Just got an IPhone. And quickly realized that it is not in fact a phone. It is a computer that occasionally makes phone calls.
Best thing so far: Maps, and that clever little blue ball that tells you where you are. My phone, you see, is a GPS unit. With a few clicks, I can put in a destination and determine the best route to get there.
Here’s the brilliant part: I can, by pressing a bus logo, find out when the next bus is coming, where to catch it and how long the trip will take. This puts transit in a competitive position with all other forms of transportation. This tells me what I need to know, when I need to know it, wherever I am.
This is spectacularly wonderful.
I will, henceforth, try not to be so geeky. And will turn over the rest of this post to Andrew Blum, New York writer, who went through similar transports with his phone but came up with a something far more insightful, as he wrote in this piece for Wired UK:
The bandwidth of urban experience has increased. The ancient ways are still there: the way a place looks, the neighbours we wave at and the hands we shake. But now, there is an electronic conversation overlaid on top of all
that: tweets and status updates, neighbourhood online message boards, detailed mobile electronic maps, and nascent applications that broadcast your location to your friends. This is far more interesting than what we were promised a decade ago: the proverbial coupon blinking on your mobile as you walk past Starbucks. (I have yet to experience this.)
Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, calls this phenomenon “blended urban reality”. It is neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions. And it goes way beyond maps provided by satnavs. The new iPhone, for example, with its GPS and compass, tells you not only where you are but which way you’re facing, thereby taking us a step closer to a real-time overlay of information.
But here’s the fascinating thing: Townsend sees it as no accident that this is happening concurrently with the rise of megacities. “It makes them manageable,” he says. “Cities may be much bigger, but the social graph is the same size.”
More here.
These devices also provide entertainment, and with augmented reality give a game like feeling to surroundings. Not only will this make urban centres more appealing, it should also reduce driving. If the experience with the device becomes engrossing enough, people won’t be able to drive and have the experience at the same time. Eventually I’m predicting a huge uptick in transit and automated transportation options. The virtual world mixed with the real world will be far too interesting to waste it with driving a vehicle.