Geekfoolery

A while back I dumped on the tablet PC as a solution in search of problem. Overpriced and underpowered. Yet the geek in me still remains fascinated with the idea that sooner or later there will be a gadget that hits the sweet spot of capability, convenience, and price. There’s a couple things that are out in the market, or soon will be, that might be getting closer to what people want–or more to the point, what I want–in a Portable Electronic Gadget.

Part of the problem with the tablet PC is that is there is this underlying assumption that it has to be able to do everything that your laptop or desktop machine can do. And the fact is that your basic, standard-issue PC or Mac is designed to do a lot of different things. Word processing, music/photo/video editing, CAD/CAM, web surfing, and 3-D games, to name but a few. The various attempts at creating a compact portable computer have started with the assumption that the gadget should be able to do everything that your PC does. Trying to get all the capability of a PC into a smaller package ends with with compromises in performance and function, and as an added bonus, higher price.

On the other hand, I think there is merit in the idea of starting off with the idea that you’re not necessarily going to want to do everything you do with full-fledged computer on an ultraportable. The laptop was created with this vision of people getting presentations done on long red-eye flights to meet the client, or somehow you’re sitting at the beach with your laptop and cellphone, “working” from home. For me, 90% of the time I see a laptop booted up on an airplane, I see Solitaire open, and I haven’t yet seen a laptop at the beach.

One device that takes the idea of just picking one function that you might want to do away from the desk and have in a portable form factor is the Sony eBook reader. The Sony reader differs from some other models that have been tried in the past in a couple key areas: The first is that while you can and are no doubt encouraged to purchase content from the Sony eBookstore, you’re not limited to that. You can load PDFs and a couple other formats as well. You could fill the thing up with Project Gutenberg files for free, if you want to. It also displays JPEGs and plays MP3s, albeit with a gray-scale screen that might not make it the best portable photo album. But it is small, has long battery life–basically, it doesn’t use any juice unless you’re turning pages–and while at around $400, it’s not exactly cheap, chances are if there is a market for this, the price will come down.

Another device that could fill that niche of PEG also comes from Sony–the Playstation Portable, the PSP. The device is sold as a game machine/movie player, and it does both of those. But by adding a memory stick, you can load your own movie clips, MP3s and JPEGs. The PSP also includes WiFi and a web browser that does a fair-to-middling job on a lot of websites. Even if you don’t use the PSP for it’s advertised function, it makes a pretty nifty PMP (portable media player) and Internet appliance. And it fits in the pocket, and the price is around $200 if you check around.

The last item isn’t quite on the market yet. It’s called Chumby, and perhaps the simplest way to describe it is a physical incarnation of a software “widget.” Widgets are those little one-function program deals that probably got their start with Konfabulator, and now are included in Apple’s OS X and Windows Vista (they’re called Gadgets, just to be different). About the size of grapefruit, with soft suede cover, the Chumby is designed to be pretty much anything you want it to be. Software for Chumby is open source, so when they become available, you’ll sign up at the Chumby website and download widgets from there, or create your own, or modify someone else’s to suit your needs. Figure all the things that widgets do now… pull scores, stock quotes, moon phases, play MP3s, whatever… you’ll be able to set up Chumby to do. Expect to price around $150, it’s a tempting little gadget to play with.

What I see in these gadgets is that they tend to fly in the face of the idea of “convergence.” As cellphones became PDAs with cameras and MP3 players and navigation tools, I think it is easy to predict that soon we’ll have one device that does everything. But I think there will always be a market for a devices that do one or two things really, really well.

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