Some things are entirely predictable - for example, customers welcome price cuts. This did not stop the head of buying for Game Stores Group expounding on two specialist subjects this week: the sales of Xbox gaming devices and the obvious. He revealed that if you drop the price of a product, people are likely to buy more.
To be fair, it's easy to laugh when you're an end user. But when you're at the heart of computer product development and marketing, things probably don't seem so obvious. How else can you explain the cash and effort poured into the development of products that no one wants, ranging from the Sinclair C5 to the Internet fridge? Not only do these development guys fail to see the wood for the trees, but they seem to become obsessed with the first tree they see. It is of course the wrong one, and they go barking up it.
These thoughts came to mind when I saw Sharp's Zaurus SL-5500 palmtop computer recently. It's a stylish handheld device that runs powerful business programs as well as personal information management (PIM) functions in a colourful Linux and Java environment. The Sharp approach reminds me of Psion's worthy intentions with its Epoc - now Symbian OS - environment. That operating system was designed for mobile computers rather than being a cut-down version of another platform, like Pocket PC. All we need now is for Sharp to take a tip from Microsoft's Xbox team and drop the price by a third.
I was being shown this great product when the demonstrator slid the palmtop open to reveal a keypad of 37 tiny buttons, including a full Qwerty set. But surely the lack of a keypad isn't so much a cruel necessity in pen-based computing as the whole point of it. Yet it seems the muscle-thumbed generation of SMS text messagers has led Sharp astray.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of fold-away portable keyboards for palmtop computers. But a set of tiny buttons is even less practical than the pop-up on-screen keypads provided in Pocket PC and Palm OS, especially when stylus navigation is so highly developed. Back in the late 1980s, one peripheral company developed a computer mouse with a microscopic 100-key Qwerty keypad arranged on top. Not only did it cost more than a full-sized keyboard and regular mouse, it was infinitely less usable.
Finally, just two days ago I saw a demonstration of Wacom's Cintiq 18SX, an 18in TFT flat-panel display with a touch-sensitive screen that can be used with a stylus. One of my colleagues expressed a concern that when you have the opportunity to write all over your display with it resting on your lap, it's a little inconvenient to reach over to the keyboard still sitting on your desk. He suggested that Wacom build a keyboard into the bezel.
Over coffee we volleyed concepts back and forth concerning mini keypads, right-click context menus, and tap-sensitive hotspots like the ones you get with regular Wacom tablet devices. Then we came onto my old favourite subject: voice recognition. Incomplete support and uneven development over the years have left voice recognition technology floundering. Get this one right, and the industry can ditch these silly keypads for good, letting the rest of us concentrate - perhaps for the first time - on actual input.
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