The Luddites were right

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

My recent rant about mobile phones and privacy got me thinking about all the technology that infests our lives and how much of it is actually useful. Case in point, the electronic key fob that lets me into my house. These days, instead of inserting a key, which has been a perfectly acceptable method of entering buildings for… oooh… 4,000 years or so, I now have to stroke my front door with a peice of plastic to get in.

 Two points. Number one: every man gets lonely but I don’t like my front door that much. Number two: it doesn’t bloody work. Most nights I stumble home from the pub only to stand before my house waving my hands like an orchestra conductor and weeping with vexation because the damn thing refuses to open. Even if it did work, it has no advantages over a key. It’s no smaller, no faster, and it’s not like keys have ever being particularly difficult to use. Except for Bayon, of course, for whom a key is like carrying around a surfboard.

But, here’s the worry. Once you start doubting the technology in your life, it becomes very difficult to stop.

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Technology the real Olympics winner

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Opposite me, David Bayon is picking away at his salad while watching the gymnastics (he’d like me to write that he was watching something manly, but we all know the truth). Jon Bray was watching the long jump. And to follow a whim, I fired up the table tennis highlights. We have, somehow, slipped with barely a murmur into on-demand internet TV, and it’s fantastic.

Even the resolution is high enough to impress. Bayon (now switching his attention to athletics) has just exclaimed “you can see her heart beating” as he watched one of the 400m runners stand ready for the race.

It takes something like the Olympics to show us how far technology has come. The BBC iPlayer has been around in one form or other for the last two years, and we’ve become used to it. But do you remember how you last watched the Olympics? If you’re anything like me, it was mainly via a highlights programme on terrestrial TV. I’d have been lucky to see two minutes of table tennis. If I wanted to, I could watch 50 minutes’ worth, or fast forward to precisely the match I was interested in.

Now we’re all casually firing up our browsers, streaming live or pre-recorded events direct to our display. Makes you wonder how far things will have improved by London 2012.

Ebooks: A bad idea getting worse

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.

And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them – digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.

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Eee and me – “the talk”

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I think it’s fair to say that in the PC Pro offices I’m known for two things: making cups of tea and an unfathomable love for the Eee PC. And when I say unfathomable I mean it. We’re like that couple in the corner of the tube every morning - you know, the overly affectionate ones who never come up for air and nobody looks directly at.

It was a bit of a whirlwind romance to be fair, love at first sight and why shouldn’t it have been? The Eee is thin, pretty and most importantly cheap – pretty much my ideal date. Only thing is, success has turned its head. Suddenly, with the release of the Eee PC 900, it’s not so cheap anymore and if it carries on gorging on additional tech, it’s not going to be so thin either.

All in all, I think somebody needs to sit down with Asus and explain that its baby doesn’t need a bigger screen. It doesn’t need a bigger chasis, it doesn’t need more memory or a higher price tag. There are plenty of other laptops around for that, and yet the uncomfortable feeling persists that while everyone else gets giddy about tiny, cheap laptops, Asus, almost perversely, intends on taking the Eee the other way.

And when it does, expect a very messy break up.