{"id":683,"date":"2004-11-04T11:30:59","date_gmt":"2004-11-04T15:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/ipaq\/"},"modified":"2004-11-04T11:30:59","modified_gmt":"2004-11-04T15:30:59","slug":"ipaq","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/ipaq\/","title":{"rendered":"The elegant uniPaq"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I have before me a device designed with the utmost brilliance.  I
\nhaven’t seen such a quietly pleasing design in a gadget-package in
\nrecent memory.  Some of you know that I was aiming to purchase at
\nleast a phone and a laptop this week, but I did not end up with the
\nDanger Sidekick I was angling for…<\/p>\n

The sidekick was an understood quantity – delightful design, with a number of
\ncharming flaws, and a few unfortunate barriers to improvement; a good,
\nand reasonable inexpensive, 1-year purchase to replace my ailing
\nphone.  A few troubles arose: 1) they no longer offer the ‘old’
\nsidekick in-store, in favor of the ‘new’ one (which is admittedly
\nsturdier and a better heft, but $100 more and with a less perfect
\nkeyboard), and 2) I fell in love, just in time, with something else.<\/p>\n

I discovered the first functional pda-phone<\/span> I’ve ever seen.  And I discovered it by chance, simply because its attachable thumb-keyboard is so brilliant.<\/span> 
\nAs I was filling out the paperwork for my sidekick, I was chatting with
\nthe rep about good mini-keyboards (or the lack thereof) and he showed
\nme the attachable keyboard for the iPaq <\/span>6315. 
\nIt was light, the width of the pda, looked breakable, but had smooth,
\nresponsive buttons that didn’t rattle or distress.  crazy<\/span>. 
\nIt was only then that I stopped to look at the awful pda-sized blob of
\nplascrete, no doubt like ever other such blob, and thought, ‘hmm, not
\nexecrable.’ <\/p>\n

As I looked at it again, however, i could see that it had been
\ndesigned with love.  I won’t be surprised if it turns out IDEO had
\ntheir hand in this one.  Its cross-sections are elegant, its
\nunderstated mechanisms for keeping the battery from coming out, for
\naligning plug-in modules to avoid wear and tear, for separating the
\nstatus lights for its three wireless networks within a square mm of
\nspace… the way it blends external buttons and covers (a headphone
\njack, a camera button [ugh!  yes, a camera; I got it despite that
\nsad fact], volume controls, a dedicated vocoder button, a smart-card
\nslot) into the slight rubberized outdent that serves as design, grip,
\nand shock guard.<\/p>\n

This kind of triple-use design shows up throughout the system, all the
\nmore remarkable for its being designed by different groups.  The
\nthumbpad that hooked me is by a partner design group; the nifty
\nelements of software integration, which float a great deal of
\ninformation up to the high-detail screens, were surely done by a
\ndifferent group than the team which laid out the no-wasted-space
\ncase.  <\/p>\n

Miam, as someone I know would say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have before me a device designed with the utmost brilliance.  I haven’t seen such a quietly pleasing design in a gadget-package in recent memory.  Some of you know that I was aiming to purchase at least a phone and a laptop this week, but I did not end up with the Danger Sidekick I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-683","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7iVvB-b1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}