Latest hi tech gadgets not without peril

A few years ago while I was visiting my friend Bill, in New Hampshire, he showed me this marvellous little gadget he had just bought. It was small, elegantly designed, with a shiny black surface and fitted easily in one hand. Bill showed me all the things it could do. It could take photos, cruise the internet, organise a daily diary. It had a tantalising image of a compass that was functional. And it even made phone calls. It was an iPhone and suddenly I wanted one - for an instant.

What put me off was not its cost, though that was a consideration. No. Three days later I was visiting my son in New York City and, while walking down a busy avenue, I could see that every third person seemed to be walking without looking where they were going - a very dangerous practice in that city. They were gazing transfixed at their hands, which held an iPhone. Those iPhone holder-walkers seemed to be in another world, with their consciousness fixed at hand level. It was an unsettling look.

The creator of the iPhone, Steve jobs, died this past October. Just before his death, Jobs allowed Water Isaacson, former editor of Time magazine, to have complete free hand in a very balanced biography that portrays Jobs, warts and all.

There's no doubt that Jobs was a genius in marketing his products. According to Isaacson, Jobs saw himself as standing at an intersection of art and technology. That may well capture the essence of the success of Jobs and Apple, the company he founded, lost and resurrected. Jobs is described at an early staff meeting when people were brainstorming about what consumers might want. In what is characteristic of the man, Jobs took charge by saying "never mind all that crap, we'll show them what they want and they'll want it". And he did, and the people wanted and bought iPods, iPhones, iPads, and even iMacs. The computer isn't dead. It just needed to be repackaged.

Despite the immense attractiveness of Apple's products, my choice has been to continue the PC route and now that Google is here, to follow the Android way.

As my friend Bill points out, the Apple system means a safe universe of stuff that works, that's intuitive to run and that protects against intrusion by foreign entry, like viruses. And it looks good too, even if it costs more.

All that is appealing but I prefer a more open system. You see, Jobs was a control freak and his beautiful products play badly with anyone else's stuff. Example: I tried out my grandson's iPad 2. To get started or to download an application (I have yet to get my mind around the new contracted language, so it wasn't an "app"), I had to install iTunes on my computer and synchronise the two devices, after which I found that iTunes had rendered several programs on my desktop lifeless. Jobs didn't want to play with Gates, I decided.

I like my programs, so iTunes had to go. And I gave the iPad back to my grandson, who by then was already off playing "Call of Duty" and dispatching hundreds of "terrorists" on his Xbox.

The success of both Jobs and Gates did not come from their own formidable computer skills. Gates bought DOS operating system from a computer scientist named Tim Patterson, persuaded IBM to let him provide the operating system for PCs and the rest is history.

Likewise, Jobs needed Steve Wozniak to write his first programs. Jobs first saw a graphical user interface (GUI) at the Xerox company, saw its potential and incorporated it in the mouse he attached to his machine. That became the Macintosh.

Of the great computer gurus who have built companies, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, is the one who wrote his own code.

They've all changed our lives, but Zuckerberg's brainchild just helped bring down a bunch of dictators. Not bad for another university dropout.