One Hand Stops Clapping; A Death In The Family

This morning one of my much-loved Beolab 8000 loudspeakers emitted a small pitiful 'pop' followed by an ominous and persistent 60 Hz hum. Some piece of its inner workings has apparently thrown in the towel.

I love these loudspeakers and after 14 years of reliable service can hardly complain about what I hope will be a brief, albeit expensive, illness.

Counterpoint

The Bang and Olufsen Serene is the anti-iPhone. Or it was before the marriage between B&O and their manufacturing partner Samsung went south.

As a design object it's polarizing and spectacular, luscious and maddening. It bucks a raft of industry trends and glides obliviously past consumer expectations: something of a Bang and Olufsen tradition. Living with a Serene day-to-day requires lot of patience as well as a willingness to abandon wholesale a lot of reasonable expectations for a mobile device.

Where to start. On my carrier in the U.S. (T-mobile) it was ultimately impossible to set up the Serene to send or retrieve email or multimedia messages, so after a long struggle I threw in the towel. Next, the experience of dialing a number –never mind pecking out a text message– on the circular keypad runs from awkward to militantly counterintuitive, depending on your patience and the length of message (note: shorter isn't just better, it may very well be all you have the time to compose). And about that circular keypad: for a company that prides itself on innovative and superior solutions, the same diabolical, hand-cramping idea was abandoned as unworkable over 40 years ago by AT&T's Bell Laboratories before reaching the market, then attempted unsuccessfully by Nokia decades later to a chorus of hoots, jeers and mountains of scorn in the marketplace. Why repeat a competitor’s failed approach?

In the end, all of this is irrelevant to a niche product like the Serene. Designed by an audio company, the Serene delivers crisp, better-than-landline-quality voice communication, but either by default or design –take your pick– it makes any other activity so grudging and onerous that the user is discouraged from even trying. Ironically, It's this distinction alone that makes the Serene the anti-iPhone. While the iPhone’s ludicrously unreliable and overextended network is seldom able to make or complete a voice call, but offers a zillion applications to keep the user distracted, the Serene offers few features beyond the ability to hold a conversation in sparkling, interruption-free clarity, and this it does exceedingly well.

I like the Serene. Closed, it looks like an anodized aluminum and black rubberized Chanel compact. The build quality is first rate, the ringtones pleasing, the audio quality second to none, and the motorized open/close function at once truly useful, beautifully executed, and geekily delightful. Of course it's feature-free, favors style at the expense of usefulness, suffers from an near total absence of any technical support in the U.S. market, and is completely overpriced. In that sense it simultaneously represents everything that's right and wrong about Bang and Olufsen and offers some insight into why the phone and the partnership that sired it failed.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Beginning

I haven't decided what all this is going to be about yet. Probably one of those any-road-will-take-me-there things. In whatever direction it heads, my interests in technology, design and how they intersect will be in tow. So it feels right that my first posts should be drawn from the ground zero of those interests.

In 1975 my parents gave me a Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera. Depending upon your vintage, you may remember it: a sleek, chrome and leather artifact that, when folded, looked like an oversized cigarette case. At the time of its introduction in 1972, it was nothing short of a revolution in optics, engineering, chemistry, microelectronics and product design. So, my earliest introduction to design and photography was visualized through the awkward viewfinder of a very peculiar and flawed little picture taking machine that had a preprogrammed mind of its own and produced interesting (if not always accurate, or conventional, or pleasing) images.

My love of the SX-70 was about more than pictures. It was at least as much about the fun of working around it's peculiarities and programming as it was the sensory experience of using it. Squeezing the shutter touched off this little symphony of whirring motors and pivoting mirrors. Even the film's odor, the emulsion and developers and opacifiers, was oddly pleasing. Commes des Garcons should clone the fragrance.

From the moment I loaded the first film pack, I spent an awfully lot of time reimagining my world through this camera.

That's where it all started for me.