July 10, 2007
Meandering down a path well tred over at least the past five years, Robert Scoble asks if 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop. I wrote a bit about the growing enthusiasm for Linux, including Dell’s embrace of Ubuntu, for a recent LAPTOP column.
The answer to the question is no, but Linux is spearheading the move of low-cost ultraportables such as the Foleo into.. whatever markets they are targeting. I’m increasingly intrigued by the Asus EEE which, contrary to my earlier post, seems poised to become a reality later this year. Indeed, I can’t decide whether I like the idea of the 7″ $199 or 10″ 299 model better. The former price resonates more as a companion product. If I’m springing for a high-resolution screen, I’m probably interested in tasks that are better-suited to a more mainstream Windows notebook. HotHardware has an informative article that spotlights the two Linux UIs being considered.
July 9, 2007
Engadget just posted the second part of my look at the iPhone’s keyboard from the angle of suitability to task. With all the attention around the iPhone and it’s well-received if sometimes inefficient user interface, I have to wonder how the folks at Microsoft feel. Few if any companies have championed so many pen computing initiatives (Pocket PC, Tablet PC, Windows Mobile, UMPC) through the years and yet Microsoft. But now the company has had its thunder stolen by Apple as it failed to capture literally what Bill Gates articulated as Microsoft’s guiding vision throughout the ’90s, the notion of information at your fingertips In retrospect, it looiks like touch was right. It was the pen that was wrong.
May 30, 2007
Later today the blogosphere will be aglow with news and commentary regarding Microsoft Surface, the company’s pricey coffee table computer that features multit-touch direct object manipulation and physical object recognition. The sheer novelty of Surface will no doubt enable it to draw attention in public venues, not unlike those Reactrix installations that seem in some ways a crude prototype of Surface.
Surface is cool for manipulating and resizing photos and maps and I can see how it could be helpful with good ol’ productivity, allowing you to spread documents around a dgital desk more similarly to how you would on a physical one. That said, it seems you could reap most of those benefits implementing a subset of the technology on a more standard-sized PC, and apply them in more situations.
I’ll say this about Surface — the user interface looks very clean. Micosoft has come a long way since the days when endless rows of cryptic gray toolbar buttons dominated Windows.
May 29, 2007
Over at CrunchGear, Mike Kobrin opines that memory card usage in MP3 players and music-playing smartphones, which is that they will be the key to sharing your media across your various devices. With this, he reveals Sony’s aspirations for Memory Stick circa 1999. And alas, this dream wasn’t even realized by its more popular and capable rival SD. Mike could counter that things are different now since the cards are getting much bigger; 8GB microSD will be here before long. Still, not many MP3 players support removable memory although SanDisk certainly has its reasons.
As I suggested when I criticized Motorola’s promotion of these cards as bringing the ROKR Z8 up to par with standalone MP3 players,. I disagree. Memory cards haven’t even emerged as the primary way that digital cameras — their most popular host device — exchange photos with other devices, and any removeable media is simply doomed to be out of date within minutes in this age of constant content acquisition.
Mike decries Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for this kind of sharing, but it’s not a problem with the networks. It’s a weakness of there being any kind of reliable cross-platform, cross-device synchronization. Indeed, this is a holy grail of consumer technology and something I plan to bring up the next time I speak with the DLNA.
Om Malik’s post on GigaOm that improved Mac media management software for Nokia’s N-series of “multimedia computers” — the kind you use to talk to other people with cellphones — will soon appear reminds me of a concern I have regarding Mac users of other smartphones in the fast-approaching post-iPhone world. In its early days, iTunes synced to several different brands of MP3 players, including those from Rio. That support waned precipitously following the release of the iPod.
Now Apple has a built-in synchronization architecture in Tiger and the architecture is open to lots of different cell phones. Will that also shut down and become closed after Apple releases the iPhone? I wonder what Brian Hall of Mark/Space — purveyors of software that connect the Mac to mobile devices never intended for it — has to say about it. I remember Brian from the days when the company did alpha paging software!
May 1, 2007
When I first met with LaLa.com, CEO Bill Nguyen spoke about the importance of selection at online CD stores such as Amazon.com (which Apple had claimed during last September that the iTunes store was on the verge of passing). A recent meeting with LaLa’s John Kuch again touched on that theme. Apple’s selection in music, however, is not as rich as its selection in movies, and that’s the target of suddenly high-profile Vudu. After all, if instant access to a limited selection of movies had been so compelling, MovieBeam would have likely found a greater audience, and it was cheaper than the $300 being bandied about for its box, particularly after discounts. (I “overpaid” for mine at about $60 as I recall.)
