(via Speedbird).
TagMobile Technology
I really wasn’t going to post anything else about the iPhone, at the very least until I use one myself. But Abe’s notes are very good, if you’re at all interested in seeing an critical look at the interface design of this product.
Interesting notes about the non-tactile buttons. One complaint I’ve heard is that you have to look at the keyboard while typing because there are no tactile clues about where the keys are or where your fingers are in relation to them. I could type really quick w/o looking on my old Sidekick. But the touchscreen keyboard would still be an improvement over typing on a numerical keypad.
Not as pretty as the iPhone, but it’s much smaller than it looks in the above pic.
More info: Neo1973 entry on Wikipedia.
(Above: Nokia 800 running Linux)
A friend of mine bought an iPhone this weekend, and I can now safely say I wouldn’t buy one, even if I had the money. She dropped $600 on the thing, but now can’t use it for anything (except emergency calls) – no music, no PDA, nothing – until her current AT&T contract expires and she can start a new contract with them. Adam Greenfield got his over the weekend too and writes:
On the life side of the equation: it’s the first device that will become as organic and as helplessly necessary to ordinary – i.e., non-Blackberry-wielding – Americans as mobiles have always been to Europeans and Asians. So far this morning, I’ve used my iPhone as an alarm clock, a timer, a phone, a map, and a handy means of getting the answer to a question that came up in conversation. I wondered if there were any laundromats handy, got a map of a few likely candidates, and clicked on the nearest to call them and ask them if they were open yet. (They were.) In other words, it’s performing exactly as intended.
[…]
And then there’s the fundamental, underlying, root-deep flaw with the iPhone, the one thing which can and should be laid at Steve’s door, and regarding which it’s impossible for anyone with integrity to pull the wool over their own eyes about. The UI is so seductive and so accomplished that you almost forget it, but in the end there’s no getting around it: this is a closed shop. A locked-down device. What Jonathan Zittrain calls a “non-generative†piece of kit.
You can’t code on it. You can’t hack on it – not without a lot of effort, which is to say, more effort than all but a very few will devote to the attempt. By and large, you cannot make culture with this device, not unless you construct “making culture†as everything you’re doing when you use the iPhone. Consume, yes – painlessly, pleasantly, engagingly. But not produce.
That’s a problem.
Putting aside for the moment how utterly pwn3d I was by the Spectacle around this thing – and that’s not a trivial thing, but it’s grist for a different mill – the iPhone as it stands now is in the end more likely to disempower than to give rise to other outcomes. Despite what I had naively imagined here, I couldn’t even use its WiFi before registering it with AT&T. Registered, it sure seems like a king-hell everyware device, but before provisioning, it was an inert brick. And that sense of playing footsie with the status quo left a nasty, nasty residue.
It sounds like Adam had the exact same reaction to the iPhone that I had to the first Sidekick in 2002. But 5 years later, I’m living pretty happily with a regular cell phone. I guess the Sidekick has opened up a bit since I owned one, so I guess there’s some hope for openness for the iPhone as well.
These days I’m more interested in ditching the Baby Bell cell grid for wifi/VOIP. The Sony Milo and the Gizmo phones, for example. None of these seem quite “there” yet, but I think we’ll be something more worth spending $600 on in the near future.
On IM this morning:
Klintron: the google phone will crush the iphone
Klintron: and it will be free
Klintron: but it will record all of your conversations
Dr. Gabbo: and target ads
Dr. Gabbo: into your ear
Klintron: yes
Klintron: it will play little ads while you’re talking based on what you talk about
Dr. Gabbo: that would be fucking funny
Klintron: like if i call you and we start talking about the basement, it will play an ad for that bar next door
Klintron: if you think that’s bad, just wait til the myspace phone
Klintron: that can only call other myspace phones
Klintron: everyone will have both a gphone AND a myphone
Dr. Gabbo: and two bluetooth headsets – one for each ear
Klintron: and everyone will bitch about how they have to carry around the big ugly myphone but they do it because everyone else does
Dr. Gabbo: haha
Klintron: and there’s people they can only call through it
Dr. Gabbo: it will constantly do the wrong thing too – calling a person you didn’t mean
Dr. Gabbo: or just giving you an error message right in your ear
Klintron: lol yes
Klintron: the reception will be awful
Above: The Myspace MyPhone
Something’s bothering me about my mobile technology and public space post (besides sounding like an anarcho-hippie by talking about “reclaiming” something), and no one’s called me on it. I utterly failed to make a case for why these changes to public space might be bad.
My attitude towards social change is usually brutal: evolve or die (or, in less harsh terms, “go with the flow”). So am I being hypocritical here? Should I just accept the evaporation of third places and individualization/interiority of public space? Is my resistance to living a life with sound hampered by iPods, viewed through LCD screen of a digital camera mere neophobia?
I think for the most part the desire for public space to be shared is a matter of preference. It’s fine for some people to want to “opt out” by disappearing into the comforting nullification of headphones and laptops.And if we want to make a comparison – is “then” (the pre near-ubiquitous wifi and iPods time) better than “now”? I’d say no – high storage capacity mp3 players and free high speed internet in public places are great tools that have made many new experiences and activities possible.
