Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • Palm Vx

    When I started agency life I still had a trusty Filofax that had my contacts I had built up from DJing, working in the oil industry and being in college written in barely legible text on address sheets or plastic sheets stuffed with business cards. It had a reassuring heft to it like it contained both the old and new testaments of the bible. In my first 12 months working at the agency, my contacts were further swelled by journalists, suppliers, clients and colleagues stuffed into two Rolodex frames and 99 numbers on the SIM of my then new Ericsson PF 768 mobile phone.In addition to all this, I also had built up a database of over 200  industry contacts on ClarisWorks running on my by now ancient Apple PowerBook. This presented me with the kind of problems that businesses sorted with CRM software. A second problem that I had was making all this data portable. The solution to all this was the Palm Vx.
    Palm Vx
    The only device that was compatiable with my Mac was the Palm series of devices and flush with cash from my first year’s bonus. I got myself a Palm Vx from Expansys. In many respects despite its lack of an always-on wireless connection, the Palm Vx was the benchmark I have in mind when I look at smartphones.

    At its core the smartphone lives or dies by its personal information manager and its ability to sync with your computer for your contacts and calendar. When I used a Palm Vx, I never had the machine brick when I loaded too many contacts on to it, it never endlessly duplicated or corrupted contacts and it didn’t freak out when you scheduled events more than three months ahead.

    Unfortunately the same can’t be said for subsequent devices I owned including Palm’s Treo 600 and 650 phones, or the succession of Nokia devices I owned up until my E90 communicator gave up the ghost and went to the great Carphone Warehouse in the sky.

    The Vx was primitive, which was one of its main strengths:

    • Its screen which showed 16 types of grey was easy to view in direct sunlight
    • It’s electroluminescent backlight allowed you to view it in a darkened room and still have enough battery left to last you a week
    • It didn’t have an app store, but then there wasn’t any productivity sucking software and you could find new applications with your search engine of choice
    • It had to use a stylus for all but the most basic items on the resistive touchscreen, but Palm’s original single stroke handwriting called Graffiti once you got the hang of it is faster to use than the soft keyboard on my iPhone. Unfortunately a long-running patent dispute that went on until 2004 meant that Palm had to move to the inferior Graffiti 2 based on a product called Jot
    • It did allow you to sync your desktop PC’s inbox with your device so you could go through your email on the commute home, but you wouldn’t be bothered by the always connected aspects of push email. Push technology was a big thing then so if you got tired of clearing out your inbox you could read highlights from Wired.com or CNBC via the AvantGo service which sucked in content via your PC that you could then browse through offline at your leisure; in many respects an RSS reader before RSS became well-known
    • Location-based software before GPS was a subscription service called Vindigo that provided recommendations on restaurants, clubs and bars, and shopping. It also had maps that provided turn-by-turn instructions from a look-up table of  directions and was updated by syncing via serial port or USB connected cradle
    • Wireless connectivity was an IrDA infra-red port which was pathetic. I once tried to use it in conjunction with my Ericsson phone to surf the web but it was too much effort to keep both of them lined up. It was perfectly fine though for exchanging business cards electronically. I remember being at a Red Herring conference during the summer of 2000, demoing Palm devices and spent half the time beaming business cards with consultants and lawyers. It involved a curious ritual akin to an animal courtship display where two people would hold their devices in front of each other and move them closer or apart until their contact details had been exchanged. But it seemed to work better than any solution since. Moo cards are now my common currency of information exchange instead

    It was the industrial design of the Palm V and Vx that feels the most prescient parts of the product in many respects. Some of the decisions in this were forced on the designers by the hardware specifications. Palm used to use AAA batteries in their earlier devices and held the OS and resident apps in ROM. ROM was expensive at the time so the V and the Vx had everything in RAM which meant that there always needed to be a power supply which meant they had to use a lithium-ion battery. Since the battery wasn’t designed to be user serviceable the case was hot-glued together. This allowed the industrial designers to make the device much thinner so that it could be slipped into a set of jeans or a shirt pocket and weighed in at a paltry 114g, some 20g lighter than my iPhone without its case.

