Convergence, or not. Again.

A few years back I was pretty vocal about my distaste for “converged” devices like iPhones. I carried around a point-and-shoot camera, a “dumb” phone and an iPod touch. Only post iPhone 4 has the converged device managed to outperform the three more dedicated devices.

But now, at Wired, there’s this:

anyone lugging around a laptop, iPad, and iPhone is also carrying the equivalent of three video cameras, three email devices, three media players, and probably three different photo albums

And I realised that lately I’ve been pushing back against the multi-device always-connected imperative built into Pads, Phones and laptops.

I’ve started carrying a film camera around because it forces me to pay attention to what I’m photographing, rather than snapping everything. I’ve started trying to check my email at a limited number of times a day rather than having it run in the background supporting an always-on continuous-partial-attention with what my colleagues are up to.

The camera is (probably) just me, but the email thing is a wider trend. Not sure what it means yet.