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Shopping smarter with Google Shopper on your Android Phone

via Google Shopper for Android.

Okay, I’ve had it. Four years of Blackberry and I really want a true smartphone. iPhone, Droid, Nexus — anything but this godawful enter-your-password Lotus Notes belching, horrible web browser, crippled App Store functionality Blackberry.

I need Global GSM. So that means T-Mobile or AT&T. I may downgrade the Blackberry to an email only device and move my cell number to an Android……

But which? I hate touch screens as I have sausage fingers. Droid is a Verizon product. …..

I stole this camera thanks to Uncle Fester who pointed me at Amazon. Sucker was half-price and arrived in a single day, just in time for my Orient Express Tour which commences Sunday. My old Canon point-and-shoot ISUS (which I bought in the Singapore airport in the spring of 2006 for my first trip to China) is with my daughter capturing a term in Florence.  I hate capturing life’s key moments on a Blackberry Bold smartphone camera — most of which come out looking like smeared crap and are only acceptable for UFO sightings, citizen eyewitness news, and sexting offenses.

No, Nova Roma, Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul deserve 12 megapixels, so I hit the Amex and am now ready to go capture some scenes and clog up my Flickr stream.

Here’s some stuff from today’s walk-in-lieu-of-lunch. Cotuit in January is not scenic — sort of like living in a depressing black and white Swedish movie — but you take what you get.

Oh, and I continue to like GDGT.com’s blog gadget of gadgets that let’s me list what consumer electronic bling I am packing. For me, any kind of gadget is better than antidepressants.  Feel blue? Buy an iPod. Want some joy in your life? Buy a Slingbox. GDGT let’s you capture that and more. And Ryan and Peter and Barry are good guys who put up with Project Mayhem at CES when our “party” got a little out of control.

Heading into CES two weeks ago I wrote about the Lenovo Skylight, the first so-called “Smartbook” to run Qualcomm’s Snapdragon ARM process, a device explicitly conceived to be a “cloud computer” or social device.

My colleague and Lenovo’s first official blogger, VP of Design David Hill, has written a riveting account of how the Skylight came to be designed by Richard Sapper, the Milan-based wizard of industrial design who designed the first IBM ThinkPad. Skylight began in the early fall of 2008 when a small team was formed to look into a rapid development project to get Lenovo ahead of the commodity netbook market with a strong, differentiated offering that addressed the rapid shifts in online usage. While we focused on alternative operating systems such as Android, our SVP of Notebooks, Peter Hortensius, urged the team to consider the Qualcomm processor because of its unique architecture, amazing power consumption profile, and integrated wireless communications.

Once the principles were established, Hill recommended we turn to the original master for a concept. His blog post details the remarkable birth of the machine, including a chance meeting at a Gloucester, Massachusetts cocktail party where Sapper was introduced to a luthier (stringed instrument craftsman) with a woodworking shop and the capability to produce a wooden model.

I think the tale is the best thing we’ve ever published on a corporate blog. I hope you enjoy it.

Coming out of the 2008 Summer Olympics I joined a small team within Lenovo consisting of the company’s best engineers and designers to re-invent the netbook category — those small (sub 11″ screen) PCs that have taken the market by storm since their introduction two years ago.

The netbook category has flourished for a couple reasons best explored by a serious PC analyst — my opinion is that sub $400 PCs in a super-portable form factor were the perfect option for consumers slammed by economic concerns in this Great Recession and who are gradually migrating to a “disposable” device model brought on by a constant upgrade cycle in their phone and other consumer electronics.  Alas, the netbook is still the same operating system, the same computing model, just in a smaller, cheaper package.

Consider the smartphone.  Small. Thin. Long battery life. No patches or updates or viruses. No waiting to boot. It’s always connected (almost always). Highly designed. It just works. But it is too small to watch a movie on and is a major pain to compose anything on — aside from simple SMS or email “grunts.”

What happens if you combine the two models — the connected simplicity of a smartphone with the physical ergonomics of a netbook? Well, you get a “smartbook.”

Today Lenovo announced the first smartbook — called Skylight —  in partnership with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based leader in phone chipsets. Using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, the Lenovo Skylight is designed with cloud computing and social networking in mind.  It is not a phone per se, but it leverages a 3G or Wifi network connection to present the user with a high definition browser experience that assumes most, if not all of the user’s content and activities are up there, in the cloud.

