The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim that their Perfect Gadget does everything up to, and maybe even including, ordering sliced bread from the online grocer at the precise thickness that it knows you will prefer (a fact derived from a semantic analyses of how you use said gadget).

Socially driven news sites will go utterly berserk.

So how long must we wait until Apple actually makes this announcement? Perhaps we’re only five or ten years away from The Perfect Gadget 1.0.

Converging on Perfection, and Overselling the Dream

In 2007, Apple announced their intent to produce the iPhone. Even before the announcement, the iPhone was hotly debated by potential owners whose excitement was akin to a small child who’s told they could go on the swings and the roundabouts and visit the local shops to buy as much sugar based confectionery as they can carry before going home to watch cartoons, leading some to call it the Jesus Phone. Even I, as a non Apple owner*, was hooked by the hype. Mesmerised by the hope of a perfect gadget.

The iPhone was never going to change the world, but reading back over some of the rhetoric that Apple spun into their press conferences you’d be forgiven if you thought it would. When Apple chief Steve Jobs opened his keynote speech saying “we’re going to make some history together today” it was an archetype of overstatement. Apple are not alone in overselling. The technology industry as a whole is guilty, and the trend is going to increase as gadgets and appliances become less about the technical specifications and more about the design of the hardware and the software – the human factors. Any company that’s marketing something with intangible or immeasurable value, can safely oversell and over-hype their product, because those that buy it want all the hype to be true. They need it to be true to validate their emotional buy-in and to affirm their “lifestyle choice”.

Future Perfect

There will come a time however, when The Perfect Gadget really is released. It will herald a fundamental change in the the world of consumer electronics. A ubiquitous device that people don’t want to part with. Users will not upgrade because they will be perfectly happy with it, so eventually there will be billions of units in circulation.

Past Imperfect

As a seasoned user of seven laptops, seven desktop computers, several hosted severs, eleven different types of mobile phone and three PDAs I’ve probably invested more time and energy than the average punter who uses gadgets. I’ve relied on them for my livelihood, maintained their hardware and software, synchronised their data with the other devices, and failed to part with most of them, so I have a fall-back if the next gadget doesn’t work. So what would be my personal perfect gadget? The gadget that would force me, the moment it’s announced, to call up the person on stage announcing it and say “I don’t care how much, I want the device that’s in your hand, name your price, sir/ma’am, ship it to me now“. When I wrote them all down, my list of requirements became unwieldy, so I thinned them out to a manageable core that can be found later in this article.

Benefiting from the Paradox of Choice

Gadgets with a similar form factor to the iPhone are both blessed and cursed with simplicity. The keyless form factor enables the gadget to be more easily be tailored to the users desire, but such devices are intrinsically harder to differentiate, and their potential can overwhelm.  Often the key benefit that gets marketed is that a product can do more than the competition, which leads consumers into the paradox of choice. With so much potential, how do they avoid selecting the wrong gadget? They have to fall back on the emotional – they choose the gadget that makes them feel good. This is something Apple do really well, they focus on ‘their way’ of doing things and make that it simple and rewarding.  The perfect gadget, above all, will be intuitive and emotionally rewarding to use.  Technological sedimentation and improved software can simplify the multiplicity of capabilities, so a dual focus on the intangible factors of software and hardware design are the critical factors in differentiating gadgets that have identical underlying technological specifications.  Apple’s name change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. highlights its bias shift towards non-technical consumer devices. Indeed, Apple are in an enviable position that when they announce something, there is a lot of interest from consumers who tend do not burden themselves with technicalities: they’re just happy to know that it’s new, that it looks nice, and will reassure their ego of its value, whilst being generally useful and (critically) unchallenging to use.

Enjoy the gadgets, but beware the hyperbole.

