Out of the Box

HP’s much-heralded Mini-note has finally arrived and to favorable reviews.  CRN calls it “a real winner” and says that “the quality and finish is outstanding.” James Kendrick now questions whether his Fujitsu Tablet PC is worth its 3x price premium over the Mini-Note. While I’m no Tablet PC fan, I like the Fujitsu P-series and form factor, and the company will certainly feel more heat in its niche as other notebook heavyweights move in.

This segment will represent a test for Dell, which seems prepared to enter this space before the end of the year. Dell has done well in the education market (for which the Mini-Note was especially designed) with its aggressive pricing while trying to improve its design perceptions particularly as it has moved more aggressively into the hands-on world of retail. It will be challenging for Dell to lowball HP while live up to the 2133’s design expectation.

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I certainly agree with Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam that mainstream consumers will be in no hurry to abandon the subsidy model. But in addition to seeing whether more sophisticated customers will shell out $200 or more to run advanced wireless devices on Verizon’s network, we have to see how Verizon will price open access before understanding the impact it will have on new or integrated devices in the market.

McAdam acknowledges that consumers won’t sign up for multiple $50 per month plans, and at Gearlog, Sascha Segan notes that Verizon might offer incremental device access for $5/month. This is the kind of scheme that Sprint has talked about for Xohm as well although Sprint has acknowledged there should be an unlimited access cap.

There are already a number of devices other than handsets that are obvious candidates to work on a high-speed wireless network — portable navigation devices, handheld gaming consoles, MP3 players/Internet radios, and more. Consumers are already buying these devices. Sure, adding WAN modems would add cost, but it’s really the high price of wireless broadband that is holding them back. Verizon needs to offer a cheap tier of service that entails either limited data or limited speed. Such pricing would go a long way toward enabling the kind of creative innovation that Dash Navigation has enabled with only a GPRS connection at its disposal.

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There’s a pretty exciting report coming from the Financial Times that Apple is negotiating with the major music record labels to build in access to their catalogs into the price of the device. Such a move would be consistent with rumors of an Apple DVR in that it would show that Apple is intent on keeping the value on its hardware products, the roots of the company. As many have speculated, while Apple has sold over four billion songs, the iTunes store hasn’t been a major profit center.

According to the FT, the labels want $100 per device, which would be prohibitive for where popular models such as the iPod nano are today. Also, I’m not thrilled with the idea of the license being tied to a device. That seems like a step backward from the trend of DRM-free music sales; even DRM tracks can be used on an unlimited number of iPods.. Nevertheless, if Apple (or any other company, for that matter) and the labels can pull it together, it would represent a digital music renaissance, taking us full-circle back to the early days of “free” digital music and the explosion in discovery that went along with it.

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Yesterday Slacker released a firmware update that addresses some of the glitches I described in my post yesterday, including the WPA password key problem and some stuttering I was occasionally hearing twoard the beginning of songs (anathema for flash device). The firmware upgrade was transparent and the Portable now automatically connects to the last access point used, which is the way it should be. By the way, unllke the Zune, the Slacker Portable can sync over Wi-Fi even when it is running on batteries.

However, I’d still like to see better status reporting on the home screen (or maybe even in the less prominent About screen) when a sync is complete because clicking “Connect” to see the status starts a sync again.

Glitches aside, it’s worth noting that the Slacker Portable provides a positive and unique portable music experience, picking up on some of the best aspects of last year’s innovative Sansa Connect, which unfortunately was tied to a premium music service that is slated to be shut down.

Slacker’s PR team also tells me that the Portable’s battery is indeed removable by inserting a pin into what looks like a reset hole.

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This weekend I had some time to check out the Slacker Portable, the device component of its free-tiered streaming music service. I’ve got more pictures after the break. Slacker describes the device simply as a “personal radio.” I was never fond of the “personal video recorder” term for describing devices like TiVo, but at least this has no “digital” or “Internet” techie nomenclature.

Some first impressions:

• Immediate out of the box experience is very good. Since Slacker knows the details of your account, they can populate the device with your custom stations. Unpack and press play (well, sort of, since there is actually no “Play” button on the device, just a “Pause” button that does double-duty).
• On the other hand, the first sync attempt failed without an error message. The new station that I added appeared on the opening menu, but there was no music available in it. A follow-up attempt closer to my access point worked just fine, except that the Portable isn’t remembering my network access key, which is quite annoying.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve started to see more stories like this one about the rise in portable navigation device theft. It happened to a co-worker of mine. Unfortunately, we tend to see this happen in a number of high-growth, high-ticket portable and mobile products such as iPods and in-dash stereos that led to the development of removable faceplates.

One local TV segment noted that Long Island police have seen a fivefold increase in theft of the devices, which would be consistent with the overall unit growth we’ve seen in the U.S. This problem will get worse before it gets better although the rapidly declining prices of PNDs may remove some incentive..

