OS 4 for iPhone / iPad

One day after my last post, Apple pre-announced some of the features of OS 4 for the iPhone (and in the fall, the iPad will get the update).

I said (more or less) in the last post that I was waiting for something to make my socks roll up and down: make me really want to keep an iPhone. Tethering say...

The main win of the new OS 4 as far as I am concerned is that I'll be able to run Pandora in the background while I do other things. And since the iPad will be able to do that, that does not make the iPhone uniquely special. I am glad that they waited to do multitasking till it did not kill the battery: the iPhone needs no help killing its battery. Even with a Mophie juice pack, I barely get 2 days between recharges.

Apple did add the iBooks app to the iPhone, but I don't see why that is tied to OS4. Looks mostly like a breadcrumb to try and get me to move over. With Kindle, I don't need to move to OS4, and I already have books for the Kindle app. And no iBooks app for the Mac means it is not as multi-platform as the Kindle.

I imagine the other book readers out there are really going to be having problems though. I thought seriously about a Sony for a long time, but they are really being left behind. I just looked to e sure I had not missed an announcement there, and no: If you want to read a Sony eBook, you need their reader. That makes sense in a way: Sony is a hardware company. But the paradigm just shifted under their feet. Barnes and Noble have an eBook reader on the iPad (still the iPhone version right as I type this...), and that also makes sense, since they sell books, I.E. content, not readers.

Maybe the new iPhone hardware will be more compelling. Won't know about that till mid-summer. Right now, I am still seriously thinking about Palm Pre + and Nexus One.

iPodian

iUnless you have been away, perhaps visiting another planet (a planet with no access to our earthy Internet or other news sources), you probably know Apple released the iPad. This had several immediate effects:

1. Apple haters went into a tizzy about how useless it was, and why only those who have been borged by the Apple would have one, and how the inital sales were all to "fanbois", and no self respecting microsoft person would have one, and on and on.
1. They cost too much.
2. They had no camera (despite the fact that the form factor is downright stupid for a camera)
3. The were too heavy
4. They were too light
5. They were too big
6. They were not big enough
7. They were closed (despite being Jailbroken in less than 24 hours)
8. There were no apps (even though every iPhone app I have tried works on it)
9. There weren't really netbook replacements (although I gave away my Netbooks upon getting an iPad)
10. etc
2. Apple Mavens went for them of course. Probably no point in even mentioning that
3. The middle grounders stood back and watched and commented. One guy at PC World who had pre-declared dislike of them played with one and changed his mind. Even the middle grounders are all over the place:
1. iBooks was cool
2. iBooks had too much extra fancy stuff. Kindle was better. Or Goodreader.
3. Kindle was great
4. Kindle was going to die soon
5. And one and on..

While many consider me an Apple fan... I guess because I replaced all my MS stuff with either Linux or Apple gear, I consider myself to be a middle-grounder. I like Apple stuff because it just works, and I love the design points, but I hate DRM and the closed nature of the ecosystem and the MS-like things that Apple does to keep people locked out and locked in all at the same time.

I have an iPhone. A 3GS. Jailbroken but *not* unlocked (because I like AT&T's service better than Verizon's, at least here where I live, and because the spirit of the contract with AT&T was that they paid for part of my phone in exchange for me using their service for a short while.) That being said, Apple may have screwed up with the iPad, and with me in particular.

If I have an iPad (which as mentioned I do), I do not need an iPhone nearly as much. What I need instead is a phone that lets me tether, and that is the Palm Pre + right now, or maybe the Nexus One: either of which appear worthy and which I would love to have. The Nexus more than the Pre because it does not have a chicklet keyboard. Hate those.

AT&T and Apple are on a timer now: unless the new iPhone is spectacular, my smartphone may stop being an iPhone. I previously noted here that the iPhone was a tablet PC. Now it is not the best tablet PC. iPad is.

Sidebar: Even my non-smartphone, the Blackberry Storm, can't tether, but that is because it is a work phone and they have not allowed it. Further digression: My old Sony Erricson on AT&T let me tether without issue. Slow to be sure: This was before Edge even.

There are two other smartphone players here that look like, from where I am sitting, to be willing to take better care of me. Since I have the non-3G iPad, I do not have cellular data or GPS... those two functions are still required in the smartphone. Having a Kindle app will also be a plus, since then I can read no matter where I am or which device I have with me. That is a hit against iBook: Only one platform. No Mac version even. No iPhone version. With Kindle I have it on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and they stay sync'ed. That may be the iPhones one smartphone-saving grace. Kindle is not on the Nexus One. As near as I can tell it is not yet on the Palm Pre either, though several forums seemed to think it might be coming because it appeared in a commercial.

So, my original Apple tablet is in danger of being replaced unless Apple and AT&T get tethering figured out soon. I pay 30 bucks a month x 5 phone on my family plan to AT&T for unlimited data on each phone. Enough is enough. I am not adding another plan for the iPad. I will go to whoever lets me tether my iPad.

The iPad is a netbook replacement, and it is largely a laptop replacement except when I am doing anything heavy duty, like editing photos. It is not a new category: it is just the Internet tablet finally done mostly right. So much more right than anything that has come before it that all previous attempts pale in comparison. I still have a Grid table with a 386-25 running Pen Windows 3.1. An HP-UX LX620. An NEC MobilePro 800. The Dell Mini-9 and the Acer Aspire One. Actually, I gave the Mini-9 to my mom, and the Acer to my son.

None of them are anything like the iPad, and all of them are replaced by it. My MacBook gets far less use as well, but is not totally sidelined. Ditto my bigger Linux laptops like the Dell D620 and the IBM T43. Still use them. Just not as much.

Not just for FanBois

I can not walk into a room right now without people wanting to touch the iPad and play with it. At one point seven grown men were passing it around, and then griping at me that I was a bad influence because now they would have to get one. None of them were / are Apple people. One did that very night, and then played with it all night, and then blamed me for his loss of sleep. His wife wants one too.

iPads are just fun, and they are hard to put down. I have been reading books on the Kindle app every night till well past midnight. Reading the news. Checking the weather just for the heck of it. I am sure all this will wear off, but for now it is quite the attention getting device. It would be easy to write books like how to pick up the opposite sex, using the iPad as the ice breaker.

Sure, the haters will maintain their distance. Some won't go near it because they do not trust themselves. Some won't go near it because they find it noble to do stuff like cut off their nose to spite their face. Either way, this thing is going to be big, but what I will be more interested in is what it does to the iPhone: the original Apple Internet tablet (not counting the Newton, which was cool, but not iPad or iPhone cool, at least where the Internet is concerned).

Tech is fun. Can't wait to see what happens next.

Worst Top 10 list of 2010 I Have Seen

I am used to hyperbole. I am used to the idea that people run out of ideas, but just keep talking. Or that writers get assignments and their heart is just not in it. Or the people with a point of view write as if their POV was delivered wisdom.

I don't like it when such things are presented in absolutes and in places of influence such that people might think there is something to it. The eWeek article titled "IT Infrastructure: 10 Products That Must Be Killed in 2010" is the worst example of this I have seen this year. I have not seen them all: admittedly I peruse technical forums. There may be worse out there. Yes. Sadly, there may be worse depths to plumb. But this one goes deep enough for me. At best it is about 20% accurate.

First of all, it is not an article per-se, but a slide show, and there is no comment section so this is unopposed blather rather than just blather. Sure, comment forums can become pure snark fests, but this post is just flame bait, pure and simple. eWeek, and the articles author, Don Reisinger are either gleefully running because they love the commotion, or hanging their heads in shame, but I have no way to tell which.

Here are some of the gems from this bottom 10 list:

Palm Pre: "... Today, it's an also-ran on a network that no one cares about. It has to go."

You know: It may just go, and it may just take Palm down with it, but the absolutes here are amazing. The phone is not hurting anyone by staying. It is a great phone, and it is the only chance Palm has of coming back, even if the headwinds it faces are fierce. It is head and shoulders better than a WinMo based unit IMHO: Why must it die? Why must it go? Where is the urgency? If someone wants one, why should they not have it? Who is it hurting?

The statement about the network is absurd as well: Clearly *someone* cares about the network. The people the own the company. the people that work for the company. The people that use it, which can not be zero, or there would be no network in the first place, The people that make the phones that the network sells. Maybe Don does not care, but Don is not everyone, even if Don is unaware of that.

