It would feel a lot like going outside without trousers and underpants if you were to beam yourself back to the start of the personal computing “revolution” which I hail from.
Leaving the house without your mobile phone, you feel vulnerable and a little a bit obviously “without phone”. Powerful, portable and highly connected, phones are the ultimate in personal computing, but there’s a fleet of other things, your laptop, desktop, tablet, headphones, and other widgets, which build out to be your personal eco-system of entertainment, work and so-called social media.
In the beginning, there was very little, which resembles what you see today. A somewhat wobbly TV with a few channels, a wire connecting it to a small fiddly plastic square-like computer and a tape recorder equally wired. Nothing came pre-installed; there were no auto-updates and certainly no internet to look things up.
Crawling out of the primaeval soup of technology involved writing your own programs or copying them line by line from a magazine you purchased down the very analogue newsagent.
It’s incredible to imagine if you weren’t there and equally incredible to have lived through the sparkling journey to where we find ourselves today. You are literally never more than 6 feet away from some form of CPU.
Technology has provided me with an almost endless supply of things to look forward to, both from a software perspective and from what seems like a habitual extrusion of new models of phones, laptops or desktops from those cheeky technology companies which sit at the top of the stock markets.
You could say that I have entered a state where I am simply never happy with what I’ve got when it comes to technology. Just writing that makes me shiver a little in my seat. Has it really got to this?
In some cases, I suppose it has, but in others, there are mainstays of technology which continue to sit on my desk like silver squares of contentment. Let’s zip through what they are; my laptop(s); pretty happy with the screen and processing power of my XPS 17 and M1 Mac Book Pro. I’m never going to jack up my mental acuity to the point where I find my workflow constricted by their ability to keep up with me.
Likewise, my M1 iPad has done some good service now, and it’s not starting to look worn or jaded by the experience.
My phone, there, my friend, we have technology which goes out of date quicker than an avocado. Smaller, thinner, longer lasting, better cameras, more this or less of that, basically. It’s gonna need to be changed bi-annually.
Now, portable gaming machines. I purposefully didn’t title this post a review because I know half of you don’t care about gaming, and the other half care very little about the whole portability of the exercise. I will, in due course, drop a review on my blog.
There’s been a handful (see how I did that) of good gaming machines in the last 15 or so years I’ve been interested in them. Gameboys blew the lid of the whole thing and kept a pretty tight grip on the space; arguably, the Switch carried on this good work, but to be honest, I’m not really feeling it. The PlayStation Portable was perhaps the only non-Nintendo device to hold water, but it leaked away pretty quickly.
The SteamDeck, well, hello there. This could be one more device to add to the mainstay of things which doesn’t need replacing. Whilst gaming on the iPhone or Android is good, it’s not the level of good of Steam Deck (aka The Deck). Hardware is only as good as the supporting software, iPhone works because of the AppStore, not despite it. And the Steam Deck works because it’s basically all your Windows games catalogue in a portable format.
I’ll not bore you with the details here; apart from a smattering, this is very literally a Linux computer (which you can use as a fully-fledged computer by plugging in a monitor). It’s emulating windows and allows you access to pretty much any game you’ve bought to play on your PC (*) not all, but you know, a lot of them.
This bit of kit is gushingly amazing, and it’s reimagined what’s possible to enjoy on a bus, train, sitting on your sofa or just mooching around in your home office in-between meetings (I don’t use it then, obviously!).
A pleasing form factor, a nice punchy display and a lovely controller layout. Battery life is, as you’d expect, a challenge in something which doesn’t want to weigh as much as a melon you might find on the shelves of a tropical island store.
I’ll draw a line under this for now, as I promised not to do a full review of it, but getting back to where I started, this is a startling advancement from where home computing began and
a next-level entrant in interactive entertainment on the move. That is before AR glasses rock up. We know they’re only 12 to 24 months away from being worthwhile and affordable (in so much as any technology is affordable).
Thank you for joining me on this little technology journey; it’s been a pleasure to have you here. Until the next one of these outputs, which I’m trying to schedule for a week today, stay safe.