32 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age DEVICE FUNCTION ADD-ON FUNCTIONS Watch Keeping time Alarm, calculator, pulse meter, contact list, compass, altimeter . . . MP3 player Listening Games, calendars, contact lists, photo albums, video . . . Mobile Calling Messaging, contact list, web browsing, phone imaging, gaming, navigation, blogging . . . Game Playing Messaging, music, video, net browsing, console online communities . . . Calculator Arithmetic Programming, graphing, symbolic calculus . . . Table 2-1. Some mobile devices, their essential functions, and add-on functions. As we said above, we will get more functions, more speed, more 16 memory size, and more of everything. Mobile devices will continue to add more functions that once belonged to separate gadgets. As evi- dence, consider Table 2-1. The add-on functions are constantly increas- ing in number, sometimes surpassing the original intended function, as current smart phones, or multimedia computers, demonstrate. The term digital convergence is often used to signify this trend of including ever more functions in single devices, which leads to a 17 situation where many devices can carry out similar functions. For instance, as memory prices fall, an MP3 player on a chip will become so cheap that it could even become a standard function in any device – including some non-obvious ones, such as light bulbs, wall sockets, batteries, glasses, cigarette lighters, shoes, jackets, or anything. While such combinations may not always make perfect sense, others will. The convergence will go on because it can, and new surprising com- binations of functionality will keep coming up, with more new forms of digital content (Figure 2-7). As more devices can carry out an increasing number of functions, and therefore can handle more kinds of content, the typical uses of the devices can become blurred. The devices become interchangeable, 16 However, the human physiology is still constant, so we are not getting any faster– better–cheaper in our mental processes. This creates the “human bottleneck” that is a key underlying factor to be considered in the following chapters. 17 There is a law in computer hacker folklore which states that every piece of software includes more and more functions until its capable of reading e-mail and browsing the Web. We feel there is a clear analogy to digital convergence.