When it comes to digital gadgets, Europeans are not impressed by do-it-all devices that play songs and films, keep track of appointments and play video games, a new survey on Monday said. In a survey of 5,000 consumers from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and Italy, Jupiter Research found that 27 percent of respondents expressed a preference for a gadget that plays music only while just five percent are interested in buying a device that plays both music and video.
Who would actually watch a movie on that small screen, anyway?
I am from Europe and I fully agree with the above. Why would I need some poorly-designed do-it-all gizmo? Do people actually browse the net with their cell-phones? Do they send MMSes? have you used its internal calendar? Why oh why can’t I just simly get a cell phone that can 1) receive calls 2) make calls 3) have an addressbook?
Now I won’t represent all Americans, but I’d rather not have a do it all gadget. I like the specialized tasks. For example, this unit here keeps my email, calendar, and to do list. This other unit here plays mp3s and videos. If you combine them to be an all in one, its going to be too big and bulky, and work like crap, much like the blackberry.
@Kiddi RE: Video
While the screen may be small, its more for personal entertainment. Kids in the backseat watching a favorite music video, your on the subway and have a half hour wait so you whip this lil thing out and watch half of pirates over the carribean. Just a few examples like that. Personally I’d like a mini video player.
For one, you don’t end up filling all your pockets if you have an all-in-one in the breastpocket of your shirt. It sure beats trying to find a place to put your car keys for fear of scratching an electronic gadget because your pockets are so full.
So, are you just happy to see me or is that your mobile phone in one pocket, your pda in another, your wallet in another, your MP3 player in another, your digital camera in another ….(!)
I think a dvb-t-handheld would be a nice thing, but I think that nobody would buy it in Europe because it would be too expensive… In Europe nobody buys 200$-devices because you can buy a much better PC for the same money and this devices are for use in public and I don`t want to go around with such a expensive thing. Europeans think much more about things like this than as a example people from the USA.
Why I think it`s a good idea? Because I would like to see TV while driving home with the train or bus. Everyone knows that this can be very a boring thing. A Laptop is too big for this job and it would be too dangerous to use a laptop in a bus, so it would be a nice thing.
I’ve got no use for a personal video player. Music is something you can do while you do the things you are likely to do every day, like walking or driving to work and being at work. Music is not intrusive and it doesn’t require your full attention.
About the only time I see myself able or willing to watch video on a portable device is on the airplane or in a waiting room. And then, I have a laptop for that.
People don’t carry around portable TV’s even though they’ve been available for years. That’s why all those Personal Media Centers will crash and burn.
Why oh why can’t I just simly get a cell phone that can 1) receive calls 2) make calls 3) have an addressbook?
While I agree that they put too much stuff into cellphones these days just for the sake of having everything, I think it’s more of a problem that they don’t let the features mature. I see my cellphone as more of a general communication device rather than a phone. In fact, I rarely make phonecalls with it. I send sms, email, surf the net and play games when I’m sitting on the bus.
But video? I wouldn’t be able to enjoy watching anything on such a small screen, not even talkshows. But I suppose some people would.
I mean, I have trouble understanding that the ring melody market is such a big one. But obviously, people(mostly kids) seem to like changing melodies once a week.
However I think the market for simple phones are a lot larger than the companies realise. Especially if they are priced right. There’s a lot of people buying used phones, because they rather have a simple and cheap phone than a multimedia monster.
I thought it would replace my Pocket PC Phone better, as I started bycycling I needed smaller phone, but with some internet, SMS, etc. I decided to take T-630, and boy was I so wrong…. Batteries last for only like .. few hours, then the battery holder is not stable – I got restarts from the phone probably 30 times a month, sometimes 5-6 times a day (I’m serious). Then WAP… WAP is not good, it’s slow, not usable, and… slow, especially on my T-630.
Buying games is tedious, no good app software, and so and so and so.
My next phone is going to be the cheapest one, with the maximum battery life, and just a PHONE – where I call people, and they can hear me while I talk to them, and it does not restart while talking to them (especically hard, when your parents are long away from you, and it gets emotional sometimes when that does happen).
Another strange quirk with the restarts – If the battery life is low, and I have a RING – then the possibily of restarts are growing HUGE, as more power is needed (probably) at that moment. Lots of friends were complaining, that I was basically rejecting their calls, while this was not my decision, but my phone one.