I have an iPhone, and I admit that one reason I would not want the Pre is that it does not run on AT&T (a network I like, unlike many). That is just me, and I know it. If Pre ran on AT&T, I would look at it. The unit itself is beautiful, even if it does have those chiclet keys rather than a real full function touchscreen.

Blackberry Storm 2: "... when the company released the BlackBerry Storm2 this year, it promised bigger and better things. It didn't happen. Get rid of the Storm, RIM."

World class dumb advice. I have an iPhone. I have a Storm. The iPhone beats the pants off the Storm as far as I am concerned. But I had another Blackberry before the Storm, and it was *worse*. Far worse. In essence, Don is saying to get rid of the only touch screen offering RIM has *before* they have something better! Completely cede the touchscreen phone market and hope that there are enough chiclet-key fans out there. Replace the Storm with something better? You bet. But don't drop it till you actually *have* something better.

Premise restated: RIM's touchscreen device is third rate relative to the competition, so no one stuck using a BlackBerry (say, for work) should have a one, but instead should use the more prehistoric units. Oh. yeah. That'll help RIM.

The Storm is, for a touch screen person like me, nearly as much better than an 8830 or an 9700 than the iPhone, Pre, or Droid is than the Storm. It. Is. Better. Than. Nothing.

Further: maybe the Storm is actually a profitable unit? Who knows? Don does not say. If it is, then why drop it? If it isn't, then it is a finger in the dam till something better arrives. Either way, terrible advice.

The iPod Classic: "... finds itself decidedly in the middle with a limited amount of value."

Just when you think the advice can't get any worse... So, again, not mentioned whether or not the Classic is profitable, or fills a useful niche still. Don would have Apple drop the Classic, I guess because he does not want one. Following that line of thought,: I do not want a touch because I have an iPhone. I guess the Touch should be killed too. I have a shuffle for working out, so I guess the Nano should also be killed. Because, well, as you know, if one person does not like the category, or must be invalid for all other people.

By the way, Blue is the best color, so all other colors should be removed. Not of iPods, but from everything.

The Classic unit that holds more music and video than any other in the line. The unit that has all its R&D fully paid for and it probably the most profitable per unit. Don says it must die. Doh.

I have a Classic. I love it. I had a wall full of CD's (now a box full of CD's), and they are all on the Classic, but they won't fit on *any* other iPod. If I ever lose or break the Classic, I want to be able to replace it! Don would deny that option because it does not match some preconceived notion he has about where music players are used. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

Windows Vista

Sigh. I use Linux and Macs mostly, but I have used Vista and Windows 7, and I have to say that Vista with all its service on is not that much worse that Windows 7, and is actually more compatible with some software. Win7 is just Vista evolved a bit, and not much more than Vista Service pack W7.

Vista has a bad rap out there, and it is undeserved. It was no worse than XP was when it was first released, and is less prone to infections... the reason I dropped XP all those years ago! But eWeek appears to be on the "Bash Vista" bandwagon, and they are hardly alone there. Other popular causes they might want to join are the AT&T is worse than Verizon bandwagon, since it is irrelevant that Verizon uses the archaic CDMA protocol, and a Verizon world phone has to have both a CDMA and a GSM radio in it if you want to travel with it. Or that AT&T may have less 3G coverage, but where they have coverage they are faster.

None of that matters because the cause celebs do not require much in the way of actual facts, and just need bandwagons. "Vista Bad" is a nice safe bandwagon to be on, even if you thought that maybe a technical publication would be fact based (or at least label their puff pieces correctly)

The really funny part here is that they think they have to tell Microsoft to try and get people to migrate. What a hoot. By any measure, MS is its own worst enemy when it comes to new releases of things, trying to get people who are happy where they are to move. Or at least comfortably miserable. Look at how hard they are trying to get people of XP and how slowly that is going....

Google Wave: ".. It still has a modicum of promise, but Google should focus on Chrome OS and forget about Wave."

Contradicts itself inside the sentence even! If it has promise, why drop it? Is Google in danger of going out of business because they are experimenting with something new? Can they not afford to fund the Wave?

I have a Wave account, and I'll admit that it is not ready for prime time, and it may never be... but it just got started! Look how many years MS funded the Xbox at a total loss before it even broke even!

Windows 7 Starter Edition: "... it doesn't even make sense for users to want it."

I agree, except that if users do want it, and it is the only product MS has that will run on a Netbook, why would MS cede that market to Linux? Is this advice that MS should just forget Netbooks, or is it that MS should drop the price of a more fully featured version of Win7, and also slim it down enough to run on a Netbook?

Ain't gonna happen. MS made some really bad choices in how they went about doing the video compositing: they are utterly dependent on higher end graphic hardware than what the current Netbooks have. The choice here is leave the half-ass Win7 in place, extend XP's life even more (and this clown wants to advise them to work hard to get people off Vista), or just let Linux have Netbooks. I think I know what MS will do. It won't start with taking this advice, but it might start with removing some of the restrictions on RAM and hard drive size that Starter Edition has, as those are utterly arbitrary.

Google Nexus One

Kill the Nexus because other Android using phone manufacturers might be unhappy about the competition. Yep. They might be. Seems like Google's problem to me.

The smart phone market is changing so quickly that however it is stacked up now will not be how it is one year from now. Right now, Motorola, a company that was on the brink of exiting the phone market has used Android as a lifeline to return from 1% market share to 13%. they are supposed to just get all huffy because Google is entering the market? They may not like it, but they are not likely to drop Android they they have something better. Ditto all the other Android using Manufacturers. It is not like they would suddenly all switch to WinMo, and it is not like Apple is going to license OS.X Mobile.

From Google's point of view, they may want a pure Android version out there. One that no one has messed with because it was open source and they could! Either way, I think Google is a big kid now, and history says they might even know what they are doing. History of this top 10 list also says Don doesn't.

JooJoo: " .. If you ask me, it should be killed before it's even released. Let's wait for the lawsuits to be hashed out before either company moves forward."

I have watched the Crunchpad / JooJoo thing with interest, and I think that it is probably true that the JooJoo is going to implode. It feels a lot like one of those stores that opens in a "location of doom": you just know it is not going to make it.

But it might, and that was the palace intrigue around the device that led to the people that at least co-created the JooJoo-when-it-was-CrunchPad getting screwed.

The thing is that the Apple device is coming, and not getting out there now means letting Apple define the category for years to come. That will probably happen anyway.

This is the least bad of the "Must be Killed's" though, to be sure. The moral issues here are strong enough that I would be comfortable saying it should not be released. Just because Apple is going to crush the market segment does not mean you get to crush the people you were working with, which is what we are being told happened with the JooJoo.

The Ultraportable Notebook

Coming strong off the JooJoo win, the list is dropped right back into the ditch from whence it came.

Just because the category is sandwiched between two other categories, it must die? Again, nothing about profit is alleged: We are told to assume that the people making these things don't apparently know that they are losing money making them.

What about Tablets? what happens when there is a market switch again, and say tablets eat a category, like say Netbooks. What if there are left people that want small computers with real keyboards? Seems like the Don-ster does not look around at trends much, and is not comfortable with others placing bets that he has no skin in.

Here is mine: Acer. Eee PC, and the other Ultra-Portable manufacturers are trying to be sure that if this market takes off, they are the one that is there first, with the name recognition. No one wants to be the last to enter the market segment again, and be left out in the cold when the shipments are counted. See Netbooks for details.

Blackberry OS (In its current form)

OK: 2 for 10. As long as it is stipulated that they actually have to have something better before they just go kill BBOS. BBOS (or whatever it is called under the covers) is a mess. It really does need to be tossed for something like Android with the email bits that make the MS Exchange and remote management stuff work ported / rewritten / modernized.

The funny thing is that Don appears to think this will be his least popular recommendation. Weird.

The iPhone 3GS and the Storm

I am sure there are about a million posts on the Internet comparing the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm (and soon, the new Storm 2). This, as they say, is one of them.

I have an iPhone 3GS as my personal phone, and I recently got a BB Storm as my work unit. It replaced a much unloved Blackberry 8830. I did not expect to like the new Storm as much as the 3GS, and I do not. It has been pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. It is better than the 8830 in most ways though.

Chiclets

At the core of my dislike for the 8830 were two things: Crummy (small) screen and tiny mechanical keys. I am firmly in the virtual keyboard camp. I had a slight hope that the Storm's virtual keyboard would be better than it is, even though none of the reviews supported that hope. I based it off one thing: That every review I read of the Storm virtual keyboard was that it was *not* a mechanical one, like a proper BlackBerry should have.