There is no harddrive, just a lot of flash memory.  Productivity applications? Google Docs. Music? Amazon.  This is a device designed for messaging and media.

So what makes it social? The user interface is a proprietary design built around an “app” paradigm. Those apps contain the user’s primary accounts — email, instant messaging, SMS, Facebook, etc. — and are extensible and customizable.  The device is meant to be constantly on and connected, permitting the user to interact with it on an ad hoc basis, not a formal session where the user needs to power on, connect, then log in.

The design of the system is amazing, delivered by Richard Sapper, the genius behind the original ThinkPad.   The user interface is internally developed on top of a Linux kernel and is pretty intuitive and very browser centric. The software implementation was remarkable, particularly given the challenges of porting a large screen user experience to an ARM platform. The engineering teams lead by Mike Vanover, Jim Hunt, and others pulled off a significant development miracle in building the operating environment.

The name — Skylight — is indicative of the device’s mission as a hardware portal into the cloud. With persistent and constant 3G and wifi, the device should have no issues living up to its name.

I presented a prototype to some resellers in London last summer and over the course of a few days was able to play with the machine on a wifi only basis. Given the early, pre-pre-beta condition of the build, it was surprisingly stable and provided a great glimpse into what a cloud device would behave like.  My earlier thoughts on stripped down operating systems and cloud centric computing models all emanated from my week with the Skylight prototype. It also was a device that seemed to sell itself. Thin is definitely in and the Skylight is astonishingly thin for a clamshell form factor. Watching the development process and the way the project leader Peter Gaucher was able to keep the device as thin as its initial prototype was remarkable: essentially thinness comes at a price, but Gaucher was able to defend the machine against the forces of thickness and economics.

As soon as we have seed units I hope to get some Skylights into the hands of the Lenovo Blogger Advisory Council for their insights into how they use the device and ways to improve it as it evolves. This represents a very interesting exercise in innovation, one I was honored to have witnessed. It represents and embodies a lot of what makes Lenovo such an interesting place to be: a place where risks are taken and old paradigms are challenged. Is this the be-all, end-all social device? No, but it is a start that marks a radical departure from old familiar models to a new one altogether.

I discussed this category at length with my former Forbes.com buddy Om Malik last week in San Francisco. He had tablet fever to some extent, and was more focused on operating systems issues such as the convergence of Android and Chrome or the presence of Jolicloud. The issue, as I see it, is one that Lenovo SVP Peter Hortensius has called the “wasteland” — the “tweener” space between a smartphone and a netbook — the space where we all are seeking some device about the size of an airplane ticket. The place where the Apple Newton once lived. And the Sony Vaio P series, and even our own prototype Pocket Yoga. We need a big screen to stream our movies and our YouTubes, yet we want to hold it to our ears so we can talk. We need a device that is persistent, that doesn’t need an outlet to survive more than couple hours of constant use, something that we can show off (consumer electronics are fashion statements).

Does Skylight achieve that? We shall see. I know I am ready to move to the category and expect it will, overtime, morph as carrier 3G/4G wireless models change, the cloud becomes more mainstream, and the  category achives ubiquity.

Reviews

Notebookreview.com

Engadget

Gizmodo

Smartbooks, netbooks, ultrathins, MIDs …. XP, Win7, Ubuntu, Android, Chrome …. 2010 is going to be very confusing for consumers seeking a cheap, stylish, and smart way to connect to their cloud.  CES next week ought to be very interesting in terms of devices and operating systems and category blur. From the NYT:

“Computer makers, however, find themselves in a tough spot these days when it comes to experimentation.

“There are lower margins and more form factors to go around,” said Patrick Moorhead, a vice president at Advanced Micro Devices. “These guys have to balance smartphones, MIDs, smartbooks, netbooks, value ultrathins, expensive ultrathins, full-size laptops and new form factors in desktops.” (A MID is, of course, a mobile Internet device.)”

via Have You Zeen What H.P. Is Up To? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

This is a very slick little device — think of a portable wireless WiFI router but instead of plugging into your cable or DSL it uses a 3G cell phone connection to provide wireless connectivity to up to five devices.

