As some of you may have heard the new Transformer movie is less than a year away and already the buzz is building the blogosphere. So for those who came in late - trusty old Wikipedia will give you a primer on the Optimus Prime and Cybertron - so I am going to save my breath for there is a lot of ground to cover here.

 

Essentially, the Transformers are the zenith of the geek fantasy. The ultimate incarnation of the uber-gadget. The epitome of

multifunctional capability. The all-in-one super tool. The I could throw out a few dozen more metaphors, but the idea here is that a core and somewhat primal geek need/want/obsession for cool shiny things (or more accurately called CSOs - cool shiny objects) are at the heart of innovation - they are the central force that drives the technology industry. This is a whole new emerging area of behavioral economics and I will deal with this in a subsequent post. And most device makers don't seem to get this.

 

For now I will keep this simple. Transformers like Bumblebee (see really cool video here) are convergence devices. With one major distinction - they are full-functionality no compromise convergence devices. The Bumblebee for example is a car *and* a robot. It is not a half-assed car-robot. At any given point in time, it is either a robot *or* it is a car. It is not a car-bot. It is not a robo-car. This, dear reader, is a critical point to make note of.

 

To illustrate, my Samsung i730 is also a convergence device, but it is no Bumblebee. It is a PDA that thinks its a phone. Its a phone that does not feel responsible enough to bring missed calls to attention. It tries to be a note-taking "pocket-PC" but fails misserably in its attempt. I even tried using Tengo- which BTW is amazing and helps a lot - but still cannot pull the i730 across the twin chasms of compromise and inelegance.

 

Now, on the other hand, we have the iPod. Which is very very good, but is no convergence device. It does not even make the pretense. It sets modest expectations and overdelivers. The i730 is an aspiring super-device but falls short. But I make the case that the i730 is disruptive or hints towards something disruptive (more on this in later posts). But before this disruptive technology hits mainstream, device makers and designers have a lot to learn from the no-compromise life of Optimus Prime.  If the boys at Samsung and their ilk of convergence device makers learn from the Transformers heres what we would have:

 

We would have 10 megapixel camera phones with retractable 20x zooms that carry 500GB of flash memory and pack the wallop of a pentium 4. And they would have a big keyboard that folds into the size of my thumbnail. Jokes aside, the key design principle would be that it would do one thing at a time. It would be one thing at a time. It would become other things at other times. It would mean taking a picture with the Cam-phone-pc-pmp in the "camera" mode in which this thing will need to look like a camera, walk like a camera and talk like a camera. Duh! But, once the picture is taken it will retract its 10 inch zoom, fold into half its size and become a scaled down laptop. Then, once the picture is emailed, it will then fold into itself into half its size again, become a phone the size of a snickers bar, sit quitely and pretend it knows nothing about taking pictures. That my friends will make me throw out my ipod. My Canon G5, my i730 and my Dell along with it. I know I would. I know Homer would. I know all my friends would. And that is a big market. Hope the Zune guys are listening.

 

[To learn more about Zune go here and here. To learn more about the iPod... well if you don't know about the iPod this blog post is probably a complete waste of your time]