I had not really realized it till I was reading about the Storm ahead of getting one but there is a huge contingent of people that like... even prefer... mechanical keyboards on their cell phones. Watching someone that is really good at the BB keyboard is pretty amazing, I have to admit: Their thumbs blazing at what is probably 50 or 60 WPM.

Getting going that fast on the 3GS would be a real challenge, and doing it in the Storm would not be possible. The Storm does have a virtual keyboard, but it is hampered by several things:

1. The processor is too slow / the OS is too slow. I do not know which it is (I have the 3rd release of 4.7: The latest Verizon has issued), but there are pauses and herks and jerks that keep the keyboard from being a fast-to-register-a-keystroke affair.


2. The entire screen has to be pressed to register the keystroke. the Storm 2 is supposed to fix that. I supposed the idea was to make the virtual keyboard more like a real one, and it utterly missed the point *of* a virtual keyboard.


3. The idea of the feedback to register the keystroke was the illuminate the key being pressed is blue, with a slight halo: All well and good, except I have wide fingers and I can't see it.

For all of this, I prefer the Storm keyboard to the 8830. I can at least read the markings, and the blue backlight of the 8830 was useless in the dark: I had to find a strong light source to use the keyboard.

The 3GS keyboard is more or less the same as it has been since the Generation 1 iPhone, except that more apps work in landscape mode, and in landscape mode I can fairly fly on the iPhone. Not as fast as the Mini 9, or the Macbook, but not too bad either.

Screen and Flip

The Storm display is very nice, and reading email on it is *far* easier than the 8830 every was. It is not just the size of the screen, or its better colors and backlighting, although those are all huge helps: it is also that the email app uses a better, more readable font, and when you are looking at letters that small, that really helps.

The apps listing is OK: Readable, if not easy to configure. The 3GS's way of allowing icons to be re-arranged is infinitely better than the setup process you have to use on the Storm, but at least it can be done.

The Storm 2 is supposed to add inertia to the screen flips, and that is sorely missed. Having to page up and down the screens on the storm is far slower than being able to flip your finger on the 3GS and the faster you do it, the faster and farther then screen rolls, in a very intuitive way.

Looking at pictures on the Storm is way better than the 8830, and nearly as nice as the 3GS, but pan and zoom are horrible.

Smile

The quality of the 3.2 MegaPixel camera is OK, and not that much worse than the iPhone (in bright light), but once again slowed either by the OS or a slow processor: it takes forever to focus and snap a picture on the Storm. Movies looked more or less the same on either unit though. The Storm overall seems to favor slight overexposure of the images relative to the iPhone.

In low light, the Storm camera is far better than the iPhone's, other than having to wait forever for it to focus. It also has a "light", which I have never used, but should mean that the Storm is good for even lower light situations than those I have tested: Places where the iPhone would not work at all.

Going to the Store

This really has very little to do with the Storm per-se, since the same App StoreWorldthingy is on all BlackBerries. It is easier to "shop" on the storm, with its superior-to-keyboarded-BB's screen. If this comparison was to any other BB, then Storm would be killer here. However, the 85,000+ apps of the iPhone, and the far better in-phone store app, not to mention the iTune Store shopping option just make the BB's couple of hundred apps appear quite feeble. Wimpy. Not even trying.

The few apps I have loaded are also pale shadows of their iPhone brethren. The Facebook app for example is truly wretched on the Storm. I can not imagine what it is like on any of the smaller screened BB's. The new 2.x iPhone version is in some way better than the web interface.

The Web

The built in browser on the BB used to be a joke. The one on the Storm is actually not too bad. It is slow, and does not render everything the 3GS built in Safari will, but it is light years ahead of the old browser. I put Opera on, and that helps, especially for things like zooming in on areas of pages to be able to read them.

None of them use the gestures of the iPhone, and in Safari, with flicks and pinches and amazing speed, the web is still more accessible on the iPhone.

Maps

Really RIM? Why did you even bother? The built in Map app is a complete waste. No OS integration. No gestures. No resolution in the maps. No composite views. No GPS or Compass integration. Low resolution. Slow slow slow. Not even trying. The Storm 2 or at least OS 5 *has* to have a better map app than this... right? Or at least Google maps in the app store?

This app is the very definition of a checkbox exercise:

"Hey! They have a map app! Do we have a map app?"

"Yeah Boss: We got a map app. Got it right here. See, It says 'Maps' on it and everything."

I went to our office in Minneapolis this week, and I was told that people with Tom Toms and other GPS had gotten utterly lost because of how weird it is to get to the building. I'll have to admit that the iPhone Maps gave me some choices about possible locations, and the first one I went to was not it: but the second one was, and it knew the weird route to get to the building. All the really means is that Google knows that route though, and that is what the BB needs: Google Maps.

(update: I have been told by some that there are Google Maps for the BB. They are just not in the App Store. You have to manually install them.)

Verizon and AT&T

My Storm came from Verizon, and of course the iPhone is AT&T. I have to say that I do not understand anyone that says that AT&T's network is not as good as Verizon's. I can not imagine where that is. It is no place I go.

At any given place, and at any given time, the iPhone and the Storm have about even chances of having or not having a signal. And I can move two feet, and have signals invert in strength between the two, especially in downtown areas.

Standing on Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco, both are strong. In North Beach at Rogue Public Ale House the BB is weak, and the iPhone slightly degraded. Up the street towards Chinatown, the BB gets a slightly better signal for a few blocks.

Most places they both have 4 or 5 bars. Same in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Dallas, Alpine, Fort Davis, Marfa .... on and on. Neither one is obviously better than the other, with this single exception: when the signal is weak, and the phone is powering up its amplifier to pull in the weak signal, the Storm, and the 8830 before it, will eat its battery in a matter of a few hours: Far faster than the iPhone will. Not that the iPhone won't eat its battery fast: it does. Just not as fast.

This inverts when Bluetooth is the radio in question. If the iPhone can not find the Bluetooth ear piece, it will burn through the juice in the matter of less than 8 hours, where as the Storm and the 8830 seemed to not obviously use any more power when their paired earpiece was off or out of range.

(Update: Actually, the Storm does appear to use battery far faster when it can not find it's headset. Still not as bad as the iPhone, but the 8830 was the king here.)

As for speed: There is no comparison. As long as I have digital service the iPhone is far faster. the iPhone in Edge is about the same speed as the Storm on "1XEV'. That probably means the high speed EVDO is not the bottleneck more than likely, but the speed of the OS and the hardware is.

Smart Phone

If there had never been an iPhone to compare it to I would be amazed by the Storm, but the fact of the matter for me and my virtual keyboard loving ways is that it is not as good a design as the original iPhone was, more or less the 3rd generation iPhone. I assume the Storm 2 will be better on all points, but I also assume from some early reviews that it will be only reaching some sort of parity with the Generation 1 iPhone, and still be a long way from where the iPhone is today. If nothing else the push-the-whole-screen-to-register-a-keystroke thing is gone.

I rode in an elevator the other day with a man who had a Storm. I asked him how he liked it. He shook his head, and said "I had a Google phone before this one. I wish I had it back".

On the plane the other day I sat next to a man with a Palm Pre. I watched with interest as he flicked about the bright, beautiful screen. It looked very iPhone like, at least until he opened the keyboard. Gaah! Chiclet keys! What were they thinking?

Still, from what I can tell, the Storm is not as good as iPhone's, Palm Pre's, and Android based phones. It is not just a hardware problem either: the OS is a mess. It feels like three of four different OS's crammed together. Configuration screens don't match in style or function, and are spread all over, The Apps are weak, and un-unified in look, feel, and OS integrations. The Storm, running WebOS or Android would be leaps and bounds better, and not having the push-to-click screen of the Storm two would fix the Storms major weakness: Really: That idea is like New Coke. It may have tested well, but in reality it is a pain.

I'll have this Storm for another two years I guess. Hopefully by then RIM will get it right. In the meantime, it *is* far better than the 8830 that came before it, so I am not ungrateful. And the camera isn't bad.

A week with 2.0.1

I have been on vacation in Far West Texas for about a week now. This is actually my real home out here, as I just rent in the Space City.

2.0.1 has been a mixed bag: Stability is better, but still not great. keyboard hangs are still there. Battery life is pathetic still.

