Recent threads both here and on Newton-FR got me thinking about the
different ways people conceive of portability and what they associate
with it.
For one thing, there seems to be two radically different ways to
understand what PDAs should be. On one hand, there is the paradigm in
which a PDA should do everything a "normal" computer does with the added
features related specifically to PDAs such as wireless everything and
HWR. Then, there's the paradigm where PDAs are mostly useful as basic
PIM+notes with restricted features. This seems to define part of the
debates on size issues as people who want like the Newt's screen size
may relate more to the first paradigm and those who dislike the Newt's
size tend to respond more to do the second.
But it seems there's more than size at stake.
There's something compellingly original in the handheld concept. More
task-oriented than session-based, maybe? It's not just being able to use
your computer anywhere, including a crowded Japanese train (I like this
image) but also having more of a digital slave than a toolbox.
A friend of mine who's both a researcher in psychology and a design
freak was telling me that people seem to like doing things with
computers rather than asking the computer to do things. Maybe this is
changing or, at least, a new form of computing experience has been
emerging with the PDA. Old news, maybe, but still interesting.
Especially in light of the other paradigm of do-it-all PDA.
After all, if you use your PDA for quick tasks and queries, you don't
need much in terms of display size and input mechanism. In situations
where it'd be appropriate (i.e., not during a lecture), a voice-based
system would work. Apart from the Star Trek references, there's nothing
specially weird about a cell phone you could ask for movie schedules,
stock quotes, daily reminders and voice recording.
But then, if your ideal machine is a Letter/A4-sized touch-screen that
you can fold and bring in your shirt pocket and still use as your sole
piece of digital equipment, the task-based paradigm doesn't work.
In fact, it even reaches the thread on digital music. Apart from the
convenience vs. quality issue, there's that of different uses. When you
workout, you most likely want to listen to music with a strong steady
beat with a fairly homogeneous profile. This is the "quality" of the
sound you want. If you want High Fidelity reproduction of a classical
concert, the last thing you want is the homogeneous profile. Most
classical music really wasn't designed for working out.
And I don't think PDAs were designed for work sessions. But maybe
there's a need for an extremely portable workstation.
Sorry for these ramblings.
Alex, on his fairly portable iBook used as a MacOS X workstation
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