So, armed with content from all of the majors save for Sony Pictures Entertainment, which may be facing corporate pressure to distribute to the PS3 (or not to further other strategic corporate interests), selection will likely be the trump card that Vudu plays as other solutions seem like they could probably circumvent any IP that the company may have with its in-house peer-to-peer content delivery network. Interestingly enough, the Times’ story quotes Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, the nearly 7 million members of which have to be considered low-hanging fruit for Vudu.
When I wrote about Apple TV versus TiVo and versus cable/satellite, I pegged programming depth and value as two areas where the digital media adapter was far behind. Vudu probably falls short too for now, but that could change fast if the company is really serious about competing with DVD and goes after the already aired TV show market. I’ll definitely have more to say about Vudu soon.
April 17, 2007
I spent most of Sunday troubleshooting and replacing an ATI Radeon 9800. (I know, not very 1337, this is an older PC.) My nearly superhuman intuition regarding computers was invoked as a burning smell emanated from the PC. Of course, I was glad to see it was the video card and not the motherboard. I touched the non-functional fan and it fell off the card — not a good sign. I downgraded to a 9250 from VisionTek with a nice, stationary heat sink. Hopefully this should last me until I’m ready to upgrade my rig.
I’ve long had both Macs and PCs at home, but after using a Dell as my primary desktop since about 1998 (moving from a Power Computing PowerWave), I’m seriously considering moving back to the Mac, although probably not until next year. I’m not yet sure whether I would want to run Windows in dual-boot mode or virtualized.
April 12, 2007
There was strong reaction today to the news that Apple will delay Leopard by a few months as a result of shifting resources to the iPhone. I’m quoted on Macworld.com speculating that the delay might be due to contractual obligations between AT&T and Apple, but I no longer believe that that could be a factor. In any case, as Tim Bajarin says in the article, four months isn’t a big delay for an operating system cycle.
Elsewhere on the site, Dan Frakes calls for calm among Apple’s frantic fans who think that the Leopard delay is the beginning of the end for the Mac. (Remember when such evangelists would have called for the head of someone who suggested such a thing during Apple’s struggles in the mid-’90s?) Citing the breadth of Apple’s Mac lineup and that the notion of what a “computer” is has changed, he rightly calls such concerns “overwrought and overstated.”
But Dan’s reasoning that Apple has long offered more than just computers, implying that little has changed, is also a bit oversimplified. None of the other Mac peripherals that he cites, such as monitors, printers and PDAs, were as strategic a cash cow as the iPod. And few, other than Newton, were platforms the way the iPhone and arguably AppleTV is. (For the record, Apple never sold the Apple Pippin, except to Bandai.)
Simply put, these are higher-growth opportunities than StyleWriters ever were and allow Apple to reach far beyond the Mac installed base. That said, Apple’s Mac business is not only broad, but it’s very healthy, As today’s iPhone announcement reinforced, Apple’s “three-screen” strategy has Mac OS X at the heart of it, and the Mac is not only the premiere device for that software, but serves as the critical “second screen.”
April 10, 2007
Ryan Block digs the digital jewel box concept and offers some good suggestions for improving it. The digital jewel box could easily be combined with a SideShow-enabled digital picture frame or other kinds of elaborate touch-screen controls. SideShow is one of the Vista’s most differentiating features. Unfortunately, the company that pioneered the idea doesn’t even have its hardware up to the expensive SideShow spec.
Speaking of (or rather linking to) Art Lebedev Studios, probably my favorite product is the company’s plush smileys. At least they’re shipping and affordable by mere mortals. I could also see them coming in useful if I had a mopey personal blog.
April 6, 2007
I’ll have more to say on the Apple-EMI DRM announcement in an upcoming Portable Pundit column in LAPTOP (and perhaps elsewhere), but for now I’ve been a bit taken aback at the many jumps to conclusion I’ve seen around EMI “ditching” DRM. It has done no such thing. It has merely offered a non-DRM option, one that still penalizes consumers in terms of making them pay more for extra quality for which they may have no desire. Ryan has framed many of the variables in providing a realistic assessment of the announcement, breaking a bit from Engadget’s typically consumerist anti-DRM crusade.
Sure, EMI’s decision has been accurately touted as a significant first step. But what if it remains the only step? It’s far from a foregone conclusion that other majors will step in line, and so the value of having only some tracks available DRM-free diminsihes the value of having one’s music library DRM-free. In fact, I could argue that — for iPod users — it is easier to stay within the DRM usage constraints than try to keep track of what’s DRM-free and what’s not, particularly when accepting DRM is cheaper , works with what they have, and offers a gateway to the living room. Apple will be challenged in terms of how it presents the choice to consumers because it has, up to now, rightly hid DRM until it has reared its annoying head.
Apple and EMI could have made this a clear victory if they removed the DRM option, but it appears as if profits got ahead of promise. Consumers, not labels, will determine the success of DRM-free music.
