Thursday, March 20, 2008

Devices of the Gen Nxt

I am at my home town in Trivandrum now, having a good time with my parents & grandma after so long. A break from the fast paced RIA world to stop me from burning out. Yesterday, my cousin came to visit us from a small village near Kottayam in Kerala. Though he is computer literate like most young indians, he still looks at a computer as a necessary evil, nothing more. As he came in, I was listening to music on my laptop and doing some work.

I offered him to play with my T61 and showed him some stuff on my system. He observed with a clam but nervous demeanor and I felt like he wanted me to stop. I offered him my laptop to play with and left him with the PC and went out of the room to get a drink.

I come back and I see that the PC was shut down, and he was happily playing with my mobile. A moderate Sony K750I at that. He wanted me to show him how to take pics, listen to music and even browse internet. He advised me to go for one with 3G support. He was immersed in it, long into the eveining until… He saw my iPod. He was instantly drawn to the iPod and handled it with poise as if he was born to play with it. He wanted to chat up on the new ipod Touch and its features.

I was left wondering. What is the device of the Gen NXT. A PC is defenitely not going to be on the top of the list for sure. A mobile? An ipod/iphone like devices? The best answer i could come up was that the Gen NXT devices will be all personal and compact. One that allows people to engage with it all the time uninterruptedly and not just in the confines of the office or home.

Product companies should take notice of this (I think they already are). Times of thrusting things down people’s throats is over. The current generation wants things on-demand, lightning fast, to work across devices and to be engaged in it always…