I am sitting at Logan Airport using the sucker — but can’t tunnel into the corporate VPN with it. Once I solve that snag I am flying and won’t need to commit every new thinkpad to a Verizon or AT&T WWAN/EVDO wireless WAN account.

The actual unit is smaller than this picture

So, now to cancel my X200’s AT&T account and live in the cloud while sticking it to the airport paid WiFi gods. Whoops, airport wifi is free right now thanks to Google.

You could buy one of these and equip a stack of Wifi enabled netbooks with one paid account …. the economics are very interesting and very disruptive provided I don’t bump over the 5 gigabytes of monthly bandwidth.

Waiting for a flight home to Boston, I lit up my wireless connection and tuned into MLB.com’s post season baseball feed. Having paid for two years in a row for a fairly weak service full of irrational blackouts and lots of calls to MLB.com’s customer service line to get permission to watch the paid stream, I expected to be able to follow TBS’ post season coverage through the MLB.com subscription.

Well, the good news is that I can — through a pretty slick video viewer that permits to select between eight camera angles and stack them together in a single, PIP, split, or two by two configuration. The problem of this “pick your angle” model is there is no editor/producer selecting camera angles and the overall experience is somewhat shitty. I want someone to decide what I need to see and not click like a fiend to get the camera to track a frozen-rope liner out to the 6-4-3 doubleplay.

The Twitter integration … well is interesting in that the peanut gallery is now officially blessed as contributors to the spectacle.

But overall, the most interesting thing about the MLB/TBS “HotCorner” application is checking out the behavior of the camera operators during commercial breaks when they zoom way in and like creeps perv the faces of the VIPs in the expensive seats to see if there are any celebrities worth calling out during the play-by-play.  Being the LA Dodgers one would expect some movie star to be fanning themselves with a program. The funny part is it is obvious the way the camera lingers that some producer is scanning faces and telling the cameraman to stick to faces wearing big “Jackie Onassis”  sunglasses or who look important by dint of their jawlines and silver hair.

Go Sox.

oh, yeah, Yankee Suck

What my world view is
Testing the Wicked Blogging App from Screaming Toaster. Seems to have a nice interface. I had been hitting my blog through the Blackberry browser but that was a long walk off the short dock. Wonder if there is a way to embed photos in process. Anyway: two day freebie then I need to decide on a $10 subscription.

This post was created at this location.

Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management at Google blogged yesterday about Google’s operating system direction. This is very significant as it signals a continuation of Google’s web-centric, cloud-focused view of the world, putting Chrome at the center of the experience.

This will be extremely significant over the next three years as the PC industry continues to evolve rapidly from a Wintel x86 legacy to a lighter, Smartphone type of model where connectivity is the enabler. This piece of news deserves the level of alerts it is kicking off. Add in the other piece of significant Google news this week — the symbolic dropping of the beta designation from GMail and Docs, and the future becomes a lot more clear.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

via Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS.

This has to be the oldest need in the world, but I would love to put my contacts into the cloud and keep them there, free from the incompatibilities of Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Blackberry, and whatever piece of crap device or software lies over the horizon.

1980s – newspaper reporter – I had a true rolodex. Stapling business cards onto the notched tabs.

1984 – PC Week. I move my contacts into AskSam, a flat file database. I start to print out huge snakes of sheetfeed dot matrix printer paper and pin to the wall of my cube.

1987 – I get sucked into a period of contact manager shiny-objectitis — GoldMine, ACT!, Lotus Agenda, Borland Sidekick ….. all fail

1988-1994: the email era commences. Starting with enterprise mail, external on MCI Mail, then CompuServe, The WELL. My personal contacts are all over the place by this point. I begin to lose portions of my “network” to entropy.

1995: Outlook. I start to declare MS Outlook is it. Despite the fact that the IT goons use some dumbass Novell email client as a follow on to CC:Mail. Opensource does not exist.

1995-2000: I rely on Outlook synching to a Palm Pilot. Forget synching to a Motorola cell phone. Not going to happen. Synch tools become a big buzz in the business.

2000: Lotus Notes enters my life at McKinsey. I give up on contact management. The Notes contact manager feels like something Franz Kakfa would write about.

2002-2004: back to Outlook, synching to a Windows Mobile device, a little HP thing ala the Palm.

2005: Back to Notes at IDG. I give up and refuse to manage contacts in Notes.