On the Amtrak train out here, I exhausted the Lenmar external battery and was at about 50% of the internal battery when I finally arrived in the Alpine, TX train station. We were running about two hours behind because every time a freight train needed our tracks, we pulled over on a siding and waited. It is a crime of epic proportions that we in the US have let our railroad system decline like this, now when we need it most. Really: Tracks in both directions guys! The carbon footprint of me on a train going 600 miles to Far West Texas is just a tiny fraction of me in my Honda Fit driving the same route. But I digress...

The Lenmar was good for about two full charges, so that means in 17 hours I charged my phone twice, and then used it down to 50% again. First company that makes a decent auxiliary battery I can just leave strapped on gets my business.

Here is what I was doing: I watched about five hours of movies, listened to 10 hours of audiobook, and occasionally used the GPS to get a fix on what city I was near. From the specs, I should have used slightly less than two charges worth, and it did not seem to be the movies or audiobooks doing the damage to the battery. The visible drop came when I was using the GPS / Map function.

This matches an observation I made when I was in SanFran a few weeks ago: I went to the city with a full charge, and I *only* used the GPS / Map function while there. Nothing else. By then end of about 8 hours of walking around the city and getting fixes (mostly for fun: I knew where I was most of the time) the battery was in the red.

GPS eats battery.

Another thing I have never really thought through about this: If you can not see a cell tower, the GPS is worthless. If it can not load a map, so it can draw a pin on it, it just goes into la-la land. Not even a basic longitude and latitude readout appears. That seems like an oversight: Another assumption that people will never be out of sight of a cell tower.

On the train, we were following I-90 most of the way, but at one point we skimmed within feet of crossing over into Mexico. For a while, I had no signal at all. Then I had only signal from Mexican cell infrastructure, which AT&T warned me about with a nifty IM telling me that International rates now applied.

I slapped it into airplane mode for an hour, and when I took it back out, it was back to "no signal". I was glad to see it went in and out of Airplane mode: I had read that some were having trouble with that after the 2.0.1 upgrade.

Since arriving, the iPhone has been in Airplane mode most of the time: my house sits in a Caldera, and the rim walls of the volcano contain enough iron that no cell signal penetrates. No Internet either, although that is because of a problem over at the cable company.

To Jailbreak, or not to Jailbreak?

So far I have not Jailbroken my iPhone 3G. The App Store has for the most part kept me fairly happy with the things that it offered. Fairly. I will more than likely jailbreak it though at some point: Whatever it will take to get tethering going. I seem to be spending a fair amount of time lately in places where the only electronic communications I have working is my iPhone.

As I write this I am sitting in the Amtrak train station in Houston. It is a total backwater of the Internet. To write this post "natively" on Blogger (I.E., Web 2.0 style, with Internet access to the Blogger built in editor) is just not possible from here: In fact, I am sharing the one electrical outlet I could find in the train station with another guy who is working on a report for his job on his iBook. (addendum from the future: I created the post in HTML in Komposer on the Mac. I uploaded the HTML to Blogger, and then I had to go back and fix all the messed up carriage returns and line feeds that Google had added to the HTML: Instead of honoring the CR/LF and other tags, it made a right mess of the posts... so I had to come back with the online editor and clean it all up. Grumble. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog, already in progress..)

This is in the heart of Space City, just a few blocks from downtown! No Internet at all!

The train is over two hours from leaving yet, so it is the perfect time to write, except that my Macbooks battery is now getting old, and I have to be near power plugs to work.. and to charge my iPhone to the top for the upcoming 15+ hour train ride, in case there is no power near my seat. My handy Lenmar battery is already topped up and ready to go.

In this situation, and in other recent one where Internet access meant iPhone only, I really need to be able to tether. It does not have to be 3G. It does have work. I used to have this with my
Samsung A series phone, and it was way less sophisticated than this iPhone is. Null River ever released a 10 dollar application called Netshare that would allow one to tether with an iPhone. Apple took it down. Then put it up. Then took it down. (As of August 4th, 2008, when I was fixing the CR/LF mess, Nullriver's web site still said they were "working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore") I do not wish to be subjected to the vagaries of Apple for things like this. I like the App Store, but as soon as I see a Jailbreak app that makes it work, this phone is getting jailbroken. Till then, I will wait. And fume.

My wife tired of the un-jailbroken 3g faster than I did this time. She spent a long and frustrating time getting hers opened up, only to find out that Installer.app was not yet ready, and that the reason she had Jailbroken it did not really exist yet. It was long and frustrating because the pwnage tool was still a work in progress as well: I read it is easy now.

I watched her in interest to see how well the new tools worked on the 2.0 / 3G phones, and it looked to me that the hackers were pretty close to getting around the roadblocks Apple had thrown up with 2.0. I wonder why Apple even tries?

My son got my wifes "old" iPhone, and we told him to leave it at 1.1.5 and jailbroken rather than upgrading to 2.0 because sadly:

1. It was more stable
2. It was better on batteries. My daughter has my original
   iPhone, put 2.0 on it, and can't pass an electrical outlet anymore.

That has been the big disappointment of 2.0 and the 3G for me so far. Well, these three things:

1. Crashing apps
2. Crashing OS
3. Dismal battery life

And that is with 3G turned *off*.

Don't get me wrong. I love the 3G: The GPS and location based stuff are huge fun and deeply useful. And after some testing I have noticed that the WiFi signal reception is better with the 3G than the first gen unit. That is goodness. And badness. I preferred the first generation units aluminum case overall: Less fingerprints and the like. Cooler to the touch. And I preferred the feel in my hand of the first one to the new one, but I am in a huge minority there. Most like the tapered edge case of the 3G. People that have not held a 3G pick mine up and usually saw "ooohhhhh.... I like that". Guess I just have to be different. For me, the Wifi improvement is worth the plastic case, even though I view it as a tradeoff.

I did put the 2.0.1 upgrade on that came out today. So far, the main thing I have seen it do is make a few apps I had installed but that had disappeared re-appear. New apps install from the app store a little faster too. Backups via iTunes still take forever. I have not had it on long enough to evaluate if it does anything for battery life or stability yet. Before I did this I researched the state of the Jailbreak and Installer.app for 2.0.1 / 3G. Looks like when I get back from vacation it will be ready.

I'm ready now... here in the train station...without Internet.

The only reason I can see not to jailbreak it will be if Apple and Nullriver set the tethering app free again. Or there is no tethering possibility coming anytime soon on the jailbroken iPhones. I guess there is one good thing: I went way longer leaving this one un-hacked than the first gen one. I guess that means Apple is making strides in the right direction.

Still: If I have to buy a different phone that already had tethering working, and flip the SIM back and forth, I am not above that, but it will be silly, and all Apple and perhaps AT&T will have proven with their roadblocks is that they do not want people to use the tools the way that we want or need to.

One last thing about the 3G hardware, and this is on the annoyance side: Why in the world can't I charge off Firewire and other older devices? I get that the data side may be costly to keep dual circuits a around for, and that Apple has capitulated to USB, but still: 5 volts is 5 volts. Use it! It is not just my firewire charger brick that is not working: I have a Maxell USB charging stand that it won't use. And my Altec Lansing portable speakers. My wife even has a battery backup unit that is nothing *but* 5 volts, and the iPhone 3G says "Nope: not gonna use it", but the 1st gen iPhone does.

Stupid. Annoying. Unnecessary.

iPhone and Blackberry

Been a while since I wrote anything for this blog. Life has a way of getting in the way of writing, especially when one is getting ready to move, and to change cities at that.

I have had this short post knocking about in my head for a while now. A few months ago a new, second phone appeared in my daily life. I now have a work phone and a personal phone. I wanted the new phone to be able to see and stay in sync from my calendar at the office (since we don't have enterprise iPhones... yet)

The new unit is a Blackberry 8830 "World Edition". It is not the latest and greatest, but I have since held and played with a Pearl and Curve, and they are not that different from the 8830. World edition in this case means it has both GSM and CDMA radios. CDMA for the US, and GSM for the more wirelessly sane rest of the world. Two radios! I guess the AT&T / T-Mobile version of this phone just has the GSM though.

Going back and forth between the iPhone and the BB requires getting used to a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Modern phone. Ancient Phone. Intuitive interface. Learn by rote interface. Easy to use keyboard. Nasty hard to read hard to use keyboard. Beautiful screen. Not as pretty screen. Etc.

The BB does the one thing I need it to do: It syncs extremely well to my calendar. Meetings will get canceled 15 minutes before they start, and the BB knows about it right away.