Okay, just a rant, Really I might’ve got a bad model or something. My roommate got T610, and she’s fine with her phone, so who knows.
they aren’t all technogeeks like some of us
I do have to agree that portable video is useless but music, GPS, cellphone, PDA, camera and FM tuner capability are a must
I’m a Gizmo Happy American and I beleive that most of my fellow Americans are that way also. It dosen’t necessarily have to be computer related, but we do invest in alot of junk thinking that it will make our lives easier, more productive, or free up some extra minutes in our “busy” schedules.
I beleive that there are good and bad points to the all-in-one “Gizmo” Good points are its all in there, one thing to deal with. The bad points are the same as the all-in-one computer. If one of the subsystems fail you’re SOL. If you keep all your addresses in your Palm and the Palm dies while on the road good luck making it to your appoinments on time, reaching your contacts etc… But if you have a Palm and a Mobile phone you sync at least you have a backup in case one of them fails.
Good to read I’m not alone…maybe it has some similarities with the hifi world, where all-in-one has always been looked down upon (not without reason), with the argument that at best only one of the all-in-one functionalities may be high quality, but that that’s unlikely/impossible for all parts of the “recordplaying receiver with built-in casettedeck home audio system”.
Not to mention when audio, video and telephony come together…
KISS or all-in-one, it just depends. Some all-in-one come with all kind of stuff you don’t want. To me, thats phones which include games/SMS/MMS/etc/etc/etc.
Nobody in their right mind spends 50 EUR cent per SMS if that same amount of text costs near to nothing on the Internet. Its pathetic, but they milk it. The young here have huge debts mainly because of SMS!
What i want is a phone which uses some kind of non-wired Internet connection so i can use Skype on that. I don’t want SMS/MMS for i’ll do that via the Internet too.
Now say it’d have a decent lens (!= 1 MP) for digital camera purposes, that’d we awesome and certainly would make the device worth more to me. But if the quality is low, or if (for whatever other reason) i don’t want that feature, it makes the high price less worth it.
There is a market for portable video, though. Some smart company made a video codec for the Game Boy Advance then bought the rights to a bunch of popular cartoons. They sell two episodes on a GBA cartridge for $20 a pop. They’re making a killing.
Is it possible that it’s just hip that it’s for the GBA. I mean it brings some hip pop-culture factor – here’s my GBA it can plays videos, or is it that kids have it, it’s well known, and why not videos on it (like play them during classes? instead of listening to the teacher
)
There’s little technological justification for that idea any more, though. You could easily build an all-in-one as good as the highest-of-high-ends hi-fi systems, but the people who buy such systems like tinkering and switching and messing around, so no-one does. It’s now a market issue rather than a technical one. The same applies to many portable functions; an MP3 player, for instance, is basically a storage device – a small hard disk or some flash memory – with a battery and some very trivial electronics (hardware mp3 decoder chips are commodity items, as are output DACs). Phone and PDA functions can share the same storage and battery. In technical terms, combining them makes sense. The interface and user perception are the challenges, although there are obvious benefits to combining the functions (I find it incredibly annoying when my phone rings while my mp3 player is playing, for instance – I have to get the player out of my bag, put it on pause, take out an earphone, then answer the phone. It’d be so much better if they were combined; then when I was listening to music and a call came in the music would pause and the call would come in through the same earphones.) Portable video shouldn’t really add much to this at all except possibly cost, but that will go down. You can get all-in-one chips to decode audio and video, they just cost a little more than audio-only chips; they don’t add anything to the complexity of the device or to its size, though, once you have audio built in.
the problem with do-it-all gizmos is, that they usually don’t do anything as good as a specialized gizmo… and some things just don’t make sense. as was stated before, who would want to view a film on his cellphone.
I am not european, but I don’t like do-it-all gizmos either. Like it has been said already, they don’t do anything right. And as for those long boring trips on the train, nothing like a good book, START READING PPL.
Which country are you living in? I’ve NEVER heard of 50c per SMS, ever (MMS possibly – but then again I dont use em)
While mobile video is, as stated, not nearly as natural as mobile audio, I still think all-in-one devices will continue to gain popularity as computing power, screen resolutions, usability and battery management continue to improve.
