In amongst all the buzz surrounding the Palm Pre launch at CES last week (including an up to 50% share price hike in one day) was something really interesting – and possibly game-changing in the longer term.
I’ve long thought that the youngest and heaviest users of technology today want just one one thing: to communicate. They don’t particularly care, fundamentally, how that communication is done. It just needs to be useful, usable, instantaneous and fun.
Say I get a message from a friend about meeting up later. Do I really care whether it’s email, SMS, twitter, facebook message, MMS or a blackberry message? No, I don’t. I just care about the message, and replying to it.
In fact, it actually gets in the way when I have to remember what technology the recipient has (it is a blackberry? will they get my email instantly, or should I SMS? Are they on Skype on the PC? etc. etc.) before I send a message.
So what have Palm done? They’ve created “Combined Messaging” – all the different kinds of message from one contact go under that one contact.
It just makes sense.
In the longer term, I believe that all the conduits of messaging (from Twitter to SMS even to email) will just become that – conduits. Invisible, unbranded, uninteresting. I don’t want to know how my telephone calls are routed, and I won’t want to know how my messages are routed!
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