Call that a gadget?

iPhone the Next Generation, Nokia Nsomething, Windows Whatever OS, Samsung Icandoanythingbetterthanyou….is it me or does innovation seem to be thin on the ground right now? You can’t click thru a website, open a magazine or read a newspaper at the moment without being bombarded by attempts at convincing you somebody has had a new idea. But essentially they are all now doing the same thing, and pretty well. Steve Ballmer came to Britain, talked about cloud computing and Microsoft tablet computers but didn’t really give us anything new to chew over. The Microsoft Chief Executive seems to be playing catchup and overtake with Google and Apple instead of leapfrog. Is genuine innovation on hold?

Before you write me off as a forty year old who doesn’t get it anymore (technology – that is)) I should explain I’m a gadget geek. I’m iPadded to the hilt, loyal to my blackberry, mifi, slingboxes, bluray recorders and 50Mb broadband (and my high tech burglar alarm). So this isn’t the cry of a luddite. But it is getting increasingly hard to care about product launches for touchscreen telephones and tablet computers. I’m sure Windows Phone 7 will be perfectly competent when it launches, and Android 2.2 marvellous. I’m positive the Playbook will be great fun for all those stressed out bankers on the tube.

But we seem to have reached the same sort of place with mobile gadgets that the motor industry got to about ten years ago. Which is to say give or take the odd Far Eastern monster, or British dud you can basically buy whatever you like now and it will do everything you need it to do pretty well. Even the great debate about Flash not working on Apple Iphones and Ipads doesn’t seem to matter anymore as more people (like the new Channel 4 News website) start using HTML5 for their video players. Just as cars stopped rusting, phones stopped crashing all the time. Just as cars became reliable phones got pretty good at web browsing. Just as every monstrous vehicle started sporting electric everything and leather seats touchscreens have become smooth and everybody’s bringing out a tablet. So we will choose our gadgets based on brand loyalty, fashion and design rather than utility, reliability and innovation.

You could decide that’s a happy place to be where everyone enjoys high quality at reasonable prices : a levelling out of technological elitism. But the schoolboy in me who still remembers drooling my way around the Motor Show, poring over computer magazines and playing Top Trumps in the playground finds it all slightly sad.