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So two thoughts about iPad:

1. I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
2. The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.

In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.

*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”

I found that there are a whole bunch of articles shared by various people on Twitter that I wanted to comment on, but with more than 140 characters. Plus, I come across some pretty interesting posts on Google Reader every so often, and I often find I want to write a response. So this is going to be a semi-occasional roundup of various such articles.

1. Via @atmasphere comes Marketers salivating over smartphone potential: Actually I suspect the apparent willingness to see mobile has less to do with what they’ve identified and more to do with: (a) there’s no irritating, resource-intensive Flash ads on most phones, so people’s desire to tune them out hasn’t kicked in as strongly yet; and, (b) there’s no Adblock for most of these phones yet. Once these ads start slowing phones down and eating through the capped data plans causing overage and grief for users, this will change quickly.
2. Saw what is probably the definitive guide to available-in-the-US e-readers over at dealnews.com. While there are a ton more readers out there if you’re willing to look at importers, this is a pretty exhaustive comparison of the various options out there. The thing that I find most interesting about this is how all the screens are 6″ or larger (basically). I, for one, would welcome an e-book reader roughly the shape and size of a traditional mass-market paperback book.
3. Engadget is reporting on the Symbian app store, joining such stores as the Android, Apple, Blackberry and Nokia stores. And in the last of that list lies the nub: given that just about the only people who use Symbian extensively is Nokia, why is there such a duplication of effort? Let Symbian licence the Nokia store for use on any Symbian-powered devices, if the legalities are a problem. This is just a tremendous waste of resources.
4. Via @bperry comes Mobile first: I agree with the the author’s first two points. Mobile use is skyrocketing, and mobile screen real estate is limited and websites designed for mobile devices are often clearer and more function-oriented than their desktop-bound counterparts. But I disagree with the observation that mobile platforms are more functional; in fact, that’s the biggest challenge in designing for mobile devices has always been the huge disparities in device capabilities. Even if you look at the two platforms currently hogging mindshare – iPhone OS and Android – device capabilities are hugely different. The original iPhone doesn’t have a GPS at all; the 3G has a GPS, but no compass. The Android devices offer multiple resolutions. More to the point, these two platforms occupy a very small market share and if you expand your audience to the entire mobile spectrum – feature phones and smart phones – then good luck getting anything beyond the most minimal of pages up.

I’ve been meaning to write a whole bunch of smaller entries over the last few weeks, but judging by the size of the draft queue, I guess I’ve not got them all ready to the point where I want to publish them. So rather than have ten or fifteen longer entries, I’m just going to a spare parts entry, mainly based off other stuff I’ve been reading lately.

