I think I argue that the cell phone is not the right interface as you say. I also imply that it’s a good place to start since you always have it with you. So if we are talking about convergence, we are both talking about a small device with an adaptable UI. How is that different than what you are saying? The camera seems just as laughable to me to start at converging. I find any camera without a decent optical zoom (greater or equal to 3X optical) to be useless… I haven’t shopped in a year or so, but every camera with optical zoom does not seem like something I would want to carry around in my pocket (vs… say the RAZR). Also, if you’re going to put a touch screen on a camera, how is that any different than on the phone? I think both are laughable as they are for convergence, but either has just as much potential as we march on developing: voice driven interfaces, or touch screens, or “glove” like typing or any other type of I/O, UI.

So even if we do use a camera and converge telephony onto it so that there is no “phone” interface. What are you likely to use more during the day, the telephony or the camera? Fill in the blank here, when you leave the house in a hurry, what do you tell your wife: “I have to run back in, I forgot to grab my _____.” Can you go a day without a camera? How about a phone?

You keep saying the cell phone is the wrong place to move. But I think you are focusing too much on the capabilities of these devices. The softwre, hardware and user interaction. I agree, that is the wrong software, hardware etc. But it’s the moving part that we need to focus on. The phone is the best place to start because it is most needed function. If you want a camera type device that has no phone interface but you can place calls on it, I would imagine people will call it phone in the long run. If you want it to be invisible, fine I agree there too. It’s voice medium, there’s work to be done, but it’s possible. But when you voice prompt that box in your jacket pocket to call the office, I would bet those around you will say: “hey, that’s a neat phone”

The problem with Bluetooth (as I got into above) is that it’s more centered around having hubs. Right now my laptop is the hub for my mobile phone, Palm, and mouse. If I want to browse the web on my Palm through my mobile phone’s connection, I must set up a separate connection between my Palm and mobile phone, making the phone the hub. My Palm should already know about my mobile phone since both are connected to my laptop—it should simply use the mobile phone for GPRS access when needed.

The camera is actually the ideal physical nexus. It is the only mandatorily (is that a word?) visual I/o device. I’m skeptical of putting the big CPU & processor on the camera, I want my camera half an inch thick with a massive touchscreen a couple buttons and a big honking battery, not a myraid of convergnce functionalities. But the camera should be the chief visual and physical I/o device, there’s no way you can remove that aspect of the camera. You cant possibly disconverge it, its part of the innate form, so you might as well go omega-factor on the bastard. But really now, who is going to be dumb enough to converge on a camera right? [Anyone dumb enough and with enough money to try, please contact yours truly immediately!] Read more on the catch-22 blog, i had a lot of fun with it and i hope you do to.

Thats why the cellphone is so laughable. Convergence is trying to make it the ultimate invisible un-touched verbal device, while at the same time we’re throwing mpeg4 accelerators, 802.11, primitive-audio-capabilitied java programs and vga screens on them. Sub-optimal optimization. Pardon me here, but… you cant converge on infinity.

Everything in its right place. Disconverge the I/o, converge the processing.

You’re definately right about worse before better. N-Gage example isnt fair though, there was no OpenGL ES spec at that point! But yes, in a nut shell, we’re devolving at an extremely fast pace. Even by my own metrics, I’m stepping out on a limb here, but I’d wager that evolution towards convergence is not possible. Look at the cellphone, how hard they’ve tried. But J2me is too cumbersome for hte phone hackers, and phones, ironically enough, lack the communication mechanisms for ubiquity. They lack the refined multi-threading to run background services, at least from every J2ME app I’ve ever seen (grabbing the entire I/o on the phone). All our attempts are to graft some other device onto another device. To capture obvious convergence niches (eg, TiVo). Thats why we need the box, the computing core we carry. Something general purpose and all purpose. Convergence is tyrannied by applications, by still being tied to the box it originally came in. Put hte damned thing in a sleek black box with two blinkenlights no buttons and call it a day. Revolution. Force the change; even if we’re going backwards in the process. Then we can start evolving.

Its going to be the hackable hardware which pushes the entire world towards something better, which shows the possibility. I’m dead drop dazzled at the gp2x; a handheld meant for hacking. SDL powered! Brilliant! They botched a number of things; the USB host is still up in the air, there’s no linux SDIO support (not their fault), but it is, in all essences, the first coming. It has no intent. Its a generic media box, something built for possibility. If you build it, they will hack.

Once we get that hackability, the plasticity to build and experiment, it seems to me only obvious that seperate I/o devices are the way to go. But they will be naturally freed from the original constraints upon which they were birthed. I/o for the sake of I/o. No longer purposed as “a cellphone screen”, “a walkman remote”.

Btw, seems you might have some knowledge on this, can bluetooth dongles communicate with more than one bluetooth device? My plan has been to route all comm through my laptop but I’m no longer so sure if its that easy to patch my cellphone through my computer. I may have to buy two dongles. :-/

It’s only going to get much worse before it gets better. The mobile phone manufacturers still have not figured out that usability can be the greatest feature. They’re really focused on figuring out which features to add next. Nokia already tried a gaming cameraphone (N-Gage) and was met with great failure. You know what they learned from it? They now believe that it just means that it wasn’t the right time to introduce the full-on gaming feature—so they’re going to focus on adding music-playing capabilities to their cameraphones. After they feel successful with that they’re going to try re-adding gaming (like, gameboy-type playing, not just the simple games mobile phones have now)… just to all their phones instead of a specific line.

And then you have the fact that the majority of HCI and usability people I speak to seem to believe in convergence of interface as well. It is more convenient to be carrying fewer devices.

But I’m still of the belief that separate interfaces are necessary, as you argue.

We just need a ton of peripherial I/o devices. My favorite right now, I/O 0.9, is the Griffin PowerMate; the original I/O, the huge fraking knob. USB. Bluetooth is a large first step towards 1.0; already we’re seeing Bluetooth mp3 players, bluetooth speakers, bluetooth speakerphones. With OLED we’ll finally have very small reasonably durable pocket-able displays. If Zigbee werent a bunch of capitalist dickheads we’d have basic input too some day soon. Lots of ski jackets are coming with builtin iPod controls embedded in the clothing themselves. Its not hard to imagine another ten iterations down the line with a do all box and various small i/o devices you can pick up and drop. Converge and unify functional capabilities (moore’s law states nothing more than everything worth having a brain is worth making a full featured brain), diverge the i/o to give greater flexibility and choice.

The only I see which truly superceeds all else, which demands its own real form, is the digital camera. Picture taking demands a sort of I/O functionality you cannot escape from. On the other hand, something like the Casio S500 but with the screen wirelessly accessible from my pocket computer— hells fucking yeah.

On the other hand, I feel so bad for the HCI people. Whole. New. Ballgame.

And Justin, yeah, security is an issue too, though Bluetooth isn’t *that* insecure (the large “toothing” problems lie in the fact that you can make a device name be whatever you want—so you make the device name your message). Most modern Bluetooth devices don’t have as many obvious security holes as the older ones.

But as a whole, I view the security issue at a higher level: Security vs. Usability. It’s a much larger problem that’s more widespread. That’s a tradeoff that’s always going on. Within the Usability side of that dichotomy, however, we have these simplicity vs. convenience/convergence issues as well.

Yet another trade off, security vs simplicity/convenience (not that bluetooth is exactly secure)