Already smartphones are taking over territory once dominated by stand-alone PDA’s. Phones with web access have been available for years, but with higher resolution screens coming out, non-WAP web pages will finally be really usable on smartphones. GPS is another great feature that is now being incorporated in cellphones.
The key to a mobile device is that you have to bring it with you for it be usefuly. Most people will carry only one device with them at all times, and that device is their cellphone. So, it’s quite natural for the functionality of other devices (PDA, GPS, to a lesser extent MP3 player) to be folded into the cellphone.
video on an ipod makes no sense. HOWEVER, if you could output video files stored on your ipod to a tv input via cable then watch it, it would be useful. dl a couple movies on your ipod, plug it into a hotel tv and watch for example.
And maybe MAME, that’s all I need. The rest is better left to laptops or big TVs.
Who has $500 to blow on a gadget that allows their kid to watch Finding Nemo when going on holiday? How many times a year are you going on holidays? Thats a lot of money on for something that isn’t exactly good for their eyes, or their social education. Better to drop that $500 on a GPS system, that highlights interesting things along the way, and gets you to your holiday destination on time.
that is why i love my n-gage qd.
-2501
I think you are right: it’s not technological but a market issue that has to deal with the psychological aspect. Things aren’t obvious any more: even a PC still remains a vague device to many. But I also think all-in-one portable devices risk getting hated sooner, since you tend to not blame this-or-that functionality because of a flaw it has, but the entire physical piece of electronics you carry around and want to rely on in so many more situations a day.
What use is 20Gb of audio anyway? If I have a 20Gb hard disk in my pocket, I want to be able to backup my photos etc. to it. The price of displays has shown no sign of coming down low enough to be useful any time soon. Little digital cameras are nothing but toys, and shouldn’t add more than about $10 to the price of a device. Protable video players? Silly. Three letters – D.V.D. Take a few of them on holiday and make sure the hotel has a player. $300 for an iPod is mad. Two weeks of audio and twelve hours of battery life… By all means, stick an MMC/SD slot and MP3 decoder in your phone. But stuff like WAP, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS just aren’t that useful right now. In a computer? Sure, but not in a phone.
Here endeth the lesson.
GPS would be useful to me (heck I get lost driving), WiFi – Equaly useful, my house, my town and place of employment have WiFi that I can access for free (well the house one I pay for), so why not have a device that is small and that I can carry arround so that I can access the network ?
WAP and bluetooth not useful? huh ? WAP – good for accessing small webpages of info, bluetooth, use it everyday for syncing and file transfer of small files.
20Gb HD – I have an iPod, quite useful. All I need is my USB connector, go to any mac or PC, and I have access to my documents, no more need for Zip discs, floppys, CD-ROMs or USB based flash devices, oh yeah, and I can listed to my music without needing to bring one stupid little CD with me.
Digital cameras on phones are not toys, but they are not exactly great either. They show promise.
portable video player, as I have said elsewhere, to listen to music, you do not need to focus on something, to view video you need to focus on the device. So where are you going to use it? When going to the toilet? or when you are home? well at home you’ve got your TV with your VHS or DVD player not to mention cable/satelite. Are you going to view it at work? well shouldn;t you be working? – not very useful feature.
Here endeth your lesson
I used to think the same thing about the iPod, then I realized what it was really about. The theory behind the iPod (or any other hard drive based music player) is that you keep your WHOLE MUSIC COLLECTION on it. For those of use who own hundreds of CD’s, that means a hard drive, at least until memory cards get a little bigger (give it a few years).
The point of having your whole collection with you is that you don’t have to decide ahead of time what you might want to listen to. I know I’ve had a CD changer in my car for years, and I never think to change the CD’s in the changer before I set off somewhere. I end up listening to the same CD’s over and over.
As to the price, the value proposition there really depends on how much you end up using it. At present, the iPod has so many more potential use cases than a flash-based player (car, work, hooked up to a stereo, etc.), you would expect it to command a premium.
Digital cameras on phones are not toys, but they are not exactly great either. They show promise.
So what’s your defenition of toys?
The digital cameras seen in phones today, even though some deliver sizes that are acceptable for digital use they aren’t great optically, and that’s where it matters.
It can in no way compete with the compact digital cameras we have today, except in physicalsize. It will never provide any good quality since good optics is impossible to build into such a small device, especially if it has to be cheap.
