The tinier the gadget the better?

In My Humble Opinion
1

For a while I was thinking about getting an iPod Mini for the hard road. Then Apple went and discontinued it to launch the Nano.

So I’m in the store looking at it, holding it, checking it out every which way, and I’m thinking “I could easily lose this, or even snap it in two”. One thing I liked about the Mini was it still felt fairly robust. The Nano is probably tough for its size, but for 200 bucks, it’s gotten to a point where it makes me a little nervous. “Tough for its size” may not be saying much, given the way I beat on things. I don’t collect Fabergé eggs for two reasons: I’m not rich, and I’m not all that delicate with my personal belongings. I’m into the outdoors. I like to play a little rough.

I love electronic gizmos, and I appreciate being able to pack a ton of capacity and capability into a small, highly portable package. But a guy at work just lost a gigabyte key drive that he was using to transport drafts of papers, and now he’s hating life. It’s only natural that he lost it; he loses everything. I knew he was in for trouble the moment he showed up with it. I don’t dare to use one. It’s too tempting to fill it up with important stuff. I’ve deliberately stuck with zip disks, even though they’re slow, bulky, and unstable, because I’ll never fall into the tiny traps that these ultra-small storage devices lay for you.

It gets even scarier with the camera phones. I have relatively small hands, and even still, some of these things feel uncomfortably small. And some day, when my phone is also a decent camera, camcorder, satellite radio, mp3 player and GPS unit, and then I lose it, or accidentally crush it, because it’s not much bigger than a credit card, I’ve lost everything, including a big chunk of money.

There seems to be no limit to how small our electronics are going to get, but we’re not shrinking. Companies pack more functionality into a smaller package, but the buttons and screens are tiny, it’s fragile, and it just does so much the interface is a maze of menus and options.

Are you getting a little fed up with this? Sometimes I think I really wouldn’t mind a nice, tough little brick about the size of a pack of cards that I can accidentally step on or drop in the toilet, with a display I don’t need a microscope to read, buttons build for an adult human…something metal, substantial, something with a comforting modicum of heft.

Anybody feel the same way? Is all this miniaturization starting to feel a little dangerous?

2

Well, miniaturization is all the rage, and there’s the novelty value of being able to fit an existing gadget into a space that would not have been feasible or possible given the state of the art a few years ago.

I don’t think it’s really going to go rampant… these gadgets are going to be made to be sold and make money, and I think a lot of consumers understand what you’re saying, to some extent… a gizmo that is ridiculously small is just too hard to use, and possibly more fragile than it needs to be. When the sales figures make it clear that this has happened, the companies go up to larger devices again, often making up the lost ‘cool’ factor by squeezing in more features.

On the other hand, not everybody’s taste in gizmos coincide, and certain slightly less popular niches won’t get populated – which really sucks if you’re one of the persons in that niche who would like it. A lot of the people in the ipod mini customer base might find that they really do like the ipod nano, or go up to one of the other ipod models that hasn’t been discontinued, or jump ship on the ipod brand name and go to an RCA or creative MP3 player, or something else.

My own regret has to do with typing devices. Now, that’s not just a miniaturization thing, there’s also the qualitative difference of stylus-handwriting based organizers moving into the market, while I’ve never really gotten the hand of grafiti of any sort and just rather have buttons under my fingers.

I love my QWERTY organizer - a gadget a little larger than a calculator with a full keyboard on it, little screen with room for 56 characters. The keyboard is larger than the ones on blackberries and other pdas, but still small enough to slip into my pocket. I love it. However, the idea has been pretty much discontinued, so if my organizer breaks down, I’ll probably have to find a replacement on ebay, if I can. Sigh.

Ramble mode off.

3

On the one hand for the nano, you have reports of the screen getting scratched to hell with little cause. On the other, the Ars Technica “stress test” (with the classic line “Because we had honestly expected the iPod nano to break by this time, we were forced to depart from our planned schedule of destruction and try and run over it with the car. Surely, we thought, it could never withstand the crushing power of German automotive engineering.”)

It’s the classic early-adopter story. The most diehard fans get devices that rarely are perfect, and only the real life field testing of consumer ownership can really bring out the flaws to be corrected in later-gen units.

4

And not just the screen…people are saying that the (some type of plastic?) fronts are scarily scratchable, as well. I know this is wildly OT from your OP, but if I were you, I’d wait until a less (cosmetically) damage-prone Nano is released.

5

I’m not so keen on things getting as small as they are. When I saw the ads for the nano, my first thought was like the OP’s, “I’d lose or break that within a few days.”

A friend of mine loves it though. He’s got a thumbdrive that’s so teeny, he can’t even attach it to his keyring. He just throws it in his pocket and goes. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I’d be constantly worried about losing it.

