Form Factors

As a game developer, what shape technology takes is of a huge concern to me, and I spend a lot of time with my other techie buddies accurately predicting what kind of technology people will be using in the future. I see three main media consumption platforms prevailing in the near future:

1. The box on top of the TV: OUYA, Steambox, etc.
2. The 11 inch laptop: the netbooks/ultrabooks ranging from 10 to 13 (with the median being 11 inches) with no optical drives.
3. The Phablet.

The biggest threat to the longevity of an individual platform is developers access to that platform. In today's world that is a question of the platform being "open source" or "proprietary" (the former giving the developer more access.) A few years ago I would not have given the box-on-TV good odds for long term survival (though Microsoft did do a good job of reaching out to indy developers on the X-Box for a while.) However the OUYA came along really driving Android to the TV, and now Valve is introducing both the Steam OS and the Steam Box not only as open, but being very closely related to the most popular form of Linux (Ubuntu.)

Contrast this to Nintendo's behavior where they actively chase off indy developers and each new box-on-TV is just an excuse to resell nearly exactly the same games over and over again (Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros, tons and tons of side-view-jumping garbage no matter how innovative the controller or 3D the graphics.) Nintendo's mentality is so closed that they don't even let people watch DVDs on the Wii, even though it's a DVD player - that mentality would have eventually killed off the box-on-TV form factor, and Google TV wasn't saving it. However OUYA and now Steam Box are.

Laptops used to cost $1,000 and have lots of moving parts that broke easily. Then the Netbook came along and changed all that. Then the Tablet came along and took over the low-end-device market. But Netbooks didn't die off - now most laptops are cheaper, have less moving parts (no floppy or DVD drives), have longer battery life, and have smaller screens. The $200 Chrome books have permanently carved this niche into the market, and there are lots of Linux and Windows computers that still follow this form factor.

WHY here is important: the reason WHY you have 11 inch as the standard size now is because that is as small as you can get and still type comfortably on the keyboard. It has almost nothing to do with screen size. Of these three form factors this is the only device where a lot of meaningful work gets done, and if the keyboard doesn't feel right then the computer isn't portable - to be put in the same pile of bricks as the tower-based PCs - and 10 inch tablets (I have never met a touch screen keyboard I would be comfortable doing a blog post with, least bit getting any real work done.) 10 inches is a little cramped for a physical keyboard, and 13 inches is almost inconveniently large to be carrying around, so from here on out work computers are 10 to 13 median 11 inch netbooks (even if by another name.)

So now we get down to the tricky part - the device scene. This has been a huge question since the iPhone and iPod touch hit the scene. People thought that the dominant tablet would always be the iPad for a few years. Then Amazon stepped up to the plate with the Kindle - and mark my words here Amazon is THE player driving the form factor of the tablets - by combining the e-Reader size with the open-source Android, the Kindle Fire burned alive the idea that 10 inch mammoths were going to dominate the device scene in the future.

I have had an Evo and a Nexus 7. The Evo's screen wasn't big enough to be a useful e-reader to me. The Nexus 7 was too large (and too fragile) for me to be significantly more convenient carry around than a Netbook - I still needed a backpack, I couldn't just slip it into my pocket. However it was very socially convenient that the Nexus 7 looked like an e-Reader, and NOT a phone or a computer - pulling out phones and computers in meetings (and other discreet places) is antisocial behavior, but an e-Reader suggested real group participation.

Now enters the phablets, the big phones. These devices are cell phones ranging from 5 to 7 inches. The first thing to realize here is that Kindle is still driving the form factor, as the latest Kindle Paperwhite has a 6 inch screen. So two questions:

• Is 6 inches portable enough?
• Is 5 inches big enough to be an e-Reader?

Over the holidays my relatives busted out not one, but two Samsung Glaxy S4s. In both cases they had leather-ish e-Reader-style cases, and they easily passed as small e-Readers, even though I am sure neither one of these relatives ever uses e-Readers. This looked like a device I could use. It's not unique in the market, the Nexus 5 has a very similar form factor:



We don't need "swiss army knives too big to fit in our pockets" (7 inch+ tablets,) or portable media players too small to be e-Readers. The device size is solidifying around the following constraints: big enough to be an e-reader, small enough to fit in a pocket. That's going to be between 5 and 6 inches, and then all these radical changes in phone/tablet screen sizes will have concluded and we will have a universal 5-6 inch gadget screen size in the near future.