So yeah, they will become slightly better, but I wouldn’t use one to capture memory shots that I want to keep for a longer time. The quality will simply never be good enough.
lots, when it’s your entire music collection. I’ve got 26GB, in fact – I used to have a flash player, which could easily contain as much music as I’d ever listen to before being able to change it, but if I suddenly changed my mind and wanted to listen to something else, it wasn’t there, and uploading new music every day really got on my nerves. One player with all your music on is a lot better.
the reason the iPod costs a lot is that Apple want the money and people seem perfectly happy to pay. Competing products are a lot cheaper (my Neuros cost exactly half as much as an iPod when I bought it).
“never” is a really, really dumb word to use.
In this specific case, I don’t think so.
We are talking about physical limits here.
If they would ever be able to build a camera that small, that could compare with the quality of a good compact camera then there would be no such thing as cellphones around anymore.
The science of optics has been around for ages, and still pro photographers has to carry around 20 kilos worth of lenses just to get some good quality. It just ain’t happening that fast. Sure optics are improving a bit (not that much) but they aren’t getting much smaller because there is a physical limit to it.
Besides, small cameras are pretty bad because of the lack of stability. The chances of motion blur is a lot bigger, so you need even more light to pass through the lens.
GPS is fine in your car – this is a discussion about all-in-one devices. GPS needs applications, like a mapping program and display, that make it pointless to integrate it into a phone or media player. OK, if you can share the display that’d be good but that doesn’t make it worth buying your DVD player from the people that made your GPS device.
You have WiFi at home and at work. You also have computers in those places, where you can sit down and use a big screen, keyboard and mouse. Same argument as video.
I realise some people want to carry their whole music collection around with them. It sounds cool, maybe it even impresses the ladies. Thing is, I don’t travel that much. I’m back home with my computer pretty much every night. And if I had a jet-set lifestyle, I’d get a laptop. From there I can fetch maybe 4 to 8 hours onto $100 worth of memory card – that ought to give me enough choice for one day. I admit though, that I’m no music lover and don’t see why people want pop music in their ears all the time they aren’t talking.
Cameras in phones are only useful for caller id and address books. That’s it. They will no doubt get better in qaulity, but, like the man said, they will never be as good as a camera – phtographic optics is just way too complicated. Due to sizes of lense, a reasonable camera will always be large enough to warrant being a seperate device. Also, I probably wouldn’t want a Fuji phone or a Seimens camera.
It really depend on how all-in-one device is define.
A phone can still have some video processing, but it does not need to display through it own LCD screen. The user can wear a pair glasses to provide the display. Moreover camera function can also be embedded within the glasses. All communication will then goes on to UWB.
Well I can appreciate those points, but at *that* point I think you’re setting the bar rather high in terms of ‘OK camera quality’. Remember, lots of people never own a camera better than you can buy in Boots for fifteen quid, and they’re happy with their pictures. Lots of people take holiday pictures with those horrible little one-shot disposable cameras, for that matter. You can quite easily fit a better camera than that in a cellphone *today*, in my opinion, and that will make probably more than 50% of people who take pictures happy. Never mind white balance and exposure time, most people who take pictures don’t know how to focus…
I’m a Dane (from Danmark and therefore an european) and I like the idea of having a do-it-all device.
I’ve got an Motorola A920 and my provider is 3 (yes, they call themself three) and I use it to watch Videos (like news or something I encoded myself), listen to MP3s (it’s not powerfull enough for Ogg/Vorbis or the player I’ve for Ogg sucks, donno), check emails, surf the net (but it’s to expensive 10 kr or nearly $1.66 at todays exchange-rate), chat on ICQ and MSN and of course I use it for phonecalls and SMS. The only feature I don’t use are the video-phone, since I only know one other with a 3G-phone and we can seem to make the video-phone work so good that we would want to use it.
The thing I don’t like, the MB price, the video-phone feature that too bad for good use, the short battery life-time and the DRM (crap) they use on the video files I’ve paid for (it doesn’t allow me to move files from the phones main-memory to my SD-card, it pisses me of)
[GPS is fine in your car…] Ehm, my Motorola A920 has GPS, so I’d think it relevant, I use that sometime when I lost or need to see a map of my location. You see, I don’t need a third parti application with maps and stuff like that, my provider give me “Guru” it a sort of online map and phonebook.
