Chris Barton: Phone-cameras offer one snapshot of our digital future

COMMENT

Yesterday I received a press release from Intel, the world's largest chipmaker. It contained this sentence: "Delivering a valued experience for the digital home that keeps consumers connected everywhere they go will depend on the ability to create a unified platform and a surrounding ecosystem of support, in addition to specific new consumer-focused technologies" (Intel press release).

Break the sentence down and you get the following logic: There are no valued experiences in digital homes. That's because there are no digital homes that keep consumers connected everywhere they go. Consumers are not connected because there is no unified platform. We are also missing an ecosystem to hold up the platform. And the technology directed at consumers is absent.

Still garbled ghastliness, but it unveils a well-worn technique used by Intel and just about everyone else in the computer industry. Invoke a digital utopia and then tell us how - using mystifying technology jargon - to get there. In short, use hype to promote a fiction.

The press release goes on to say how most of the above - valued experiences, digital homes, connected consumers, unified platforms and so on - are coming soon, thanks to Intel and its marvellous slivers of silicon. In other words, "buy more Intel chips".

But when the digital futures promoted by Intel and others never come to fruition (and almost certainly never will) in quite the way they're hyped, there develops a credibility gap. The central premise is convergence - that "the computing, consumer electronics and communications industries are merging to become one". Which is not quite true. It's more correct to say bits of each of the industries are merging to produce hybrid products that so far have had only marginal success.

Mobile phones, for example, have merged with handheld computers which many people find are too cumbersome for everyday mobile phone use and too small and underpowered for everyday computing.

Intel also sees convergence as meaning "consumers want all their devices to connect and communicate wirelessly". Do we really?

Most of us get by with the TV, PC and mobile phone as separate devices - and I imagine we will do so for quite some time. If there is any unifying principle here, it's connection to the internet.

But by far the most interesting aspect of convergence is the trend towards "no PC required".

One example, not available in New Zealand, is TiVo - a service that operates a digital video recorder (DVR) which is like a VCR, but with a hard drive.

As the company's web site explains: "It digitally records up to 80 hours of your favourite shows automatically, every time they're on, without the hassles of videotape. That way, all of your entertainment is ready-and-waiting for you to watch, whenever you are."

If that's not a "valued experience" in a digital home, I'd love to know what is. The bad news for Intel is that none of its microprocessors are required.

Another site of convergence where the PC can be disconnected is printers - not just the multifunction types that allow scanning, faxing and photocopying, but also the type that allows you to print by slotting in a memory card or hooking up your digital camera directly. Another valued experience, sans Intel.

But that's not all. Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard have just formed the Mobile Imaging and Printing Consortium to develop standard ways for printing camera-phone photos using a variety of technologies.

The convergence between mobile phones and digital cameras doesn't stop there, either.

A significant breakthrough is that 2 megapixel phone cameras are now coming to the market and producing a picture quality the same as entry level digital cameras. Which not only delivers more value because consumers have just the one device, but also means "consumers are connected everywhere they go". And unless I'm missing something, it's a technology focused (literally) on consumers too.

Perhaps these mobiles are the "unified platform" and "surrounding ecosystem of support" we've all been looking for.

* Email Chris Barton