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Tuesday, September 05, 2006
By Simon Woodhouse.
I've started to notice life is all about moving from one trend to the next. Take fashion for instance - periodically flares are in and then flares are out and then flares are in again. Then there's politics, with its constant swings between the Left and the Right. In a similar vein, every so often we all want to drink Coke, and then after a while it's time for something new so we all go back to Pepsi again. What I'm getting at here is it's all about movement, change, shifting to the opposite of what's popular at the moment. And this same sort of pattern occurs in consumer electronics, but it seems to be more about size than anything else.
Do you remember when mobile phones first came out? Motorola led the way in 1983 with the DynaTAC 8000X. You may not know the name, but you'd probably recognize the device itself. It was a massive, gray beast of a thing, more akin to a house brick than a phone. But if you had one, and it worked, you were way cool. It took a while for the mobile phone market to establish itself, but when it finally did, having a mobile became less and less of a status symbol. What you needed then to improve your kudos rating was a smaller phone. Things carried on like this until 3G technology arrived. These phones were bigger than their second-generation cousins, but that was ok, because if you pulled a slightly bulkier phone out of your pocket it showed you were hooked up to the 3G network, and hey-presto it was kudos gaining time again.
TV's have done a similar thing. First they where big, then for a brief moment in the 80's tiny TV's were cool. Nowadays you're no one if you haven't got a forty-two inch plasma bolted to the wall of your living room. These are good TV's, just don't try moving the thing on your own if you haven't got the best health insurance money can buy.
The practicality of a device's design doesn't really seem to play a part in whether it's cool or not. Bigger phones with bigger buttons have got to be easier to use. But if you're not video calling (and very few of us are at the moment), what difference does the screen size make? And it's nice to have a big TV, but not so good if you need a small crane to move it.
So who is it that decides which way a trend is going to go? Industry people say it's consumer driven, but I'm not so sure. I recently bought an iPod Nano, Apple's ultra-slim MP3 player. It's the 2GB model, so it holds about five hundred songs. The sound quality is good and it's certainly very portable, but from a practical point of view it's almost too small. At only quarter of an inch thick there's not much to get hold off. The click wheel offers what Apple calls touch and go control, however this is so sensitive I find myself not wanting to touch it unless I have to, which means handling the thing is even more difficult. I get the impression from the Nano that Apple got so carried away with seeing just how small they could make a decent MP3 player, they forgot to take practicality into account.
Rather than going to the extremes of big and small, I'd prefer it if the companies that produce consumer electronics concentrated on finding the optimum size for a device. A set of dimensions that result in a product that's not only practical and functional, but also easy to handle at both ends of the scale (not so small you can lose it down the back of the sofa, and not so big you need a team of slaves to shift it).
I have come across a couple of products that seem to fit this description. Up until very recently I've been using a Motorola V50 mobile phone. When I bought it in mid 2000 it was a pretty cool piece of kit, but the thing that kept it in my pocket for over six years was its ease of use. The buttons were nice and big and the screen was perfect for my needs. It also had a real tactile quality to it. All the corners were rounded and it used to fit perfectly in the palm of my hand. I'd still be using it today if the buttons weren't all cracked and unreadable. The other device that seems to have the right balance between size and practicality is the Game Boy Advance SP. I bought one a couple of years ago when I was going to be doing a lot of long haul plane flights. I never really used it very much, so I sold it after a couple of months. But during the time I had it, I found it was such a tactile thing I just wanted to keep picking it up and flipping the screen open. I may be wrong, but it seems to me both Motorola and Nintendo put a lot of thought into the design of these two products. Not only do they look and feel good, but they work well too.
Perhaps I'm expecting too much in hoping for all consumer electronics to be as well designed, and maybe my only concern should be how well they work. But as a way of generating consumer loyalty, surely it would be better if manufacturers came up with one or two really good designs that kept people coming back again and again, rather than trying to create new trends which just tell people what they want.
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