06.10.07
d: all things disastrous
The D: All Things Digital conference, which ran in the United States last week, was an interesting look at what happens when you run a highly promoted event where the major players want to turn up and be seen without actually committing to announcing anything useful. Three big companies were meant to take the stage with something to show off; by the end of the week, you’d forgive anyone with any remaining critical faculties for wondering why they bothered at all.
Perhaps the worst off after this whole mess is poor, beleaguered Palm - a company which has watched, apparently powerless, as the PDA market it practically invented is dominated by rivals with better devices, better technology, better marketing and better vision. I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, if only because I thought the interfaces and technology used in the original PalmOS devices were very elegant and clever. I thought it was a real shame when it became apparent that the company’s strategy had changed over from building small, lightweight, clever operating systems to trying to snap at the heels of feature-rich, overpowered and overweight systems like Microsoft’s various Windows implementations on smartphones.
I think my soft spot for Palm has turned into outright pity in the wake of this week’s reveal of the Foleo “mobile companion”. The company has spent a fortnight hyping up the entirely new class of mobile device it planned to reveal at D; when the Foleo appeared on stage at the conference, that suddenly all seemed like a cruel joke. Except Palm’s execs weren’t laughing. They looked deadly serious, in the way that a completely batshit insane old woman on the street who thrusts a dog turd wrapped in a dirty blanket at you and insists that it’s her baby might look serious.
Out of options and out of creativity, Palm has seemingly chosen the road less travelled; madness. The Foleo is, in essence, a particularly ugly, underpowered and overpriced laptop; its small screen and form factor are offset by chunky plastic styling and large surrounds. Trying to sell this device as a magical new class of mobile technology is incredibly misguided - and what’s worse, it speaks of a company which has presumably run out of ideas for improving its smartphone device, the Treo. The iPhone may turn out to be far from perfect, but at least it’s innovating and pushing other manufacturers to do likewise. Trying to persuade people to carry around a chunky slab of laptop to extend your smartphone’s functionality is a step in the opposite direction. It feels like a white flag.
Second place in this uninspiring list has to go to Microsoft - although, on form as ever, the company seems to have garnered plenty of positive headlines for “Surface”, the company’s ludicrous and pointless rip-off of a million tech demos of yore. Such is the joy of the modern tech news media; the perfect meeting of bloggers who don’t do even the most basic research on their stories in their rush to be the first to regurgitate the latest press release, and PR people who can dangle freebies in front of their credulous, eager faces in return for the disposal of integrity they never had in the first place.
Here’s some real, honest to got analysis for you; Microsoft Surface is shit. It’s not just shit, it’s old and shit.
I’ve seen demos of interactive tabletops for almost a decade now, and the concept itself is much older. Every year or so, regular as clockwork, the research labs at somewhere like MIT, or Cambridge, or Philips or Fujitsu, will churn out an interactive tabletop, controlled by gestures, or by RFID-tagged objects that you move around on the table, or by a pen, or whatever. Every year or so, we look at it, and go “right, that’s nice” - and nobody gets terribly excited, because while we can see the potential uses for such a system, they’re not very exciting uses and the whole thing is much too expensive anyway.
This is exactly the same problem Microsoft Surface faces; the uses aren’t very exciting, and it’s too expensive. Microsoft’s implementation faces a further problem; it’s rubbish. While other researchers have managed to put together systems that are entirely integrated into a table, mostly by using cameras under the glass to read hand positions, Microsoft’s Surface requires that you have IR cameras positioned in the room above the surface (yeah, they glossed over that bit in the demo a bit). While some systems use RFID or bluetooth, Surface requires that your various devices have stickers on the bottom of them with unique ID tags that the camera can identify. For a tech demo, this is fine; for the real world, I’m not exactly convinced by the usability (or by the $10,000 price tag).
To the large, expensive and poorly designed Surface, then, add Bill Gates’ astonishing comments on user interfaces for videogames. He heavily implied that MS is working on gesture based input for Xbox 360, but said that it won’t be like the Wii - going on to dismiss the Wiimote because you can’t, err, “pick up your tennis racket and swing it.” This, apparently, is a “natural thing” to want to do.
Strike one; Gates (not, it should be added, a man with a great track record in terms of predicting consumer technology trends) believes that we want to play videogames by picking up real-life devices and flinging them around our living rooms. Hmm.
Strike two; Gates then goes on to say that this revolutionary, amazing new technology will be based on… Video recognition. Unfortunately, his interviewer didn’t have the cop on to check that Bill has actually heard of Eye Toy, or seen any of the next-gen stuff Sony is doing with that technology.
It’s good that Microsoft is thinking outside the box on interface stuff, at long last, but perhaps they should try getting their thinking out of other people’s boxes while they’re at it.
Final strike for the week - albeit a somewhat weaker one - goes to Apple, who turned up at All Things Digital with really very little to bring to the table. Apple has an excuse, admittedly, since WWDC is just around the corner and Steve Jobs will want to keep his powder dry for an event on the company’s home turf. All the same, his announcement at All Things Digital was disappointing - an Apple TV box with a bigger hard disc, and the ability to play YouTube videos.
Now, the former is fine, but the latter? YouTube videos played full-screen on a HDTV? Even the normally far from incisive Walt Mossberg, interviewing Jobs on stage, couldn’t help but comment that this looked, well, a bit crap. As plenty of other have observed, what AppleTV needs isn’t YouTube support - it’s decent support for a wider range of codecs and containers. Admittedly, you can now hack that onto the box with relative ease; but supporting a full set of codecs out of the box would change it from a curiosity into a killer product. On that front, Jobs had nothing to say.
Oh well. WWDC tomorrow. I don’t know whether to hope for the rumours of a 12″ display, ultra thin and light MacBook to be true or not; if they’re true, I’m going to be significantly poorer in the coming weeks, I fear. The joy of geekery is matched only by the pain in my wallet.
