A phone is too small to do any multimedia/PDA stuff usefully; so make it bigger and what do you get? The N-Gage.
The iPod has too few controls to do any full-scale interactive PDA stuff. So add more controls! —And you ruin its user experience.
A PDA is too big to use as a phone and its OS is too specialized to make it a usable music player in the car or jogging when you can't look at the screen easily. How to solve that? Hell if I know. Maybe that's why PDAs are the least compelling players of the three.
The "convergence" of PDA functions in the iPod, music-player functions in PDAs, and camera/organizer stuff in phones is a matter of adding what's easy to add to each device without ruining its basic premise. You can only go so far down that path in any of these cases. That ought to tell us something, namely that these devices don't want to converge. Not all the way.
Any good UI designer knows: let a device be what it wants to be. Far too many good ideas have been killed by a designer who got too clever for his own good. And I don't know of any successful UI designers who started their careers as tech columnists.
by Brian Tiemann — Dec 24
The iPod has too few controls to do any full-scale interactive PDA stuff. So add more controls! —And you ruin its user experience.
A PDA is too big to use as a phone and its OS is too specialized to make it a usable music player in the car or jogging when you can't look at the screen easily. How to solve that? Hell if I know. Maybe that's why PDAs are the least compelling players of the three.
The "convergence" of PDA functions in the iPod, music-player functions in PDAs, and camera/organizer stuff in phones is a matter of adding what's easy to add to each device without ruining its basic premise. You can only go so far down that path in any of these cases. That ought to tell us something, namely that these devices don't want to converge. Not all the way.
Any good UI designer knows: let a device be what it wants to be. Far too many good ideas have been killed by a designer who got too clever for his own good. And I don't know of any successful UI designers who started their careers as tech columnists.