I suspect people like the Boston Herald writer need to file copy regularly, and so they get into the habit of extruding enough verbiage to fill the column inches. They don't necessarily think very hard.
The notion of convergence between devices has become something of a given among tech columnists. But I'm not aware of any evidence that most of the public - the people actually buying the devices - want that. Since the columnist says he's "fed up" with separate devices, I suppose he must be.
For myself, I find slipping a phone (Nokia 3650) in one coat pocket and an iPod (30GB photo) in the other is no terrible hardship. And both of those are considerably larger than my thumb. These devices are as small as they usefully need to be by now. If my Nokia phone were any smaller the screen would be too small and/or the keypad would be barely usable.
As for my iPod, well, it fits comfortably in my hand and consequently is "just right". (Frankly, I think it could be argued that Apple has gone a little overboard on size-reduction with the Nano, and it's not surprising that Steve Jobs has been caricatured as offering an iPod "inviso" on a comedy show.)
And I don't want any more "functions" on my iPod anyway. It would only complicate the interface. I can see the attraction of movies, but that's still multimedia, and that is the point. The iPod is a multimedia device, and that's what I want it for: I don't want to make phonecalls on it and I don't want to enter appointments into it. I certainly wouldn't want to go editing Word documents on it with some stylus thingy.
by Michael — Dec 23
The notion of convergence between devices has become something of a given among tech columnists. But I'm not aware of any evidence that most of the public - the people actually buying the devices - want that. Since the columnist says he's "fed up" with separate devices, I suppose he must be.
For myself, I find slipping a phone (Nokia 3650) in one coat pocket and an iPod (30GB photo) in the other is no terrible hardship. And both of those are considerably larger than my thumb. These devices are as small as they usefully need to be by now. If my Nokia phone were any smaller the screen would be too small and/or the keypad would be barely usable.
As for my iPod, well, it fits comfortably in my hand and consequently is "just right". (Frankly, I think it could be argued that Apple has gone a little overboard on size-reduction with the Nano, and it's not surprising that Steve Jobs has been caricatured as offering an iPod "inviso" on a comedy show.)
And I don't want any more "functions" on my iPod anyway. It would only complicate the interface. I can see the attraction of movies, but that's still multimedia, and that is the point. The iPod is a multimedia device, and that's what I want it for: I don't want to make phonecalls on it and I don't want to enter appointments into it. I certainly wouldn't want to go editing Word documents on it with some stylus thingy.