2006: Lenovo. Still on Notes. Not entering any contacts into Notes. Putting business cards into a binder with plastic sleeves.

2009: About to declare contact bankruptcy. My contacts are scattered to the winds.  I have IM contacts, internal Lenovo directories, backed up ancient CSV, PST and comma delimited Outlook files — gmail accounts, Thunderbird as my desktop email client pulling down pop3 mail for churbuck.com and my david.churbuck@gmail mail ……

Going forward: I want to stick this all in the cloud. How do I do this and balance my personal network with my professional? Suggestions please.

Chambers, the CEO of Cisco opines on GigaOM about the necessity of provisioning true broadband as part of the Obama economic stimulus package. Just as I am in favor of a big investment in high speed rail, I am definitely in favor of a high speed data highway for the country.

Chambers writes:

“If 100 Mbps at home seems ambitious, consider this: Japan and South Korea are already reaching that level. According to a forthcoming research paper by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, South Korea — a country with 1/6th the population of the United States — has almost as much Internet traffic. That’s because they’re already operating at average speeds of 49 Mbps.

In the U.S., ITIF projects that high-speed connections to the home would increase the number of telecommuters to 19 million by 2012. That would save 1.5 billion hours of commute time — and reduce gasoline consumption by 5 percent. It is a green technology, one that can help us kick our oil habit.”

I have telecommuted since 1988 when I started the New England bureau of a national magazine in my Boston bedroom. From 9600 bps Hayes Compatibility to my present DSL connection courtesy of Verizon (and as the first residential ISDN account on Cape Cod way back in the early early 90s), I would dearly love a surfeit of bits flowing my way. Would faster connections mean an economic boon for an economically challenged hinterland like Cape Cod? To some extent — and it certainly would change the nature of the upper Cape from arduous commuter bedroom community to a more normal residential cast with white collar types working from home for Fidelity rather than clogging Route 3 with their Camry’s.

Chambers doesn’t cite the set-aside in the stimulus plan for broadband. I need to go dig that out.

via John Chambers: Broadband Speeds Our Economy.

I just sent and read my first “private” documents on my Kindle — a bit of a breakthrough as I wondered if I could ever take my “to read” folder off of my desktop and transfer it to my Kindle. Turns out it’s simple.

Every Kindle has its own email address. Send a mail to that address from an approved sender and the attachment will be delivered wirelessly.  Most formats are supported, with PDF in experimental beta. I moved a Jeremiah Owyang’s white paper out of Forrester on social platforms, and aside from some formatting gremlins, it’s quite a convenient way to get reading off of the laptop and onto something better suited.

I’m not ready to go full New York Times or Wall Street Journal on it, but I have started the New Yorker and am quite pleased.

Now if there were a way to make a right-click function that sent docs right to the Kindle address the way I can right click and image and send it right into Flickr via the desktop uploader.

For the past month I’ve been using an opensource video player called VideoLAN that was developed as a student project in France. It is, in short, the single best piece of opensource code on my system and an incredibly capable video player — kicking the stuffing out of commercial offerings from the major OS players as well as third-parties. The bullshit of wrestling with QuickTime, Microsoft Media, RealPlayer, Intervideo, DivX blah blah blah are over.

Indeed, I’ve found that if I have a problem with a video file in say *.avi format playing in its native player, Quicktime, I can open it with VLAN and the problems vanish.

So, a plug for this nice piece of code. If you want to simplify your video viewing, here’s the solution.

The New York Times took the words out of my mouth Friday morning by raising the criticism that the economic stimulus package – which is long on tax breaks and non-infrastructure projects – totally misses the opportunity to restore the American railroad network through a heavy investment in high-speed train lines on the two coasts.

Michael Cooper writes:

“It may be the longest train delay in history: more than 40 years after the first bullet trains zipped through Japan, the United States still lacks true high-speed rail. And despite the record $8 billion investment in high-speed rail added at the last minute to the new economic stimulus package, that may not change any time soon.”