Other pluses:

• Battery life is pretty good
• Sound quality of the earpiece is good, although the mic is tinny
• Bluetooth headset works well with it: At least my Motorola H681 does.

When the new iPhone 2.0 firmware is released, and there is a real, enterprise way to get calendar and email going with it, the BB loses its only advantages except maybe battery life (and the new iPhone 3G may address that with a better battery). Then its disadvantages become even more painful by comparision:

• Tiny, hard to read keys with lousy backlight and non-standard special symbols placement
• Smaller screen
• Worse Calendar app (if you can get a meeting onto the iPhone, it is much easier to read and manipulate there)
• Worse email app
• Worse phone book
• Far far far worse browser. Did I mention far? And I have Opera 4.1 on the BB, but that only makes things slightly tolerable.
  
• Both of my supplied cases broke within the first week! That would be a leather case with pivoting belt clip, and the hard plastic dock looking thing. Both broke at the same place too: who thinks a pivot made with a 1 or 2 mm plastic center axle is strong enough?

The whole thing has the feel of an OS / hardware platform that was not designed but sort of grew organically. Stuff was bolted on to the side over and over again. It is a hodgepodge of stuff, none of it intuitive. I had to read the stupid manual to find the *mute* button for the movie theatre, never mind the goofy way the ringer volume is managed!

I know a large number of people are not happy with Apple and the things they have been doing with the iPhone. Lock in to AT&T, controlling the application delivery mechanism, and so forth. I sort of agree, but you know what is also true? It is easier to hack an iPhone and install whatever you like on it than it is to use the approved install mechanism on the BB.

If the trueism about why Linux is not winning the market space is the MSWin has all the apps is true, then the same thing applies to the iPhone and the BB, with the BB playing the part of the application underdog. And all that is *before* the iPhone App Store even gets going.

One of unhappy sets of folks has to be RIM. They are really going to have to re-think their device line and their OS, and soon. Right now they are bringing a pen knife to a machine gun fight.

More iPhone Support Center, plus World Domination

Akshun J , well known Internet Apple non-fan, humorist, Blogger, and generally good person (if for no other reason than he likes my stuff.... :) ) posted a comment on my last post about the experience I had with the Apple support center, and it went this way:

"It's all a secret plot. A Romulan conspiracy to overthrow the Federation.

Although the best cosmetic surgeons have made him look human, Steve Jobs is clearly a Romulan. Who could doubt this? "

And here I thought he was a deity (humorous first minute of this video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2gO8blNd4A

Actually, I can not complain. Turned out the second iPhone return box was because someone at Apple had read my comments in the first attempt to get the iPhone fixed via the Apple web site, realized I needed to send in the iPhone, and sent the box. Another call to 1-800-my-iphone got everything cleared up.

More importantly: I talked to two very nice people at the support center. Bridgette and Jamey. They were helpful, knowledgeable, and also clearly both native speakers of my language (which is a Polyglot of AmerEnglish and Geekish). They both realized right away they did not need to run a script with me on how to do things to diagnose my problem, and jumped right in to actually solving my problem. Add to that the whoever read my web submission at the support center realized that the "headphones" (that ended up being a docking station for some reason) being sent were not going to fix the problem, and sent the return box.

I did get an email noting that the dock had been returned and that there was no charge. Nice.

In this day and age, getting to talk to competent people in a support center was a pure joy.

I use Linux all day long every day, and I love it dearly. The new Ubuntu 8.04 is looking very spiff. I can't wait for the Mint 5.0 version of it! The people I have dealt with for support on Linux have all been very good as well. But that is a different deal. This was a good support center experience from a commercial vendor, and that is rare. Good on you, Apple. Keep up the good work.

Honesty also forces me to admit one last thing. When my little Internet tablet was gone, even for only two days, I felt amazingly bereft. My backup phone is a Motorola C168. Nice sound quality, and loud enough ringers. Light weight. Impressive talk time. But it was just a phone. I am used to being able to look things up on the Internet no matter where or when. At dinner the other day my daughter was telling me about "Red Pandas", which I had never heard of, and right there in Taco Palace I was able to get a quick look at one, and see what they were related to, and know that there are only 2500 of them left. The ability to do this was so very cool. Made the time I was spending with my daughter that much better because I was able to get up to speed fast.

I borrowed a Blackberry Curve the other day to see what its Internet access looked like. Yuch. I welcome the day the iPhone has competition, but as of right now, it does not.

I totally get Akshun J's dislike and distrust of Apple. It is not very far away from how I feel about Microsoft and the things they did to stomp out anyone and anything in their way to world desktop domination. Apple could very easily (now that they have something like 14% of the laptop market) be positioned in the near future to begin to do and act the same way as MS. In fact, in an odd turn of events, they might even force MS to become more open as they continue to watch their market share eroded from the bottom by Linux and from the top by Apple. The way MS rigged the OOXML fight shows us that that day is not yet here though.

Similarly Apple has proven that they will deal roughly with small companies and developers, although in the case of the iPhone SDK there is at least some concession that Apple is not able to fully control the iPhone platform, as much as they dearly want to. Apple needs the developer community to support them. Unto itself the iPhone is a blank slate waiting to be written upon. Example at lunch today:

We were waiting for the veggie dumplings to steam over at Lai Lai's, and my daughter asked me if she could borrow my iPhone. She looked at it, then at me and said is disgust as she handed it back "You haven't hacked this yet." I admitted that I had not. She wanted to know what was taking me so long. I had had the phone for over a day at that point.

Without all the extra things I put on the phone when it is hacked, she did not think it was any better than her RAZR. Of course she was not looking to Netsurf. She wanted to play games.

I am trying to decide if I will hack it at all, or if I will wait to see what the App Store looks like. The guys from iPhone DevCamp think that their way is better of course, but I have to admit that the idea of being able to get stuff for the phone in a vendor supported way is tempting after this little experience.

Or, I may put Linux on it. They say the new PWNED way of getting into the iPhone is going to let them be able to put whatever they want on the iPhone. I won't for now because the experience at the support center is going to keep me on the Apple side of things (even if I decide to hack it in the near future). It is not blind, unthinking loyalty though. Quite the opposite. I am always watching to see what the vendor is going to do next.

Beside, if I go too darkside, Akshun J will reach through the Internet (being a series of tubes) and poke me.

iPhone repair experience

All hardware breaks. Linux clusters break. Mercedes Benz diesels break. Entropy, like the speed of light, is an unbreakable law.

The iPhone is an amazing bit of engineering, but it is a device that one sticks in their pocket, carries in a belt-holster, bangs into walls, charges and recharges over and over. It has four radios, touch sensitive glass screen, batteries, antennas, a fairly speedy CPU, a docking port, earphone jack with built in switch, and RAM and ROM memory. It has more memory and a faster processor than my XO-1 laptop from OLPC. It is sophisticated as the day is long, nearly as state of the art as it gets. It therefore has a bunch of points of failure. The amazing part is that it lasts as long and as well as it does. The wonders of solid state design.

My iPhone was purchased on the second day they were available last summer. A couple of weeks ago, the earpiece started acting like it had lost its amplifier. When holding the unit to my ear, the voices were small and very far away sounding. At first I thought I was going deaf in that ear. I soon realized what the problem was: The headset worked fine. The Bluetooth headset worked fine. The speakerphone worked fine. The built in earpeice... not so much.

I reloaded the 1.1.4 operating level to make sure it was utterly clean, and not something bit-flipped someplace in the phone. This made no difference. As soon as I got off a road trip, I called in to Apple, and they sent me a box. I put the phone in the box. There was even a little bag in the box with a picture of an un-bent paper clip pushing in the tray to release the SIM card, and inside the bag a paperclip. The sealed box (box sealing tape included) went into the Fedex box, and two days later a new iPhone was at my house.

Wow.

All was not as good as it could be though. I tried to to use the the Apple web site to report the problem first. This somewhat confusingly led me to ordering a new headset. When I realized what I had done I called in to 1-800-my-iphone (which I did not find on the web site till after I tripped into accidentally ordering the headset. It warned me that it would charge me 29 USD if I did not return the defective headphones. OK: fair enough.

What arrived was a docking station. I have no idea what happened there. But it had an easy to turn around envelope, so I just sent it right back.

Oddly, the docking station came DHL and the iPhone replacement box came Fedex. Good thing Office Max has both drop boxes in it. This would be less convenient if I did not reside is a big city / swamp.

