Yesterday I posted about a discussion Jared Spool and I had about the import of the iPad.

I made the claim that the handset would continue to be the innovation driver, and as soon as it had the computing horsepower to drive a large LCD monitor and run productivity applications, it would be the primary and dominant computing platform.

Several smart commenters weighed in as well, so check out their comments here at the post’s permalink.

Anyway, it turns out I’m not much of a prognosticator. It’s already being done.

Check out the video to see Citrix’s Nirvana phone driving a full-size LCD, keyboard, and mouse, and running Windows.

Now *that’s* what I’m talking about.

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I really thought I’d be able to resist bloviating about the iPad. But then I read this tweet from Jared Spool:

Is nobody else talking about the iPad’s interesting facet? It brings the gap between phone & computer manufacturers closer together.

It got pushed to his Facebook as an update, where I flippantly responded:

And that’s a good thing why?? :-)

Graciously, Jared ignored my dumbass comment and persisted, writing this:

Seriously, I think there’s going to be some really interesting synthesis here. Nokia, LG, and Motorola really haven’t done anything scaled up before. The laptop & netbook players haven’t gone this small.

The competition will be interesting. Of course, there will be a lot of crap produced. (It’s Sturgeon’s Law.) But, there will be some really interesting innovations.

All because Apple had the balls to try something nobody else had done before. I think that’s the most significant part of all this….

(And here’s a question: How will Google respond? After all, they have Android on the low end and Chromium on the high end, but neither will really talk to each other.)

His follow-up got me to thinking. I didn’t respond point-by-point to his last comments, but his points helped me to suddenly sharpen my thinking and spin out a scenario in which tablets aren’t the wave of the future, but phones will continue to be.

So below I present to you my reasoning for why and how tablets are at best a diversion, and the real innovation will continue to happen with handsets. Read on for yet another opinion on the future of computing.

I agree with what you’re saying J. But my thinking is that until we have a truly convertible handheld-slash-desktop (and mobile computing) solution, the gap will continue to be a chasm into which product after product will fall into.

Now I’m not the most visionary person in the world, but it seems to me that the big, latent, unmet needs are this:

  1. I need a mobile device that fits in my pocket, that allows me to do [pretty much what the iPhone, Android, and BB handsets do].
  2. I need a computing device that gives me my familiar input devices (read: keyboard and pointing device), gives me access to my apps and content, and provides a large enough viewing area so I can work productively.

Notice that I didn’t say “contains my apps and content.” That was intentional. It doesn’t take a tech visionary to see that both our apps AND our content are migrating to the cloud.

Anecdotally, I can affirm that I am mighty tired of “curating” the content on my hard disks. I’d rather that stuff just lives in, is accessible from, and gets backed up in the cloud. And I WILL pay money for that. So, long story long, you’re right, the iPad comes close. But I think the real opportunity is this:

  1. My phone-like mobile device does it’s thing while I’m mobile.
  2. When I need to sit somewhere and work, I dock it. Then it pushes (at the VERY least) 1280×800 to an LCD, and automagically connects to my keyboard and mouse, to my suite of apps (wherever they may live – Office Live, Google Apps, whatever), and to my content. (And of course it brings up all my social interfaces.)

Obviously, handsets don’t have the horsepower to do this…yet. But they will. It’s clear that current PC architectures have massively oversolved for the computing horsepower problem, and if you’ve read any Clayton Christensen you know this is a scenario that’s ripe for disruption by a “good enough” solution that addresses the market’s new value dimensions.

Netbooks are an ongoing attempt to serve these new dimensions of value, but they’re constrained by having to run either bloated legacy OS’s or not-ready-for-primetime Linux distros. Plus, they don’t serve as  phones very well. Imagine holding one up to your ear… it’s like Maxwell Smart with a shoe to his head.

And you probably noticed I didn’t address the “how do I work productively when I’m mobile?” scenario. I’ll grant you that. But it’s certainly not an impossibility…I can envision a netbook form factor device with a big-@ss slot for receiving – you guessed it – my mobile phone-slash-computing engine.

So, to sum up:

  1. You’re right, things are getting interesting, and
  2. If product makers can make the phone the bearer of CPU horsepower, connectivity, and OS, then everything else becomes a terminal that the phone docks to or slides into.

And I’m adding here that this last point is what makes tablets superfluous.

Thoughts?

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Ling’s Cars: It Works

February 1, 2010

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Here’s the thing about LingsCars.com: It works.
Yes, it’s ugly as sin, an affront to the design sensibilities of practically everyone.
And this picture doesn’t do it justice. Go to the site, you need to see the seizure-inducing blinky-blinky.
But it works. It really does.
Let’s unpack that a bit. What do I mean when [...]

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The First Thing We Do, Let’s Keep The Lawyers Out Of The UI

January 31, 2010

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Old-school readers of UsabilityBlog may remember my (ranty but well-reasoned) diatribe against EULA’s and how they’re presented in software user interfaces. (Also check out my follow-up posts here and here.)
This picture I took the other day  reminded me how easy it is to corrupt and degrade the user experience with obtuse [...]

