STEVEN POOLE
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.
Or was I, perhaps, just before my time? (A thing I have often wondered while pondering my book sales.) Yes, any half-decent modern smartphone can run high-quality videogames, so why am I so pleased with my new Super Pocket? You may wonder why I enjoy playing 1942 and its sequels on my Capcom edition, even though half the already-tiny screen is wasted to present the vertical aspect ratio, and even though I could as easily replay the brilliant Sky Force series of 1942-alikes on my Switch. I’d say that there’s something about playing the Super Pocket that feels sillier, in a beautiful way. More gratuitous. And there’s no way you can check your Twitter feed on it.
Of course, the Super Pocket has physical buttons, too, which will always be better than the touchscreen of a phone for shooty or jumpy games, and speaks after all to the compromises of convergence. (How soon we forget that typing on glass, when all-display smartphones were new, was such a disgusting experience that it could only be redeemed by a massive advance in autocorrect algorithms.) We are, after all, ancestors or at least cousins of homo habilis – ‘handy man’ – so named because they manufactured stone tools a few million years ago, and we still like to do things with our hands. And dedicated gadgets give more possibilities for the unexpected pleasures of fine industrial design, which has nearly nothing to work with on the modern anonymous smartphone. The geniuses who created beautiful and ergonomic masterpieces such as my old Sony MiniDisc recorder, or that Psion nano-laptop, need single-use machines to express themselves.
Any half-decent smartphone can run high-quality games, so why am I so pleased with my new Super Pocket?
And, gradually, they are coming. For many composers and music producers, for example, everything gets done in a DAW (digital audio workstation) running on a Mac or PC, but using a mouse to push pixels around on a screen in order to create sonic beauty often causes an unpleasant cognitive dissonance. Some therefore join th