1. Unplggd had an interesting entry about the downside of digital. I can’t find the other blog post I came across talking about that, but I found myself agreeing that an all-digital world can be … problematic. For example, NASA can’t find the tapes it made a mere 40 years ago of what I consider to be one of the five most important milestones in human history. But we can read ancient Egyptian poetry. My two pence addition to this is that one complication that no ancient Egyptian ever had to deal with was DRM – looking at the past 15-20 years, when data has literally exploded, it’s been accompanied by various forms of draconian digital restrictions – lock ins to proprietary file formats, actual encryption and obfuscation, and a general lack of consideration for the future. I wonder if in a hundred years, historians will look at this time and call our present time “The Hole” – the time between the end of print and the rise of open, interoperable and forward-looking technologies.
2. Speaking of forward-looking technologies, I started wondering about the state of my CDs burned in the early part of this decade; a few days later, Slashdot discussed the asked the same question. In my experience, a surprising number of them actually work okay even today. Unfortunately, the ones most prone to failure were the rewriteable ones – which means that if there were earlier versions of my HS thesis paper or my first-year college documents, they’re all gone. Not too much of a loss, but I’ve started wondering about the limits of storage – and I don’t mean megabytes, but the ability to back up that data. Just this year’s photos alone are 4.03GB – a not insubstantial amount of data to backup.
3. And my perennial backup question rises once again – even on Slashdot! Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good suggestions out of this year’s edition of “how do you backup your data” question. I think I may have to one day go get my parents a toaster and setup a peer-to-peer backup system – their data gets backed up here, my data gets backed up there. In the meantime, Jungle Disk to the rescue, though the question about reliability of the providers, the security of the providers and so on remain valid…
4. Google announced Chrome OS. And none of the details, leaving me slightly suspicious about the timing of the announcement and convinced that there’s a lot of work that needs to yet be done before the OS is ready to ship. The other question is why Google cares about the OS – after all, as long as their web browser (the bit that interacts most directly with their web services) runs on your choice of OS (be it Linux, BSD, Mac OS or Windows), then why should Google care to develop the rest of the software stack? I wonder if this is another ploy by Google, ala their 700MHz auction to foster innovative work in the field of OSes, rather than actually compete. (This guy, though, thinks that it’s the start of an all-out war.)
5. I’ve been using my Canon SX10 IS a lot (1777 photos since I’ve got the camera, though, admittedly, a number of them need to be deleted; see point one above). I’ve also had a chance to compare it to two other cameras that were close runner ups for my money – the Nikon Coolpix P90 and the Sony DSC-H20/B. I have to say, it would be a tough call – all of the cameras succeed and fail in their own ways. For example, the Nikon has the best optics – and the worst JPEG compression algorithm (and no support for RAW), giving weird ghosting artifacts. The Sony has an absurd lens – 38mm to 380mm – but an absolutely breathtaking digital zoom (by far and away the best I’ve ever seen on any device) and unbelievable low-light performance. My Canon is a good compromise between the two, but given the number of random failures I’ve seen of Canon cameras, the sudden whining noise the lens is making is beginning to scare me. A one month old camera should not be making this sort of high-pitched whining noise. Putting my ear to it also reveals some weird, Iomega click-of-death-like sounds, so I’m pretty scared. I also played with a couple of the newer DSLRs and came back very impressed, but realized that this means that those four year old cameras I drooled over are cheap and I should be able afford those now!
6. I also bought a wonderful telescope, cheaply since it came from Craigslist. Unfortunately, I’ve not been at home much, nor have the clouds parted to let me actually use the telescope. Sigh. However, I’ve discovered that a webcam I have fits perfectly into the telescope’s eyepiece, and the camera itself doesn’t heat up too much during use, giving me an inexpensive, and excellent astrophotography setup. Thus, with any luck and some time playing with the scope, I should have a decent chance at taking some pictures of planets. Maybe I’ll catch the next hit on Jupiter?
7. Related to the above: the Patriot Act strikes again! Some years ago, I had read a fascinating novella by one of The Big Three about an earth that was struck by a meteor shortly after genetic material for several humans was stored on the moon; after a cycle of several rebirths and failing to recolonize the planet, the last few humans were resurrected several million years after the calamity. For whatever reason, I didn’t write down the name of the book (nor the author), so I can’t find it. Since I had borrowed it from the Montgomery Public Library, I went to check if they could tell me what it was… only to find that in response to Title II of the Patriot Act, they purge the borrowing information for the libraries immediately and irretrievably so they can’t respond to a subpoena on what I’ve been reading. Sigh.
8. Speaking of reading, I made the jolly attempt to read Dune. After forcing myself through part I, I concluded that I had been erroneous in calling Virginia Woolf the most unreadable writer ever; Frank Herbert is by far and away more deserving of that “honour”. If this book is seriously considered one of the best science fiction novels of all time, I shudder to imagine what the worst might look like. I’ve returned to reading my beloved Alastair Reynolds (but not before making a short detour into old territory by Kim Stanley Robinson).

I think that’s it for this installment. I’ll see about doing one of these sorts of posts every couple of weeks if I don’t post more regularly. Or you could join the conversation at Twitter.

One of the things that I’ve been debating about is what to do with older, perfectly serviceable, hardware. It’s a problem that’s become worse in recent days with the development of the Intel Atom, dual and quad core chips, but it’s not recent – this is a problem that’s followed me for a while, but of late it’s become a little ridiculous.

It started with a friend in college dropping off a 1.0GHz Pentium 3 box, saying that he couldn’t get it working, and had bought a new computer. As it was the middle of the exams in the fall quarter, I put it aside, and figured I’d get to it a little later, maybe after winter break. Opening the case after the break revealed that the machine was fine, but that dust had clogged up the fan, preventing it from spinning and causing the BIOS to refuse to turn on the computer. 15 minutes and a through brushing later, it was up and running and I called my friend – only to discover he’d graduated early and that he no longer wanted the computer back. “Cool. Free hardware!” I thought. I decided to put Windows Server 2003 on it and learn the basics ahead of a major transition to Server 2003 from NT 4 Server and Server 2000 machines at a city school I volunteered at. A year later, I installed an early version of Ubuntu (I think Hoary Hedgehog, but it may have even been Warty), and used it to become familiar with Linux. A year after that, I sold it at graduation for a $100, a princely sum for a machine that I acquired for free and was the better part of a decade old by then.

