STEVEN POOLE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
One day in the early 2000s, I was lunched by a couple of editors at a broadsheet newspaper, who asked what I thought of the then-speculative notion of ‘convergence’: that all our different gadgets would eventually become one super-gadget that did everything. I nodded sagely and brought forth my Psion 5mx pocket computer, with its gorgeous touch-typable qwerty keyboard, and the Sony Ericsson phone by means of which it communicated with newspaper and magazine ‘wires’ (servers), via infrared and 3G data. These things would remain separate, I announced like some kind of reverse Nostradamus, because to combine them would compromise the efficiency of each too much. Half a decade later, the iPhone came out, and before long I was proved comprehensively wrong.