Another odd thing: I got a second box to send in my iPhone with when I recieved the new iPhone. No idea why. I'll call Apple tomorrow and ask what I am supposed to do with the empty box: Hopefully they are not expecting the new iPhone to be pre-broken.

Apple iPhone camera and Linux Mint / gThumb 2.10.6

I have been on the road for a week or so, and I have been using my MacBook for most of the trip. Today I decided to use my Dell D620 running Mint 4.0 at the office instead, since it is better at accessing my MS Exchange calendar via Evolution 2.12. When on the Mac, I have to use Webmail to read my calendar. It works, but not as nicely as Evolution on Mint does.

My office here in Sunnyvale appears to have Faraday cages around it. I have at most one bar of signal on the iPhone, and often I'll walk out to get a drink and suddenly the iPhone will tell me I have missed calls.

Every cell phone I have ever owned uses way more power when it can not reach its cell tower. It appears that the transmitter in the phone cranks up to 700 milliWatt full power to try and find someone... anyone... it can talk to. Out in West Texas, where I get zero cell phone signal, my iPhone will go to zero power in a day. So did my Samsung and Sony before it.

For this reason, I keep the iPhone plugged in to a USB port on the computer de jour when I am in the office. I jacked it into the Linux laptop today for the first time ever, with the expectation that all I would see / hear is the iPhone chirping to let me know it was seeing 5V DC and was happy with the "drink".

I was surprised to see the Linux desktop ask me if I wanted to import the pictures on the "new" digital camera it just found. I said yes, and gThumb 2.10.6 was engaged, and it drained the iPhone in short order. There they were. All the pictures I had taken on the trip so far! Cool beans. Drained is probably not the right word: Copied. The pictures are still on the iPhone too.

Side note: gThumb is not installed on Mint by default, but I had loaded it with Synaptics. 3:2.10.6-0ubuntu1 is the package number, so it is something that Mint inherits from Ubuntu.

I would of course like it better if iPhones were better supported on Linux, but I did not think they would work at all, so this was a pleasant surprise. At least the iPhone pays attention to one standard out there. It sure made it easy to get a picture off the iPhone to use as my new desktop wallpaper! Rogue Ale Public House menu, now on tap... err... screen.

Not Quite Dead Yet, plus Ubuntu and Mint

OK, sure. It has been a while since I wrote anything here. It has been everything I can do to keep my corporate Blog up to date recently.

Since my last post from India (back in the end of October), I have been to Vancouver, the Gulf Coast twice, Far West Texas (Home), and right now for the last two weeks, San Francisco. To write about home use of Linux or Open Source, I would have to actually have been home! I did use my iPhone a great deal to stay hooked in, but I have already posted a fair amount about that. The only new thing there is that I finally downgraded from 1.0.2 of the firmware to 1.1.1, and re-installed all the hacks and everything to re-enable all the cool things Apple left out. I finally have Solitaire on the iPhone! Thank you Chris Miles!

Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0 on the Acer 5610

In my most recent post over at talk.bmc, I mention using Ubuntu 7.10 and then Mint 4.0 on my office desktop system, a Dell D620. What I did not mention there was that tested each of those release first on my personal Acer 5610.

The very most interesting thing that is different for me between Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0 did not show up on the Dell at all. On the Acer, the SD flash card reader that is built in to the left hand side of the unit has never worked under any previous version of Linux. It was present in the hardware inventory, but nothing ever mounted when the chip was inserted. Research said that support was coming for the specific chipset from ENE Technologies, and should arrive along about 2.6.22 or so. Ubuntu 7.10 did not appear to see the reader any better than 7.04, or Mint 3.1. But Mint 4.0 had the reader, and the chip in it (I left it there for testing long ago) mounted and ready for use!

Mint 4.0 has many other nifty features over Ubuntu 7.10. As Ubuntu has matured and picked up some of the functionality of Mint, I was wondering what the Mint folks were going to do to stay ahead of the curve. The answer is, they continue to innovate.

The major new nifty thing I have found is the new updater. At first I was very skeptical about whether Linux really needs YAUT (Yet Another Update Tool). I mean really: Adept, Apt, Synaptic, Yum, Yumex, YAST, UP2DATE, ... to name but a few. But the new MintUpdate does a risk classification for each patch on how likely the patch is going to be to cause your system to have problems. The update screen is clean, easy to read. I like it.

One problem I had was that I wanted a very specific feature of the new Compiz Fustion enabled: The one where the cursor hovered over the task bar reveals a small composited screen of the application. I find this very handy for checking on things I started running and then left to go do other things. I use this almost in preference to putting application screens on multiple workspaces. I could not find in Mint how to turn that back on, and said so in my talk.bmc post. The answer came in at once via a comment from "67GTA":

You have to install "compizconfig-settings-manager". It was left out of Mint by default. There you can tweak the effects. It was Advanced Desktop Effects Settings in Ubuntu 7.10.

Sure enough, with this installed, I could turn on the window preview, and I was good to go.

Linux has been good enough for a long while to be a complete enterprise desktop, although it helps if the place you work is smart about the infrastructure they deploy. The more attention to open standards they have paid, the easier it is. The more they have deployed closed stuff like MS Exchange, the more coping skills required.

Oddly, most home usage has been ahead of the corporate environment in this regard. Webmail, POP, IMAP, SMTP, AJAX web applications, and so forth have been staples of most ISP's / Broadband carriers for years. You only get into trouble when you want to do things like play MS Windows specific games, and Linux is even starting to be able to do that. Mint's broad hardware support and easy installability make it hard to ignore as a viable home OS. Between Linx and the Mac, I have not used MS Windows at the house (other than to experiment with Vista) for years.

Hard Drives Not Included

My brother has been running Ubuntu 7.04 on a hand built computer for a while now. I have never had to do anything to support him (unlike MS WIndows days) till now.

Linux is pretty good. Probably better than pretty good. But no OS can withstand having its hard drive fall apart. FSCK's show low level corruption that just can not be repaired.

My first house call ever on his Linux box will be to rebuild it on a fresh hard drive. Ubuntu 7.04 will become Mint 4.0 in the process. Hopefully we'll be able to get something off his old harddrive... but I am not holding my breath. This thing was *toast*.

The Other Side of the World is Amazing

In my last blog here, I mentioned the "Stand Up, Speak Out" web campaign. i did so knowing I was getting ready to come to India, where I was going to see first hand what this campaign is really all about.
You can not travel here and not be changed by the experience. This ranges from serious insights to silly observations. In no particular order, here are some of them:

1. I talked about using Linux on the road over at Talk.bmc in my last post there. Nothing really specific to India here other than the plug shape is different here than at home and I had to get an adapter. Both the Apple and the Dell D620 have auto-sensing power supplies, so all that needs adapting is the power.
2. So. Many. People. If *just* the people of this country were to consume resources at the rate they do in the States (and I am here in India at the moment, so I get to phrase it that way), then all the resources of the planet Earth would be consumed. But instead in India resources are consumed at .4 of a planet. The difference is mind boggling. All lights are power saving. Very few lights. When you leave the hotel room, the entire room is powered down while you are gone. Everything. Not even the wall plugs to run the battery charger work.
3. So many people, part II: Streets are built by people, not for the most part machines. People carrying concrete bags and manual tools.
4. So many people, Part III. With over 1.13 Billion people in a land area 1/3 that of the US, not only are people very close, they are very close. By that I mean they are both physically and emotionally close. Family is everything, followed by community. Visitors are taken care of every waking moment.
   