Acela is a feeble disappointment, hamstrung by a 19^th century railroad bed from Boston to Washington and a xenophobic Congress that demanded the train be built in the US on inferior American technology rather than on the state of the art advances seen in France, Japan and China. Result? A bad train capable of 150 mph that generally runs at 86 mph except for a brief stretch in Rhode Island near the site of the Great Swamp Fight. The French TGV operates at average speeds of 173. I should, in this era, be able to ride from Providence, Rhode Island to New York Penn Station in two hours. I should be taking the train from New England to North Carolina and accomplishing the 750 mile trip in less than six hours. Instead I get $100+ one way ticket prices, no wireless, antiquated speeds, and broken down equipment. Thomas Friedman is right – walk through the new airport in Beijing and then walk through JFK and tell me who is the superpower.

Friedman wrote on Christmas Eve, 2008:

“A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity?”

I don’t think it is backwards nostalgia to state that America was built on the strength of its railroad, was a pioneer in mass transit at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries with its Interurban line systems, and then let it all go to hell in the 1960s when the Eisenhower administration decided to pave America with superhighways. The result was the birth of the automobile society, the rise of Detroit, and a short-term mortgage on our future predicated on $0.25 a gallon gas, muscle cars, and the Kerouacian vision of every man expending his rugged individualism on the highway to hell.

Meanwhile the railroad slipped from backbone to creaking embarrassment. Not to be a cheese-eating/European-loving surrender monkey, but I did spend two years of my life in Switzerland and got a close look at how mass transit is supposed to work. From my government subsidized “halb-tax” pass, to a precise schedule that insured the train arrived at a station on time where a bus arrived – on time — to make the transfer to essentially any spot in the country within a half-kilometer of one’s final destination … this obsessive coordination included mountain trams! How did the Swiss and rest of Europe do it? First they taxed the snot out of a liter of gas, making it prohibitively expensive. Then they invested those taxes in the subsidization of the railroad, making it the most attractive form of transportation there is.

If the objective of the stimulus package was to turn things around for the future then why doesn’t it reduce reliance on petroleum, create heavy duty public works projects, push a green agenda, increase the efficiency of travel and commerce …. why didn’t Congress stuff a ton of cash into a total rebuild of the coastal rail systems? Instead we get a weak last minute allotment and keep shipping stacks of cash to Detroit. I don’t want to make this a car vs. rail post – but if we learned anything since the Oil Embargo thirty years ago, it’s that the car is doomed in the long term. Amtrak is a joke, kept on life support, and barely so, by a congress enthralled with the Big Automotive Supply Chain and the public works implications of an ever expanding federal superhighway system.

The historian in me can’t help but compare these early days of the Obama administration with FDR’s 100 Days – nowhere do I see the same hardnosed emphasis on public works, reform, and true Keynesian stimulus that my grandparents saw with the rise of the WPA, the CCC, and the reforms of Glass-Steagall. As rock-ribbed Cape Cod Yankee Republicans they were doubtlessly horrified by the socialization of the American economy, but the net result of FDR’s stimulus was a pump priming that put people to work. This package reeks of give-backs, tax breaks and dispensations to people who can’t pay their bills and not an investment in the future that government can, and has made in the past. This is the time to rebuild our power grid, air traffic control systems, railroads, nuclear power, wind, solar, invest in a new DARPA, and find the technical innovations that will drive the next generation of progress.

Having rebuilt two machines this weekend and not having the restore CDs  that shipped with the boxes, I have dropped $300 getting certified versions of XP installed via the Net and Microsoft’s Genuine Authentication thingy.

$150 for a XP license after I’ve paid for it in the past — but was too stupid to create recovery discs — is a) a lesson to myself and b) a warning to Microsoft that free beats the pants off of paid any day and that in this day and age, with Ubuntu getting better with every rev, the Giant of Redmond might want to go sit on the mountain and think real hard about a Windows 7 model that includes a free-kernel. The Win7 beta is free — and early adopters are reporting positive things. But come September, when it ships. The free ride ends.

Most vendors, like Lenovo, no longer ship physical XP discs with their systems, but instead ask their customers to create their own backup CDs during the system set up. I, of course, do not create these damn discs, and like most other aggrieved users, only rue that day when the hard drive fails (as all hard drives inevitably fail).

Combine a few things and Microsoft is in a perfect storm. 1. It’s the Economy Stupid: No one wants to pay for anything if there is a free alternative. 2. Track record. Vista is being written off. All eyes are on Win 7. Consumers are   looking at OS alternatives and coming to the conclusion that an operating system should be as irrelevant to them on a PC as it is on a phone. E.G. — give me a device that doesn’t need to boot, have patches, get viruses, or otherwise require a full time nerd to babysit.

