It says a lot about what people expect from Google Glass that the term “glasshole” has already passed into blogospheric jargon less than a month after the developer model reached the public. Not surprising; in a world where the default position of every transit commuter has become “head down over the smartphone” in a span of less than a decade, you have to think that the prospect of heads-up distraction will be an issue sooner than later. I’m sure it will lead to the continuing Aspergering of the Valley, and I say that as somebody with some pretty Asperger-ish tendencies myself, but the extent to which people around here tend toward truly oblivious of the world around them is reaching severely annoying proportions.
Still, though, the technology press seems to need some new thing. Phone? Old hat. Tablet? Already passé. We need a watch, or glasses, or some sort of wearable thing, because a three-year-old market is played out. Never mind that we have yet to see a tablet other than the iPad make a serious impact – the Kindle Fire is the closest thing, and it only succeeded by out-Apple-ing Apple. There may or may not be new Nexus tablets out of Google I/O this week – significant, since the Nexus 7 is the only general-purpose Android tablet worth criticizing – but they’re probably a couple of months from shipping anyway.
And in the meantime, it looks like HTC is about to take a bath on its “Facebook phone.” It’s not *really* a Facebook phone so much as a cheap stock Android phone with “Facebook Home” pre-installed – but when most any Android phone can download the Facebook Home client, it makes little sense to stake anything on a bespoke device. Which started at $99 on AT&T (with a two-year contract, natch) and then suddenly dropped to 99 cents within a month. That is the definition of Bad Arithmetic. There’s still room to innovate on the phone, but people aren’t really sure how – HTC did it with the sweetest physical hardware of the last two years, Samsung seems determined to do it with cramming every imaginable bell and whistle into a plastic case and to hell with whether any of them work outside the ads, Motorola…hasn’t done anything since being consumed by Google, and Sony appears to be going with…waterproofing. I guess if you really can’t get out of the shower to Snapchat, Sony has your back.
And oh yes, Samsung is now honking the horn for the “5G” they tested. The original sin of T-Mobile in branding fast HSPA+ as “4G” is now complete: “5G” means absolutely nothing at this point, but by being first to announce, Samsung gets a jump the way Sprint tried to with WiMax as “4G.” Proof, if any more were required, that at this point marketing trumps actual technology. People can say all they want about Apple being all hype, but the fact remains that for the last fifteen years or so, when Apple succeeds it’s because they’ve done something right where people can understand and use it. And that’s where the next new thing will emerge: when somebody can do an iPhone-esque job of producing something new that makes people see they need it without having to be told they need it.