5. Being taken care of: This really is hard to deal with if you are used to doing for yourself. I carry my bags in airports. Not because I am afraid they'll get stolen but because I dislike the idea that I am somehow not capable of doing so. I have probably been very rude by local standards.
6. Where in the US one person does many different things, here with so many people available to do things, there are specialties. At the knick knack store yesterday one person wrote up the bill, another packaged them in a box, Another stood by to see if any other things need to be bough, while another opened and closed the door to the store, and another took care of storing and returning bags that you werr carrying when you came into the store. Yet another (the owner or manager) watch over it all, and talked on two phones at once. In the Sari shop (in a shopping district for just clothing that stretched to the limits of vision in all directions) one showed me Saris, thre of four others retrieved Saris or acted as Sari holders. Another slotted the ones I was interested in away for later final decisions. Four or five people sat behind the counter to take money. One for Cash, One for Credit cards, one for bill writing, and another to run the card. This may all seem silly to a western mind, but it makes total sense. People have to be employed.
7. About the Cell phone thing. They are everywhere. No one uses land lines. Cell towers line the roofs of buildings and the sides of roads. People drive one handed on motorcycles because the other hand is holding the cell phone to their head. Given traffic density and the utterly lack of street line, this is an order of magnitude scarier than it is the us, yet at the same time I have not witnessed a single accident while here. Not one.
8. Signs are everyplace. They are about everything. Many mention classes in data structures or C++. technology is everywhere. Linux is everywhere. Roughly speaking, half of the R&D Support team here knows Linux. MS Windows sits on the desktop systems, but it takes not effort to find Linux.
9. iPhones may be dead useful in San Francisco, but here it is mostly a world clock and to-do list organizer. I am really glad mine is hacked, because Web 2.0 only works if you turn on the Edge service. I have a services app hack that lets me keep everything off but Wifi. So far, that has been borderline useful but WAP's are not prevalent. If I had no hacks, I could not do in-phone to-do lists and other text editing. Still, there will be an iPhone SDK out early next year, so I imagine I'll get to unhack my iPhone in a few months. Since I am locked to AT&T, and roaming charges here are over the moon, it will only ever be a useful PDA when I am here. I have seen iPhones here, so I assume they went for the full meal deal and unlocked them too.

Next week I change countries again, this time to Canada and BMC Userworld. The Adventure continues.

Does Apple have a community?

Akshun J commented on my last post the Apple does not have community. The understandable point behind that comment is that Apple is doing some things recently that are very negatively impacting people that use their gear.

Whether or not Apple has community might be semantics, however according to any definition I have of the term, Apple does in fact have a strong community. They also have fans. They also have detractors, and in fact there is a community of detractors too.

I can't read Akshun J's mind here, but I think this might be a reference to the fact that Redhat builds community by actively sponsoring projects like Fedora, and SUSE has openSUSE project sponsorship, and LinSpire has FreeSpire, and Sun has among other things OpenOffice.org, and on and on. These are for profit companies that that actively try and build community.

Apple spends a fair amount of time doing things agains the community that has sprung up around them: that can not be denied. But to not call the folks at iPhoneDevCamp a community, or what happens around TUAW or any of the other pro-Apple community web sites a community is not accurate. They are a community, even if they are a community under seige. Apple may not value their community in the same way that Sun values theirs, but that does not mean that the community is not there. As an aside, the OpenOffice community has been hard at work on porting their excellent flagship product to OS.X, extending their community to include the OS.X one.

It can not even be catagorically stated that Apple is anti-community, because Apple is not just Steve Jobs. It is a large comapny, and there were Apple employees at iPhoneDevCamp, even if it was not in an official capacity.

The main point here is that community will exist around all sorts of things, and what Apple needs to watch out for is what their communities do may be inspired by what Apple does. Apple is creating the crucible that fires people into doing things like porting Linux or BSD to the iPhone so that they can be rid of the yoke that binds them, but still get to play with the device that they love. The same thing is true in Akshun J's references iPod article: Linux already runs on the iPod. I can have the device that I want, and use it the way that I want as well.

90% of the folks that buy iPods or iPhones are going to use them exactly as Apple designed them. Apple has no worries there. It is only that the 10% that will not use them as they are built are not going to just decide they were being silly, and they were really sorry, and "oh, OK I'll put it back the way it was meant to be" because Apple fired update 1.1.1 over their heads. The 10% are highly creative, and highly influential. They will either fix Apple, or Apple is going to find that "the next big thing" grew out of the community that they were firing at.

It is an easy fix. All they have to do is release an SDK for the iPhone to allow apps to be created for the platform. Problem solved. Or they can stay at odds with their community and be on the receiving end of the law of unintended consequences.

Waiting on the iPhone Community to fix Apple

Apple is being deeply clueless lately, at least about the iPhone.

I am not talking about iPhone unlocks here. I do not get why Apple does not sell an unlocked model at a higher price-point than the unit they sell via AT&T here in the states. Seems like a no-brainer, so I assume it is contractual with AT&T that they do not.

I don't really care: I know there are folks who really have issues with AT&T but I am unable to discern any major differences in moral character between any of the carriers here in the US. The price is the price, I have looked at it, decided it is worth it, and am willing to pay it.

I also do not care about the iPhone sealed battery, no GPS chip, or no 3G. I have looked at each of these issues, and decided that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For ME. I also do not expect that others needs, wants or desires here are the same as mine, and I expect that others will stay away from the iPhone because they don't like these two features *more* than they like what the iPhone is. [update from the future: Ok, that was three features, not two. Doh.]

I am pretty clearly on record as loving my iPhone... mostly. It is as much a portable computer as anything else. That is what I wanted from the converged device.

However....

Apple is not meeting my needs in the application department. I want things other than what they offer. I get the whole web 2.0 thing. I still want certain classes of things to run locally on my iPhone. My deepest disappointment to date is that there is not a decent Klondike time waster available for local install. Not from Apple, and not from the iPhone community at large, even with their local applications installer. I know about the web site solitaire sites, and so far none of them are making my socks roll up and down.

I have the Nullriver Installer.app, and have used it to install all sorts of the stuff that Apple forget to install or at least make available as options. Things like a native IM client No iChat... what *were* they thinking. Give me this great keyboard, and I can't use it to IM! I am not a big IM'er. I don't do it at work much at all. When I have time to IM is when I am sitting on the subway someplace, or in a waiting room at the Doctors office or something. When I am with my iPhone, not my computer.

Other missing stuff I want are things like an RSS news reader, VNC, and (as a geek) the BSD subsystem so I can open a terminal and SSH around to things.

There should have been an SDK from day one, and when Apple did not create it, they should not have been surprised that the community was not going to sit around and wait for them to figure it out.

I am in the interesting position now that I will not install the new 1.1.1 version of the code on the iPhone because it is attempting to break my applications (and perhaps brick my iPhone in the process), and I value the community developed applications far more than any ability to directly download music to my iPhone,(iTunes store access being the only really new thing in 1.1.1, and "Just In Time Music" is not something I live for. I can wait till I get home.).

It would be nice to have iTunes Store access from the iPhone, but I do not want it more than I want all the other cool community applications. I mean really: has Apple *seen* Navizon? I don't care that the iPhone has no GPS chip. Don't need it with Navizon.

Instead of taking the opportunity to build community, not to mention get great feedback about what people really want their iPhones to do, Apple appears to be trying to make the community mad. It won't be long before folks just say "This isn't worth it. Great hardware though. Time to install FreeBSD / Linux and just be done with this."

I don't think that is what Apple wants: an lPhone. That is exactly what they are incenting. The law of unintended consequences is a cruel master.

So, like the Chuck Norris joke, I am waiting (Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits). I am waiting for the community to fix 1.1.1. I am watching what Apple does next. I am deciding.

I don't *have* to buy Apple stuff. I do so far, but I am fully willing to not do it in future if Apple continues not getting it. Linux is taking off in the Smartphone market. There is probably a reason.

Come on Apple. Please figure this out!

On the Road with the iPhone

I was in San Francisco recently. My iPhone made this into a completely different experience than it ever has been before. I love SanFran: One of my favorite cities. I do not get there often enough to be a native son or anything, but I know my way around enough to know I don't need directions from the helpful dude on Powell street who has "memorized all the local clubs: where do you want to go?"

I used the iPhone so much one day that the battery was at 5% and the icon was looking seriously red when I got back to my room. I normally do not run my cell phones down below 90%. Lithium Ion batteries do not like to be deep cycled.

In the process of using the iPhone on this day I decided a couple of things about all the anti-iPhone factions main complaints. Mostly it came down to that all phones are going to have to rise to the level of design and usability of this device before I'm letting go of this little jewel. I may never update the OS level past here in order to keep my installer.app applications working (Really Apple: open up the software side of the iPhone!)

During the course of the day the only thing I didn't use the iPhone for was as a phone.

I got up early and headed into the city from where I was staying down in Santa Clara. Picking up BART just south of SFO at the Millbrea station, I started to research with the web browser and google maps where I wanted to go. My plan was to see the Cable Car museum and Power House. I was alone on this trip, and no one else in my family had ever been interested in this, so I wanted to take advantage of my solitary status to do a few things I had always wanted to.

I also had a goal: I had always wanted to "Hike the Hill", I.E., get off at the Powell BART station, and walk the line the cable car travels up the hill, and then back down to where the Cable car museum is, then down to the wharf.