Consumer Linux is becoming more and more attractive. If Linux can get some solid driver support rolling for consumers’ peripherals, hide the heck out of the kernel (a consumer user should never be aware of stuff like GRUB and Wine) with a friendly GUI skin …. I could have rebuilt both of these two ThinkPads with Ubuntu but didn’t, and paid $150 per machine to build them back up on XP for one simple reason:  the people who will be using these machine expect to see XP on them. Me? I’m more than happy to mess with Ubuntu. My wife is not.

Microsoft can buy a lot of time and hearts and mind with one simple solution — go free at one level and make it up in volume on upselling. Seriously. Whack a consumer for a credit card in this market and free starts to rule. Give me a free OS to enable a device, and when I decide I want some added benefit … then hit me with the credit card. If Microsoft can get on the free-bandwagon and get free into the corporate mindset, they buy another decade of success without any problem.

Would you buy a device between a laptop and smartphone? « GartenBlog.

Michael Gartenberg’s column caught my eye through one of his Tweet’s –   he casts a skeptical eye on the “tweener” space between the smartphone and the laptop (aka The One Pound Wasteland).

I like to demonstrate this tweener concept by taking an ultraportable laptop — say a ThinkPad X200 with a 12″ screen and setting it on the table next to an iPhone or a BlackBerry.  Then in the middle I drop one of two objects — either an 8″ by 5″ Moleskine paper notebook or an airplane ticket — and say: “What could you do with that?”

Devices in the tweener category are too big to hold up to your ear, and too small to do any serious keyboard work. They won’t fit in a pocket and one looks dorkish holding one like a lady purse at the opera. Yet from the UMPC to the Kindle, the form factor lures us in — designers and consumers alike. And never has there been a success until the use-optimized Kindle.

Gartenberg posits that consumers will carry three electronic devices — let’s say a digital camera, cell phone and laptop (I throw in a FlipCam and Kindle) and that trying to breakt triad …. well, let’s go to his bottom line:

“Mobile devices are following two contradictory trajectories. One class is fragmenting in terms of core functions, creating new markets for stand-alone devices such as dedicated cameras and media players. The other, which includes such devices as smartphones and mobile Internet devices, is taking on new features and functions, rivaling stand-alone devices in terms of functionality through convergence. Neither approach is universally correct, and vendors more than ever need to understand the contextual factors that influence consumer device usage. They have to focus on providing the sorts of core features that will lead users to include these devices among the three that they’re willing to carry. Devices that can’t displace one of those three will simply not be purchased.”

I agree with his premise — this is a dismal space where few have succeeded. And the industry is in an interesting state driven by advances in smartphone/handset functionality on the iPhone side, and decreases in laptop pricing from the netbook end.  I think Gartenberg is making the case that netbooks are tweeners. I don’t agree. I think they are Wintel machines that don’t cost much money. A tweener is a netbook like Sony’s $899 P device. The form factor is airplane ticket like, the keyboard is pretty cramped, but the screen height is very crowded in terms of scroll space. Netbooks have been a hot category — driven by a few factors: consumer attitudes towards commoditization, disposability, and their own economic comfort. If I can get a Windows experience on a sub-$400 device that hits the web when I connect to the home WiFi, then game over for many users. Keyboards aren’t super duper. Screens are ultraportable 10″ and under. But netbooks get the job done for a big segment of new laptop owners and the questions I have are this:

Can we go smaller or should we go smaller? Are tweeners just too big for pockets but too small for hands and therefore doomed? Or is the industry thinking about things entirely wrong? Where does pervasive connectivity come in? Where does simply working trump speeds-and-feeds? I never have patched, scanned, or otherwised babied my BlackBerry. So why am I patching, scanning, and babying a netbook running Windows XP?

Gartenberg is right. Either do something really well like a camera or an iPod, or do it all like a notebook. But trying to be all things to all people … no one has nailed it yet.

Driving home and listening to NPR I heard about this company that continues to make IBM’s classic Model M keyboard. The clickity ones that would break your foot if you dropped one.

I think I want this baby — it has a Trackpoint built in. Only short coming — no split key set.

