Sunday, January 10, 2010

The gadget gamble
By Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall
Published Financial Times: January 9-10, 2010

It was a level of breathless anticipation worthy of Apple. Normally, only products from the hand of Steve Jobs, boss of the technology company and visionary genius behind a string of trend-setting devices from the Mac computer to the iPhone, can stir up this level of interest.
In the event Google’s announcement of a new smart-phone at the beginning of this week was no ground-breaking event. Instead of the first “Google phone”, it turned out to be just another in the lengthening line of devices made by other companies but running the company’s software.

But the level of anticipation was itself the most instructive point. With Apple tipped to be preparing to unveil its own wonder-device this month – which many in the technology industry hope will launch another wave of personal electronic products – gadget fetishism has reached new heights.

Mobile internet-connected devices of all shapes and sizes have become the rage in tech circles. Caught between the Google and Apple announcements , this week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the biggest industry event, was overflowing with them.
The array of choices is becoming bewildering. Apple’s rumoured new product is a tablet – an A4-sized touch-screen computer with all the attributes of a smart-phone but a bigger screen better suited to reading and viewing video.

Assuming the months of anticipation are correct, it will join a crowd of gadgets fighting for attention: smart-phones, increasingly being used as gaming devices and for internet access; e-readers, originally simple reading devices but now with added ways for users to interact with text; netbooks – shrunken, stripped-down laptops that have taken the personal computer market by storm; and smart-books, small computers with the internal guts of a mobile phone that will soon be entering stores.

The average tech lover, once content to lug only a laptop computer and a standard-issue mobile phone, is now weighed down with any number of portable screens.
“It’s one of the costs of living in the digital world,” says Ray Kurzweil, a technology futurologist who has been predicting the arrival of digital book readers for two decades. The compensation, he adds, is that the prices are falling, and many users will be happy to buy a collection to act as windows to a new internet-centric world: one where many of their entertainment, information and communication needs are handled on central servers and accessible from any gadget – a new technology architecture known as cloud computing.

But the deluge of new gadgets also comes at a cost to the planet, which must absorb the many old gadgets thrown aside by the ever-accelerating product cycles of consumer electronics.
For consumers, the penalty for picking the wrong device is a drawerful of discarded duds. For technology companies, backing the wrong horse can yield severe competitive setbacks.

The smart-phone business is a case in point. The apparently stable business dominated by Nokia, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Microsoft was turned upside down by Apple’s unveiling, three years ago this week, of the iPhone. Now, with half a dozen companies vying for a position in a market unlikely to support all of them, it seems even some of the strongest companies are no longer guaranteed a place.
The full piece at FT Weekend Edition.

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