6

Vibrator Manufacturers Scrap Miniaturisation Plans As Sales Slump Hits iProd Mini

7

I agree with the OP. Miniaturization is going too far, for all the reasons you’ve mentioned: too easy to lose, too easy to break, and too difficult to use the tiny little controls.

I wouldn’t buy a thumbdrive that I couldn’t attach to my keychain. Last time I checked, a 1 gig thumbdrive was about a hundred bucks, and that’s way too expensive for me to just toss it into my pocket like loose change.

The comment about losing your combination phone/camera/camcorder/satellite radio/mp3 player/GPS unit is a good one, too. How many teens are going to get that new iPod phone, and then be unable to call home (or receive a call) because they’ve worn the battery down listening to music?

8

I don’t think miniaturization is going too far. Compare a new cell phone to a 5-year old model; overall size is much smaller, but the screen and keypad size are about the same. If anything, the newer phones have better designed (more contoured, etc) keypads and easier-to-see screens. Same with laptop computers - they are thinner and far more powerful, but things that need to be big, i.e. screen and keyboard, are still the same size. (Excpet on some niche products, and low-end products because small screens are cheaper). My new PDA (Palm Tungsten T5) is thinner than my first PDA (Palm III), but its screen is actually larger. The iPod Nano is actually a very generous size - they could have made it shorter and narrower (but thicker), wich would have been more “compact” but would have required shrinking the display and/or controls even more.

I don’t think the “smaller = more fragile” connection is true either. If I drop my 9-lb “desktop replacement” laptop, it’s going to break just as easily as a 3-lb mini-notebook computer. My 3rd generation iPod is more fragile than the iPod Nano because mine contains a hard drive. And why would a shirt-pocket size digital camera be more fragile than a digital SLR?

9

Well, I’ve never lost an SLR in the couch…

10

There’s nothing wrong with miniaturization, we just aren’t quite there yet.

When you can fit all that and a Dick Tracy style videophone into a thin, stylish wristwatch with a three year battery life, you’ll have my attention. :wink:

11

Yes, there is a practical limit to size. Memory chips for cameras would be a good example. The larger “compact flash” chips are much more reliable and easier to handle than their smaller brethren.

Cell phones were getting smaller until manufacturers realized people wanted something easier to hold so the flip phone has become the defacto standard.

Laptops were getting smaller until someone realized there was a dual market for them: one for ease of transport and one for a powerful computer that is portable

12

I’ve noticeed the growing popularity of mini-notebooks (looks like less than 8-10" screen) at my school. THat doesn’t do it for me, I prefer a screen size closer to a desktop computer. Take my roommate: His toshiba has a 1" widescreen.

Thas what IM talking 'bout.

13

Miniturization (and computerization) is fine, but I think it’s often at the expense of user interface. Remember when car stereos used to have separate knobs for bass, treble, and fader? You could safely adjust all that by feel while driving down the road. Now you’ve got to go beep-beep-beep-beep through a bunch of menus to get all of that.

And my iPod is good, but why is the shuffle/no shuffle hidden a few layers deep in the menus. I want a BUTTON, dammit!

14

At the same time I finally caved into the peer pressure and decided to buy an iPod, they released the nano. I was super psyched to have the newest coolest tiny gadget, but when I went to the store to buy, I found it was too small. I don’t lose things, and I’m pretty careful with my stuff, but I couldn’t shake the feeling something awful would happen if I bought the nano. I left and found a store that sold the mini. Apple will not discontinue the tech support for it, you just can’t buy it as readily in stores.

15

I carry a pager for work. (I’m resisting switching it to a cell-phone, for reasons which aren’t relevant here.) A year or so ago, the pager broke down and we had to get a new one.

The new one was much smaller…and inferior to the original in every way. It’s too small, for a start; it’s at a point where you can’t hold it and press those damn little buttons easily. The screen is small enough that it’s hard to read. It’s loaded with unnecessary features that we never use, and that just make it clumsier. And it rips through batteries in a fraction of the time the older one took.

Sometimes smaller is good. Sometimes it ain’t.

16

Yes, I remember. And you’re right. User interface my ass. User manual buried in the house somewhere and I can’t use all the functions. That’s what I’ve got.

17

On my iPod, you can bring the Shuffle toggle to the top menu. I believe it’s in Settings:Main Menu.

18

That’s more of a cost-reduction measure than miniaturization. Buttons and knobs are expensive - not only do the buttons and knobs themselves cost money, but every button you add represents extra wires that need to be soldered, extra traces added to the circuit board, and extra pins added to the microcontroller. But it costs almost nothing to add extra lines of code to the microcontroller software to display complex menus and give each button multiple functions.