Monday, 8 May

I keep having this internal debate about convergence v. divergence in electronic personal accessories. On the one hand, I love the idea of a device that I can carry about my person that will serve as a music player, video player, phone, organizer (PDA) and photo/video camera. My current phone the Samsung D600 does all these things with the possible exception of PDA, as the calender doesn't have full appointment functionality. The picture quality is surprisingly good for a phone (previous posts have pictures from it) at 2.0 megapixels. The phone functionality is great. And there it kind of ends for the glowing reviews. The music player is cumbersome and playlists are awkward. The headphones have a special plug, so you have to use the Samsung branded ones which make my ears hurt and have nothing on my noise reducing Shure E2Cs. The screen, while quite large for the footprint of the phone is still really too small for enjoying movies on and Transflash (the format of memory card the D600 uses) doesn't make anything larger than a 512mb card, so you aren't going to have a collection stored on your phone. So convergence on this phone means mediocre at most things and good at a few. And that is the case with all convergence items. The Archos has a great screen and plays movies well. But the thing is HUGE as a phone/pda/everything else. And on and on.

Then there's divergence. Apple's ipod didn't pretend to be anything but a great portable music player. That has changed now that they offer the Ipod Video, but still, it has a small footprint, making it easy to carry and the interface is almost telepathic. My gorgeous trophy wife artist bought me my first ipod a year and a half ago. I returned the favor a year ago, and we both love our ipods, they go almost everywhere with us. This month week, I won my second ipod at work, a 2gb ipod nano. And I think I like it even better than my 20gb ipod. I love the footprint! It fits in my pocket and you can't tell anything is there, it is still the same slick interface and I find that I don't listen to all 5000 songs I had on my 20gb so 500 is more than enough. If I could get a phone that was just a phone and had the same dimensions, I would be in absolute heaven. And the thing is, I don't mind carrying around three or four different things if it means that they are easily carried and work well for what they are designed to do. So, until someone can create a Nano that acts as a phone as well as pda, music player and perhaps comes with glasses that perform the screen function for movies, I don't think convergence is quite there yet. Now if only I could find a way to eliminate the cumbersome headphone cords and keep the small earbuds...