The Perfect Gadget Specification

The perfect gadget should incorporate:

1. Everything in the iPhone. Because in a world where design differentiates, the iPhone is a great design. Telephones have undergone two critical form factor changes in the last 30 years. The first was moving the keypad onto the handset, which enabled the whole phone to become mobile. The second is the removal of the keypad from the handset, which removes the limitation on the device to be predominantly a phone. It can now just be a device that has communication as one of it’s capabilities. Apple were not the first people to suggest this: cognitive scientists have been saying it for years, but Apple brought it to market very successfully.
2. Screen size vs Portability. Phone screens are too small and a larger screen area is key to making the gadget useful in more circumstances. Something that uses up every available millimetre in the back pocket of a pair of jeans is perfect.
3. Flexibility. The problem of a device that’s sized for the back-pocket is that placing it there will put all kinds of stresses through it (because buttocks are not flat) so some degree of flex would be a bonus.
4. Induction Charging. I never ever want to plug my device in. Instead, I will have a tables and shelves around the house that are rigged up with an inductive charging system. The shelf by the door is a perfect candidate. Anything left on these inductive shelves would be recharged with no need to connect cables. We already have all the phones syncing over Wi-Fi and bluetooth, so it makes total sense to never ever have to plug them in again.
5. GPS/Galileo. I want the unit to know where it is at all times so my whole life can be tracked, then every photo and every calendar event can be correlated. GPS is good, but for Europe, Galileo is likely to be better (because of the control and positioning of the satellites).
6. Compass and spirit level. The device must know which way up it is and where it’s pointing, so that when I take photos using the device both location and viewing frustum can be recorded.
7. Cameras. Equally spec’d cameras and screens front and back (so that front and back become concepts in software only). The camera image sensors should be interspersed with the screen pixels so video chat is more natural and doesn’t appear as if the other person is talking to a point on the wall just behind you. With a screen on both sides, the image could be viewed by the person taking the photo, and by the subjects, bringing to an end all pictures where the subjects are needlessly and awkwardly tilting their heads when they’re already in-frame.
8. Social awareness. The device should be able to associate geographical locations with social conventions. When I visit the library (or the crematorium) the gadget must know this and no matter how loud I have it set it must not interrupt.
9. A Thermometer. If the device is below body temperature, it’s in my bag not in my pocket, so vibrating is less to help – it should know this and be more noisy. If it’s below body temperature and flat on it’s back, and its after 11pm, and it’s dark, then I’m asleep, so don’t ring until after 7am… Intelligence and configurablility of all these capabilities is key.
10. Peer awareness. Sensing the environment can be enhanced if other sensors can be consulted for comparison. If multiple perfect gadgets are near each other they could (and should) share common information. Rather than each one of them running at full power measuring all things, they could take it in turns. One sampling and sharing GPS position, another doing cell negotiation, etc. Sharing the work could mean reduced overhead and increased battery life.
11. Waterproof. Induction charging would make a 100% sealed unit a highloy viabile possibility; and with so9lid state devices operating better than disk drives under increased pressure it could be made waterproof for diving (or mountain climbing if that’s your bag).

… and of course, since the is the perfect gadget …

1. Tactile Feedback. A feedback system that makes the surface smoother and stickier as it is exposed to a varying electrical current. The whole experience of using the iPhone is lacking in tactile feedback and whilst a vibration feedback system would improve things, it’s not enough.
2. Self Repair. An organic surface, that can repair itself of scratches.

What’s probably not necessary…

1. Replaceable or Upgradable Storage. Globally ubiquitous and fast network connections with inexpensive data rates will render on-device storage irrelevant. Users will no longer need to replace their device every eighteen months for the sake of more space.
2. Replaceable Batteries. Opportunities to recharge mobile devices could increase exponentially. An induction device in your car seat would mean you never have to take the phone from your back pocket. A induction device in the train table would mean your phone would charge whilst commuting. Your whole desk at work could charge phones, laptops all at once. Batteries will never run out of charge.

Palm Sync for Google Calendar is Needed

My initial impression is that it looks good, but without the ability to sync with handheld devices (e.g. Palm Pilot) it’s ubiquity is far from certain.

