Technology on the Estate

We’re a gadget-intensive household. Our shelves are filled with books and most of us read daily, but to give you an idea …

During the birth of our most recent daughter my wife passed the time between contractions playing Lumines on the PSP. One daughter noodles away on a Leapster while the other daughter amuses the family by re-working photographs of the dog on the “Digi Makeover” she received for Christmas. And yours truly, as a blogger, totes the obligatory laptop from place to place, scanning with geekish intensity for a wi-fi connection.

The smallest addition to the household, nary a month old, coos away in her bouncy seat amidst this maelstrom of LEDs and LCDs. She apparently did not come with a built-in 802.11g card which transmits useful statistics about hunger and dryness – although I hope babies are equipped this way in the future. (Take heed, you geniuses at Apple and Samsung.)

And the trend in technology, it’s interesting to note, is turning towards more and more devices, after a brief sway towards “convergence”. For years the industry has been pushing towards the “one device to rule them all” model – a phone meets mp3 player which reads email and talks to your digital toaster. According to the Korea Times this was more a factor of enthusiastic engineers than the way consumers actually use technology devices, which is highly context sensitive. You take your iPod jogging, and grab the cell phone for a trip to the store.

And of course none of the “converged” devices ever fully delivers on the promise of being a digital Swiss-army knife. There are some notable exceptions, like the Blackberry, but the cost of these devices is daunting to many consumers, and even if the price point is manageable it can be a real problem if the tiny item is misplaced. It all depends on your income level, but the principle holds true - a broken $200 digital camera is a loss. But when that $900 camera-phone-media player is left on the airplane, or blinks out because of bad firmware, or gets nuked in the microwave by the 7-year-old, then Daddy is probably going to need a counselor to recover completely.

And now, some shameless whoring: If any company wants to use the Spacetropic household as a test environment for their latest cool technology, please contact me here. Reviews will be posted accordingly to the blog – although additional cash payments may be necessary if your device is astonishingly crappy.

Tags: Technology, CES, Samsung, Sony, Apple