The name of the company is Unicomp. The name of the keyboard is the Endurapro. Dan Lyons at Newsweek was asking me for an external keyboard as good as the one on his ThinkPad. That would be our UltraNav series which has an embedded trackpoint as well. I am on track to go through one new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic per year, but I may suck it up and splurge $100 for the Unicomp.

Migrating from one PC to the next (never mind going from a Mac to a PC or vice-versa) is one ugly, nasty, stupid experience. From moving my corporate persona from one laptop to the next, to reconfiguring all my favorite non-corporate apps (Adobe Photoshop Elements, Flickr uploader, Office 2007, blah blah blah).

It feels tedious just beefing about it.

The days of locally resident applications is so ripe to be shotgunned from existence the way the world finally croaked 50 lb. CRT displays and is in the process of doing away with spinning hard drives in favor for solid state.  The optical drive just needs to go away, maybe preserved for some old DVDs to watch on the flight, but other than that — I want my software up in the cloud where someone else can upgrade it, patch it, and deal with it. Just give me my user name and password and be done with it. Digging around closets for my official copy of Office 2007 — and then having to patch it to the latest service pack? Life is too darned short for such stupidity.

Oh, and give me free broadban WAN while you’re at it please.

Pretty please?

Interesting front page story in the NYT this Sunday morning about President-elect Obama likely having to surrender his Blackberry and email privileges for the duration of his term due to security concerns and public information laws. At first I was reading the piece, saying “Boneheads. Email good. Luddites in government, bad.” Then the security concerns were cited and I suddenly thought it is maybe not such a good idea to have the Commander In Chief on the RIM network sending emoticons to the National Security Advisor: “Dude. Chechnya! WTF? Call me! (Go Sox)”

Still, for an administration that is releasing weekly “fireside chats” on YouTube, that is seeking a National CTO, and which delivered on the promise of technology first opened up by Joe Trippi and the Howard Dean campaign,  it seems utterly ass-hatted to take away email. But, unless a secure alternative can be developed, the president-to-be may be in the same boat the president-that-was found himself eight years ago when he sadly signed off of his AOL mail account and told his friends it was nice knowing them electronically.

The void between smartphones and ultraportable notebooks has been called the “tweener” space in computing. This week, in his review of the so-called Netbook, space, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg dinged this not-a-phone-not-a-laptop device as one that has never taken off. UMPC is a perfect example.

So what is a tweener? To demonstrate I like to line up my ThinkPad X200 and my Blackberry 8300 and in between drop down a 7″ x5″ moleskine notebook. That, in my mind, is the Tweener, the device that hasn’t lit the world on fire yet. But … I’ve owned a tweener for two months now – an Amazon Kindle – and while it is version 1.0, it has definitely found a place in my life, even if I can’t run a spreadsheet on it or make a phone call.

Why? The interesting thing about the Kindle — aside from E Ink, the technology that permits it to display text in such great resolution – is the points in has in common with phones. Instantly turns on – no boot time, long standby battery life, and pervasive, always on wireless connectivity (switched on or off with a hardware switch at my discretion). That wireless service, unlike a phone, does not carry usage or monthly charges, doesn’t require a separate relationship with a carrier like Sprint or TMobile, indeed, is “free” in the sense that it is subsidized somehow by Amazon to provide a channel for me to buy books and have them delivered to the device.

Whispernet – the name of the service built atop Sprint’s network – is a big innovation, but not one necessarily conducive to always-connected internet. Yes, there is a web browser on the Kindle, but the device is not intended to be anything like the crop of 7″ to 10″ mini-laptops that have taken the market by storm thanks to Intel’s Atom processor. Those machines, which are moving rapidly towards 3G wireless connectivity, has so far relied on ordinary Wifi (802.11 wireless lan) connectivity atop XP or various Linux flavors.

Would I seek out a reading experience on a netbook the way Amazon has positioned the Kindle? No. Kindle is optimized for ambient light reading and as such is indeed a book replacement. A netbook … I need to get my hands on one our Lenovo S10s and see what the fuss is about beyond the sub-$400 price.

Anyway, long way of saying I think the future is bright for Tweeners, especially when connectivity becomes pervasive and people begin to seek them out for dedicated tasks such as e-books, GPS nav devices, etc.