PC World put out an article talking about the new Motorola Android phone touting a 2.4 GHZ processor. That is more than double the speed of any smart phone on the market to date. This opens the door for many possibilities of creating programs that were impossible to build up to the standard of a regular PC. Take for instance Microsoft Office. Sure there are office programs on iPhone and Android but really none of them even remotely compare to the capabilities of the full fledged Microsoft Office suite. Current smart phones just don’t have the multithreading capabilities or the speed needed to really accomplish this and still have a good user experience. Most of these applications have to be ‘dumbed down’ for it to be able to run on a smart phone. With these new found power there are many more possibilities for creating more powerful rich applications

Yay, Utopia is here!

Well, not really. One of the things that is still in its infancy is human interaction. Sure we’ve come a very long way with our touch capabilities and how we interact with interfaces, but there are a couple limitations. Number one is size. If you want a small pocket size device, as of right now you get a small pocket size screen. We don’t have the futuristic holographic imaging bursting forth from the tiny little device yet. Right now, if the device is small, the screen is small. There’s a lot that can be viewed small and a lot that may not be as desirable to be viewed as small. Number two would be that human interaction isn’t always the same with touch screens. I have friends who have smart devices and they have ‘mastered’ the touch screen and type very fluently, however, not as fast as on a regular old keyboard. It amazes me that after decades of computer evolution the one thing that hasn’t changed is the basic qwerty keyboard. It’s been around since before electric typewriters. Sure you may make them more ergonomic etc, but the foundation of the basic qwerty keyboard remains the same to this day as it always has and it doesn’t look like it’s going to go away anytime soon. So to be productive on these devices as we’ve been on desktops or laptops we will need to continue to innovate on the human interaction aspect.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Android. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.