Hardware walled gardens dying on the vine?
An interesting Techdirt article just caught my eye, and riled up some old notions I’ve stewed over in the past. Apparently Cingular’s jumping into the act, and putting music on their headsets too. They’re a little late to the party, but have quite possibly one big advantage — it looks like they may not intentionally screw consumers with a walled garden!
Now, Carlo at Techdirt seems to think “it seems inevitable that standalone music players will eventually be rendered irrelevant by mobile phones with music functionality” and he may well be right, but it’s this age-old argument that’s irrelevant. What seems more inevitable to me is the divergence in mobile devices. Perhaps I should explain…
Every jerk has a cellphone, some have two or three. I don’t know too many pricks without a PDA of some sort, and every douchebag and their brother seems to have an mp3 player these days. For years people have predicted a convergence among these devices, and with recent advances and miniaturization, this is now technically feasible. But there’s a number of problems with carrying around such an expensive digital swiss army knife. Just to name one, what happens when you flush it down the toilet (which, yes, I’ve only done it once)? That’s a lot of coin down the shitter. Even if you’re less clumsy than myself, water damage is an all-too-common mishap. What about hardware failure? One simple glitch in one little component and you’re out of order until it’s fixed or replaced — and you can bet that won’t come cheap.
Almost every device carries with it the overhead of a speaker or two (usually quite poor), a mic (ditto), a screen, memory (flash and/or magnetic), and increasingly, some kind of networking. Oh yes, and an overpowered chip and hulking battery to power all of these components.
Simply put, there are too many duplicated functions in the mobile devices we carry to mention. Of course, there’s a huge disincentive for manufacturers to correct this flaw (among others, for the reasons listed above). It’s only a matter of time, however, until someone comes along and puts an end to this chaos. Someone with the will and the way. It may be a billionaire like Shuttleworth, possibly a forward-thinking company like neuros, or more than likely, a loose-knit group of hackers with a penchant for design (no link — but if you know of one, do comment).
There are no technical barriers I can see that would keep someone from selling a small networking device that can connect to the cheapest and best network available at any given time — probably through some sort of MVNO (mobile virtual network operator). It could make that connection available to any other device you own over a lightweight personal area network. Who needs a costly one-provider plan when you could have one or many numbers routed to you via something like GrandCentral, TalkPlus or some other as-yet-unimaginable service? You choose any or all of the required components. For those that don’t like choice, packaged offerings would obviously make their way into the market appealing to different tastes.
There are countless advantages to breaking each function down into pluggable components. Of course we’d need a few standards, but many of which already exist. All it will take is a few smart people or a little consumer backlash and a better world would fall right into our laps. Like I said earlier, this is inevitable, but I’m sorry to say, probably not any time soon.
November 4th, 2006 at 12:00 am
[…] is a bit foolish though. It won’t be too long before someone fills this gap (hopefully the right way, IMHO). Even a trickle of bandwidth could synchronize a big-ol’ multi-gigabyte music […]