Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog

The (ir)relevance of handheld hardware?

I flew my family across country last week to visit the mountains of western North Carolina – the High Hampton Inn in Cashiers, NC to be specific. The flight took us from Seattle to Atlanta and consisted of my wife and I delicately managing the unpredictable temperaments of our three children (4, 2, and 1) for about five hours. Not to say that they aren’t angels, but hey – we all know the reality of keeping a child stationary for extended periods…

Long story short, and after a relatively good flight, we packed up everything to leave and I accidentally left my iPod on the airplane (flight 969 seat 19E if you happen to find it). Now, iPods are not cheap and I am still irritated by my negligence, however, I was more surprised by my initial reaction…

When I first realized that it was missing (and realized where I had left it) I was instinctively more concerned about the content on it and not the hardware itself.  To be more specific, my first fear was that I had left some type of personal information on the machine (unlikely, but a reactive concern right?)…This obviously was not the case, so my next concern was how to replace the hundreds of songs and podcasts that I had compiled over the months. I was also concerned about how I would get iTunes to replace ‘lost’ material that I had purchased (not likely). Of course, I quickly realized that everything was backed up both on my PC and on a NAS device – phew. No worries.

 So after running through content scenarios,  I finally got a small knot in my stomach about the device itself ($399 down the drain). It had been in the pocket of the seat in front of me along with a bag of pacifiers for our 1 year old. For some reason I remembered the pacifiers when we left…survival mode perhaps?

At any rate, and not to get too deep on this, but the experience left me pondering why I had mentally prioritized my content over the device.   I suppose with the multitiude of gadgets that we deal with on a daily basis (laptops, PC’s, mobile phones, pda’s, ipods, etc) the hardware itself is becoming less and less significant as information access becomes more and more ubiquitous – its all contained in an always on, always accessible cloud, right? Just give me something to carry a portion of it around on while I go between access points…This, of course, is when we are at our most vulnerable. The device contains a ton of personal material without an easy way to erase it, protect it, or otherwise hide it, should the device get lost.  The device then becomes very secondary to the information it contains. I know, for instance, that this is a huge concern for mobile payment technologies. To side bar a bit, DoCoMo – Japan’s leading wireless provider – had enabled virtual cash on their iMode phones. The only problem was that the cash could not be replaced if the device was lost. Like gambling, users could only put in what they could afford to lose (hoping this has been fixed now)! Likewise, as near field communication matures, we will see mobile technology blend further with payment technologies. It will not be uncommon to have credit cards embedded into your mobile device. Information protection and  identity management will be crucial for success!

But in my case, I simply lost an audio player - an expensive lesson in ‘paying closer attention.’ If you find it and care to let me know, I would appreciate it. If not, the Pressure Boys , Guadalcanal Diary, and Drivin’ and Cryin’ are good suggestions to start…