Punditry about google voice and iPod (
Two news items this week caught my interest.
On fun news item is that Google has announced a new telephone service, Google Voice, which I have been using since just before Google acquired grandcentral.com twenty months ago. Grand Central has been great, and now as Google Voice it has added text messaging (both send and receive) and some other convenience features such as integration with the Google address book.
For me the ability to hand out a phone number that rings all my phones and takes voice mail has been invaluable, and lets me cut the tether to any particular phone company. I'm not particularly enamored of Verizon, and if I should happen to switch I'll just change one setting at GoogleVoice, and my calls will go to my new number.
The most wonderful impact, though, has been the elimination of junk phone mail. When I get a call from XYZCorp's tech support, wanting to sell me a warranty that I don't, I just add the call to my address book and mark it as spam. I never hear from them again. Yay!
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The other fun news item is that Apple has introduced a new iPod, which is so small that it practically doesn't really exist. Many pundits have missed the significance of this itty bitty thing: it's not really new! (Except perhaps for the size aspect -- it's small enough that it becomes a wearable system).
Many pundits complained about a "new" interface feature, that clicking once on the headphone-wire-control paused and restarted play, double-clicking skipped to the next track, and triple-clicking skipped to the prior track, while plus and minus controlled the volume. How would people be able to learn this new method?!
As chance would have it, today was a desk-clearing day, and what should I run across but the one-page instruction sheet for the Griffin "TuneBuds" microphone/earbud combo that my brother gave me last Christmas. These headphones use EXACTLY THE SAME user interface convention as the "new" 5th g eneration iPod nano -- and there's a list of all the iPods that it works with, the Touch, the classic, the phone, and the older clip-based iPod nano.
In other words, the "new" controls aren't new at all -- they're just one part of an entire family of interface conventions, in other words, a system.
It's a system for which the physical parts are almost disappearing, where the software and audio playback and tune organization have become wearable. If flexible organic LED displays (OLED) displays ever become cheap enough to mass produce, I'm sure we'll see many more wearable items coming our way from Cupertino. Apple's main strength is system design, rather than making their products look beautiful. iPod/iTunes? System. Mac-OS/X integration? System. Airport/TimeMachine backup? System. Apple TV? System (though somewhat nascent) iPhone/app integration? System. What interests me most coming from Apple in the future is NOT their wonderful new piece of hardware I can hold. It's this: what *system* will Apple invent and, then, apply their superior engineering talent to create.
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