When the GPS doesn’t work, which happens something in the concrete jungle that is my home Guru can still locate me from the antennas me phone is connected too, it’s just not as precise as the GPS but its mostly not off by more when 1.5 kilometer.
Cameraes in phone are usefull for many things, caller-id is one of them, people might see something fun and take a picture of it and send it too their friends or save it. For this one (well I) don’t need the best camera, just a camera that does the job. And the cool thing is one only need one device in their pocket.
I sometimes encode one of my movie for my phone, it doesn’t take long, and then I don’t have to be bored then I’m in the bus or train. Also I like music-videos so I cary a couple with I like.
You might not find all-in-one gizmoes to be usefull, fine buy an ordinary or not one at all, I on the other hand loves new tech. and find all-in-one gizmoes very usefull.
PS.: I can take playboy on it to, now thats usefull :-p
I too hate massive integration. When i got my last phone I wanted one that was, small, not a flip phone, no antena sticking out, good battey life, vibrate alarm, a good phone book. I ended up with a T-616/610 that have tons of stuff i will never use, like camera and such. But it was the only phone that met my specs. Any other phone that came close was some huge ugly thing. Interestingly the more features you put on a cell phone, the smaller it gets. Which is purely marketing driven. Cell phone companies know people would love a cheap tiny basic phone. But that would hurt profits for them on extended plans that people end up getting cause they decide to use a feature or get fooled into signing up.
Why the iPod has done so well is it is so simple and basic. People like simple things. Adding tons of features makes for crappy interfaces. And cost and such.
I think integration will peak, because some companies are going to catch on and start taking the ipod approach, make a great simple device that does one thing great.
The other thing about all in ones, such as pda/phones, phones are something most people just replace everytime they renew their cell plane, like every year or two. A pda is something they buy maybe every 4+ years. Now they are stuck with both for a long time, or replacing something they don’t really want to replace. Similar issue to why people would pay the same price for an emac without a monitor as an emac with a monitor. It’s not about value in having a monitor too, its about not wanting things you allready have.
Also things like phones are dispossable things, if you loose it, oh well, no biggy. A PDA is not. I want gadgets to be seperate, i replace things on differant time frames, and If one one part of a gadget dies or gets outdated, i don’t want to have to replace everything.
Cameras in phones are only useful for caller id and address books. That’s it. They will no doubt get better in qaulity, but, like the man said, they will never be as good as a camera – phtographic optics is just way too complicated. Due to sizes of lense, a reasonable camera will always be large enough to warrant being a seperate device. Also, I probably wouldn’t want a Fuji phone or a Seimens camera.
You are missing the point. A multifunction device doesn’t need to be the best device for every function. I have an LG U8120 and the pictures it takes are hardly masterpieces. However, it fits easily in my pocket and it is always with me, this makes it very useful. Sure if I was going some where with the intent of taking a photo I would take a proper camera. But how often do you see something and wish you had a camera.
A good example is a photo I took recently of a used car that a friend might have been interested in. There are countless times when the fact that it is there makes it useful, regardless of quality.
So sad to see all this highly integrated rubbish on the market masquerading as PDA for example. Why Psion ever gave up the market they began I do not know. There you had small useable PDA with excellent keyboards, pocketable and yet what have we today? CRAP. Zaurus is closest to the Psion ideal….
I’m not saying camera phones are useless, just that their use has limited value. Yes, it’s great to have a camera with you all the time. Just don’t rely on it to take snaps of your trip to the grand canyon or the himalayas. You still need a real camera.
I’m a country boy and have never really understood GPS, but I guess it has it’s uses.
I’m not knocking device integration, I’m just saying it has limits and that companies are always going beyond those limits in order to list more “functions”. For example, my parents just bought a cheap new phone. It has a torch function. That’s right, if it’s dark and you’ve lost your keys, you can wear out your phone battery, looking for them!
The problem with too many of these portable devices is that although packed with features, they are usually of extremely poor quality – just look at newer Motorola, Nokia and other mobile phones – they feel like they are going to break in hand! I guess the days of durable consumer electronics are over. It is probably much easier to add newer features to excuse low quality than to offer a real solid state product. Besides the customers are already used to cheap desposable junk by now.
Exactly. Do-it-all junk does lots of tricks and nothing very well. Probably made in China, even though it is sold at Western prices, using the cheapest parts possible with zero longevity. How on earth have we come to this stupid crossroads?