Ain’t tech grand!

…when it gets out of the way

In Evelyn Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust’, Tony Last’s fate is sealed when, to get away from the horrors at home, he decides to accompany the incompetent explorer, Dr Messinger on an expedition to search for a lost city in the Amazonian rainforest.

In one darkly comic scene Messinger attempts to trade with the local tribe by offering them some brightly coloured clockwork mice. When he sets the mice on the floor the tribesmen panic in front of the apparently possessed, magical beings and disappear into the jungle.

This feels not dissimilar to the attitude of some folk these days when confronted by the latest gizmo to hit the tech market. But there is a germ of truth in their reaction. Technology may as well be magic when it has the apparent ability to perform miracles. Being a second-half boomer is to be in the perfect position to bear witness to the delights of technological advancement. We can still reap the benefits from said gizmo’s abilities, while also, conveniently, being able actually to afford the odd one ourselves.

Especially, we can also still feel sheer astonishment of the apparently supernatural properties these things possess. Millennials have grown up with this stuff and treat these everyday miracles with an insouciance I can’t begin to feel. I have had “Bloody Hell!” moments several times in the last few years, but since the Millennium there have been three devices which have stood out for me as being, well, magical:

Nikon D100 Camera

I’ve had dozens of cameras over the years, from high end SLRs to tiny pocket film cameras that wouldn’t have disgraced James Bond’s dinner jacket, but the Nikon was a redefinition of what was possible when capturing images. I bought it for my business, when I had started to do some commissioned photography. It arrived at my unit on 22^nd August 2002. I unpacked it, charged the battery and took a few snaps, then went home with it. It was the first fully digital camera I had owned, and I wanted to show it off to Susie (partly it must be said, to justify its high cost to myself as well as her).

In our kitchen I raised it to my eye and with the eleventh exposure using the Nikon I took this picture.

I claim no photographic skill here, other than spotting the sun setting through Susie’s hair, but I can still remember the feeling that, for the first time ever a camera had reached inside my head and pulled out the picture I had wanted to take, rather than the slightly disappointing rough approximation all my previous cameras had managed. These days of course I would get onto Photoshop and lighten Susie’s face, but this is as it appeared on the back of the camera that day.

It kept performing this miracle too (Plenty of its results are on my www.gwimage.co.uk website btw plug, plug), but this was an unforgettable, and yes, magical, moment.

Samsung Frame TV

As with many things techy the rate of change seems to be accelerating, with new wonders appearing seemingly daily. Nevertheless, when our new telly arrived last year it was a moment when I remembered TVs of the past. The ridiculously small black and white boxes of the 60’s. The faux wooden drinks cabinets of the 70’s (they had doors, kiddies!). The huge, almost-cube-shaped silver plastic boxes at the end of the cathode-ray era.

Then this, a slender wall mounted wonder that, when switched off becomes a 55” picture, displaying art. It has freed up cubic yards of the room. But for me, the “bloody hell” moment came when it sank in that the only wire required for connection, power, everything, was a small, thin, strand that you can just see below the frame.

I mean it has to be magic doesn’t it?

Remarkable Tablet

This device arrived a couple of years ago and was a moment when mysterious aliens tapped into my brain and extracted the precise requirements I had for a digital notebook.

These were that it had to be impossibly slim and light. It had to be able to store my notes in multiple folders in the cloud. It had to have a long battery life and above all else it had to be indistinguishable from a paper notebook when writing.

Which describes the Remarkable to a tee.

For forty-five years I have used paper notebooks for work. I create a daily to-do list each morning and write all of my other notes on separate pages during the day. Nowadays there is the added complication that with several different fingers in separate pies, I need to be able to switch seamlessly from one category of work to another. Before this tablet I could manage two work streams, one at the front of the notebook and one working from the back! Currently I have four, plus my to do list, all of which are immediately available.

But there are two traits of this wonder that make it possibly the greatest gadget I’ve bought this Millennium.

The first is that it assists with my lifelong inability to concentrate. It does this by restricting my online access to my cloud documents only. I never disappear down the doom-scrolling rabbit-hole when I’m working on this device. Now I know it sounds like I’m describing one of the Remarkable’s possible weaknesses as a strength, but until you’ve spent up to an hour (an hour!) without once checking what’s happening online, or who that email that just came in was from (always Majestic Wine in my case) you can’t really appreciate what a big deal this is.

The second trait though is where this sliver of glass displays its true magical properties. When I write on it the feel is the same as if I was using a ballpoint on a piece of foolscap. To be clear it’s not nearly the same…it’s exactly the same. This means that the technology recedes into the background in a way that no other device I’ve owned has fully managed. I am experiencing the same physical feedback that I have always experienced when I’ve scribbled stuff for the last sixty-odd years. It’s jaw-dropping.

I can concentrate.

No, it’s not perfect for everything (I have a keyboard for it that I never use) but at the thing I need it for, it is.

All three of these three pieces of hardware share one trait that moves them from the merely technologically advanced, to the essential and that is their ability simply to enable the activity, but then fade out of the process for which they are designed. They are there to do a job and their only function is to complete that job.

One of the great irritations of modern technology is the wish of creators to try and be all things to all people:

“Oh yes you want a car to drive from A to B? This car can do that but look! It can also make you a cup of tea as well and it will helpfully sound a chime every time you get in to remind you to restock the teabag holder”

Each of these three is a specialist. It does its task extraordinarily well, but then disappears. It’s the ease of integration of modern technology that is the ultimate measure of its usefulness. That is why the phones we all carry don’t hit the heights of these three. My Samsung phone is now capable of taking pictures that are technically superior to those from my Nikon 20-plus years ago, but to raise a snap to the same level as the SLR requires a series of adjustments and menu accessing that just weren’t needed back then.

Tech firms frequently fall into the trap of failing to distinguish between a feature and a benefit. They shoehorn bucketfuls of features into tech simply because they can, without asking whether the vanishingly small number of users who might actually use the feature are worth appeasing, at the expense of all the other users who quite frankly just don’t need yet another sub-menu to negotiate when trying for example, to turn on their car’s cruise control.

These three haven’t fallen into the trap and in these distracted times that is true magic.