PODOLATRY

Dick Pountain/18 September 2005/10:21/Idealog 134

I need to confess. I have lusted after an iPod. There, it's said, and I feel gratifying flushes of shame on at least three separate counts: firstly because I've always believed myself immune to Steve Jobs' brand of hi-tech idolatry; secondly because, as a refugee from TabloidCelebWorldUK, I don't usually do public confessions; and thirdly because talk of such slinky, man-jewellery music boxes has no place in a business computing magazine like PC Pro. It was the new Nano that finally broke me down. When my stepson Jack first showed me his original white iPod I could admire its design, the neat dial, even handle the thing without any twinge of wanting one. Those coloured alloy ones just looked to me like something you might buy in Paperchase to pack Christmas presents in. And in any case, I already own a thumb-sized USB MP3 player that holds as much music as I need, sounds fine, and uses a single replaceable AAA battery instead of a stupid recharger. But then I saw *that* picture of the Nano, looking like some marble artefact in a museum display case. Simply beautiful.

This appalling realization made me wonder about a lot of other stuff, like whether the Bauhaus got it all wrong, whether a rational approach to technology is ever possible, and whether Steve Jobs is the Antichrist. I peered into my desk drawer repository that holds the carcasses of no less than five PalmOS PDAs - original Pilot, 5000, Professional, M100, Clie SL10 - and wondered for the first time whether I really had only been seeking extra functionality each time I upgraded, or was I already addicted? I concluded in the negative: those clunky grey lumps just weren't pretty enough to be truly addictive (and that may prove to be PalmOne's downfall, of which more below). No, the aestheticisation of consumer electronics didn't start with PDAs, but with the Macintosh, when Jobs had the inspired idea of hiring a real industrial designer who came up with the fruit-gum-coloured iMacs. And, as with the atom bomb, once that principle was understood it had to proliferate because to be without the 'Want it!' factor became commercial suicide. Walking down Tottenham Court Road nowadays is much like walking down Bond Street: the windows are filled with glittering, jewel-like gew-gaws, but they're mobile phones, digital cameras and (to a diminishing extent) PDAs rather than hats, belts and shoes. 

Now I could run off into all kinds of dodgy theorising at this point, about the feminisation of society, commodity fetishism, Thorstein Veblen and conspicuous consumption, but I'll restrain myself. The main point is that this phenomenon represents an odd sort of growing-up for the IT business, a passage from the realm of business tool/scientific instrument to fully-fledged consumer product (and it's mostly the Internet that achieved it, by putting computers into so many homes). However this is 'growing up' in a marketing sense only - in a technical sense it may (though doesn't inevitably) mean stasis or even regression. Computers and PDAs work by digitally representing some aspect of the real world within themselves and you peek into this virtual world through their display screen, so what the outside of the box looks like is entirely irrelevant to what happens inside. Except, that is, for those few rare occasions like the first mouse, the colour LCD or the iPod's dial, where an external novelty directly reflects a radical improvement of the user interface.

The sexy black-anodised, razor-thin, clamshell cases of modern mobile phones conceal exactly the same atrocious user interface as on your bog-standard plastic item. That means that PalmWhateverItsCalledThisWeek's Treo 650 should have been able to capitalise on the excellence of the PalmOS interface to conquer the smartphone market. But it hasn't, and in fact the firm has now blown it to the extent of selling its OS to a Japanese company and talking about putting Windows Mobile onto future Treos. PalmOS certainly has its flaws. It lacks a proper multitasking kernel, essential both for telephony and glitch-free music playing, and despite flirting with both Symbian and Linux, PalmEtc never fixed this. Also HotSync is inferior to the latest versions of Microsoft's ActiveSync. Even so PalmOS is several hundred clicks easier to use than Windows Mobile, let alone a conventional phone OS. 

But in the cosmetic department the Treo just doesn't cut it. It's too big, and there's something faintly retro about it that reminds me of a Wurlitzer jukebox, which shouldn't matter but does once you've been seduced into podolatry. The other day I was in the duty-free at Stansted airport looking through the boys' toys and the gadget that caught my attention wasn't the Treo. Neither was it Palm's Lifedrive, a dull looking slab that unfortunately launched just at the moment everybody's talking about solid-state memory - as in the Nano - finally being fit to displace the hard disk. (Admittedly that battle has been raging as long as I've been in this business, and hard drives have always crept ahead again, so far.) No, I fancied something called the i-mate Jam smartphone. Small, simple, with a lovely little screen and looking a bit like, well, an iPod. Now I've been using and evangelising Palms from the very beginning, so once I've started thinking like that the firm is *really* in trouble...