Two months after graduation, a friend came visiting me from New York, bearing gifts from another friend – an apparently dead AMD Athlon64, motherboard and an ATI Radeon 9800. Some amount of twiddling later I figured out that it was a bad capacitor on the motherboard, but I had neither the tools nor the soldering skills to replace the component. Instead, two years after I got it, I passed it on to a colleague at work who was studying for his CCNA, and told him how to repair it.

Of course, in the interim, I had acquired quite a collection of hardware from various sources; mixing and matching produced my current home server from spare parts, and a half-done photo-frame PC. Other parts have made my home network, allowed me to fix nearly a half-dozen laptops for friends and relatives and so on. But I still have a ridiculous number of parts from all sources, ranging from the useful-by-itself (a dual-core Athlon64 x2 HP Slimline with a bad 6150 that will become my and my flatmate’s DVR after the digital transition is done and we rid ourselves of cable) to the what-do-I-do-with-this (a Mini-ITX board with a soldered down ULV 600MHz Celeron that served as a firewall). I’ve tried selling a number of these things, but in this economy, no one’s buying, and those things that I’m willing to give away, people don’t see enough value in coming to pick up.

Most recently, two days ago, I resurrected my flatmate’s “obsolete” HP machine and made it a dedicated encoder machine – it sits and converts media from useless formats to useful ones. Sure, it’s slow, but I can’t help but feel bad about tossing a 5 year old, 2.0GHz AMD Athlon64, 400GB of hard drive space and a gigabyte of RAM. I’m still not sure what to do with the little Mini-ITX motherboard; any suggestions? What about a 1.6GHz Pentium 4M laptop? What about a 1.42GHz G4 Mac Mini? So far, I’ve thought of an Asterisk server (don’t really need it), a development box (for what?), and a bedside computer (though I have a netbook) respectively for each of those. Or maybe I should send the Mac Mini to Nevada, and give the laptop to my parents?

One of the pretty nifty new features of Ubuntu 9.04 is its global notification system. Just like Growl for Mac OS (and clone Snarl for Windows), this basically creates a single, unified, neat little notification system that shows up in one spot on the desktop. Not only does this cut down on clutter significantly (just take a look at the mess that is the Windows task tray notifications, if you don’t believe me), but it also makes the whole OS less intrusive, yet highly communicative.

It got me thinking, though, about a universal notification system – as in, for every computing thing in the world. That includes things like “Machine with MAC ID 00:11:22:33:44:55 (‘Varun-Nangias-Mac’) connected to the router” to “Updates available”. In fact, most of the messages (“New SMS on Blackberry”, “Printer on fire”, “New Yahoo! IM from Kats Gupta“, etc.) all fit in 140 characters. Sure you could have longer messages but for the most part, 140 characters is more than enough to communicate the jist of the message and to provide a no-nonsense summary of the event; if you really need more information, you should be able to take further action on by looking up a syslog, or the requisite application. And putting this information in an RSS feed or a Twitter-like stream on the Internet means that it’s easily accessible from almost any device with a web browser.

Given that Laconi.ca already exists and can be deployed to your own server, basically what is missing is software that links clients to the Laconica backend. Ubuntu and Mac OS already have most of that support – the notification systems can forward events that they receive. Windows support is sort of there in the form of Snarl (though very, very few applications use it). A J2ME application is needed for the vast majority of phones out there; an Android phone can have this sort of background daemon running all the time, anyway. Apple would likely need to build some sort of support into its push notification system in order for iPhones to mimic this functionality.

Put all of this together, and you’ve suddenly got a way to aggregate your digital life into a single, very easy, stream of information. Add the ability to respond to certain events via replies (ex.: “Updates available. Reply ‘install’ to install available updates”) and the cost of your remote management system has dropped to pretty much zero. How cool would that be?

If you believe the hype, electronic paper (“e-paper”) displays are going to take over the world. Unlike traditional emissions-based displays like LCD screens, or CRT screens, e-paper displays reflect light and thus look exactly like a piece of paper does. The huge advantage of such a display is that it only draws power when it is changing and that it (supposedly) is easier on human eyes, as it does not flicker and has a wider viewing angle. The Amazon Kindle and the Kindle 2 are the first mainstream e-paper based devices I’ve seen in the U.S. – though e-paper based gadgets have been available commercially ever since the Sony Librie came out in 2004. These are my thoughts about the Kindle 2.

