amobilegeek

A new favorite show of mine is Pawn Stars. It is about a pawn shop in Las Vegas that buys, sells and pawns all sorts of items from all sorts of people. I am fascinated with the items that are brought into the store that are then sometimes appraised. Old weapons seem to appear every so often and apparently are popular items that sell easily.

On a recent episode a man brought in an antique pistol from a few hundred years ago. Rick Harrison, one of the owners of the shop, wanted to test the pistol to see if it would fire (They usually test everything to make sure items work as described). It took Rick a full minute or so to load the pistol and fire it. At the time the gun was manufactured, it was probably the best technology around.

Nowadays, a pistol that takes a minute to load spells certain death for the user. I can't help but compare this to current mobile operating systems (hence the title of this blog). Although we have reached a point where mobile technology is processing increasingly complex information, we have not yet reached a point where we have instant feedback from cellphones. Even with a 1 Ghz processor on my HTC Incredible, some programs take longer than a second or two to load. That is of course understandable, but not perfect, yet.

Decades from now (or possibly sooner), we will look back and wonder how anyone could possibly wait a full second or two for a program to load on a cellphone. We will experience and expect instant gratification from advanced cell phones. We won't be able to imagine how people had the patience to wait a full five to ten seconds for Google Maps with a traffic overlay to load on their cellphone after touching the Google icon.

I am anxiously awaiting for that time to come. In the meantime, I will exercise patience and realize that it wont mean anything close to death as it does with antique weapons in today's modern world.