Cursing Technology

For years now there has been a certain principle that drives technology forward. It’s not a rationale, cohesive or tangible standard, but more to do with emotion and passion. This is called the WOW Factor and it describes the emotional state that you enter when you see a new category of technology that completely and totally knocks your socks off. The first time you saw a ultra portable super slim notebook, the initial euphoria of using a digital camera for the first time, the pure bliss of wire free browsing on your Wi-Fi computer, the initial shock of seeing the clarity of a High Definition Plasma display, the pure sensory experience of hearing a perfectly tuned 5.1 Home theatre – that Ladies and Gentlemen is called the Wow Factor; and sadly it may be time for us to bid goodbye to this incredible experience.Face it; when was the last time you truly felt like the earth had moved when you had either heard or seen something new in the consumer technology arena. Innovations and inventions in this field have been few and far between for quite sometime now. Things have moved to a evolutionary phase and it’s always add on features that come to mind. The iPod is in its fifth generation and still looks pretty much the same, Plasma Displays have entered their eighth generation and still suffer from burn in, CD’s have been around forever and still get scratched, mobile phones still crash, cameras still generate red eyes, notebook batteries are exploding all over the world and it will take about 3 wrong key presses to bring your computer to a grinding halt.Just about the biggest thing that we have all been waiting for in the last 3 years have been High Definition Displays. While it is has been slow to come, today most companies have delivered some cutting edge products. They are rock solid, crystal clear, bigger than ever (140 inch is in the works), have great color depth and amazing resolution. But what now? These display are already as clear as the human eye can perceive. Going any clearer or increasing the resolution anymore will be a zero sum game with very few benefits. They also can’t make them bigger as even the 110 inchers weigh about 400 pounds and need 8 people to carry them. The fact that your house doors and maybe a few walls will have to be torn down to carry the TV in - may be another damper.Consider the other Holy Grail of Technology. We all want it lighter, smaller, thinner and sleeker. Today we have hybrid camcorders so small that they barely fit in our hands, mp3 players the size of our fingernail, notebooks so slim that they look like they may snap into two and phones that are pure featherweights.While these micro machines are radical devices - the small ergonomics and form factor may have hit the law of diminishing returns. Have these products become so diminutive that they are now effectively unusable? Our fingers are already too large and clumsy to press the buttons on our gadgets, our eyes can hardly comprehend their tiny screens and most of us cannot grip or control such small gadgets properly. It’s just not possible for them to make them any thinner or smaller without sacrificing usability completely.Technology will still continue to enthral us - but in tiny surges. It may well be time for us to embrace the fact that from here on technology will only move forward in small incremental steps. It’s lights out for WOW technology and the sooner we all realize it - the lesser the chances of being disappointed.Having said all this let me also add that consumer level technology has always defied standard norms. The fall of future innovations has been predicted many a time and yet every year the gadgets and gizmos around us continue to mesmerize us in every way.