-
Blog
- IN FINNISH: Lähdesmäki: Matti Nykänen katoaa lööpeistä 2030
August 19, 2010
- Design oriented approach in Agile SW development the best of two worlds
May 3, 2010
- IN FINNISH: Apple iPad, ensikokemukset
April 4, 2010
- Five Trends for 2010
January 14, 2010
- IN FINNISH: Viisi nousevaa trendiä
January 12, 2010
- Internet Marketing Guide Book (in Finnish)
December 22, 2009
- October Newsletter - Lokakuun uutiskirje
October 30, 2009
- Work, work, work
October 27, 2009
- Teaching the old dog some new tricks
September 9, 2009
- New Finnish Guide for Internet Marketing Coming Up
September 4, 2009
- IN FINNISH: Lähdesmäki: Matti Nykänen katoaa lööpeistä 2030
Size Doesn’t Matter?
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Everything is bigger in America, as the saying goes. Cars, roads, burgers, everything. I remember as a kid trying to come up with something, which is actually smaller in the US than in Europe. The only thing I could think of was the hockey rink. NHL teams play in a smaller rink than their European counterparts. Size matters for sure, but sometimes it makes sense to shrink rather than grow.
Recently I have witnessed a trend of many consumer electronics becoming smaller. Small laptops, or netbooks, were 2008’s most visible examples of this phenomenon. Products such as the ASUS Eee PC and the Acer Aspire One have been selling well and receiving significant media attention. There are other devices too, however, which have started to shrink. Last year I read stories of portable desktop computers, data projectors fitting in your pocket, printers the size of a cigarette box, and even portable music studios.
There are two major exceptions to this shrinkage in the past couple of years: mobile phones and displays, including both television sets and computer screens. Stationary displays can still grow. I predict that in the future indoor screens are going to be as big as the rooms’ inner walls. In fact, they can become the walls, as many sci-fi movies have suggested.
Mobile phones, instead, are a different story. They shrank already in the 90s so that the smallest models were too tiny to use with standard man hands. In addition, recently mobile phones have become far more than devices for plain calling and texting: they are used for gaming, surfing the web, personal navigation, emailing, organizing calendars, etc. These functionalities demand large enough displays, better batteries, GPS receivers, and so on. Naturally equipping phones with these hardware components causes them to grow.
Some innovations slow down the growth of mobile phones. Lately touch screens have enabled better browsing experiences without having to make the phone physically bigger. The bottom line is that there is an optimal size to a phone: it has to be big enough to provide good usage experience, but still fit in a pocket.
What about optimal sizes for other consumer electronics? Why are laptops becoming smaller and displays bigger? These questions are rooted to the (evolving) habits and needs of people. Netbooks come quite close to the most powerful smart phones – in fact, many netbooks are sold by telecom operators bundled to a data plan. In other words, mobile phones and computers are converging. They are both personal devices for storing and accessing information, communicating, and so on. These personal devices need to be accessible any time, anywhere. TVs and desktop computer screens are not carried around so there is no need for them to stop growing until the physical spaces they reside in start to set limits.
Some growth/shrinkage phenomena are related to fashion or marketing gimmicks, such as the Zippo-sized mobile phones of the late 90s, but most of them are answering some genuine need or desire of users.
Santtu
It seems that as the optimal size of gadgets is reached, they start getting thinner and evolving crazy hinge mechanisms.
We’ll the controversy between small pocketable devices and big screens is becoming obsolete as the flexible OLED display technologies (and pocket sized projectors) are being introduced all around the campus. It won’t take too long until we have almost normal desktop sized screens on our netbooks and even phones.
Harri that is an interesting prediction. I’ve remember thinking way back that mobile phones should utilize external shared input and output channels whenever possible. Buses might have screens on the backs of their seats, cafes could have pluggable keyboards on tables, etc. However, this path has not progressed that much. So it might indeed be more likely that personal technologies such as small projectors and e-paper folded in the pocket are the way of the future.