A cousin of mine has the original Kindle. The device was a weirdly shaped wedge, and in the few minutes I had to play with it, I found much to criticize with regard to its industrial design, but I also held out hope that the next generation of the Kindle might have a better designed future. He also was not entirely happy with the catalog of books available, but in browsing the catalog myself, I found that a majority of the books that I am interested in were indeed available in the Kindle shop; since then, the Kindle online shop has only increased in size, though the genres from which books are available have not increased dramatically. Thus, if you’re a science fiction buff, then you’re going to enjoy the Kindle’s selection; a more mainstream fiction person is likely not to enjoy the Kindle store much – and good luck finding any Harry Potter on the Kindle, legitimately.

In its opening letter to you on the Kindle, Amazon states that its goal is to make the Kindle disappear as you’re reading – that they would like you to think of the Kindle as you would any book. After reading a few books on it, I realized that they had largely succeeded. It takes me a few minutes to get into the mode of reading it, but after I do, it goes a lot faster. There are, however, some important caveats that make it possible:

• First, I have always been comfortable reading from a screen – in college, and even to some extent before that, in high school, I was equally happy reading from a screen or from a piece of paper; many people are not.
• Second, I choose to use the Kindle at its smallest font size, which gives approximately the same number of lines on screen as a page from a mass market paperback, meaning my brain accepts the switch reasonably easily; on the other hand, when I was using the Kindle with its default font size (about four points larger), I was getting frustrated how quickly I ran out of text. If I were able to adjust the line spacing slightly down, the Kindle would likely be indistinguishable from the layout of a mass market paperback, but it works closely enough that my brain doesn’t bother distinguishing the two.
• Finally, I do not write in my books or printouts. Call me old-fashioned if you must, but I grew up in a household where murder was less of a crime than writing in books, and I refuse to write in books, or bend their pages to make a bookmark and so on; it pains me to see people scribbling in their books, and I wince if I should end up with a copy of a book that someone else has written in (hence why I rarely, if ever, buy used books). Those heathens of you who do write in your books, however, will find it painful to annotate with the Kindle.

So, there is a target audience that the Kindle can fill the needs of very well. Certainly, it is not yet ready to have replaced the 20 kilos of books and laptop that I was carrying around in college, but it is an important stepping stone on the way to that dream being fulfilled.

Amazon has also gone out of its way (some, including myself, would say intrusively so) to make buying books easy on the Kindle; pressing Menu at any time pops up a menu with “Shop in the Kindle Store” selected by default. From there you can search by starting to type, or by browsing through the Kindle’s quarter of a million books, or hundred odd periodicals. Buying is as easy as clicking Buy; in fact, the combination of a slightly stiff and unresponsive directional pad and Amazon’s decision to make “Buy” the default selection has caused me to buy at least a couple of books accidentally. (I should note here that you are, as always, reliant on Amazon’s continued goodwill in order to return those accidentally bought books). Nonetheless, the store is easy to use, is very convenient (at least, in areas with a Sprint signal) and encourages people to buy books the same way that they would in a bookstore.

Of course, there is a lot more content that is out of copyright, and more recently, available under copyleft licences. Through the Kindle’s free internet browser, a quick visit to a site like freekindlebooks.org or feedbooks.com will net you thousands of out of copyright books, stories and the like – all downloaded directly to your Kindle through the magic of Sprint’s wireless network. More problematic is modern content available under a copyleft licence. For example, one of my favourite modern sci-fi stories, Charles Stross‘ Accelerando, is a collection of nine short stories, all available under a Creative Commons licence, and freely available from accelerando.org. However: 1) Amazon sells a $8 copy in the Kindle store; and 2) Stross does not offer a Kindle optimized file (nor can you, legally, create one, as Stross prohibits creating derivative works); I resorted to sending my Kindle the HTML file and tracking through the story that way, a most unpleasant way of doing so (it also shows me as the author, which is flattering, but wrong).

