Stinking of futurity
From Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist:
Vanna reached unsteadily off the barstool, pulled up a knit Guatemalan shoulder bag, and produced a brand-new cell phone the size of her forearm. “Instead, I got me this k-rad Motorola Iridium.”
“Damn,” said Starlitz, gawking. “That’s the first one of those I’ve seen!”
“Instant global access,” Vanna announced, bravely sniffing back her tears. “It’s linked up, like, literally out of this world.”
“Yeah, that gizmo is totally not of this century. It’s got the new stuff!”
“Calls cost six bucks a minute!” she said proudly. “If you pay for ‘em, that is. Of course, this unit’s been phreaked.”
“Well, of course.”
Starlitz stared in silent hunger at the satellite telephone. The device stank of futurity. They would probably go broke, being so far ahead of the curve and all, but the gizmo was an utter harbinger of things to come, like discovering a fossil in reverse. Starlitz felt a powerful urge to grip the phone, caress it, perhaps bite it, but he restrained himself. Vanna was sure to take that gesture all wrong.
That’s how I’ve been feeling about the Nokia 770. An 8 oz. handheld Linux computer with wireless Internet connectivity. An 800×480 pixel screen that, from the pictures, makes for better portable websurfing than anything short of a full laptop. It’s not weighed down with a stupid thumb keyboard — input’s by stylus (unfortunately, no word yet of a SHARK implementation, or anything other than a lame virtual QWERTY keyboard) or an external keyboard. Dozens of applications have been ported to it already (Nokia released a development kit a while back.) And all for $360. It’s got the new stuff. I want to eat it.
And, like Iridium, it’s doomed. It’ll be a favorite of geeks, and I bet a decade from now there’ll still be an on-line forum for its hackers and users. But it doesn’t replace a cellphone; it doesn’t replace a PDA (it could, but it’s shipping without PIM software); it doesn’t replace a laptop. It’s too bulky for anyone to want to carry everywhere, and how often do you really need portable net access when you couldn’t, without much more difficulty, have brought a laptop? (It’s not even cheaper than low-end laptops — the Dell Inspiron 2200 has been going for around $400 after rebates; rumor has it that Walmart will be selling an under $400 laptop as a Black Friday deal.) Its CPU is too slow and it has too little memory.
Oh, but. It looks like it’d make a decent e-book reader, something at which PDAs and laptops are clumsy. It could be used as a arbitrarily sophisticated remote control for a home network. I read somewhere that someone’s already using it to stream audio from his home network — all he has to do is attach it to powered speakers in whatever room he’s in.And the really interesting things will come later — the ones that aren’t obvious in foresight.
Another development I’m excited about is that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab demonstrated the hand-cranked (!) $100 laptop. I’m not sure how well it’ll help in directly improving the lot of impoverished children, the program’s stated intent, but I think the spin-off technology from this effort will, in the long term, be a great boon for everyone (including said impoverished children.)
I’m also excited about electronic ink, a display technology that apparently looks close to printed text, remains easy to read in direct sunlight, and consumes very little power. Sony’s selling an e-book reader with it, but only in Japan. Sadly, I haven’t seen e-ink in use yet; apparently, it’s also conspicuously slow compared to other computer display technologies — even e-books will have a pause to turn the page. It’s probably not suited for most other tasks. But if I won the lottery, I’d drop $3000 on a prototype kit.
I’m not going to get a Nokia 770. If it already had SHARK, it came with a Bluetooth keyboard, it could replace the PIM functionality I get out of my Palm, and I knew I could virtually rotate the screen into portrait mode (including sensibly rotating the functions of the directional buttons), well, I’d probably fail to resist it. But I’m worried they may have rushed it for a Xmas release (there have been reports of poor connectivity; its CPU is weak; its memory is low. I’ll let the early adopters sort out the early problems (and pray they don’t add a thrice-damned thumb keyboard in the meantime.)
In a year or two, could we combine all of the above? Give me something the size of the Nokia, with the hand-cranked power of the $100 laptop, beefier CPU and memory, and with a color display on one side, and electronic ink on the other, suitable for both e-book reading and general computing. And all for $200?
No, probably not. But I bet the next couple of years won’t have a shortage of gadgets to drool over.
(And while Iridium filed for Ch. 11 bankruptcy in 1999, it still exists, and one could even still get a satellite phone.)
"Another development I’m excited about is that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab demonstrated the hand-cranked (!) $100 laptop."
Sure, but have you wiped the glass entrance to his office, or polished his desk?
:-)
(Odd jobs via temp agencies rool at times.)
Posted by Gary Farber on November 24 2005 19:34
I have ordered a Nokia 770 because, well, I am a geek, and I tinker with such things.
Your prediction is probably pretty good though.
As for the $100 laptop - I have several friends I know working on it. I also have several friends who think it may be a noble effort, but ultimately misguided.
I believe Lee Felsenstein puts it best on his blog:
http://www.fonly.typepad.com/
He is doing some good work for 3rd world countries using modern technology.
If you follow such things you should read his stuff.
Posted by Scanner on November 25 2005 09:08
My old mac laptop, the 180, had a pure black-and-white LCD screen that looked great in direct sunlight. You just turned off the backlight and all was easily legible -- with almost no battery drain. Is there some technical reason why LCD pixels couldn't be shrunk down some more to make crisper, even better displays?
The best new inventions usually fail, as we know from cycling. Look at Cyclebinding cleats, which were better than Looks back in the 1980s. Or look at suspension handlebar stems, which disappeared in favor of overbuilt shock forks.
So far as developing world computerization -- electricity is less of a challenge than internet connectivity. The best idea I've heard is to put as much of the net as possible onto DVD and have a local mirror of some of the most content-rich sites. IANACS, but as I understand it, you can fit every book ever written onto a few DVDs if you want.
Posted by bodzin on November 28 2005 12:22
IAACS, and, uh, no. A single-layer DVD holds 4.7G. An average prose book stored as plain ASCII text would be in the ballpark of 400K. That's around 12,000 books. Maintaining any images, graphs, special typesetting (as would be required for equations), etc., would dramatically increase the size, and, thus, reduce the number of books per DVD.
There are 120,000 books published per year in the US, alone.
It's straightforward to compress English text by 70%, but you wouldn't want that in this case, where it'd have to be uncompressed by either a low-power client or an overburdened server.
Even dual-layer Blu-Ray, the most capacious of the current contenders for next generation optical storage, only holds up to 54G. Possibly, as few as one of those could handle all the plain text content of a year's output of the US publishing industry. (But that plain text constraint would leave out a whole lot of the content of those books.)
Could you fit a large number of important works and references on a few DVDs? Definitely. But everything? Not even close.
Posted by Zed on November 28 2005 13:27
Such a toss up. I was sucked into the sleek look of the Nokia 770 at a local store, and still haven't made up my mind on if it's staying here for good. I have twenty one days to test drive it, before I can't return it for something else, and it's only the first few hours of our relationship.
I have owned several PDA's and assorted handheld gadgets, starting with my old... very old, newton from apple. I blame Star Trek for my obsession with handheld touch-screen electronics, from the tricorder to the PADD. In fact, I, like so many of us, long for the day when the market can produce an all in one voice/data communications and personal entertainment device. However, my obsession goes one step further, in that I am a Flash developer, and have always wanted to design an application for a handheld with a version of the flash player that has networking capabilities. Until now, I'm un-aware of another handheld that has Flash Player 6 or better except for this little Nokia. Well, we're still on the honeymoon, and it bekons me...,"Coming dear,".
Posted by Anonymous on December 13 2005 22:23