The Rise of the Convergence Device

When most people hear the term “convergence device”, they’ll likely think it’s some sort of science fiction device, some Star Trek McGuffin or other. However, if you look at the definition of the term, namely that it’s a device that combines the functionalities of several previously separate devices, things become a whole lot clearer pretty quickly. You see, most of us carry just such a convergence device on a daily basis, our smartphone, although in fairness, modern phones seem like something out of science fiction at times. They are however true convergence devices, combining a phone, media player, mobile office, games console and generally a pretty good camera all into one single device. Some of the latest models can even communicate with satellites, truly bringing these devices into Star Trek territory. 

However, for all their futuristic capabilities, it’s surprising just how long smartphones, and convergence devices in general, have been around. The term itself was coined all the way back in 2000, when Swedish communications company Ericsson used it to describe their then brand-new R380 phone, although devices with what we would now consider smartphone capabilities date back even further to 1996 and the Nokia 9000 Communicator. However, whilst these devices were in many ways the progenitors of our current smartphones, they were also woefully limited in their capabilities. For all their email capabilities and rudimentary web browser, they were far from the multipurpose marvels that smartphones are today. There were no 3rd party apps, no media or entertainment functions let alone anything like a built-in camera. Even if the technology for that did theoretically exist, the state of mobile networks in the late 1990s simply didn’t allow for any of that, there simply wasn’t the network capacity. 

Instead, these elements developed on a completely different tech branch, that of the PDA, or Personal Digital Assistant. At their heart, these very very simple devices, rolling an address book, calendar to-do list, notepad and calculator into one compact package, usually with a resistive touchscreen and stylus as an input method. Without any wireless data functionality, synchronising the data on the device had to be done via a sync cable. Simple as they may have been, these PDAs, particularly those manufactured by a company called Palm that had pioneered the concept, sold like crazy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and they executed their simple principle perfectly. In fact, by the time I got my first PDA in 2001, a Palm m105 for those who are interested, 3rd party software, what we now call apps, had become a thing. Even in this early state, the potential of PDAs quickly became apparent to me. I still remember sitting in an intercity train in Austria back in early 2002 on my way to Graz and reading an ebook copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey on my Palm m105, long before Amazon even thought of anything called Kindle.

Shown here in a stand macgyvered together by my late dad, Palm's Zire 71 was the first real "convergence device' that I ever owned.

The big revolution in PDAs was just beginning however. In 2003, it launched the Zire 71, the top-of-the-line model of its Zire series of consumer-oriented PDAs. Just looking at its blue casing and metal back half made it clear that this device was a completely different beast compared to the older m100 series, or even the other Zire models. And beast was the operative word here because with a 144Mhz Texas Instruments OMAP CPU, a colour touch screen, SD Card slot, headphone jack, onboard media player and a built-in camera hidden behind a slider mechanism, it was so far beyond the capabilities of the m105 that it seemed inconceivable that these two devices were only separated by two years. For the budding tech nerd in me, this device was absolute catnip, and after scraping together money from my first part-time job, I eventually took the plunge in early 2004. For the next five years, this little handheld device would be a fixture of my life, seeing me through my first full time job and into my second one, from a room in my parents’ place to a first apartment of my own, to a number of Interrail trips. However, it was in its everyday use that I first came to understand the real advantage of a convergence device such as this.

Having a slide-out camera, shown here documenting one of my late dad's Franken-PC projects, in the same device that held your notes, calendar, documents, and MP3 player, was a real slice of the future in 2004!

Back in 2004, I had been voted onto the management board of my local choir. German law requires a certain management and oversight structure even for clubs and voluntary organisations, at least if that organisation wants to take advantage of the tax breaks that come along with it. I had been voted onto the board as not only the board secretary but also the press spokesperson. This meant that it was up to me to type up the meeting minutes for all the board meetings, as well as handling media enquiries, press releases, etc.. The Zire 71 turned out to be an absolute godsend here, because I quickly got myself a folding keyboard that would interface with the PDA’s infrared port, which allowed me to type up my notes right then and there in the board meeting, rather than laboriously having to transcribe borderline illegible handwritten notes. Afterwards, when I got home, it was just a question of dropping the Zire 71 into its sync cradle to move the notes to my desktop, cleaning up the notes, and sending an email with the notes out to all participants. Alas, no pictures of this setup exist, I wasn't too big on documenting every aspect of my life back then...

This extended into my private life as well. By 2005, I had started to embrace my inner writer, and the Zire 71, combined with the fold-out keyboard, allowed me to entertain my writing hobby beyond the constraints of my four walls. My habit of going on “writing dates” into various cafés started in those days, the ability to just set up in a Starbucks, which was something special in Germany in the early 2000s, and type away set in motion a pattern that persists to this very day. But it went beyond just notes. The ability to listen to music without having to lug around a bulky discman was something pretty unusual in the early 2000s, even more so because I could do it on a PDA. The colour screen allowed me to play games on the device, including some pretty nifty clones of the original SimCity or Civilization. And while the integrated 640x480 camera wasn’t particularly great, the fact that I had a camera with me at all was something special in its own right.

I can't find any pictures of the HTC/MDA Touch, my first real smartphone, but it really took until the arrival of the Motorola Milestone as it was called in Germany for my Zire 71 to start being phased out.

As useful as the slide-out keyboard was, it wasn't really all that comfortable of a writing device for longer texts...

Now, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. The restrictions of PalmOS, the operating system of the Zire 71, came into focus more and more as the days wore on. The display went from being one of the best I’d ever seen to more and more subpar as the first OLED and later AMOLED displays came into use, and the lack of any type of wireless capability, whether Wi-Fi or even just simple Bluetooth, became an issue once those technologies started becoming more and more common in consumer devices. And yet, there was something refreshingly simple about typing up your thoughts on the go, and then syncing them to your computer simply by putting the PDA into its dock and pressing the sync button. For me personally, the age of the PDA finally ended in January 2009, when the Zire 71 was replaced in its role as my note-taking device by the Acer Aspire One 110L, a Linux-powered netbook that I had bought myself as a Christmas present. It had already been replaced in all other roles by my first true smartphone, a reskin of the HTC Touch that was marketed in Germany as the T-Mobile MDA Touch. However, I remember my mom using her Palm Tungsten E for quite a few years beyond that.

It took the arrival of my first fully fledged netbook to truly replace and retire my Zire 71.

Nowadays, I’ve fully embraced my status as a device supernerd, and I absolutely love the technology at my disposal. From folding-screen smartphones to tablets and smartwatches, if it’s interesting or off the beaten track, it has my attention, and I wouldn’t want to give up the convenience of those devices, or the cloud services that connect them, even as the tidal wave of minimalism seems to grow bigger and bigger. Somehow, I feel like part of my fascination with these devices is the fact that I still remember how the whole movement towards the convergence device started.