    The need for a ‘picture frame’ around the screen provided the designers with a way of making the device feel nicer in the hand by making it have rounded edges. It wasn’t that far off the iPhone in terms of size, but felt nicer to hold. When I first got my iPhone 3GS the device felt too wide in my hand. The product design encouraged premium brands like Burberry and Jean Paul Gaultier to make Palm V cases (which is a bit nicer than the silicone rubber jacket most people have on their iPhone. I used to have a slider case by a company called Rhinoskin made out of laser cut titanium plate that was indestructable.

    At the bottom of the Palm V and Vx was a connector that Palm continued to use on the M500-series devices. This connector meant that lots of companies made great accessories. A company called OmniSky sold a GSM modem that the PDA slotted into, ThinkOutside made the best folding keyboard I have ever used, again using the connector at the bottom to connect with the PDA. I once wrote a by-lined article on the train back from London to Liverpool without any at seat power and with both the keyboard and the Palm Vx slipping into my jacket pocket when I reached Liverpool Lime Street. Something I just couldn’t do with the iPhone due to its greedy battery life and the bulky keyboard accessories currently available.

    Looking back on it, the Palm Vx was the high point of of Palm the company. Missed technological opportunities, numerous management issues, poor quality product and software engineering together with wider market technological progress meant that the company and the PalmOS developer eco-system was a shadow of its former self by the the time the company was sold to HP.

  • Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro

    The Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro had a central part in music culture. By the time I was in sixth form many of my friends who were into their rock music used to order bootleg concert recordings from mail order outlets like Adrian’s Records.

    The quality of the later bootlegs were noticeably better as it was easy to connect an affordable portable high-quality recording source up to the concert mixing desk or use a good microphone for a field recording. In fact, whilst some bands, notably The Grateful Dead, built a following using bootlegged concert tapes as a marketing tool; the record industry viewed it with a horror comparable to bit torrent today.

    Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro

    If there was one device responsible for improving the quality of these recordings it was the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, then often known as the Pro-Walkman. Michelle Shocked, a folk artist beloved by the likes of Q Magazine, sprang into the spotlight with an album called The Texas Campfire Sessions (which was originally a bootleg or ‘field recording’ released by an English producer) recorded on a WM-D6C and Henry Rollins used one to record many of his spoken word recordings. In reality Sony had built a number of professional grade cassette recording devices, but this was the most useful. So it was inevitable that I would write about this throwback gadget.

    Why was it so great?

    • Cost: in terms of recording, the WM-D6C was favourably compared to Nakamichi hi-fi cassette decks. Nakamichi were about as high-end as cassette tape ever got with the Nakamichi Dragon cassette decks selling even now on eBay for 1,000+ USD. Hi-fi magazines recommended them as part of an ideal starter audiophile set-up. One of my friends used to have a Pro-Walkman, a NAD amplifier and a set of Rogers speakers. In terms of portable recording the Pro-Walkman was cheaper and more portable than comparable items in the Sony and Marantz ranges and was far cheaper than the Nagra range of portable reel-to-reel recorders often favoured for professional field recordings
    • Features: the Pro-Walkman was also distinguished by being the only device of its size to have Dolby C noise reduction and a line-in socket. The tape mechanism was a quartz controlled capstan servo which controlled the tape speed precisely and dramatically improved the recording and playback quality of a cassette
    • Build quality: the Pro-Walkman is exceptionally well put together. They last forever and can withstand a lot of abuse, being a lot less fragile than your average Walkman. All this engineering came with a price; as the device had quite a heft to it; however it could still be easily dropped in a coat pocket or handbag. If you see one of them dismantled you realise that it required hand assembly with almost the same level of skill as a watchmaker
    • Trusted brand: It is hard for anyone younger than 16 to imagine the amount of trust Sony had as a brand. I still have a Sony Trinitron TV as it has an exceptional picture quality and my Uncle invested in a Sony Beta video recorder because whilst VHS was more popular this was a Sony. The Walkman defined listening to music on the move in the 1980s and for most people, though boom boxes had their place too and the Discman picked up where the Walkman left off. Think Apple or Google to get an idea of how big this brand was

