The smart get dumber

John Yunker writes about devices getting not smarter but dumber. And it's the future he writes about, I am sure. He uses the Orb from Ambient devices as a great example of products that are doing less but do it better. The Orb, a beatiful lamp and a beatiful idea lets you keeping track of your favorite stock portfolio, the pollen level in the air or the traffic intensity by glowing in different colours. But, you can just only choose one piece of information to cover. The information is distributed at no extra cost wirelessly over a pager network.

The opposite of the Orb must be the N-gage game consol from Nokia. A device packed with functionality including a phone, gaming, browser, calender, mp3 player and you name it. Projected sales until this spring was 6 million devices. Only 1.4 million have left the stores.

Please, we have had multiple devices before. Because different devices are performing tasks differently. I hope we start to realise that again. Or to be clear. Let's keep it simple stupid!