Progress is wonderful - but at what point do things get out of hand? Mike Elgan investigates
We all know technology gets smaller, cheaper and more feature-rich over time. But is that always a good thing? Too small Take netbooks, for instance. The original idea was that they are tiny enough to slip into a bag and use on the move. But a recent product launch by a Chinese company makes us think they can actually be too small. uSmart showed off a netbook with a 4.8 inches screen at the Hong Kong Electronic Fair. The mini netbook is powered by an Intel Atom processor and, unlike many full-size laptops, has HDMI support for audio and video. What makes this a netbook, rather than a PDA, is that it runs XP, Vista, Windows 7 or Linux. Small, portable netbooks are great - provided you can see the screen and use the keyboard. Users complained about the cramped screen and keyboard of the first-generation netbooks with 7 inches screens; how can a 4.8 inches-screen netbook running Windows be anything but miserable to use? Even devices without screens and keyboards have become too tiny for their own good. USB flash drives are a good example: the iDisk Diamond is about the size and nearly the thickness of a fingernail. Elecom, meanwhile, offers a MicroSD MRSMC03 card reader that's nearly as small. The tiny device lets you insert your own MicroSD Card and read it on any PC. Both the iDisk Diamond and the Elecom MR-SMC03 are small enough to swallow. Drop either, and finding it will be like searching for a contact lens. Fortunately, both have places to attach a strap, which secures the gadget but triples the bulk. Too cheap While it's fairly straightforward to make the case that some gadgets can be too small, is it possible for gadgets to be too cheap? We're about to find out. The ukp300 netbook was big news last year. But at press time, you could get a full-size Toshiba laptop with 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and Windows 7 for ukp299 at Tesco. The problem with such low prices is that, if everybody gravitates toward zero-margin products, quality will suffer. Just look at the airline industry; people now use the internet to book flights based exclusively on airfares. The result is lousy service, no food and overworked, underpaid pilots. Too feature-rich? IoSafe offers a waterproof, fireproof external hard drive called the IoSafe Solo ($499 or around ukp297, iosafe.com/solo) that holds 2TB of data. That's 2,000 gigabytes of storage space. What are you going to do with all that storage space? If you fill it up, you'll never be able to back everything up online or anywhere else. If you have a hard-drive crash, that data is gone forever. The iPhone is famous for its accessories. You can buy just about any peripheral device you can think of. But a new product called the 8X Telescope with Hard Case for iPhone is an accessory too far. The case attaches to the phone, and the absurdly large telephoto lens attaches to the case. You put the whole thing on a tripod that comes with it, because the telephoto lens will exaggerate any movement and make your pictures blurry. But if you're going to carry a bulky case, tripod and lens, why not just carry a separate digital camera? Meanwhile, the Apple Magic Mouse is getting a lot of (bad) press. It attempts to make all functionality invisible, using multitouch gestures rather than buttons. The opposite of the Magic Mouse is an over-engineered pointing device called the OpenOfficeMouse (OOMouse) which has 18 buttons. It also has an Xbox-like joystick on the side. Those buttons are highly programmable with key commands, macros and what the write-up calls "default profiles" for OpenOffice applications. What's the point of so many buttons, and so much programmability? It will probably take you two years to master all the time-saving features. We never thought we'd see the day, but here it is: some gadgets have now become too small, too cheap and too complex. To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
