Since having my iPhone my handbag has become lots lighter; instead of carrying a camera, video camera, voice recorder I am now just carrying my iPhone which not only has all the tools I need as a blogger/journalist, but also gives me direct access to my distribution channel via the Internet. I am constantly using apps like TweetDeck, Twitpic, Audioboo, and Twidvid to upload pictures/videos/voice which then feeds through my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn directly to my network.
Instead of carrying three or four devices that are each do one thing, I am carrying one which does all things and there’s no faffing with cables, transferring or editing -I can upload to the Internet from pretty much anywhere In real-time.
For me the next phase of the web is about simplicity, consolidation and real-time. Real-time is this year’s buzz word in tech due to the huge success of services like twitter which show people’s need for wanting short stabs of information right now. Simplicity is what Facebook did where MySpace failed and consolidation might save the planet- What I mean is the 50,000 apps that the iPhone offers means that your iPhone can potentially be 50,000 different things. In the past these 50,000 different things could have been manufactured gadgets/gizmo/games -think of all the energy needed to make, manufacture and distribute them.
Of course gadgets will have a place in the market, especially at Christmas when no one knows what to buy Dad, so they buy him one of these tablet computers that teaches you how to cook. He uses once on Christmas day, burns the turkey and then the gadget, like so many others, gets shoved in a dark drawer for the rest of its life.
Why would you have a separate tablet that gets recipes off the Internet when you can just use your netbook which also gives you access to your iTunes, Facebook and everything else?
I’ve got the same beef with e-readers. Inevitably net books/laptops will become tablet like or devices like iPhones/smart phones will get a little bigger so they will actually resemble an e-reader. It would be stupid to carry round two devices looking exactly the same- why wouldn’t you just use your tablet with for example, a books app? ‘But e-readers have a special sun mode which means you can read outside and it doesn’t hurt you eyes’ I hear you say. It won’t be long before netbooks/laptops/iPhones have the same ‘sun’ reading mode that you can switch to.
And to all the Android lovers – It’s not just iPhone that will have all these apps, Android is heading it the same direction. Google’s Chrome OS is clearly putting the emphasis on apps instead of software and no doubt their phone will do the same.
The e-reader market is huge and will no doubt continue to be for a couple of years but I don’t think they will have longevity as tablets with a reading mode will dominate.
I think the future will be about apps, you will have one device that can do many things, not many that do one.
I would be interested to know how many unused gadgets do you have at home? I have around 20.
Not to rain on this particular parade, but tech as been “about apps” since the invention of the affordable general computer in the 60s
I have tonnes of apps on my PC. Apps are very much the past and the now of tech, not just the future.
I agree with “gadgets are not the future”, though.
We wont be using Facebook in the future (and maybe not Twitter unless they actually do something properly)
Apps are definitely the way forward. You’re totally right – one device with tonnes of apps is far greater than 1 million devices in my bag
Although I’ll still need other devices if I’m looking for proper quality (digital SLR camera, video recorder etc)
But the iPhone is fine for silly on-the-go photos and vids.
Ha ha! No parade … But why then are people still being fooled into buying separate devices that do the same thing as an app on your PC?
Because of the novelty factor?
you’re right, the past is apps, the now is web apps, the future is….?
But Barney – the quality will very quickly get better and better on mobile devices.
The future is “just apps”. We oscillate between online and offline apps, but today’s web apps are just like the original terminal client apps: you had to be on the network, data was stored on the network, etc.
Then local computing because powerful and apps ran offline and data was stored offline. Computers were pervasive but didn’t talk to each other.
Now the internet is pervasive, computers are talking to each other, and (some) apps are going back online again. We buy devices because the PC doesn’t fit in the pocket or because we need a certain function (e.g., 3G radio).
The future is apps that work online and offline (both modes are useful), and people having “personal computing power” rather than “personal computers”. Your own little bit of fog rather than the full cloud.
And maybe at that point everything will actually work together.
Totally agree that tech would be so much nicer if integrated into one object.. But will this object really be a phone? Phones have led the way over the last few years however what to stop a new gadject emerging, that will still be able to carry voice calling but NOT be a phone as its main function..?
I have many gadgets that i bought on impulse and soem of them are still boxed (like the i-touch) I think in total I must have around 15.
This made me think about how we define “gadgets” (taking gadgets in this case to represent computer devices rather than electric whisks…) now compared to a couple of years ago. When I think of PDAs, which were the rockstar gadgets of the nineties, they were effectively inspired by the same ethos as iphone/droid-era smartphones, in that they were vessels for apps rather than inherently functional. But look at how naff PDAs look now. It’s now only proper and perpetual connectivity that makes a convergence device work, and apps that allow some kind of collaborative/hive function, and in this sense I absolutely think that apps as we know them now have replaced gadgets.
I think Technology is an evolution, operating systems get better, devices get better the not so distance future might be an updated version of the iPhone or Android …I don’t think a new device will just jump outta no where.
AH thanks for the history – but why will we only have a little fog? why won’t we have access to the entire cloud?
Hermione – we’d have the full cloud obviously, but we’d also have our little clouds. The fogs, I call it – but what people call “the cloud” is already a mis-used term.
Eg., if I use google apps, that’s not the same “cloud” as an app running on Amazon S3. The cloud is made up of lots of smaller clouds, and we’ll have our own little clouds (fogs) each in which we can run apps and save data. No more “iphone” app, you just install the app in your fog and it’s available to you on all your devices.
Closed-off platform specific apps and proprietary data stores are not the future.