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The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is wrapping up after a week or so of excitement* (*YMMV). This is the main event for all the major electronics manufacturers to show new products. The result this year was a flood of Tablet and E-Book readers. Although there has never been a hit product in this space - with the possible exception of Amazon's Kindle (for which Amazon refuses to release any sales numbers) - a lot of people are betting 2010 is the year.
But do we really need small devices that are too big to put in a pocket, and lack keyboards? Steve Jobs famously (and unattributedly) wondered what they could possibly be good for other than surfing the web from the bathroom. I was long a skeptic as well, thinking there just wasn't any room between a good smartphone and a small notebook. But now I've changed my mind. I think most of what was shown at CES in this category will fail, but I think something in this space will succeed. By "this space" I mean a lightweight portable device with a 7 to 10 inch diagonal screen and no keyboard.
And unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard the speculation that Apple has an entry ready to be shown at the end of January. Has Apple found a use outside the bathroom? I think so. We'll see in just over 2 weeks.
Just throwing out more pieces to the puzzle. Wish I could tie it all together better.
One thing that has really caught me eye regarding the increasing use of mobile devices for surfing the web (and just accessing the internet in general) is the de-emphasis of the URL. On the desktop (whether that be an actual desktop computer or a laptop - in other words, a computer with a full sized keyboard) the URL (the 'Location' field in your web browser) served as a sort of command line for the internet. You type the globally unique URL into your browser and you "get back" the web resource it specifies. On a mobile device, where typing is more difficult, the general purpose web browser which presents a general location field is (and I think will continue to be) de-emphasized in favor of small applications that "launch" the user directly to the remote resource with one click. For example, to use FaceBook on the iPhone you just launch the free FaceBook app instead of going to your browser and typing in facebook.com.
So what? Underneath everything is the same. The FaceBook app isn't much more than just a shortcut to pointing the mobile browser at facebook's web servers. Something like a glorified bookmark. But this is really important because as we move to using more and more individual apps to access information on the web (not just FaceBook app, but also weather, stocks, dictionary, wikipedia, etc.) we have less and less need for Google.
If I want to find information on wine on my desktop I will probably start with Google. But on a smartphone I may well download a free wine widget instead. Both methods will use the internet to return me hopefully relevant information, but using Google fuels a particular advertising model (where Google can serve me ads targeted to everything I search for on the web,) while using specialized smartphone widgets circumvent this model.
Put another way: as the internet more and more becomes the operating system of mobile computers (i.e., Chrone, Android, iPhone OS) what we used to think of as "websites" become more and more like what we used to call "applications". So instead of "going to" a website, we will increasingly be "launching" applications (widgets). The result is the same, but the cognitive set is much different. Instead of one vast sea of websites we navigate with our browser and the help of Google, the web is being sliced up into categories that will be accessed through special purpose widgets.
Note I'm not saying Google is going away. But just that smartphones, and specialized single purpose widgets, may well be the end of Google's total on line ad dominance.
In related news, Apple buys mobile ad company Quattro.