in the mind more than their combined best features do.
But hey, I thought video was a dumb thing to put in an iPod, so what do I know.
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Brian Tiemann
