The uber-gadget, deferred

By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive

Two years ago, while working and studying in Boston, I considered buying a PDA but decided to wait. I had limited space in my pack and already had to contend with a cell phone, mp3 player, digital camera, and laptop. The U.S. Army Survival Manual advises:

“In preparing your survival kit, select items you can use for more than one purpose. If you have two items that will serve the same function, pick the one you can use for another function.”

In this case, what’s good for the soldier is good for the urban commuter. At the time, I could look at the trend lines of converging device functionality and predict that, in a year or two, I would be able to replace my aging gadget fleet with a single lump of shiny plastic. This uber-gadget would perform the functions of the PDA, cell phone, internet communicator, digital music player and camera well enough for serious everyday use, even if not as well as an agglomeration of dedicated devices.

The Apple iPhone debuts at the end of this month as the much-hyped fulfillment of convergence manifest destiny. Does its advent signal a brave new era of pants with only one bulging pocket?

Alas. As I was watching my brother-in-law trying to connect his Nintendo DS to my home wireless network the other day, it occurred to me that the reality of the situation is—and could only ever have been—something quite different. While the iPhone or a similar device would allow me to do away with all the little lumps of plastic in my life, no single gadget could ever be everyone’s end-all. While many people carry around multiple pieces of personal tech, most of them have a go-to device, closer to their hearts and the center of their digital lives than the others. Ask yourself: if you could take only one gadget with you, which would it be? For most people, this would be a cell phone. For others, it might be a music player, GPS device, or handheld game console.

Instead of a single class of uber-gadget, what seems to be emerging is a plurality of multifunction device types, each organized around a different primary function. Even the iPhone is, first and foremost, a cell phone—a point underscored by Steve Jobs at its announcement, when he declared that its “killer app” is making phone calls.

Whatever your gadget of choice, the odds are good that beyond its primary function it can do many of the things that other devices can do. A few years out, devices like your favorite will almost certainly continue to exist as a class—and will take on more and more functionality that overlaps with other device classes.

Who knows? Some day, we might even see an iPod with a built-in FM radio.

©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.