We are in the era of the multi-converged super-gadget. Soon, all the smartest pockets will sport a silver-finish fetish object that combines telephone, music, camera, organiser, video, games, satellite navigation, bells and whistles, all crammed on to one do-anything device.
These objects, such as the feted palmOne Treo 650 phone-cum-whatever else, are the latest lust objects in the world of mobile gadgetry. Yet some would say that they represent the apotheosis of what design guru Donald A. Norman calls “feature-creep”. When will the average person actually use all these functions? And how long will it be before this 21st-century talisman, so desirable now, is an unfashionable piece of junk?
For many gadgets have started up and failed. Some become obsolete, some were poor ideas, others good ideas at the wrong time, yet more were mere stepping stones on the way to a better product. They fill an ever-more bulging dustbin of technological history: indeed, many of yesterday’s white-hot must-buys occupy places in a 2002 survey by Telewest of UK households’ most-neglected electronic gadgets.
Such is the harsh Darwinist world of gadget evolution. But remember that even the failures are a necessary part of growth. “Some products never gain a market,” says Stephen O’Connor, technology strategist for innovations company IDEO. “They may find niche communities, like the Acorn computer, but never penetrate the mass of consumers.”
Among them, O’Connor cites the Audible, a mobile player launched in 1997. “It had neat features, but it was ahead of its time,” says O’Connor. “It couldn’t play music because it didn’t have enough memory and the spoken word market was too niche.” The Apple Newton message pad was also a product caught in the wrong time. This, says O’Connor, was “a great device, but it failed because the battery needed recharging too often”.
When something becomes standard, that’s when it flies, says O’Connor. But when “the consumer proposition is ahead of the delivery” it dies. The same fate occurs when a technological advance is taken up by a small market of “innovators” and “early adopters” but is ignored by the “early majority”, “late majority” and “laggard” purchasers who make up the bulk of technology buyers. (These are terms that describe five main consumer types, identified by Everett Rogers in his book The Diffusion of Innovations, which explores the difficulty of getting new ideas adopted - even when they’re clearly good ideas.) “It’s about understanding the context of use,” says Patrick Jordan, president of the UK-based Contemporary Trends Institute. “Sometimes, the technology might seem interesting to the designers and companies, but not to the public.” Then the gadget bombs.
Or it suffers from poor timing. The Minidisk was the ne plus ultra of cutting-edge technology - for a few months. As the MP3 player kicked in it went the route of Betamax, the home-video format infamously superseded by VHS in the 1970s. It wasn’t bad: it just hadn’t anticipated that the internet was going to become a vast, downloadable library of music. Equally, Web Tablets, positioned somewhere between PCs and laptops, are not bad products in themselves, but they haven’t taken off, probably because laptops are just as convenient and offer more features.
Jordan, who used to work in the mobile communications industry, says that ideas become sexed-up beyond their capability. “At one time, it was all WAP,” he says. “Expectations were incredibly high, but it was basically Teletext on the phone.” On the other hand, no one in the industry expected SMS texting to become so enormous, indicating that there is a magic at play in the fetishistic world of mobile technology - take the fuss about the BlackBerry, for instance, which is so compulsive that some call it the “CrackBerry”.
The point is: the market is unpredictable. Indeed, many didn’t think that convergence would work; including Martin Cooper, widely acknowledged as the creator of the mobile phone - and some think it could still flounder. “The 3G people are saying you can download music and video too,” says O’Connor. “But I’d question whether people want to look while on the move. Fundamentally, to watch is a different state of receptivity than to talk.” Jordan too remains unsure, particularly about the increasing use of location devices on phones: “It seems to go against the freedom offered by mobility.” With the ordinary consumer frazzled by upgrades and baffled by functions, the road to gadget hell is paved with good inventions.
The radio pager
This early piece of white-hot mobile technology was the height of connectedness in the mid-1970s. Although destined for the fast-movers - the financiers, surgeons, movers and shakers - the pager went the way of so much technology: started groovy, went sleazy. Even now, popular perception of the typical pager-user is drug-dealer rather than doctor.
Karaoke MP3
This is only included because it falls into a special class of products - those that look like they might offer maximum nuisance value. So it’s lucky for us, if not for Europe’s teenagers, that it is available only in Korea.
Segway motorised scooter
The pizzazz around the launch of the Segway appears to have been matched by sheer consumer indifference. If you doubt this, ask yourself the question: have you ever seen anyone driving a Segway (apart from a journalist doing a gee-whizz story, that is, or someone on television)? I bet that the answer for most readers is a resounding No. The Segway may not yet be the new Sinclair C5, but things aren’t looking great.
Video calling
A staple of sci-fi for many years, the video calling phone has never quite hit paydirt, despite various attempts. Perhaps it is the reality of talking to someone while looking at the phone that doesn’t quite work, or the fact that sight is not the dominant sense in a telephone conversation, or the fact that you really don’t want to be seen when you’re on the phone.
The e-book
The idea of e-books was that you could store them on a memory card, then have millions of words to read on PDAs, notebooks, laptops and mini PCs - and marvel at how great it was not to have to pack dusty books when travelling. This scenario hasn’t happened. Barnes & Noble shut down its e-books store in 2003, the inescapable conclusion being that few people want to take a slice of cold technology to bed when they could have a nice warm paper-and-board book.
Telepoint
Some might remember BT’s Phonepoint, along with three other telepoint providers: Mercury, Zonephone and Rabbit. Telepoint phone systems meant that you could make a call from your “brick” out on the streets, but you’d have to be near a radio phone point to use it. So why not just use a telephone box? Telepoint soon went to join the corded car phone in the product cemetery.
Electric shoes
The electric mobile-recharging boot was an invention from the dynamic house of Trevor Baylis, he of the Windup Radio, who famously tried out a prototype pair in 2000. But despite the move towards cyborg-style clothing that supports a range of functions - there is even a WiFi backpack looming - the boots haven’t zoomed out of the factory and off the shelves, largely because of a topical if unintended consequence: they trigger security fears.
Computer wristwatch
This is firmly out of the James Bond school of gadgetry: in Moonraker, for instance, Bond’s Seiko has explosives in its casing. But, somehow, this beast doesn’t quite fill one with confidence.
