Since reading the book The Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer many years ago, I’ve been interested in the much overlooked prospect of audial user interfacing and its application to mobile computing. The display has always been the most challenging element in mobile computing devices, responsible for most of the weight of devices, most of the hardware cost, most of their power consumption, as well as most of their processing overhead. We’ve had high performance digital audio capability for quite a while and it’s long been relatively cheap in cost, size, power, and processing overhead. With an effective audio information space — a digital soundscape instead of a ‘desktop’ — it’s long been possible to put comprehensive personal computing capability into solid-state form factors like the original MP3 players. But the field — a wide open field for potential innovation — has just never been explored.

I’ve never quite ‘gotten’ the smartphone. To me it’s like a Swiss Army Knife — it does a lot of things and none of them particularly well. It makes sense to me in the context of a pocket PAD. A pocket computer and communications hub where text messaging is the basic communications mode. But the displays don’t really work in direct sunlight and the notion of holding a touch screen to your face is, when you think about it, a bit gross… Smartphones are hampered by the notion of a ‘phone’. Why do we still even call them that? Telephony is now a minor application of a vastly larger communications system. When I was younger I anticipated the mobile phone would evolve into something more specialised, sleek, convenient, and jewelry-like. A form factor like the Samsung Slim Stick Bluetooth handset or the more pen-like Elecom LBT Pen. Something completely voice-driven, global, and which didn’t make you look like an ass using it. But then, I didn’t think we’d still be talking about ‘phone companies’ in the 21st century either…