Wireless technology is a big boon for those on the move and for those of us who want freedom from - wires (what else!). Technology has progressed so much that now a days we can have wireless internet, wireless headphones, wireless communication between home devices and even wireless power - a recent development at MIT that works on magnetically coupled resonant receiver-transmitter pairs. Technology really has made rapid strides to make life simpler for us.
Or, has it? My immediate need is to buy a bluetooth headset with a mic/ headphone and a bluetooth adapter for my laptop to be able to communicate with freedom over VoIP channels to far flung places across the world. I want to be able to simply walk into a neighbourhood store, pay for it, plug it in and start talking. Tech savvy people would really laugh at that desire, something that will remain unfulfilled for ages to come! Laughable in other ways too - why pay double for something that's available at throw away prices, at throw away quality, at throw away customer service levels over some unknown e-commerce site? Having done some preliminary research on the net, I found that I'll have to install drivers on my laptop, configure some settings for both the adapter & headset and ensure compatibility between the adapter-laptop and adapter-headset (taking care of v 1.1, 1.2, etc). I believe I'll be able to manage all this to make it all work together, the how seems like a miracle. The question is how much time I have and what is my priority for this sort of thing right now. Being free of wires and being able to walk around while talking on VoIP is definitely a top priority for me right now. But spending many hours just digging up drivers, upgrades, potentially crashing my laptop - that's just not my cup of tea at this stage of life!
It may seem an exaggeration at first that it can be so hard to set right these things & get them working. I did a simple test run to check out these bluetooth headsets. Borrowing from my friend who bought a Sony Ericsson headset which claimed compatibility with my K700i cell, I checked if the 2 of them get along well. Can technology ever work that smoothly? Its simple enough to charge and switch on the headset. But no way on earth would the cell recognise the headset! The headset bought on ebay had no manuals in English - only Swedish, Italian and French. Not that manuals always help. Maybe it was defective. Maybe there was a secret 1 micrometer long switch that I had to press with a needle, looking through a microscope. I could have easily gone to user forums, browsed articles on the net, discussed with users and arrived at a solution. But the whole thing had just turned me off, as I wasn't interested in publishing a research paper on that technology, but merely to use it!
This forms the crux of why companies like Apple make a fortune based mainly on triumph of form over function. There is a huge market for creating devices and software that do just what they're supposed to, with no frills and no surprises, with no steep learning curve. Form over function goes beyond mere aesthetics. Its about intuitive, user friendly interfaces - simplicity is harder to come by than complexities. The best ideas tend to be the most simple - almost too easy to miss. In the area of personal computing, the potential is huge for offering ready made, fully tested, guaranteed to work solutions. Think of a bulb - one is nearly assured in 99% of cases that it will work as advertised, else money is refunded. Installation is dead easy too. For mass markets, that is where the future lies, not in just pushing through sophisticated products that fail to work mostly.
However the price one has to pay is exorbitant. In the lower to middle strata of society, only the people in a country like America have the opportunities to make investments in such geeky gadgets and make it worth their while too. Of course the other advanced countries in the world can definitely buy these - but unless one is very deeply interested in possessing the latest technology, its not worth the cost-benefit analysis. So, for a long time to come, the rest of the world will still be mired in plenty of wires and magazines showing what can be wonderful, easy to use solutions to get rid of them!!!! As for me, I'll invest in a 3m long headphone cable, upgrading from my current 1m cable length!!! :-))
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