The launch of the iPad caused yet another wave of Apple hysteria around the globe, not least in media and technology companies such as ours. Having used the device now for almost two months, I find that it has added a new dimension to my views on what convergence means in the technology and media industries.
Many, including myself, saw the iPad as a “a big iPod Touch”. It took only a few hours of use to completely dispel that belief. The iPad manages to combine a great deal of hardware into a single well designed piece of electronics. Sitting in front of a desktop computer, I look around and notice that all the following is combined into one: screen, CPU case, keyboard, mouse, and in the next version of the device the webcam will be integrated as well.
How did they do this ? Well – the device has become controller, input mechanism and output mechanism in one. By integrating the screen, and adding motion, position and touch sensors, it has become possible to use software to control what the device does with the input it receives. It is not necessary for the sensor that registers keystrokes to be JUST a keyboard anymore – it can morph into the tip of a paintbrush or a controller for a weapon in a game. Similarly with other components – the screen can become a window on the world, it can be a placid pond, it can be a web browser, a calculator, a paint palette.
Of course the iPad can be used in many ways – as an entertainment device for pre-packaged content such as movies and TV series, or as a device for consuming interactive entertainment in the form of games. It makes the (in my opinion ill-conceived) concept of netbooks immediately redundant. It is serviceable for use as a limited business tool. And yes – for many it is an adequate replacement for print media, in particular magazines and books.
This post is not about the iPad. I am using the iPad to demonstrate that a device with many sensors, and a catholic approach to receiving input, can be used as a generic tool. The hardware itself becomes a generic substrate which is given concrete expression by the software running on the device. The iPad is the first of these devices, a primal ancestor of what is to come. I predict that increasing miniaturisation and the eventual arrival of practical nano-technology and programmable biology, will make “generic” hardware a common reality in ways which we cannot foresee yet. The Internet of Things will be the operating system for all our software.
In summary – convergence means more than the universal consumption of media on IP based devices. In the medium to long term convergence will come to mean the universal configurability of all devices, to deliver whatever function we wish them to deliver.
Ten years ago something like the iPad would have been considered science-fiction. Today’s science fiction will be the must-have product in two year’s time.
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