Monday August 29, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin
You of course know a dolphin, even though it has fins and lives its entire life in the ocean, is a mammal – the suborder odontoceti, to be exact. But the similar-looking and similarly-toothed (well, not similar, exactly – there's a slight size and sharpness disparity) shark, however, is a fish, of the superorder selachimorpha.
Both lobsters and land-lubbing woodlice (aka "armadillo bug"), which would never be confused in the kitchen, nonetheless belong to the subphylum arthropoda – crustaceans.
And both the horse and the rhinoceros are dues-paying members of the eutheria infraclass and the order perissodactyla. I wonder if they have a bowling team?
Biological taxomic ranks – scientifically determining why one animal is different than another – may be something we in the gadget gazing business, with the exploding number of multi-use gadgets, ought to adopt.
Order evidentiary hearing
Classification-confusing Exhibit A is the iPad. For more than a year, we digital Darwins have been trying to figure out if the damned thing is of the computer class, the laptop superorder or a mutant deserving of its own family. We have to count iPads – but as what?
A second related classification accounting conundrum is the Nook Color and its e-book reader-cum-tablet ilk, such as the Kobo-powered Aluratek LIBRE Touch, the Gemei GM2000, the two Naxa Noodle Colors and the Barnes & Noble-compatible 7- and 9-inch Pandigital Novel color e-readers, likely to be joined by a similar Amazon Kindle e-reader-cum-tablet sometime later this year. And the Tribune Company is reportedly readying a newspaper-reader-cum-tablet.
Neither you nor I want to be keep typing "e-reader-cum-tablet" each time we have to talk about these e-reader-cum-tablets (and not just because it's too long, if you catch my drift). So, what are they?
There's the always popular walk-like-a-duck/quack-like-a-duck test; these…things…are equipped with a 7-inch touch LCD screen, run a version of Android, are equipped with Wi-Fi to surf the Web and check email.
That sounds like a tablet to me. And yet…
A dolphin looks and acts like a fish, but it's not; a rhino looks little like a horse unless you count unicorns; and, if you try and serve me a woodlouse when I ordered lobster, there's going to trouble (after my Mr. Creosote imitation, of course).
And what happens when we start getting e-ink color e-readers?
E-reader-cum-tablets aren't our only digital definition issue. With Blu-ray players increasingly adding streaming IP content, at what point do we start counting them as media streamers? Digital cameras and camcorders, both capable of shooting high-def video and multi-megapixel stills, are beginning to merge. When Mobile DTV broadcasting begins to launch in earnest, what multi-function devices with built-in tuners will be defined as portable TVs and which as multimedia devices?
Perhaps it's time we geeks created our own technology taxonomy system so we all know what what is and how to analyze them. Before someone on Top Chef serves up Woodlice Thermidor.
