Musings on the Future of Digital Media – Hardware or Getting connected

adminComputer, Gedanken, Hardware, Medien, Netz, Software

Within the second part of my series on ideas regarding the future of digital media, i will try to take a deeper look on the hardware side of all things connected. In the first part, i have defined the internet as a digital universal transmission platform, which Kevin Kelly views as the ultimate machine mankind has ever built. Being connected to the ’net is imperative already and the pressure to be always on will become even stronger. But with what kind of device and for what purpose are we gonna be connected? Classifying Devices For the moment, four specific always connected device classes are to be defined: Phones Tablets Laptops Desktops These four classes can be parallelized in parts by a categorization provided in this article by Mark Segal on O’Reilly Radar. He defines devices by their portability as Wearables Pocketables Bagables Portables Wearables are smaller than phones – at least for the moment – and desktops no longer portable. Desktops could be considered as moveable. The less portable a device gets, less people will own one of these devices, as usage scenarios of Portables or Non-Portables will become more and more specialized. According to Gartner, 1.2 billion mobile phones were sold in 2009. Compared to the 306 million computers (laptops and desktops combined), portability has already won by far over functionality, but the latter is moving fast into the former. Individualization Additional individualization of entertainment will be driven by devices like tablets. Everyone can view the content she or he …