The Circle of Tech

The Circle of Tech

THE GADGETS I NOW GET TO PLAY WITH EVERY DAY ARE MY REWARD FOR WAITING PATIENTLY WHEN I NEVER GOT THE GIFTS I WANTED!

JAMSHED AVARI, Assistant Editor – Technical

The start of a new year is often a good time to make a wishlist. At the turn of a new decade, I find myself wishing for pretty much the same kind of thing from technology products as I used to ten years ago: they should be unobtrusive and easy to use, they should make my life richer, they should keep me productive and/or entertained, and they should expand my own capabilities while opening me up to new things and new ways of doing them that I might never have imagined possible.

I used to go green with envy every time I saw anyone whip out a Palm, especially when I knew they had just received them as gifts and didn't use them for anything other than storing phone numbers. I really, really wanted a Palm, and I would have used every possible function, loaded it with software and keep it in my pocket at all times! I even tried to buy one secondhand, but never did end up owning one.  Today, my smartphone is always with me. I store my phone numbers and do a million little things that make me happy—with a few casual games thrown in for good measure. It’s still exactly what I want; all my personal information organized and accessible, but just in a different type of device.

A decade is A short time, but the pace technology develops at makes it seem like forever.

Ten years ago cellphones were large and exotic, borrowed from parents to show off, or smuggled into college by the tragically hip. People were just getting used to the idea of being disturbed by a ringtone, and I saw my first demonstration of WAP on a Nokia 7110. That enormous, bulging green phone with the rolling wheel and supercool sliding cover was one of the most brilliant things I’d ever seen. Only a little while later, I was fascinated by another first: the giant Nokia 5510 with its outlandish QWERTY keyboard and—gasp—64 MB of fixed onboard memory for storing MP3 music.  I wanted them for different reasons and could never have justified owning both. At the time, you were lucky if your devices were good at one thing each. Today, as evolution would have it, the same Palm-displacing smartphone takes care of my needs for mobile Web surfing and music. I didn't have a phone to call my own till a quarter of the decade had passed, and even then it was just a basic call-and-text brick, handed down by an uncle.

If there was anything that made me go easy on the music phone demands around Y2K, it was the emergence of the MP3 player. Yup, I’m referring to the 32 and 64 MB Diamond Rios and Creative Nomads of yesteryear; designed to look like walkmen or CD players because people hadn’t yet thought that digital music players should look any different. This was my only partially-fulfilled gadget dream—I got an MP3-capable CD player for my birthday in 2002.

It's often said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. A decade is a relatively short span of time in our lives, but the incredible pace that technology develops at makes it seem like forever. Maybe the good part is that people who wish for gadgets like I used to can now find them cheaper and easier to get hold of. But the cycle goes on, and today's teenagers have a different set of potentially out-of-reach things like high-res phone cameras and GPS devices to look forward to owning whenever they can.