By now really, much as I have a dislike for gimmicks, I cannot deny that mobile devices are a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Nearly everyone in the UK has a computer on their person, and that computer is likely to have a powerful processor, an updatable Operating System, numerous pieces of software, several databases, some form of internet access and probably many other features. These things are useful in a multitude of ways, and I think the real test as to whether they are a pointless gimmick or not depends on the user’s usage of the features.
What is somewhat frustrating though is that because mobile devices reach such a wide audience, they often fail to accommodate for a particular section of society. Most mobiles are marketed at the broadest range of individuals as possible, and as such attempt to do everything they possibly can as well as possible, prioritising only the features that appeal to the majority of the market. This leaves people with an amount of choice that is paradoxically both incredibly broad but also guilty of not catering enough for specific niches. Why do we need a netbook that touts potential for ‘multimedia’ usage as well as internet usage? Some folks might be quite content surfing the web and reading plain old text without watching videos as well! And the two are a very different purpose: compare e-readers with iphones (and ipads) – the design is deliberately different. So why are there hardly any web-readers? At best one can find a handful of good quality ‘Mobile Internet Devices’ which aren’t phones and don’t focus on multimedia delivery.
I’m not against mobiles that can do everything, but sometimes I might want to buy a product for a more specific purpose – because a phone just can’t do everything as well as a product designed for a specific purpose.
On the software side, I agree that people want choice more than anything. But the problem is real choice isn’t a lock-in operating system or an App Store which is designed to turn the people who made the hardware a tidy profit. I’m happy to pay for software but I want to feel I’ve chosen the software, not that someone’s chosen it for me. And I want to at least have the option to tweak under the hood, and again if necessary I’d pay a small premium for an optional OS that offered such flexibility.
Its a shame that because the success of different types of mobile devices is driven by the mass target market, new innovation tends to emerge rarely. When it does happen it often becomes quickly absorbed into the ever-growing list of features that any new mobile device seems to have to implement in some way. Using this mobile features ‘checklist’ to develop new products gets in the way of any really creative developments which come from trying to solve a more specific problem on its own, or implement something in a better way by focusing entirely on it. I can only hope that more specific mobile devices will co-exist and thrive alongside their more all-encompassing cousins.
