...more recent posts
Looks like sales of camera phones have outpaced the sales of digital cameras in the first half of '03.
I've been saying this for a long time: the stand alone consumer camera market is doomed. But the handset manufactures still have some progress to make. We're starting to see 1 megapixel units, but we need at least twice that resolution. And, more importantly, we need on the fly variable jpeg compression. I mean: each time you snap a picture you should produce two images. One full size image that gets stored in your phone (and synched to your PC later by bluetooth or cable,) and one smaller (the user can select a target size, say, between 20K and 200K) reduced quality image that can be emailed (or sent via mms) right from the phone immediately. I think this is key. So far I know of no one doing this.
Fastap is a new alpha keyboard layout for cellphones. Very interesting compromise. Intel has some reference designs and we should see production models by the end of the year. Will this finally get Americans text messaging?
On Wednesday there will be an Applescript for system admins webcast featuring Apple's AS guru Sal Soghoian.
Pictures of my new 1,100 dual 2.0 Ghz G5 Mac cluster.
Oh no wait, those are shots of the cluster at Virginia Tech.
Got a chance to play with Alex's new 17 inch Powerbook yesterday. That is one sweet machine. Compared to my 15 inch (last generation titanium,) the 17 inch aluminum is much nicer. The screen is sharper, with (it seemed to me at least) better color. The hinge mechanism for the screen is greatly improved and now glides open fluidly. A real pleasure. And the backlit keyboard is hard not to fall in love with.
This was also my first chance to play with two wireless powerbooks. We had Alex's machine connected to the office router with an ethernet cable. And my machine was wirelessly connected to Alex's through airport. This is very easy, but still not perfectly easy. I could share his internet connection. And my iTunes library automagically showed up in his version of iTunes (and vice versa.) That one is especially impressive.
I can't wait for the first time my iTunes program loads up some unknown iTunes users library when I'm out in public somewhere. Imagine being on a plane flight and having the music library of everyone with a powerbook on the plane suddenly display on your computer. "I wonder which of these people is the big Joy Division fan?" That's going to be fun. Ad hoc local wireless networks. Wi-fi and zeroconf (airport and rendez-vous in apple speak) are going to make the gadget world very interesting.
Still, when I tried to copy over my 17 gigs of, uh, uncopyrighted, uh, historical data (yeah, that's it, Alex and I are *way* into historical data,) we could see the limits of 802.11b 10 mb/sec connections. The highly unreliable time remaining indicator told us we would be waiting 9 days for it to finish. Plugging the machines directly into each other with an ethernet cable (both machines have gigabit/sec ethernet) resulted in the transfer time being knocked down to under 1 hour.
The WSJ's Walt Mossberg loves the Treo 600.
Canon EOS 300D - $899 6 megapixel digital SLR:
This digital SLR based on the EOS 10D's superb six megapixel CMOS sensor and image processor in an inexpensive consumer body similar to the film EOS-300. This camera is designed to take the prosumer end of the digital camera market by storm, everyone is fully aware of the image quality of the EOS 10D (considered by many as the benchmark six megapixel digital SLR), and so a consumer priced digital SLR based on the same sensor is irrefutably attractive to anyone who would have previously considered an 'all in one' prosumer digital cameras.
This camera is probably the most fundamentally important step for digital SLR's since the introduction of the Nikon D1. It will place digital SLR's into the hands of consumers (with a moderate budget) and will probably also have a very strong negative effect on the $1,000 prosumer digital camera market.
The Howard Dean campaign is developing an open source "web community kit" for building grassroots campaign websites. Deanspace.org is the developer site. This is cool even though it's just a modified version of drupal.
A company I've never heard of (no big surprise) called Firetide has announced a wireless mesh router. This is very sexy technology. If you're into such things. I will be very curious to read independent reviews of this product when it ships. It's the software that will make or break this device. Seems expensive at $799 per access point, but not completely crazy in such a young market. Assuming it works. And scales.
Texas Instruments joins Broadcom, Atheros, and Philips in announcing a wi-fi chip aimed at the cellphone market. TI's chip will support 802.11a and g in addition to the older (and most widely deployed) b variant. Looks like we will definitely be seeing combo cellular / wi-fi mobile phones next year.
But it's hard for me to understand why telco's would offer such a product. Seems to me like it will be the beginning of the end for them. Do they figure they'll get the backhaul business? Are they just scared that the competition will offer this and steal their business? Do they really want to give us something cool? (Yeah, I don't believe that last one either.)
Maybe they'll incorporate wifi but still charge you minutes for using it? They could have the phones "call home" and report on your wifi usage. But that would be insane...