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So Bad It’s Good

January 15, 2010

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Check it out now. Today. Go on, you know you want to. And here’s the scary thing: IT’S STILL BEING UPDATED REGULARLY. How scary/awesome is that?
Here’s the URL: http://www.Havenworks.com.
I should also post Ling’s Cars. I’ll get around to that this week. In the meantime, enjoy HavenWorks, and try not to have [...]

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Guidelines For Design Guidelines

January 8, 2010

This post grew out of my response to a question on the IxDA discussion board. Russ Wilson, fellow Austinite, UX VP at a large software co., and all-around good guy, posed this question:
I’d like to get people’s opinions on the value of “company-wide” design guidelines (for software applications/websites)?In theory, design guidelines could help to remove [...]

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up…

January 6, 2010

Y’know that last post of mine where I pointed out that I didn’t know what to do with the “Yes” button?
I discovered what that button does. It’s probably the second-worst case scenario. (First worst-case scenario is that it makes you lose data or a setting you’ve selected.)
It CLOSES THE WINDOW.
Classic. You just can’t make up [...]

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What Am I Saying Yes To?

January 6, 2010

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I just took this screenshot this morning. Here’s the situation: I’d just installed new trackpad drivers on one of my Windows laptops. This laptop’s trackpad is a bit hinky, so I knew I wanted to get into the trackpad’s control panel and make some settings changes.
So I clicked the trackpad’s system [...]

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UXmatters Article: Testing Your Own Designs Redux

January 4, 2010

This is just a quick pointer to my latest UXmatters column, which is a follow-on to my article from September about the perils and pitfalls of testing your own designs.
In this follow-on, I revisited some of my more bombastic points about testing one’s own designs. Thanks to some excellent comments by several colleagues (and colleague-slash-wife), [...]

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My Amazon Pay Phrase Is What Now?

December 20, 2009

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Not exactly a usability post. But still worth a chortle. Or maybe a guffaw. OK, how about a titter? No? Alrighty then.
And while we’re talking Amazon.com, I need to post someday soon about how fantastically great Amazon’s “Amazon Recommends” marketing emails are. They rope me in more than I’d like to [...]

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Design To Make You Smile

December 15, 2009

You *will* smile when you see this design. Trust me. You will.
Then come back and we can talk about why it’s so smile-evoking.

Philco PC from Dave Schultze on Vimeo.

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First Name Form Fail

December 7, 2009

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So I was looking for a good price on a little Honda I’m interested in. I stumbled across a site that pings all the dealers in my vicinity for their best price.
One thing I do when I’m not sure of how trustworthy a site is…is use my initials instead of my [...]

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Sorry, But I Don’t Know Your Acronyms Intel

October 27, 2009

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Illustrated in this simple dialog are three common errors that software producers make:

Assuming that users know what the heck their acronyms mean,
Not helping users understand the implications of selecting/not selecting an option, and
Using a single selection control to perform what appears to be a combination of two actions (e.g., [...]

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This Is Going To Take Awhile…

October 27, 2009

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Really? I need permission from EVERYONE?
Well OK, but I think that’s going to take awhile…can you give me some time to get everyone’s permission? Or do you need to know right now?
Fine, be that way.

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Computerworld Article On Linux Drawbacks Misses Usability

October 15, 2009

I just read an article I found via Digg (my favorite guilty pleasure social news aggregator) about the drawbacks of desktop Linux. The writer touches on the ecosystem-related reasons that desktop Linux is languishing, but almost completely glosses over the fact that many people who try out a Linux distro are beset by significant and [...]

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Lazy Programming 101

October 15, 2009

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Not parsing phone numbers into area code-exchange-suffix is just plain lazy coding. It makes for hard-to-read numbers.
’nuff said.
OK, I didn’t say enough. This is yet more evidence that the price of usability is eternal vigilance.
Stepping off the soapbox now. Have a good day y’all.

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My Usability Marathon Preso

October 14, 2009

I just posted my Usability Marathon presentation to Slideshare. (I love Slideshare btw…no surprise; Rashmi Sinha started out as a UX person.)
I’m getting good feedback and nice retweets on Twitter; which is a good sign.
Normally, I’d pull some choice quotes to whet your appetite. But I’ve got a pile of storyboarding and wireframing to do [...]

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Time Zone Drop-Down List Fail

September 25, 2009

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In general I try to be strategic, which usually means talking about “big” user experience and staying oriented on the business value of UX.
But every once in a while I just have to point to a particularly bad interaction, then cluck my tongue and wag my finger.
So it is with this [...]

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My UXmatters.com Article On Testing Your Own Designs

September 22, 2009

In my last post I advised that my pending UXmatters.com article would be covering the topic of whether designers can usability test their own designs. The article is now available here. In it I presented feedback from several people about the wisdom of testing one’s own designs, and generated some recommendations for how to do [...]

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Testing Your Own Designs: Discussion

September 10, 2009

I’m putting an article together for UXmatters on the topic of usability testing and validating one’s own designs. My goal is to develop some guidelines for self-testing.
I’d love to get your feedback on some questions I have:

Testing your own designs: all-around bad idea? Or is it possible to do it well?
If so, what should you [...]

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