A couple weeks ago I made the leap from iPhone to the latest Android phone to be released in the US, the HTC Hero on Sprint. I am a pretty big Mac guy so this was a big jump for me, but looking at the iPhone in 2009 compared to the strides achieved by the Android phones using their open type OS, the iPhone is starting to look like it’s starting to grow a little gray hair. Apple is the king of “being pretty” but with the Android OS you can change every little bit of the way your phone looks and acts. you can add widgets, change the way screens run or are structured, clocks and widgets are animated and if I say so myself, are pretty damn cool.
Because the Android system is so customizable I instantly thought about my new phone when I read the description of the TED videocast of Neil Gershenfeld on his ‘Fab Labs.’
Gershenfeld’s goal is to create a place where people can build exactly what they need with both digital and analog tools. The examples he presented like using lego’s in playing music extremely unique approaches to the materials and technology that is used today. Now that we’ve embraced technologies and advanced to netbooks, wifi, texting, etc, it’s now time to craft it all to make it exactly what WE WANT, HOW WE WANT IT. Society is very needy like that. Smaller chips, smaller computers, personalized UI, creating and tailoring technology to “compute to fabricate.”
What is interesting about these ‘Fab Labs’ is that they allow more exploration, instead of taking what we’ve got, waiting for Apple, Microsoft, Motorola, Adobe etc to create our new technologies for us, it’s a great challenge to let people explore and custom build technologies. Just like the Android phones the power of the technology is being put in the owners hands which can only lead to more points of view, more uses and more ideas.
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October 19, 2009 at 2:37 PM
Unless Droid sucks, it’s my next phone. The irony, of course, is that I’ll have no time to do much in the way of hacking apps, etc. But I like the principle of the thing.