Mary-Jo Foley at Zdnet.com offers a humorous but thought-provoking article about the fabled all-in-one device that can read eBooks, play movies and cruise the Internet for recipes, all while you’re using it to trim your nose hairs. The truth is, designers have to be careful they don’t assume that consumers are as wild about technology as they are. Obviously, you don’t build an iPhone or Kindle so you can read electronic books unless you’re a techno-freak to begin with.
As Mary Jo Foley says in her article, there are people out there who have joined the 21st Century but prefer limiting their devices to single use, and are happy to cart them all around in a bag. (Utility belt market opening up?)
Didn’t they just publish a report saying that people who are multi-taskers, actually perform poorly at their tasks? Why expect our handheld devices to do it well, yah?