Entering things in the Google maps app like "BART Powell" as my start location, and "Cable Car Museum" as my destination, it drew me a map of exactly what I wanted. First time. Wow.

I exited Powell's BART station with my headphones in my ears. I didn't have any music on. It was an experiment. Sure enough, the panhandlers at Powell left me alone, assuming I could not hear them. I knew where I was going, and I had an iShield.

Half way up the hill, I was stopped by someone asking directions. I guess headphones means you must be a local too. I looked up what they needed on Google maps, gave them directions (we were two blocks from where they wanted to be), and they smiled, thanked me, and took off. This happened four times before the day was over.

I had my Pentax digicam, so the iPhone did not do camera duty at the museum. That is goodness: 2 Mp doesn't really get it done for most things. It's nice as a backup when I forget my real camera, but it isn't great.

I got to talking to an employee of the museum, who was a life long area resident. They told me about some things I needed to see that were off the beaten path over in North Beach. I looked this up in the iPhone, got a map, and headed off through the heart of Chinatown.

I realized on the indicated route that I had never been in this part of Chinatown: it was very cool. Lots of open air markets, very little in the way of tourist stuff. Before I knew it I was wandering into North Beach. I saw a little pub that was interesting called "Rogue Ales Public House". I googled this from across the street, it looked promising, and so I had dinner there. A quick picture of the beer bug was emailed home to let my wife know I was OK. She was deeply worried I might not find a quality beer.... Or not.

Next stop was Ghirardelli Square. I cut over to the Embarcadero, and took a side trip onto Pier 39 to see if there were any new shops. I stopped to do some Google research on the historic Eagle Cafe, which is a historic building built in 1928 that was lifted to the 2nd story of the entrance to Pier 39.

When I got to Ghirardelli, there was an unexpected-by-me crowd for the Chocolate Festival. I was there for Chocolate sauce so that my wife would let me back in the house. The live music was great, and so now I looked up the festival to see what that was about. I listened to a great Santana cover band, then stepped up the hill to the Square to buy my get out of jail sauce. Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce in tow, I headed back to Powell station, reading email on the trolley.

I stopped outside the Apple store to see if I could pick up their free Wifi, and I could. Not sure why: I was just curious. Legs called up to the head and indicated they were ready to have a seat, so I got onto BART to head south, watching a movie on the way back to the car.

I was sorry I didn't go in to the Apple store and get an auxiliary battery. At 5%, the battery was just about dead. If someone had called at that point, I probably would have had no significant talk time.

This was all before the Navizon app came out too: I kept thinking all day that the only thing that I was missing was a GPS chip tied to the map application so that I could map my current location a little easier. It turned out to not be a major issue in a city though. Plenty of street signs and significant locations to enter for my current location.

I know SanFran well enough that the iPhone just added an extra level of confidence to my ability to get around. The ability to look into background information was very very cool, and I have to say that at least in SanFran I had no issues with the Edge network speeds. Given how I was pushing the battery life with my usage, 3G would have really needed the extra battery pack!

What will be interesting is next time I travel to a city I do not know as well: that should be even better, especially now that I have the Navizon application on the iPhone. If you don't know Navizon, it locates you by looking at the various cell phone towers the phone can see, plus any public wifi's, gets their coordinates from a database on the Internet, and triangulates your location. Driving around the swamp, it appears to be pretty accurate. Not as accurate as a GPS, but good enough for me.

More iPhone Madness

More iPhone madness

I am on the second week of a two week vacation. There are big doings over at BMC, with the announcement of the BMC Developer Network. it has been kind of frustrating to be on vacation at this particular time, since with my Corporate Blog I have been talking about Linux and Open Source for nearly two years there. This Developer Network stuff is so cool, that I of course want to talk about it too. And I have hardly been near the Internet for two weeks.

My home is in the mountains. I of course live and work in the big city most of the year, but on vacation I go to my house. My real house. A little cabin in West Texas, tucked neatly in the caldera of a 36 million year old volcano. The lava flows were rich in iron and effectively block all the electromagnetic radiation I might otherwise use to communicate with the outside world when I am there. So I fix up the cabin instead. Probably makes me far more productive at home repair not being able to surf and blog. Certainly makes me far healthier. All that lifting and hammering and digging in volcanic soil with rocks bars and what not....

Most of the ways I have stayed in touch for the last two weeks have been the iPhone. Every time I dropped out of the caldera, and could "see" either a cell tower or an open WiFi access point (there are actually quite a number of those in the cities) I could read gmail, update twitter, surf the news web sites to see if the world was still out there, post to this weblog via email, and so on. The Macbook only came out of the bag twice so far, and this is the second time. I could have posted again from the iPhone, but I have to admit using the Macbook keyboard is nice. The iPhone has the best itty bitty "keyboard" I have ever used, but it can take a bit to tap out a post on it.

The Macbook screen does seem positively huge now though. Next week, back to the real world and Linux.

On Vacation With the iPhone

I am on vacation for the next two weeks . A normal vacation for me means just connecting to the Internet from time to time, and only using the Apple Macbook. No experimenting with Linux. The Linux laptops are all sleeping at home. This is not because they don't work fine on the road but because I can always run Linux as a guest on the Mac should the need arise.

The new Juniper VPN client works fine from the Apple or Linux. The only reason Linux hardware stayed home is because I did not want to carry that many computers. It is vacation after all.

The point of this post is that so far the Mac has not left the case. The misnamed iPhone has been been meeting my entire computing device needs. Near access points it is fast, otherwise not quite as fast. Web browsing, email, this blog post, keeping Twitter up-to-date,weather, maps to places I have not been... All on the Apple Mini-iTablet.

Oh, yes. It is also a phone.

If I decide to check work email, I'll need the Macbook: even MS Lookout Webmail works from the iPhone, but the screen does not really have enough space on it to be fast on the poorly formatted web pages Lookout Web creates. I don't like the screens much on a big screen either.... MS needs to go to Google Mail school for Webmail clients.

Steve Carl
Blogs: on-being-open.blogspot.com / talk.bmc.com
Sent from my iPhone

Apple tablet computer

As rumors of the iPhone Nano swirl, and folks have handbuilt Apple tablet computers and Axiotron has their "Modbook", it occured to me that Apple has just delivered their first table PC. They just called it "iPhone".
Now imagine all that scaled up to 3/4's Macbook size, and still 1/2 inch thick.
Betcha Apple has thought about that long ago. All the tech: the touch screen, the virtual keyboard, the gestures...
Sigh. I think I better start saving my money. Again....

What do you call an iPhone addict?

Blackberries became CrackBerries. The iPhone is far more devastatingly addictive (IMHO). What shall we be called?
Sorry. Gotta run and see what is new on the iPhone and YouTube... :)

The iPhone has the wrong name

I admit that it is a phone. So what? So is my wifes Macbook, running Skpe.
What the iPhone really is: a handheld computer. The first really good one. What the iPhone should be called (assuming the trademark was available):

• Its a Mac Micro.
  
• A Mac Handheld.
  
• A Mac Sidekick.
  
• A Mac PDA.
• A Mac Palmtop
• A Mac iTouch
• A Mac Featherweight
• A Mac iLife
  
• Something.....

I was talking to whurley today about this subject, and it echoed a conversation with my wife over the weekend about why she wants one. It all came down to the same thing: Apple finally created the first usable handheld computer. With iPhoneDevCamp (very coolly sponsored in part by BMC I might add!), it is about to get extended too!

I bought an HP 300. Then a 320. Then the 500. The NEC MP 800. I gave up on CE, and switch to Palm. I have had a IV, a V, a VII (still have this one actually, even though there is no more wireless service for it), then jumped over to a series of Sony units. Total it all up, and over the years I have spent *thousands* and I have never ever gotten what I really wanted: a handheld computer.

The iPhone was what I wanted all along. And the cool thing here is? This is the new entry level. From here on out, whatever comes next has to work better, be less expensive, have more features... something.

Palm will have their Linux unit out in 2008. This is the bar they have to reach.

The iPhone is not perfect of course. My two main gripes are that I can not use my music for distinctive ringtones: my Sony Ericsson s710a could do that and it's over two years old! Whurley told me he is glad of that, since that means I can't subject him to my music...

The other thing is games. I am not a big gamer, but I like to have Solitaire with me in case I get stuck somewhere. I'll just have to surf over the slow slow Edge network instead I guess.

I can't wait for update 1.