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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.

Did Postbot work?

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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