On the other hand, getting Cory Doctorow‘s Eastern Standard Tribe was as simple as browsing over to Doctorow’s site and downloading the Kindle-optimized file. A proper directory of Kindle-optimized modern stories under a copyleft licence would be very helpful. And I’m guessing that it may even be in Amazon’s interest to establish and provide this directory as it would provide an alternative content stream for their device. Simply adding native PDF reading ability would solve a huge usability gap – even the modern Sony Readers have that ability, and it’s truly a sad day when Sony, that bastion of proprietary formats, has a more open device than any Amazon, a supposedly web- and standard- friendly Internet company.

Ultimately, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with the Kindle – and that comes from someone whose needs are met by the Kindle. As someone who is willing to suspend some of the disbelief that this is not paper, the Kindle 2 is an excellent reading device: light, high contrast and sporting easy access to an extensive content library. To be sure, the always-on connection helps tremendously – it means that I can look up a term on the go (ever tried to read a Neal Stephenson novel?), and download my next book as soon as I finish one. That said, even I, an enthusiastic early adopter, have some reservations with the device itself.

First the form factor is awkward. I would happily forgo the keyboard, or accept a tiny little keypad ala Blackberry, for a much smaller, thicker device. Something physically the size of a paper back, even one of the larger trade paperbacks, would not simply be an easier form factor to carry, it would also make it a little easier to mentally accept the Kindle as a book replacement. Second (and I know this would push the Kindle from book-replacement to full-fledged computer), the OS leaves something to be desired in the customization department. For example, to get to the browser (easily the most used experimental function), I have to go to the device home, click Menu, go down several options to “Experimental” (no easy thing when the screen refresh is so slow) and only then can I open the browser – by which I’ve forgotten what term it was that I was searching for in Wikipedia. Meanwhile, that “Shop in Kindle Store” function is in every menu, sitting unused except for moments when I’m actually interested in buying a book.

Finally, there’s the question of why Kindle the device exists at all. At this moment, I have a very fine little Kindle app on my iPhone, and I cannot help but think that Kindle for Android-based phones, J2ME phones and the like are not very far behind. While those applications certainly lack the all of the Kindle’s features (like shopping in the Kindle store), those are certainly things that can be added to future revisions of the Kindle software. And there are certainly some very compelling reasons to use those existing devices, not the least of which is that they already exist and already have a huge marketplace presence. The Kindle adds yet one more device to carry (and in an uncomfortable form factor at that), and while I go back and forth on the one device or many device argument, a book reader is not one of those additional devices that I would want to necessarily carry – no matter how nicely designed or what advanced screen technology may lie within.

While I don’t doubt Kindle 3 is coming, the only question I have for Amazon is: will the Kindle 3 be the last dedicated device? Because from where I sit, Amazon seems to have solved the most vexing e-book problem of all (content) and is now merely creating more problems by continuing to insist everyone carry yet one more device. There’s a limit to the number of pockets that I have – and I’m not sure the Kindle 2 has earned its own pocket on its own merits. But it is pretty cool to be the first on the block with the future of displays and to have a device that can go weeks between charges.

I got a great kick out of reading some of the comments to this Lifehacker.com article. Just a few days ago, I wondered what it would be like to not have Internet access 24/7 and while I admit to being slightly weirded out by the thought, I thought I could manage.

Then it occured to me that chances are that if my Internet access is down, it’s likely to be because of a weather issue or some local disaster. This is a problem because the Internet is my primary source of news: wandering around the house resulted in one TV (probably also useless since the same people provide Internet and cable) and one radio (slightly closer to the dead side of things than the live) being found and no other real way to get the news without the Internet.

The worst case scenario, of course, is a prolonged power outage, which happens more often than you’d think around here – the spring and autumn rains are pretty devastating when it comes to utilities. Then not only is the main Internet out, but all the devices with wireless connections are soon to follow as the batteries die out.

One of the earliest “mobile devices” I had, the Nokia N800, quickly became a sort of mecca for porting efforts. In quick succession, I saw Abiword, Gnumeric and other staples of the Linux world ported over, meaning that with a little bit of luck and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use the N800 as a full-fledged computer. (I would know: I did use it as my primary computer for some three months while HP and I haggled over the warranty status of my main computer.)

By contrast, Android and the successive iterations of OpenMoko’s Neo and various other Linux phones simply do not seem to have inherited this rich set of applications. Even something as trivial as a proper .Mobi or PDF reader has not made it past the initial design stages. (Google “android PDF” to see the littered corpses of PDF readers through the months.)

