Placing bets on the next Apple invention
by: Mark Wagner
Aside from all the news about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld and tradeshows in general, as well as the questions surrounding the health of Steve Jobs, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple’s next Big Deal is.
How about an enhanced, more evolved, touch screen iMac? This is not a stretch. HP has it. Or maybe you just call it the iPhone. Will Apple will roll out some application that is more intuitive, more useful, more sexy, more capable of complex interactions than current devices out there? How quickly will non-keyboard gestural interfaces become part of the lexicon of computer interaction? We’ve seen how the iphone technology works with current ergonomics of human movement. Here are some foreseeable extensions of the idea:
- POP swiping and account transacting (e-money services have been popular in Asia for some time)
- Mobile health monitoring that tracks human movement and vitals
- ‘Smart’ apparel that collects numerous points of data from and for people that wear it
- Any type of research requiring micro viewing
These applications are not only forseeable, but require sophisticated new devices to handle enhanced human interaction. The moment of truth: How will a company like Apple strike out on this front? The pressure is on.