Form Factor

June 2004

Being involved in IT and having more than a passing interest in useful (in the widest possible sense of the word) gadgets and gizmos I often find myself discussing peoples latest phone / DVD Recorder / computerized toaster in much the same way as people talk about the football or the weather. One of the things that has struck me recently in observing the things we all buy is the ever changing interaction between the form factor of a device and its functionality.

Let me explain…what I mean by the form factor is the size and natural location of a device, whilst the functionality is what it is capable of doing. Not, you may note, its primary function or even what it is ever likely to do, just what it can do. The electronics industry can supply an ever increasing list of mind bogglingly sophisticated capabilities on smaller and smaller pieces of silicon whilst the manufacturers of consumer products face stiff competition from one another and in many cases from the perfectly functional device they sold us last year. So there is real commercial pressure to keep redefining the role of different devices and adding new ‘must have’ features like cameras in mobile phones or speed camera detectors in PDAs.

Similarly as a consumer I often find myself wanting to buy something with a combination of form factor and functionality which nobody has quite thought of yet. It is particularly annoying when the only reason we can’t have the combination of features we want is down to someone else’s ideas about how they want to segment the market. For example, satellite navigation systems generally only come as standard in cars with very poor fuel consumption (and leather upholstery).

Another common experience (at least for gadget enthusiasts) is the brilliant device we spend ages coveting and then find we never use either because it doesn’t actually save us any time or because its never there when we need it.

All of this has got me thinking about this from an ecological point of view. Are there a finite number of niches in our environment for electronic gadgets, and are we witnessing a kind of Darwinian struggle as different devices try out the value of various capabilities in their battle to survive and multiply.

In my life I have identified 5 main habitats for gadgets, namely, on my wrist, in my jacket pocket, on my desk, in the car and in the corner of the living room. Each one of these spaces imposes a different set of environmental constraints on size, power consumption, and cost. For example I find that watches rarely survive me for long enough to get through their first set of batteries so the limit here is about twenty quid; which is still enough to get several alarms and Olympic standard sports timing facilities but doesn’t cover much in the way of precious metals.

At the other end of the spectrum the gadget in the corner of the living room can, within reason, be as large as it likes, here the main constraint is that it needs to be controlled remotely from a semi reclining position by someone who is not necessarily at their sharpest. It also generally needs to be shared with others which is why the television has still not really taken off as a competitor to the PC for internet and personal computing tasks in the home.

I have written before about the battle that is raging between the mobile phone and the PDA (palm top computer) for control of my jacket pocket. This contest is getting even more interesting because of the developments in satellite navigation and direction finding systems and cost effective wireless networking technologies. This development along with the ban on using phone handsets whilst driving has made the car into an important additional factor in considering the design of mobile devices.

A mobile phone can now connect to the cars sound system using Bluetooth (a short range wireless network) it can also use Bluetooth to connect to a portable GPS (global positioning system) receiver and GPRS or 3G to get mapping and route finding information from a remote server. A PDA can do Satellite Navigation without accessing a remote server and with a larger screen for displaying maps whilst a smart phone such as the XDA can do both. Car manufacturers are increasingly installing multi functional touch screen displays to support more sophisticated driver information systems and satellite navigation as well as providing a built in interface to Bluetooth enabled phones.

I can’t help wondering how long it will be before we are synchronising our diaries with our cars on board computer. Having listened to quite a few men of a certain age swooning over the calm way in which their apparently female voiced satellite navigation system informs them of an alternative route after they have missed the turn for the third time, I can see there being a market for a similarly unflappable approach to our diaries. “You are half an hour late for the school concert…but that’s ok, just turn left at the lights, I know a shortcut”.