L. M. Lloyd

There is a lot of talk about the first Android handset coming to market, and most of it completely misses the point. I have read article after article about how it compares to the iPhone, or Windows Mobile, or the BlackBerry, but ultimately none of that matters. What people seem to be missing, is that as of this instant, the entire calculus of designing a mobile phone has changed. Up until now, if you were a company wanting to bring a phone to market, you basically had two choices. You either paid to license an OS, or you developed your own. Now, with Android, there is a third option, which is that you modify Android to fit your needs. Suddenly, the entire landscape changes.

Before Android, there was no question that the OS was going to be expensive, the only question was could you manage to get the functionality you wanted out of a licensed OS, or did you need to develop your own? With Android out, the question now becomes one of what the other OS options offer that makes them worth the additional expense? Sure, you can argue pretty much forever about which OS might be better for this task or that task, and which phone might be better for this user or that user. However, what you can't argue with is that Android is free. This means that no matter what kind of phone a company wants to make, any responsible product manager's first step will have to be to first evaluate whether or not Android is an option. Before even starting to compare the costs and options of licensing or developing your own OS, it would be irresponsible not to check out the free option. Thus Android becomes the default.

I have always been a fan of alternate input devices. The keyboard/mouse combination has always, frankly, offended me. As someone who has been creating graphics on a computer since the days when I had to code the graphics program myself in BASIC, I have always been irritated by the notion that I should adapt how I work, to what is best for some company's bottom line. The whole concept of QWERTY offends me, the actual design of the hardware offends me, and the mouse has to be the most illconcieved pointing device ever designed. If you were actually setting out to create the least efficient interface possible, you would have a hard time doing better than the QWERTY keyboard and mouse. Back in the early days of the mouse, I was one of those people who used a trackball. Eventually, I had enough money that I could buy a digitizer tablet, and was in heaven. When I moved into 3D graphics, I started building dial boxes and as soon as it came out, the Spaceball shot to the top of my "must have" list. If you look at me desk today, it is cluttered with all sorts of input devices, including a Space Explorer 3D mouse (essentially the newest version of the Spaceball), a Wacom tablet, and a little game keypad that lets me map any keys I want over to it to just have a grouping of the buttons I want. If I could afford it, I would love to have something like the JazzMutant Lemur, and I still need to buy a USB mixing board to get a few sliders and knobs. I find it lets me sit down and work with the least amount of thought, and hop from app to app, without having to constantly reconfigure in my head which hotkeys do what on the keyboard. To me, the purpose of an input device is to make my life easier, not require me to do more work.

I was recently reading an article on the web going on about what a gimmick multi-touch technology is, and how they don't see any good use for it. Now, I could not agree less. Sure, the ways it has been used so far are pretty gimmicky, but that doesn't mean it has to be. I haven't worked as an interface designer in years, but even I can see the exciting possibilities presented by the technology. In fact, I can think of tons of way to use it, that I could probably make a fortune off of patenting, but patents aren't cheap, and I don't have the kinds of financial resources to patent every good idea I come up with. So, if you are the wise ass who will read this article, and then go out and file a patent from what you read, then at least have the decency to offer me a job, ok?

Anyway, the ways I see it being really useful are mainly for creative applications, as that is where I spend most of my time. I'm sure it has exciting applications elsewhere, but I will focus on the creative ones.