Doubting Thomas Blog

I love that there are so many tech gadgets available now. When I was a kid, I was the 2nd person in my Area Code to buy his own Commodore VIC-20. (No, I have no way of proving I was the 2nd…. But I do know that I wasn’t the first, because my friend Craig bought his first.) I never would have dreamed that things like the iPad would ever be created, much less at a price that we commoners could afford.

I am not shopping for cool tech gadgets myself, but I like to know about them. So, I look at their specs, their features, prices, and I even read background articles about how the designs were developed, how they affect (or are affected by) other tech gadgets that are available, etc. With all that info, it is easy to form an opinion, and it is easy to picture how I might use the gadget. But it is not any easier to choose one gadget out of the available set of gadgets.

If I had to actually make a decision and pick one of the new gadgets that has come out in the past month, I don’t know which I would choose. First of all, I don’t think I actually need anything. It’s all a matter of want, which I think most commoners would agree is also the case with them. What can’t we do without gadgets? I probably have more gadgets than I can fully utilize as it is, but please don’t ask me to be circumspect about my consumerism, I don’t know if I have enough headache pills to handle that.

One of my best friends bought a Kindle, and when he showed it to me, I was amazed. It is very good at what it does. And it does some things that aren’t necessarily advertised, which my friend was quick to show me. Cool. If I were a person who does a lot of reading (oh, I miss grad school), I would need a Kindle.

And then along came the iPad, which also lets you do a lot of reading, but it does a lot more than the Kindle, too. And a lot of the things that the iPad does are things that I like to do: look at photos, read web sites, listen to music, find stuff on a map, etc. Cool. If I were a person who didn’t already have a laptop computer, I would need an iPad.

But then I read in the tech news web sites that Google is going to try to get in on this game too. Google published some pictures of what a portable flat computer thingy might look like if it were running the Chrome web browser (which Google gives away for free). Google is also putting out operating systems for mobile phones and computers now, so the only cost involved in using their product is the hardware, which is mainly produced by other people.

You may know that I prefer Apple computers over Windows computers, but I do use Windows (I’m writing this blog entry on an old Windows XP desktop), and I use Linux a lot, too (specifically, ubuntu). My newest computer, a netbook I use for meeting with clients on-site, runs both Windows 7 and the netbook remix of Ubuntu, and I like both of those systems about the same. So, at least in terms of operating systems, I don’t have to choose one–I use whatever is handy at the moment, and whatever best suits the activity or project that I’m working on.

And that’s what guides my decision-making process for the mobile gadgets I started this post with. I have a mobile phone that is not a smart phone. Would I like a phone running Android? Sure, you bet. Would I like an iPhone? No doubt. But neither of those mobile gadgets is better suited to accomplish what my current phone does for me. And while they are cool, I won’t be buying a Kindle, an iPad, or a Chrome-something, because, as far as the developers have brought them so far, they don’t suit me any better than the gadgets I already have.