Leibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. This blog is about the disruptive technologies that either have or will win over electronic engineers, some that won't, and why. Please feel free to link to these blog entries! Written by Steve Leibson, a marketing consultant specializing in lead generation and content creation for high-tech companies, former VP of Content for Reed Business, and former Editor in Chief of EDN. See my consulting Web site at www.sleibson.com and my history site at www.hp9825.com. You can email me at steven.leibson followed by the magic email symbol @ followed by att.net.
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Blog
Friday, December 21, 2007
Attack of the iClones
Dec 21 2007 1:26PM | Permalink |Comments (4) |
CES in Las Vegas is now the place to take the pulse of the industry. It starts a scant two weeks after Christmas—time enough for dealers to see what did and didn’t sell last selling season and to start girding for the next. One thing that clearly worked this season was Apple’s insanely great iPhone, which (as usual) captured its unfair share of sales and celebrity. So it’s no surprise that the current CES PR email blizzard should bring an announcement of Shiro Corp’s trio of “slender and lustrous” personal media players (PMPs). Their industrial design makes them kissin’ cousins to Apple’s iPhone. And why not? Apple’s high end entries (iPhone, iPod Touch) set the bar on style. Everyone else either gets to dance the limbo under Apple's high bar or tries to hurdle it.
Technical specs on Shiro’s three new PMPs (VJ, MR, MD) are not unusual. They’re flash-based players with 4 or 8 Gbytes of internal flash storage, various size LCD displays, and the VJ and MR players have micro SD card slots for storage expansion. They handle MP3, WMA, and WAV audio. Each supports a different set of video-file standards. All have FM radios and can record off the air.
These technical specs are just the price of entry into this sort of market. Sleek industrial design now matters more than ever in the cutthroat CE market. Shiro (a subsidiary of Singapore’s Aztech Systems Ltd) clearly realized that.
Reader Comments
at 12/27/2007 8:27:14 PM, constantin.grecu@gmail.com said:
Here's a device everyone wants to heve. I would be very happy to be able to use it just now. I recommen d it warmly.
at 12/28/2007 2:33:39 PM, Moe Rubenzahl said:
Color me skeptical.
Remember the Star Trek in which an alien, Trelane, kidnapped Kirk, Spock, Uhura, etc. and hosted them in a reproduced 18th century parlor? Spock noted that the food was a visually exact reproduction but had no flavor because Trelane, having only observed it from light years away, only knew its appearance and not its substance?
A shiny black device with a grid of colorful icons on a touch screen does not an iPhone make. Will these stylistic knock-offs match the finesse and panache of the original? I'm betting not.
It's really too bad but poor user interface is so common. Some manufacturers don't get it and don't even know they don't get it. I am currently wrestling with the menu systems on a Toshiba DVD and a JVC television. I rented a Ford Focus (I had another not-nice name for it) last month and it took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to change the bass control!
Arg.
at 12/28/2007 4:35:40 PM, Steve Leibson said:
Moe, that's one particular Star Trek episode I try very, very hard to forget. Personally, I'd agree with you that the finesse of the iPhone's user interface is strongy differentiating but the WalMart buying public is not so pickly, I think. Nor are they likely to try out a good-looking player in a package before purchase. Looks can still get you a long way in this society.
at 1/2/2008 1:26:22 PM, Jonathan Williams said:
Right on Moe. The "buried" controls on car radios are maddening to say the least. Thank goodness my VW has a radio with separate knobs for each feature instead of forcing you to sequence through a menu list to get to the parameter of interest. There is no excuse for such crappy engineering. The program managers for those devices should be forced to live in the world they create, including a difficult to read screen, obtuse graphics, multi-level menu hierachies, and tiny buttons for flushing their toilet and turning on the reading light.
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