Steve, I was addressing components; you are addressing consumer devices.
Increasing component density translates into increasing performance, reliability or capacity/capability (depending on what the engineers focus on). It allows things that were stationary to become faster, mobile or just cheaper. The user interface is an entirely different issue. You are addressing that issue. Thank you, Mark Snyder -----Original Message----- Again, this is true for some, perhaps even most electronic/digital devices, but this trend is not universal nor is it always permanent. Some types of devices that went through a size shrinkage phase reverted to becoming larger again because smallness became a liability as opposed to an asset. Going small in such cases provides a benefit only for the manufacturer, not for the consumer. Hand-held two-way radios are an example that immediately comes to mind. Being made too small did not work well for users. The tiny buttons became hard to deal with, the small speaker rendered voice communications hard to understand, smaller displays were hard to read, they broke when dropped or were handled roughly, the smaller batteries would not last or provide sufficient power, the radios could not be placed upright on a table because the weight of the antenna would cause it to fall over, etc. This became a problem for pros such as police and firefighters and also with consumer level radios such as FRS or GMRS devices. Going small is not necessarily a good thing for the end user. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