    Its_a_Sony
    It’s a Sony stood for unsurpassed quality in consumer electronics in the minds of many consumers because Sony’s industrial design, manufacturing prowess and quality were second-to-none (though in truth, the cracks had already started to show by the mid-1980s with some cheaper products being exceptionally cheap and nasty). And regardless of my current ambivalence towards the Sony brand and what happens to Sony in the future; both the Sony logo script and the ‘It’s a Sony dotted logo’ have to be two of the most iconic pieces of graphic design for me. More Sony related posts here.

  • CES 2011

    I have been watching the coverage of CES 2011 in Las Vegas with a greater degree of detachment than usual. Partly because I am not in the office. But also because most of the product announcements at CES 2011 didn’t really felt like news. The only one that did was Microsoft’s move to support Windows on ARM.

    Why the main computing OS haven’t moved to a real-time OS a la WindRiver or QNX (now part of Blackberry) years ago is one of life’s great mysteries, however iOS seems to have brought that to a head now. With non-PC devices the concern is now about computing power versus power consumption, something that real-time OS’ have been doing for decades.

    Otherwise CES 2011 seems to be about lots of companies playing catch-up with Apple and the consumer electronics companies trying to jump-start the big-screen television market. LCD television sales have peaked in developed markets and growth will be driven by emerging markets, which means higher volume of sets sold; but lower revenues as the margins are much smaller. This is what the whole 3D home cinema efforts all about.

    As for the competitors to Apple, it says a lot that one of the big stories at was covers for the forthcoming iPad being shown at CES 2011 by their manufacturer.

    Finally I find the trend for celebrity-endorsed gadgets a bit disturbing. Back in the day I was involved in launching the Palm Vx Claudia Schiffer edition. The key difference was the the fascia was anodised with a powder blue colour. It was also the point at which I started to get a real sense of the imminent decline of Palm as a company and a platform. I am amazed that Dr Dre’s headphones with Monster go for more than a decent pair of Beyerdynamic DT-150 or Sennheiser HD-25s. So my heart sank when I read about Lady Gaga and Polaroid.

  • 2010: How did I do?

    About this time last year I wrote my 2010 predictions on technology, media, consumer behaviour and online:

    I see 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up… We need to think about the implications for etiquette, ethics and what will be the new social norms that we have to deal with.

    This is very much a work in progress (at least in the UK); where the NHS feels that it is acceptable to leak information about an audience’s health concerns with Facebook and politician Nadine Dorries felt it was perfectly acceptable to lie to constituents at least 70 per cent of the time on their social media platform

    From a government perspective all this self-organising power can be dangerous: people getting together and standing up to authority – we’ve seen it before:

    • Climate–change protestors
    • Poll tax riots
    • Illegal raves

    Each time, the government has brought resources and legislation to bear against them. I expect this to be at least considered in the next year.

    Well beyond shilling for the media industry with the Digital Economy Bill and the coalition government’s proposals against net neutrality to favour News Corporation prominent UK media companies, there was the Crown Prosecution Service and police’ increasingly hard stance with everything from jokey Twitter users to websites. More interestingly comes a request for Nominet to provide a mechanism that would allow police to close down sites by taking control of domains at will.

    The UK will still have analogue intellectual property laws for an increasingly digital world, I don’t see a dramatic change to correct this coming anytime soon.

    Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the government was going to leave the Digital Economy Act intact. However TalkTalk and BT’s requested judicial review may temper some of the more draconian parts of the Act.

    Social media will no longer be special but part of the normal mix.

    There was discussions at the open panels I attended at the JUMP conference about dropping the ‘social’ from social media as it is not anything special, but the glue that binds all the marketing communications and business communications processes together.