Some TV segments advise not only removing the windshield mount when you leave your car, but taking care to wipe away any smudges that the suction cup might leave behind! Fortunately, PNDs are getting thin and small enough so that stuffing them into a handbag or even a jacket pocket is becoming more of an option.

Last December, Sanyo introduced a PND with a fingerprint reader. Given the trend toward voice recognition in these devices, voiceprints may become another verification tool that, if broadly implemented, might discourage thieves,

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More favorable response is pouring in on the iPhone SDK, which significant capital will support, but John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball was a key inspiration for my Engadget column Switched On, points out that enforcement will have some challenges.

It leads me to another question. How easy will it be for applications to spread virally for the iPhone? I’d expect the App Store to support links and ratings, much like albums in the iTunes Store. Will iPhone applications, like other mobile ones, have the ability to share a demo or trail version with a friend or colleague? For that matter, will the App Store offer try-before-you-buy versions?

And speaking of the iTunes Store, isn’t it odd that the App Store, launching in June, will be available over EDGE, but the iTunes Music Store is available only over Wi-Fi? I have to think full-fledged games would be bigger than song downloads. That would lend credence to speculation that we can expect a 3G iPhone in June.

Update: Michael Arrington notes that when applications are not active, they quit — shades of early Mac OSes. Will we see a multitouch MultiFinder? And, again, would Apple allow a utility that would juggle multiple applications, the way Switcher did in early versions of Mac OS? He also notes John Gruber’s excellent question regarding whether Amazon would be able to deliver a version of its AmazonMP3 store for the iPhone. However, if it’s true that apps can write only to their own little sandbox, it looks like the answer would be no. Or, in any case, any such purchased tracks would not be synced back to iTunes. There’s no problem if you buy them on the desktop, of course.

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If Apple was going to be excessively restrictive with its SDK, there would have been no point in publishing it, Apple noted at the introduction that it was a “platform company” (most of the time anyway). Combined with the $100 million iFund, it appears clear that we are witnessing nothing less than the rebirth of the Macintosh now shrunk to pocket size and inviting a new breed of developers to rethink mobile application development.

Perhaps, contrary to Michael Mace’s post on why smartphone development is dead, the reason is not the “combination of splintering platforms, shrinking distribution channels, and rising costs,” but rather that native applications haven’t been distinguished enough from what you could do in a browser or via platforms such as BREW. Other factors helping development are having the App Store on the device and available over cellular connections and not having to account for countless platform and screen size variations.

Of course, these are all conditions that make it easier to dip the fishing rod. There are still no guarantees that the consumer will bite. But from what we’ve been seeing iPhone users do in terms of accessing the Web and using their music features, they have high potential to create the most successful mobile smartphone application market we have seen.

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Some may gawk that Apple chose to work with Microsoft on a corporate e-mail solution for the iPhone but, really, after Palm did (before it offered Windows Mobile handsets) Nokia licensed ActiveSync (in the days before it was Silverlight-friendly), there wasn’t much doubt that Apple would be amenable to doing so.

Despite now having the Exchange imprimatur, the iPhone probably won’t overtake Blackberry overnight, but its acceptance of Exchange indicates another setback for Blackberry Connect.  Still, even though many enterprises don’t have an up-to-date enough Exchange server to support ActiveSync, more of them will get there at some point. RIM certainly hasn’t helped its cause with recent (albeit brief) outage.

Despite it being positioned as the ideal enterprise mobile device, study after study has shown mobile e-mail as the killer application for these devices and you can effectively do that on a device that is a lot cheaper than an iPhone. Of course, if that’s what businesspeople are buying with their own money anyway, that could become a moot point. In fact, to some extent Apple is betting on that.

I’ve asked Apple representatives if Apple would allow a third-party Blackberry Connect application to be offered in the App Store or whether they might consider that a security risk. I should hear more on that later..

Update: RIM shows they’re down with cool consumer media, too!

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Over at News.com, Coop joins the reaction to Apple’s “slam” of Flash, throwing in the Adobe reaction that both Flash and Flash Lite have been very successful, thanks so much. I’ve often marveled at how responsive Mac OS X feels on the iPhone. This was a thread that Jeff Atwood referred to in the post about Vista’s perceived performance. Jobs says simply that desktop Flash is too heavy for the iPhone, and that Flash Lite isn’t up to desktop performance. Essentially, he’s asking Apple Adobe to do the same thing Apple has done, which is to optimize desktop software for a mobile platform.

If you are an iPhone user, you have to read between the lines here because Jobs is essentially saying that Apple wants Flash on the iPhone (which is good news considering the scenarios I laid out as to why Apple might not) but just can’t accommodate it. That’s an engineering problem Adobe is motivated to solve given as iPhone sales grow and consumers do more mobile browsing on it.Adobe will get there. And let’s face it, few software companies have as long a history of supporting Apple technologies as Adobe.

We may not see it announced on the 6th, but Flash playback will come to the iPhone.

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