Besides “just getting used to it,” I can think of two main avenues for the furthering of the public experience:
1. “Tech free zones.” – Adam Greenfield predicted long ago that one of the first business models in the “ubicomp” world would be “dead zones” where there was no ubicomp. (See his book Everware).
2. Technological solutions. More mobile social technology. There’s more and more of this sort of stuff coming out, we’re getting closer to the world envisioned in The Headmap Manifesto. Twitter seems to have taken off, but it doesn’t have any location awareness or “discovery” features (Dodgeball was close to this, but looks to be dead). Plazes seems interesting as well, but it’s never really taken off (I’ve never really used it… and it’s still in beta?).
This post Is The Bedouin Worker Killing The Third Place? got me thinking again about the subject of mobile technology and public space. Years ago, there was thread on Margin Walker about “third places” and the concept of “fourth places.”
To sum up, the “first place” is home, the “second place” is work and the “third place” is, as Adam summed up nicely, “those locales neither home nor work that are critical platforms for socialization.” Places like coffee shops and bars. Adam went on to speculate about the possibility of the emergence of “fourth places” – public, social work places (some more notes on this here).
This sounded great, but what actually seems to have happened is that 3rd places have been hijacked and turned into 4th places. I’ve seen more and more posts about this on various blogs over the past couple years, and have observed it myself here in Portland. It seems like coffee shops are becoming more like libraries – everyone’s got their heads down workin’ on something, everyone’s being very quiet.
The iPod exacerbates the problem. I’ve always been sorta bugged by people with their ears stuck in their disc/walkmans, but portable mp3 players have brought this to a more critical level. What headphones essentially do is turn public space into private space by cutting off or dampening public/shared sound and replacing it with a private soundtrack. Sound is a crucial aspect of a shared space, but what happens when it is no longer shared? It seems to be increasingly unlikely for spontaneous conversations to occur in public when individuals are clearly showing that they are not listening to each other, and are inhabiting a whole separate (private) world.
Cell phones are actually not as bad as either laptops or headphones. The cell phone connects to spaces, and essentially disrupts both – both ends of the call are effected by the location of each end, and any bystanders are effected as well. In other words, the cell phone user is not removed from their surroundings, but changes it and is changed by it. The users of laptops and headphones withdraw.
Bars are relatively unaffected by all of this – they remain predominantly social spaces and I don’t see too many people zoning out to iPods at them. But practically all other public space, from buses to stores to the sidewalk to parks, seem to be consumed.
What efforts are being made to counteract this? In the above link, Piers Fawkes notes a coffee shop that restricts laptop use to certain tables. Victrola in Seattle turns wifi off entirely on weekends. This doesn’t stop the podpeople from zoning out to their headphones, but I suppose it’s an effort. Fawkes also notes a meet-up called Likemind that tends to claim a lot of space from the laptoppers. PDX Occulture tends to do the same thing at our meet-ups.
Are there any other interesting attempts to reclaim public space?
Cory Doctorow says:
A Platform for RFID Security and Privacy Administration is a paper by Melanie R. Rieback and Georgi N. Gaydadjiev that won the award for Best Paper at the USENIX LISA (Large Installation Systems Administration) conference today. It proposes a “firewall for RFID tags” — a device that sits on your person and jams the signals from all your personal wireless tags (transit passes, etc), then selectively impersonates them according to rules you set. Your contactless transit card will only send its signal when you authorize it, not when some jerk with an RFID scanner snipes it as you walk down the street. The implementation details are both ingenious and plausible — it’s a remarkable piece of work. Up until now, the standard answer to privacy concerns with RFIDs is to just kill them — put your new US Passport in a microwave for a few minutes to nuke the chip. But with an RFID firewall, it might be possible to reap the benefits of RFID without the cost.
I think this is great news. It seems like an implementation of Adam Greenfield’s 6th principle of ethical development of ubicomp, “be deniable.” (see: All watched over by machines of loving grace and his book Everyware).
Business 2.0 speculates that Google may be readying a free wifi program. Sounds cool, but: “Google’s interest in Feeva likely stems from the startup’s proprietary technology, which can determine the location of every Wi-Fi user and would allow Google to serve up advertising and maps based on real-time data.”
A number of people, notably Abe, have been concerned with Google’s emerging “big brother” status for quite some time. I’ll be the first to admit that geolocative advertising would be useful to both businesses and consumers… but I also have to admit that yes, things are getting scary.
Could this work like Dodgeball as well? Search for your friends, pull up their location on Google Maps? Now’s the time to check out Headmap if you haven’t… this stuff’s finally happening.
I love reading about this sort of stuff:
It’s especially effective for intensifying the thrills of a horror story, said Satoko Kajita, who oversees content development at Bandai Networks.
The Tokyo-based wireless service provider offers 150 books on its site, called Bunko Yomihodai, or All You Can Read Paperbacks. It began the service in 2003 and saw interest grow last year. There are now about 50,000 subscribers.
“It’s hard to understand unless you try it out,” Kajita said, adding that the handset’s backlight allows people to read with the lights off — a convenience that delights parents who like to read near sleeping infants.
Users can search by author, title and genre, and readers can write reviews, send fan mail to authors and request what they want to read, all from their phones.
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