    Changes in marketing spend will come partly at the expense of search advertising.

    Google’s growth is slowing in search advertising and flattened in some markets. I think that this is why Google’s prediction that mobile is the next big thing and the big investment in Android. For a long time there has been a theoretical ceiling for Google’s earnings that include the following factors:

    • Maximum cost of acquisition that a company is willing to pay for a customer – this varies business-by-business
    • Maximum number of businesses that can benefit from search advertising. Your local 7-Eleven relies on impulse purchases so Google Adwords even on local search or mobile apps may not make a lot of sense. Other businesses maybe regulated out of it, or search may not fit into a brand’s profile
    • Number of markets that Google operates in. Google’s new frontier is barely online continent of Africa

    So it was no surprise that Google has set up a wealth of ventures to try and continue to grow. However the culling of these ventures and relentless focus on earnings indicate that Google is maturing as a business. Part of this is down to the fact that Facebook is now serving 25 per cent of display adverts in North America. Coupon services like GroupOn are probably eating into local search advertising budgets as well.

    The good news for the search engines is that consumers are much more open to a curated web via friends and authorative individuals, many of the concepts of social search will be ready for an early majority audience in 2010.

    What really wrong-footed me on this one is that I thought services like Hunch and Quora would come from the search engine companies, that this maybe the ace-in-the-hole Yahoo! may have had to reinvent search, which is the reason why they gave the algorithmic side of the business away? I didn’t expect Caterina Fake come back and put a new spin on the social search work that was happening at Yahoo! when she was there. It’s early days on this but Gifts.com seems to find Hunch’s work with them is delivering real commercial returns. Quora feels like the kind of product that Yahoo! Answers should have been, it will be interesting to see how they monetise the product in the future.

    I expect there to be an increase in social media rightshoring.

    Rightshoring didn’t take off in the way that I thought it might in 2010, this is maybe because of the recession has made the UK more viable, at least for the time being.

    Social media will be looked at to provide solutions to problems that businesses continue to wrestle with: from knowledge management to customer relationships and workflow.

    Altimeter Group has been doing a lot of work wrestling with the implications of social CRM as part of this process of using social media to solve business problems.

    One of the break out trends for 2009 was ‘the web of no web’ where a mix of QR codes and augmented reality allow consumers to interact with the real world with online information. This has a huge potential, but there are two key challenges, the most dangerous one being that someone comes up with a creative execution so bad that consumers reject the ‘web of no web’ concept.

    The web of no web has broken out in a couple of new directions in 2010. Firstly a much more serious focus on location with this year’s star Foursquare and the hangers on like SCVNGR and Gowalla. This isn’t a new area per se location has been incorporated into Twitter for a while and Yahoo!’s ZoneTag and FireEagle were doing this years ago, but failed to get sufficient traction. From a business perspective this has been partly driven by the coupon market as online and offline businesses discount to get consumers through the door – thank you financial crisis.

    A secondary aspect of these applications is that they are less draining on a battery than the AR stuff getting heat last year. Barcodes rather than QRcodes may make the biggest impact yet as ‘augmented retailing’ takes off, it is no coincidence that the latest eBay and Amazon US iPhone apps include a barcode scanning function to allow real-time real-world price comparison. What did 2010 in tech mean to you?

  • Size zero design

    Size zero design

    What do I mean by size zero design? If you look at the product design of Apple’s most-hyped products: the Apple MacBook Air, the iPod Touch and the iPhone all have one attribute: being thin. I am picking on Apple just because they have some high-profile designs feature it and Steve Jobs seems to obsess on it, but they are not the only sinners.It’s just that Apple happen to be taste-makers for other consumer electronics and technology manufacturers.

    Before size zero

    It used to be back in the day that things were about small. Owning a cellphone in the late 90s and early noughties saw my handsets shrink dramatically in size from 1999-to-2001:

    Handset                          Size                                             Mass

    I888                                130 x 49 x 22 mm                    195 grams
    T39                                  96 x 50 x 18 mm                      86 grams

    However there is a limit to how small a phone can get from a usability point-of-view. Secondly, more functionality meant more powerful electronics which gave out more heat and larger screens for email, web-browsing and other smartphone-type functions.

