Does the iPhone voice thing seem like a crazy gable? Maybe not. I suppose no one ran off to by TouchPads because Ping was a big dud. Still, it seems like this has the potential to be a disaster. If any other handset maker announced voice control I feel like they’d be dismissed as totally clueless. It’s a statement to the credibility Apple has built up that everyone seems willing to give this a chance.

I guess from Apple’s perspective it makes a lot of sense to move first on this if they think that the worst that happens is it’s a punchline for future speculation about new features (see Ping). How embarrassing for them if someone else got to claim to reinvent the interface, right?

This is the other side of the reasoning I think is behind Apple’s seeming lack of urgency regarding NFC tech compared to some others. NFC is not a leap forward for how everyone and anyone uses devices. It’s an incremental step in the context of specific set of capabilities that depends on the cooperation of third parties to be meaningful. Getting NFC wrong means potentially being tied up with the losing side in conflicts over standards, having to take a second stab at doing payment integration right (more embarrassing than sweeping a little microphone icon to somewhere deep in the settings menu), and explaining an unfamiliar new interaction (as opposed to something like talking) that wouldn’t even be widely usable for some time.

Getting NFC tech after Google’s short list of pet Android devices doesn’t seem like falling behind. Having to add speech control after it becomes all the rage on someone else’s platform would. It’s like the iCloud stuff. Device syncing isn’t new. On the contrary, people have made fun of the iPhone since its release for requiring a cord to sync. But getting around to adding that feature barely registers in the discussion, even among the bloggers that managed to convincingly care about its absence. 

It’s kind of cool that the pressure to stay ahead of the pack on human-device interaction specifically is enough to make a company with Apple’s secure footing risk some non-trivial amount of embarrassment. Maybe I will get my brain phone eventually after all.