#7: Hold the Smartphone!

I like technology. I like prying it apart and seeing what's underneath. I like understanding its architecture and trying to fit that form with its functions. I like its ubiquity and its flexibility. It's cool, it's useful, and it's hackable.

However, there are some things in technology that make me thing that technology "experts" are really just a bunch of quixotic jackasses. Especially when technology "experts" go and make technology predictions. Such as here. Some of these predictions are warranted. For example, that the mobile smartphone will become the Internet browser of choice for many people is not a surprise given the recent successes of the iPhone and G1 Android. Their prediction that copy protection will become less and less relevant (the Internet itself is based off of storing, exchanging, and viewing copies of files anyway, be they .html, .php, .cgi, .doc, .jpeg, or .mp3) is also reasonable and based on good evidence (Creative Commons et al). Nonetheless, there is one thing in this article that happens to annoy the crap out of me.

The keyboard simply ain't going to go away! The "professionals" in the article keep mentioning that people are going to just be dictating to their phones to input content and typing will only be resorted to when privacy is needed or desired. Utter bullshit! I type good faster than I talk well, and what I write when I type is a lot more coherent, legible, and intelligible than my spoken speech. When typing, it is easy to edit oneself and make the sentence make sense. When speaking, especially in German (and English, I guess, although it doesn't have so many rules), if you lose a clause at any given point you're completely fucked for the rest of the paragraph. I don't lose clauses when I type because they're right there.

Furthermore, I would NOT want to try to design an experiment in tables and graphs using only voice input. I mean, how would that even work? "Y axis base ten logarithmic display CFUs in Table 1 column 3, X axis linear scale time units in Table 1 Row 1." That would suck! And to even think about trying to manipulate a spreadsheet or Prism file with data in it with just my voice gives me a faint sense of doomy nausea.

So no, the keyboard isn't going away. And neither is the mouse.

Get over it.