    Size zero origins

    There were hints of size zero design back in 1999 with the Palm V and Vx PDAs. These pioneered the use of glued one piece devices and a metallic slim look. In 2004 Motorola released the RAZR clamshell mobile phone and could be considered the inciting incident driving the current fad for size zero design. It had sales-floor sex appeal and stood out from the competition. In reality it was a crappy cell phone with poor battery life that felt wrong when you held it. But it became the best-selling clamshell phone ever. By contrast Motorola’s PEBL which was designed to give the consumer a more tactile experience was a more modest sales success, good enough for Motorola to make a second version but not enough to echo through the product design of the Motorola’s phone range.

    Handset                          Size                                             Mass

    PEBL U6                        86.5 x 49 x 20 mm                    110 grams
    RAZR V3                        98 x 53 x 13.9 mm                     95 grams

    The apparent lessons where not lost on the industry. Steve Jobs used to have a RAZR. Despite the fact that it was Sony Ericsson who was the handset manufacturer who led compatibility with Apple’s iSync software at the time. I had to buy adaptors from a German software company to get iSync to work with my Nokia devices. Jobs experimented with size zero design on the first iPhone and iPod Touch and then rolled it out to the MacBook Air. By the time that the iPad came about, size zero design was encoded into Apple’s tablet DNA.

    The MacBook Air is notable because unlike the iPhone, Apple did have a product to judge it against. Delving back into the Apple past products the MacBook Duo series of the early 1990s set an aggressive product design to match in terms of size and functionality. That the MacBook Air decided not to have a dock is a discussion for another time, what is more interesting is how the MacBook Air is actually bigger in every way except depth than the Duo series of devices.

    I call this obsessive size zero design because I believe that it is an unhealthy design language. Jonathan Ive’s recent work at Apple owes a lot to the works and thinking of Dieter Rams. How does these size zero designs stake up against Rams’ ten principles of good design?

    1. Good design is innovative.
    2. Good design makes a product useful.
    3. Good design is aesthetic.
    4. Good design makes a product understandable.
    5. Good design is unobtrusive.
    6. Good design is honest.
    7. Good design is long-lasting.
    8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
    9. Good design is environmentally friendly.
    10. Good design is as little design as possible.

    I think that the Apple’s size zero product range break rules: 2, 4, 6, 10.

    Good design makes a product useful

    Tell that to iPhone owners who are stuck with a device with an inadequate battery life. I can get just over one working day out of my phone if I nurse it carefully and use a mophie 3G juice pack air. The slimness of the product makes it awkward to hold and cuts down on the amount of battery that can be crammed into the case. Slimness was also responsible for the iPhone 4’s controversial antenna design.

    Good design makes a product understandable

    The iPhone 4 antenna debacle was partly down to people holding the device wrong, hardly an example of good design makes a product understandable.

    Good design is honest

    The first iteration of the MacBook Air has complex beveled sides to make it look thinner than it actually is.  Then there is the alleged gorilla glass failures on the back of the iPhone 4.

    Good design is as little design as possible

    Rams last principle is like a zen koan. On the one hand it could be talking about materials, on the other side it also means a lack of customisation and a lack of awareness from the user that the product has been designed. Instead it must be seen as the only obvious way that the design should have been done.

    Users of Apple iPhones and MacBook Air devices, by contrast are conscious of the products design. They are also conscious of the fragility of their devices, which is the reason why an eco-system in cases and protectors has been built up around mobile phones for the first the first time in a decade.

    In conclusion

    In conclusion, I think that size zero designs are leading technology product design up a blind alley, one that doesn’t benefit consumers in the longer term. Product usability has been sacrificed and the consumer is not free to alter any part of the device such as memory capacity the way they would with a normal laptop.

    All phone dimension data came from GSM Arena. More design related content here.