Tatiana, one of my student employees, sent me a link to a YouTube video a few weeks ago. “You have to see this,” she messaged.
I was as blown away as she was.
It it (if you’re too lazy to follow the link) a conceptual video of the features the iPhone 5 might have. In brief: as thin as a playing card. Able to display a virtual keyboard (which can be manipulated and enlarged) on the desktop below the phone. Able to display 3-D graphics.
This is delicious.
Now, I realize this is all pie-in-the-sky. It’s a wish list. Of course it is! The technology isn’t there yet.
But you know what? It will be. And sooner than you think.
As I’ve said before, I am no friend of Apple. I was one of their biggest fans, back in the 1980s and 1990s. Then they became provincial and unfriendly, and I realized that the PC world – broad and dull as it was – was the world of the future.
Well, here we are in 2012, and what do you know? The iPhone and the iPad are way ahead of the pack.
Believe me, I know. I bought a Kobo Literati reader about a year ago. It was slow, unhappy, pathetic. Then a B&N Nook (reconditioned): nicer, but unable to do a lot of stuff.
Then the office gifted me an iPad, and it was as if someone turned on the light in a very dark room.
The iPhone 5 video is laden with comments about how ridiculous it is: “maybe in 2050,” one of them snarks.
Listen, junior: a lifetime ago – in 1995 – we were just getting the Internet in our offices. We didn’t know quite what it would do, but we were very excited. I remember one of my officemates telling me that she’d actually logged into the Aer Lingus website! I ran over to see. And it was –
A picture of an airplane. And nothing more.
This is it? we said. This is what the Internet is all about?
Well, of course it wasn’t. Seventeen years later, we’re streaming movies and TV directly to our mobile devices and our televisions. We’re shopping online. We’re doing everything online.
And these stupid commentators think that it will take another forty years to achieve a few more advances?
I don’t think so.
We must be good at this evolution stuff. We do it so fast.
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