I attribute this to two main causes:

First, like Nokia did with Maemo, I think that Google almost expects people to come to the platform and write such basic apps, because they are a well known company. On the other hand, unlike Nokia, which basically ignored (or provided not much leadership, at any rate) the Maemo development community until the Maemo 5 announcement, Google is trying to be responsive to the needs of its development communities. This includes things like a single storefront and a paradigm shift (in the Linux world) away from package management to app management, which is simpler and more straightforward for a non-technically minded audience. However, Maemo started life with a lot more apps out of the box; the lack of basic media capabilities on the G1 put me off the phone quite quickly (and by media, I don’t just mean music, but rather the entire stack of video, audio and document handling). From where I sit, as an end-user, Google seems poised to repeat Nokia’s mistake of essentially providing life support to its platform, rather than actively nourishing and sustaining the platform with its active participation in user-facing components.

Second, the G1 is also a cross road between two very different communities: a technically savvy, highly intelligent community of geeks who dig Linux, and second group of users that the first consider the unwashed masses. This is apparent most of all in the storefront: even in the early days of the G1, the first community would post demo code or a how-to for others to learn and be rewarded with feedback like “this application doesn’t do anything” or “what’s a proof of principle” or, even, “first!1″ from the second. While that’s allowed the big, mass-facing companies like EA Mobile or Namco to thrive, along with independents who are there to make a quick buck off the goldrush (much like the iPhone App Store), the Linux buffs have been scared away, along with their years of meticulously crafted and beautiful code, like Abiword and Gnumeric, not to mention VNC apps and H.264 decoders. Google can choose to ignore this community absolutely, if they so choose (there is often more money in the masses, after all), but in doing so, a shallower, less interesting platform emerges and many of the gems of the open source world will never make it to Android.

I’m not laying the blame at Google’s feet here. What I’m trying to point out is that Nokia had time to make mistakes with Maemo because it had huge first mover advantages. Google has more competition and needs to move more nimbly to ensure that its platform not just continues to survive, but thrive, and that can happen only with more Google code in Google’s code.

One of my recent musical discoveries is a group called Anjunabeats, a group that specializes in electronic and dance music. One of their songs on a recent album (that I must admit, I was not a fan of initially) has a Bill Gates-like guy saying something to the effect of “leads to decreased performance and reduced battery life”.

I was thinking about this song today as I thought back through my history of phones. My earliest Nokia 3310 lasted between 4 and 5 days initially and between 80-90% of that when I left it after a year of use. My next one, a Sony Ericsson disaster, still lasted as much as a week between charges (though, admittedly, I didn’t do much with it). From there it got better – with BT running, my Nokia N80 started with about a week or so of standby time and just over five days under normal usage; I should add that in those days where my commute was routinely 90 mins to two hours, and I lived pretty far from the city, my N80 was used pretty heavily as my link to the outside world. Even towards the end, my N80 would last me three to four days on its original battery and about five days on a new replacement battery.

All this changed when I got my iPhone. Gone were the days of two hour charges lasting my entire work week. Instead, every other night I found myself plugging my iPhone in and waking up to a full charge. When I used a G1 briefly, I noted the atrocious battery life in my review – it was bad enough to warrant special mention. And I find it weird that I’m beginning to think of my work Blackberry as a battery champ because it lasts two and a half days of my heavy use.

I wonder if my expectations for what I ought to be able to do with phones has increased so much, or whether manufacturers have managed to convince us to lower our battery life expectancies. I, for one, would love to go back to the days of a week long charge.

Anyone else think similarly?

In 1998, my Father and I went shopping for a top of the line monitor for his then top of the line HP desktop. We came back with a 17-inch Viewsonic CRT that had to be specially ordered, and cost somewhere in the vicinity of $650. 7 or so years later, I acquired a second-hand 17″ Dell LCD  for less than $100. You laugh now that I paid money for a 17″ LCD monitor, but that’s the moral of this story: in 2002, a 720p video camera cost about $20,000, weighed about 20 kg, and required a post-production studio in order to correctly format the video for broadcast TV. A few weeks ago, for 1% of that price, I got a 200 gram 1080p camera that produces video suitable for HDTV broadcasts. Or, at any rate, suitable for broadcast via YouTube. This, then, is a review of the Sony Webbie HD. I should note that this is a review of the MHS-CM1, which looks like a traditional camcorder; Sony also has an upcoming Webbie HD called the MHS-PM1, that looks more like the usual pocket video camcorders.

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