It’s January 2008, a good time to look back at 2007! What did catch my eye?

      

This is my list: OLPC’s XO, Apple iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle and HP’s Kitchen Kiosk (A826). I have some personal experience using each of them. Yes, this is my hand next to the Kindle, to give you a sense of size. I found most people have some pre-conceived idea about how big or small it must be. Much has been written about these since their introduction, my intent isn’t to give you yet another review. Instead, I want to share why I find them “interesting”: they all have one thing in common: they redefined our expectations.

XO has redefined what a “cheap” computer can do: a laptop/tablet personal computer with camera, excellent audio, WIFI, mesh network, brand new user interface (no overlapping windows, a thing it has in common with the other products in my list), full web access, for less than $200.

The iPod has redefined the notion of a computer on the go.

The Kindle has redefined where computing innovation might emerge (a book retailer designing computers, who would have imagined).

The A826 has redefined the photo kiosk to also encompass the home and illustrates a year of change for the “consumer photo” and the links between online services, retail photo and home print.

Each of these products redefine prior and probably well entrenched notion about laptops, phones and print. What a laptop gives you for the given price, what a smart phone is, which companies create computing products. How you get access to bookstores (on the go through a data phone network).

The iPhone isn’t really a phone, it’s what a computer we always carry with us should look like. The Wall Street journal reported in December that iPhone owners surf the Web about as much as the typical PC owner. May be the main contribution of the iPhone is to be a tipping point. Now I can seriously think about not carrying my laptop with me on some short business trips. It also gives new life to the notion of being always connected to the web (one of the key tenet of Print 2.0). I found this interesting analysis on the WSJ Blog: “on December 25, visits to the search-engine Google from iPhones spiked dramatically. The lesson isn’t just that the iPhone was a popular Christmas gift: It’s that mobile devices need to be built with surfing the Web in mind”.

It’s more than hardware. I think we are starting to see what sort of services and web interface work. Once you look at the web through an iPhone you get a few surprises: UTube videos look actually better on the iPhone screen and are more usable. Some online information is closer because there is never a “boot time” or much navigation (not surprisingly, it’s the information or service you go to more often). It is a fascinating example of the notion of “simple applications that just work”.

The XO demonstrated much can be reinvented in the “PC” category: displays, user interface, connectivity and communication (the social mesh of the XO is really cool) and that it does not take a hundred million dollars (or 5 years).

The biggest surprise about the Kindle is that it came from a brand (Amazon) we would not have associated with computer products just a couple years ago. A book retailer designing computers, who would have thought?

They have common technology innovations, at least directionally: All have new displays. Touch screen for the iPhone , sunlight readable and color backlit for the XO, eInk for the Kindle (OK, it’s hardly new, but it hasn’t been widely used yet). It also shows it is possible now to innovate in vertical markets without loosing economy of scale. It isn’t an accident that the XO display is 7”. It’s the size of most portable DVD players, yet it is unlike most LCDs, it’s a modified LCD.

And of course, they are all small enough to be moved around.

So you can browse the web with these devices, download books wherever you are. Can you print from these?

We are working on printing for the XO, you can print from iPhone with cloudprint.net . For Kindle, well, what would be the point…but you might decide to buy what you are reading, or a customized version of it.  Stay tuned . . .

The computing landscape is becoming a much richer landscape. Innovation is alive.

My friend Eric (who, like me emerged from a “blog winter”) wrote this interesting Predictions 2008. A nice complement to this post.

Do you agree with this view of the world?

Patrick