The touch screen – transforming our consumption of media

I sense that we are reaching a tipping point (to quote the title of the excellent Malcolm Gladwell book) when it comes to our engagement with consumption of media.

I have just spent a week in the US at admittedly a technology conference for real estate, but my overwhelming sense is that we will witness within a year (maybe two at the outside) the transformation of our media consumption

We are at the dawn of the transformation where our simple finger(s) will drive our actions.

It started barely 3 years ago with the launch of the iPhone and as ever the adoption curve has become exponential. The iPhone was followed within a year with a couple of other smart phones all using our simple index finger to drive a complex computing platform in the palm of our hand. That couple of mobile devices (calling them phones is misleading) has grown into a flood as the Google Android platform has provided the open-source option to Apple’s proprietary system.

Adding to the smart phone platform has come the iPad, with a a staggering 3 million iPads sold in the first 100 days – far exceeding the initial sales of iPhones 3 years ago – this for a product costing over US$500 of which the majority of the first quarter of a million buyers had not even seen let alone touched the device before they typed in their online credit card order. A staggering US$1.5 billion in pre-order sales has to be a record for a brand new piece of complex technology.

This pervading wave of new hand-held mobile computing devices radically changes our engagement from the humble keyboard to the screen. For anyone who owns or has used a smart phone or an iPad (of which there are reported to be several thousand in NZ already, yet it is not officially on sale) the user experience is both intuitive and instantly engaging. You are drawn to “click” (touch) and swipe; you pinch to zoom and rotate to change perspective – the keyboard suddenly seems part of the typewriter generation.

The comment was made to great amusement at the conference that the 3 year old son of one of the presenters went up to the TV the other day and tried to swipe the screen to change channel!

Having said that I am still typing this using a traditional keyboard, and that is where the demarcation exists. The touch screen mobile devices are consumption devices, whereas for content creation the traditional PC with a keyboard still retains a functional efficiency. There is a blurring of the edges admittedly when you attach a blue tooth keyboard to an iPad, but that reinforces the point that our adopted manual dexterity for the keyboard is hard to supplant with a touch screen – some how the physical keys depressed to reinforce typing is too ingrained in our psyche, or at least it is for our current generation.

As a point of clarification the expression “media consumption device” does not imply a restriction to just reading magazines, viewing music and movies or playing games – just take a look across the endless aisles of apps for the iPhone or iPad, now totaling close to 200,000 and you can see almost every conceivable concept presenting every conceivable form of data.

So where does all of this take the real estate industry and the property searching process. As I stated in the summary from the Connect conference, “Location is context” and mobile computing devices are location aware devices so this tipping point will be critical for real estate. Being mobile to be able to view property information will benefit both buyers, sellers and agents. The insatiable demands of buyers and sellers to be better informed in the data that lives behind property transactions will be forthcoming at the point of decision making – inside a property, for as much as rich media can provide great insight to a property nobody is going to make that buying decision without doing the walk-through, well almost nobody!

Full Disclosure

I have both an iPhone and iPad – my experience with the iPhone was instantaneous (although I was a late adopter), it is both intuitively simple and yet so staggeringly valuable and versatile. As for the iPad, I have had it for 2 months and I had an initial passion as part of the novelty; this waned slightly, however once I adjusted to its use as a complement to a laptop and the addition of some awesome apps I am now beginning to get hooked – seriously hooked! The recent launch last week in NZ will certainly only enhance the experience as I suspect we will see a flow of excellent local apps onto the “shelves” of the app store.