Technology At Your Fingertips

As with most things in life, once an idea has been had and a product/ service/ whatever has seen the light of day, everyone soon jumps on it and makes their own version. Technology is a great example – take mobile phones, TV’s and computers, for example – look how saturated the market is with these items. All offering the same basic features and covering all budgets from the very low to the stupidly high. Let’s face it, it’s not really the basic features that sell any of these products, is it. It’s the ‘extras’ – the bits that the competitors don’t offer that we’re interested in as consumers, and the manufacturers know that as they bend over backwards trying to out-do each other.

The mobile phone first became commercially available in 1983 and was something the size of a briefcase and could just about manage to make phone calls. The first text messages weren’t sent until 10 years later. Two years after that in ’95, the first digital cameras were being integrated into mobile phones, although these were very poor quality. Given that back in ’95 photographers were still shooting on film, to now have a camera in your phone? Wow! Nowadays the cameras offered on the top-of-the-range phones are offering a staggering 14MP! Move over all DSLR’s? Not quite but it’s still pretty impressive. Jump forward a few years and the first ‘smartphones’ began to emerge, giving us internet on the go. In January 2007, Apple changed the game completely by launching the iPhone. The touchscreen revolution had begun! Everyone started making touchscreen phones after that, but none could match the quality, the speed and the technology that was encapsulated within this device.

Even now there are only a few devices that can get anywhere near the latest incarnation of the iPhone (the 4s). In January 2010, Apple did it again. The iPad was launched – a touchscreen tablet computer. Some say it was just an enlarged iPhone, but that clearly didn’t matter – it went on sale in April 2010 and to date has sold over 15 million units so something must have set it apart from its little brother.

Technology moves swiftly in everything. Things evolve and improve because of new ways of thinking, hard work and public demand.

I used the mobile phone as an example because I saw something today that made me think.

The photo at the top of the page is of the new VW E-Bugster concept car (Don’t blame me for the silly name!). A new fully electric car, complete with ….. yep, you guessed it – a touchscreen tablet PC.

The technology cross-over is amazing. To think, if that first mobile phone had never been invented, this car and others like it would probably not exist. Some might think that having an integrated tablet PC in your car is a ridiculous idea, but do you think VW, one of the worlds largest car manufacturers, would have bothered if there wasn’t demand for it? In this day and age, communication is key. We want to be able to talk, text, email, Tweet, Facebook and surf the net 24/7. We want to be able to connect everything to everything via bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so why not include our cars in that equation? Computers pretty much run our cars behind the scenes anyway – why not have one up front that you can see, appreciate and use.

I’m a manufacturer’s dream and a bank managers nightmare – I WANT ONE!