Here’s something interesting that I’ve noticed lately.
There’s this continual push to have everything digital. Digital TV, mp3′s, e-books, movies on your iPod, etc. It seems as if the goal is to move from physical copies of things to only having them “exist” digitally. That being said, I don’t think actual books are going to disappear anytime soon… but still.
The interesting thing is that even as we’re digitizing everything, we still want to interact with it in the “traditional” sense. We want to be able to touch, pull, push, drag, and draw. Would the iPhone be as successful without the multi-touch functionality? Maybe, but it would certainly be very different. Look at Microsoft’s Courier. Purely digital content, but interacted with in the same way as a traditional journal.
Where are we heading with this? Minority Report anyone?
One Response and Counting...
I definitely don't think the iPhone would be viewed the same way without multitough. In fact, I've used other phones that try to recreate the iPhone's look while still using a keyboard, and it's a huge letdown. That's why I don't remember their names.
In fact, I was just using the Sony E-Reader the other day at Borders and was wishing I could just flick pages back and forth by hand.