Sierra Kilo

…convergence devices…I have a Canon SD850 camera, a T-Mobile Wing Windows Mobile phone, a GameBoy Micro portable game system, and an iPod media player. They all do their job very nicely, yet still have some drawbacks. If they were all combined into a single device, however, the drawbacks could be overcome by features of one of the other devices.

For example, the camera, phone, and GBM have removable batteries, but the iPod doesn’t. The camera even has a compact battery charger for charging the spare while the other is in use. The phone only has a 2 megapixel camera, while the camera is 8 megapixel. The phone only has like 64MB of storage (2GB more with micro SD), but the iPod has 60GB. The phone can multitask applications and is also very easy to develop new applications for, while the others are single-task devices. The iPod has a nice, clear display and easy-to-navigate media library, while the phone’s media library is often difficult to navigate. The GBM has controls that make it easy to play games, but the iPod and the phone’s controls limit the control of games.

So, if you put them all together, you would have a multitasking operating system with an easy-to-navigate interface and controls that work well with the interface, applications, and games. You’d also have a high-resolution camera and plenty of storage space to store application data, games, and media (photos, music, videos). You would also have a removable battery with a compact charger that makes it easy to charge spares. All of the devices are relatively the same size, but several of the components such as the display, controls, and battery mechanism could be shared. So I ask, how difficult would a device like this be to create? I don’t think it would be that difficult at all. You won’t get Canon, HTC, Nintendo, and Apple working together, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to use the same parts and create a device to juggle all of these tasks just as well as the single devices. Don’t give me any grief about battery life or device size because there are plenty of ways to help in those areas. So, again, where is my convergence device?

One of my favorite games is now available on the Mac (a freeware port, anyway). UFO: Alien Invasion is based on the game X-COM (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown/UFO Defense), which is the first game that drove my need to upgrade a PC. When X-COM came out, I had a 386 with 1MB of RAM. A friend down the street just got a 486 and could play X-COM with 4MB of RAM! Unfortunately for me, it wouldn’t run on 1MB, so we spent a small fortune to buy 4 1MB chips. I had one of the old 256k chips attached to my keychain for about 10 years and still have it around today.

Anyway, the game is very simple to play. It is turn-based with action points. It gets more complex when you get into base building, weapons research, and move into global invasion. The game difficulty scaled very nicely depending on your research and funding level. It mixed action and strategy very well.

Being turn-based, it may be the perfect game for short play sessions. I know there’s a port for Windows Mobile and the original designer (Julian Gallop) also developed Rebelstar for the GameBoy Advance, which I have on a GBA flash cart alongside other GBA classics like Zelda: Minish Cap and A Link To The Past, Metroid Fusion, and a slew of classic NES games. If only I could combine my GBA Micro, my iPod, and my Windows Mobile phone…I would have the perfect convergence device! I should really use by GBA Micro more. I love that thing.