When I used to sell electronics back in the day I used to abhor the gadgets that had all the extra gadgets and doo-dads. I would warn against the combo dvd/vhs players (unless they had limited inputs on their tv) because inevitably when one item failed they would come in to complain to me that they were no without 2 items. So I learned to ignore phones with cameras, camcorders that did pictures, tvs with vcrs, etc…
Not that I didn’t think that the item couldn’t handle doing each of the jobs it was meant to but because the fear of losing the whole unit for a failure in one part (that and sometimes you got a lower quality dvd player and vcr even though you pay a premium for the combined feature – sort of a reverse ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ deal – remember how crappy cell cameras were?).
Then there was a huge cry for ‘convergence’ in the early part of this century to have things that did multiple jobs, especially when it came to soft electronics (computers and mobile devices). And I’ll admit that I’ve hopped on board. I picked up a cellphone with a camera as I saw how cool it was to take photos at a concert because they’d take my camera away, but not my phone. I have a lot of devices that sit dormant nowadays. My Palm TX, 2 digital cameras, 3 netbooks, etc…
However, there’s one area that I have yet to yield to my cellphone – my mp3s. True – I do have mp3s on it, and now and again I will plug it into my fm transmitter as it was a little closer to hand, but I haven’t gotten rid of my Zune (yeah, i heard you groan – I’m one of those dozen people who picked it up – I like it). I’ll list below why I haven’t changed over, but what have you not ‘converted’ to your smartphone? Let’s hear what digital jobs are still sacrosanct to your non-multi-use item?
So why haven’t I given it all up in the Zune area? Well, for starters I love the desktop software about how to pick which songs I want on and which ones not… for me that’s the real deal breaker. If I have to get ANOTHER desktop program for my phone, I’ll go beserk. The Kies software that Samsung makes you use is just annoying. Winamp is another music player that’s just unnecessary and I’m not going to try iTunes and play with doubleTWIST to make that work… sounds like a huge headache.
Another reason is I find it annoying enough that if I’m in the car and have it plugged into bluetooth the notifications buzz in mid call (I have mine set up to say “text message”, “gmail”, etc… so they ‘buzz’ in mid call). If I had the music player going it does the same thing. I kinda like having some music playing in the background if I’m on a call, but that’s just me.
Lastly – my phone is being a real pain lately. For some reason, without any call it’ll just stop playing mp3s, avi, taking video or play youtube. No program I can isolate seems to be causing the glitch – so I just don’t know. The link over there is for the XDA post I made on it – to date, nobody’s answered. I’ve called Samsung and we’ve gone over every possibility. I’ll run every app, then run youtube and it doesn’t seem to trigger the issue. Anyways, the pain is that I then have to power down (~1 minute) and then boot back up (~2 minutes, more if you want it to do the media scanning).
So that’s my point, phones now are great at a bunch of things, but is convergence really the be and end all? Isn’t it nice to have some dedicated items?
After writing this story I realize it’s eerily similar to an article by Giz, but I wasn’t able to find it, so I’ll leave that up to the commenters.