PC-using iPod owners will no doubt be delighted to know that their music machine can already sync with google calendar, thanks to it’s support for the iCal format (if Palm Inc. are listening, take note!)

iCal

The best of the low-hanging fruit so far is that it happily subscribes to iCal files, so publicly available calendars (which are typically produced by the legion of apple users who have been enjoying a good calendar app for a couple of years) are now far more accessible to web-based users.

Sharing

The ability to collaboratively author calendars looks good too, however, this seems to be broken at the moment.

Update: People want Palm Sync!

Since writing the above entry I’ve noticed an awful lot of people arriving here with similar desires… it’s understandable really, given that Palm have sold over 34 million PDA’s worldwide, and licensed the OS for use in millions more phones.

Extensibility is Key

From the launch of Desktop V1, Google provided open access to the API, for free. This enabled third parties to extend the search capabilities by adding plugins that index file-types which the basic software is unaware of. This extended the reach (and ubiquity) of Google Desktop Search, making it “all things to all people” *.

From my initial use of the basic functions it’s apparent that this application could be considered really useful, or really annoying, depending on your perspective. What Google have (again) got right is that just about every aspect of what Desktop V2 does is configurable, so if you don’t like a feature, you can turn it off or replace it with a third party plugin.

More Configurability

Currently most of the configuration involves only the enabling and disabling of plugins; whilst this will obviously be extended with time, it’s definitely the first thing that’s missing, more configurability.

More integrated search results

One obvious addition to the V1 capabilities is that the toolbar widget can now pop up results to a search as it’s typed. The browser is still fired up as soon as the Enter key is pressed, but with a little familiarisation this mechanism is faster.

Better Mail Integration

One of the default plugins provides a view of the latest emails that have been received. Whilst very useful, especially since it has the ability to filter which messages are shown, the interface is a little confused. It’s just a list of messages and author. Perhaps a little organisation (pictured) would make it a more useful tool.

To Do

Good news: there’s a “To Do” plugin.
Bad news: it doesn’t integrate with Palm Desktop, or any other PDA software, so if youre the kind of person that’s got a to do list already, this potentially very useful feature isn’t really useful, yet.

Integration with Exiting Sidebars

There are now quite a few tools that use sidebars, the most well known of these are the instant messaging tools, and whilst the bars do happily exist together, they run the risk of taking over the screen. A common solution to multiple IM sidebars is to use Trillian, Gaim, or one of the other clients that can connect to multiple IM networks at once. In the interests of keeping the sidebar count down I’m hoping some way of integrating these applications can be found. Running multiple monitors is becoming more commonplace but having one of those dedicated to sidebars is overkill.

Konfabulator Kompetition

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of google desktop is that it paves the way for Google to compete with Yahoo!’s Konfabulator widget toolkit. In a nutshell, Konfabulator Widgets are to the desktop what Utilities are to the Command Line. Konfabulator is a system for creating nice looking widgets that live on the desktop and provide various useful tools such as nice-looking weather reports and nice-looking clocks and nice-looking anything you care to think of.

Google is obviously aware that it has to compete with Konfabulator and the sidebar is a first step towards this. The main limiting factor so far is that:

• Panel’s can’t be undocked and dragged anywhere on the desktop
• Konfabulator widgets work on both Apple and Microsoft machines. *

* No Linux Yet

Google Desktop is still not available on Linux. Google are definitely playing a percentage game here, and the fact that linux has again been omitted shows that Google’s resources are finite.

Google Earth Integration

One possible next step for Google, and one that would appear obvious, is be to extend the quick search facility so that it is closely integrated with Google Earth, perhaps where hitting Enter takes you to the browser, hitting tab might take you to Gootle Earth results.

It’s just an idea, but that’s what Google seem to do best, stringing a series of simple ideas together to make something more useful than the sum of it’s parts.

Adopting the Developers

The make or break aspect for Google Desktop is now it’s 3rd party developers who are no doubt already preparing a slew of Konfabulator widget clones. Such eye-candy is the obvious low-hanging fruit, but it will take time before the real killer plugins emerge. That time is necessary in order for the real potential of “local search” to be understood.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Google are an Advertising Broker. What this tool provides is another channel through which Google can sell their adverts. How? Well the sidebar isn’t really anything to do with Google Desktop Search, it’s a curiosity that will help them position against Konfabulator, but the pressing business reason for it’s bundling is that it’s an RSS reader, and the majority of Joe Public is only just becoming aware that RSS is a useful way of receiving content. Google recently began inserting adverts into RSS feeds, so through the sidebar, Google have a new means of advertising.

What’s important is that unlike the blatant “advert box” that you see on web pages or other “free” software such as Opera or AOL instant messenger, adverts in the GDS sidebar will look like normal content, and take you to “real web pages”, the only differentiating factor that will be apparent will be that Google get money for passing on your patronage.

Google have sown the seeds of an interesing harvest which may change the way we think and work, again.

The good news is that the cause of the problem has been identified. Apparently, when adding birthday details to the a contact, the reminder is turned on it must not span a year end. Hopefully this gets onto the Palm OS developers radar as an issue that needs to be fixed.

The really good news right now though is that I know exactly whose birthday record is causing the problem (EmmaB, you have caused me several hours of head scratching with your Jan 5th birthday and my 7 day reminder; please change your birthday to later in January!) – so my Palm T5 will shortly be fully operational again.

Oddly, nobody else had mentioned the Graffiti issue, just the fact that the unit was powering on by itself. I’d just been closing the palm and pocketing it, so I’d not noticed the power issue until much later, it was the graffiti problem that was most immediately obvious to me.

Update: After hotsyncing from my backup data and reducing the Jan 5th reminder to three days instead of seven, the T5 now works perfectly.

It took a lot of steps to zero in on this fact, and for the record, neither the Palm Desktop “Tools | Options… | Tools | Check and repair any corrupted records” not Pimlico’s DBScan software could spot any records which are corrupt.

I called Palm Support and spoke to a really helpful chap who basically confirmed that I’d already taken all the steps he’d have walked me through and that the quickest resolution was to re-add the records one at a time until I found the problem.

To be sure, I deleted all the records using Palm Desktop then sync’d – and LO, the problem was gone – note I exported all the records as a backup first) – so now I have to re-add the records one by one…

In fact, to save time, IÂ’ll be adding the first 50% of the records – and if the grafitti still works IÂ’ll continue adding 50% of whatÂ’s left I can find the problem in the most efficient manner. It seems my studies of sorting algorithms have hitherto untapped benefits for normal human endeavour.

Initially I had no problems at all using Grafitti2, it’s a definite improvement over the old Grafitti letter shapes; much closer to natural handwriting than the original.

The problem I’m seeting now occurs with letters that require two pen strokes, such as t and x, those letters just don’t work. Additionally, the unit no longer powers down after my requested 1 minute timeout, it just stays on and drains it’s battery. When disconnected from the mains, I can turn it off, then approximately 15 seconds later it turns itself back on.

Being a bit of a hacker I’m not averse to looking under the bonnet when things go awry, but with the palm platform that’s just not possible, so I’m stuck with a problem that I have little hope of solving myself. So, I’m guessing that it’s not the Grafitti per se that’s the problem – it’s probably another application that I’ve installed which doesn’t play well with the very new T5 – but without the tools to investigate my hands are tied.

Hence this little missive – if you’ve come across a similar issue, and found a solution to the problem please let me know. When I find a solution I’ll post a trackback to here so others who find the same problem may benefit.

1. Take one relatively inexpensive wireless enabled handheld computer.
2. Post it to a non-existent person at a company which you believe to have a wireless network
3. The machine will in the mailroom for a while before being “bounced”.
4. Set it to run your favourite wireless scanning program once every few hours.
5. Have the machine “phone home” once it’s makes a connection, using that connection.
6. You now have a machine, potentially inside the corporate firewall which you can use to tunnel your content until the battery dies – use the available time compromise a more permanent machine.

Notes:

1. Using a Return-To-Sender address might get you in trouble if this turns out to be illegal in practice.
2. For added bravado, why not send it to a real person – hopefully they’ll like the gift and not notice the background scanning and kindly recharge the unit, maybe even taking it to other sites.