...more recent posts
In my fantasy stock trader life I've been betting against Nokia because I see them as too unfocused, with no experience bringing a full hardware / software stack to market in anything but the entry level phone space. Or, put another way, I think Symbian (the open source OS backed, primarily, by Nokia and Sony that Nokia uses in it's smartphones) is doomed and I'm betting that Nokia can't get anything else together.
But of course now they've just released a new flagship "phone" they are calling the N900 Mobile Computer. And it's not running Symbian, it's running a full Linux distribution (based on Debian + Gnome) called maemo. Hardware specs look great: Arm Cortex A8 CPU like the new iPhone, lots of RAM, 3D graphics horsepower, full hardware qwerty keyboard, and a 5mp camera with a zeiss lens.
Obviously the very stock linux OS is appealing to the geeks. This is what I thought the iPhone was going to be when it was first announced - something exactly like my computer, but in my phone. Instead the iPhone turned out to be a much more closed, more closely controled by Apple, computing device. This has turned out great for Apple who are selling a gazillion of them, but a little disappointing to geeks like me who would like to run a full LAMP stack on their phone. Just 'cuz.
So I like the N900. Very intriguing. But the devil is in the details, and we'll see how it works out. My guess is that just like there are much better PMPs out there than the iPod, the N900 may well be a technically better smartphone than the iPhone. But you can't consider these things in isolation. The iPod won because of the complete iPod, iTunes, iTunes Music Store package. It was just completely easy to use, buy, and manage music with it, Similarly, the iPhone, iTunes (for syncing), and the App Store are a killer combination that Nokia (or Microsoft, or Google, etc...) is going to have a tough time competing with. (Om Malik says the App store does 2.4 Billion in sales a year, with 1.5 Billion applications having been downloaded.)
The N900 looks like a good move by Nokia. Enough to make me wonder about my (fantasy) short position. But I'm sticking to my guns. They have layed a nice foundation here, but I still think they can screw it up. Competition is good for everyone though, so the better they do the better phones we'll all be using. Congratulations on at least building a seemingly very open system. Now will they come?
Doctype is like stackoverflow but specifically for HTML and CSS questions. It all depends on who uses it, but this might turn into something good.
There's an app for that: USAA bank has started to accept check deposits by iPhone. Take a picture of the front and back of the check and you're done. They suggest voiding the check afterwards and keeping it for your records. Very slick.
Apple relents and begins offering a matte display option on the 15 inch MacBook Pro. It costs $50 extra and results in a silver bezel around the screen instead of the standard black (just like the matte screen option on the 17 inch seen here.) I think I'd get the matte if buying again but I'm not unhappy with the glossy.
3D texture mapped iPhone version of Paris. Wow.
LOL. Transforming MacBook.
For my reference: the best way to load external javascript.
The NYTimes David Pogue battles the cell phone giants: Take back the beep
In 2007, I spoke at an international cellular conference in Italy. The big buzzword was ARPU–Average Revenue Per User. The seminars all had titles like, “Maximizing ARPU In a Digital Age.” And yes, several attendees (cell executives) admitted to me, point-blank, that the voicemail instructions exist primarily to make you use up airtime, thereby maximizing ARPU.It's such a shameless scam. If I was dictator of the world I'd get these guys right after those colluding inkjet printer manufacturers.
Because I'm a nice guy, here a some free ideas for the cell phone industry. Perhaps some of these ideas have already been implemented on phones and/or by specific providers I am not aware of - but here goes anyway:
Predictive dialing. Just like in your browser's location field. Start typing a phone number and you get a pop up list of numbers from your address book and history that match what you have typed so far. So 2122283 would get me car service (probably just 21222 would do it.)
Home area code. If I just dial 5551212 and press talk my phone should attach my user specified home area code to the number automatically.
Selective ring. I should be able to turn my phone off (well, turn ring and vibrate off sending everything to voice mail) except for certain specified numbers. I want my family and current clients to get through, say, but everybody else goes straight to voicemail. Or in the middle of the night I want my colo facility to get through but nobody else.
Individual voice mail greetings for different incoming numbers.
Multiple numbers. I'm sure you can do this already, but it should be much easier and cheaper. I want several different numbers. Really I want dozens of different numbers. And I want to be able to set different ring tones for different numbers, and to send some numbers straight to voice mail while letting other numbers through. Due to the restricted number space I'd settle for one regular 10 digit number and then a second 10 digit number that will accept any combination of additional numbers (like extensions) on the end of it. So if 2125551212 was my secondary number I can give out 2125551212777 and 21255512129 and 212555121277701 and all these numbers can be set up in different ways (different outgoing voicemail messages, different call routing, etc...)
More below as I remember them...
About to pull the trigger on the new iPhone purchase. Finally. For the past year or two I've been feeling like the tech world has been stagnating, but now just lately, for me, I feel another surge coming on. And the iPhone and the various Google Android handsets are leading the charge. What I'm excited about is being called "augmented reality" and I think it's going to be a big deal.
The phrase is a play on "virtual reality" which was a popular thing to fantasize about around the time I became interested in computer technology (early nineties.) The idea is that through equipment like a head mounted display (i.e., goggles with computer screens instead of lenses) we would create entire 3D worlds that people could interact with. William Gibson's Neuromancer was the canonical text for describing such a thing, and Jaron Lanier was the main evangelist.
Augmented reality is similar, except the computer generated world is overlaid on the real world. It turns out this is a much more useful idea. And the inclusion of video cameras, GPS, and magnetometers in these handsets allows for some really new breakthrough applications to be built. Our phone now knows where you are on the earth, and what direction you are pointing the phone. Hold it up like a third eye, with the video camera on (doesn't need to be recording - that may turn out to be a seldom used function of the camera!) and it sees what you are seeing - only it can overlay information on the screen.
Point your phone/camera/third eye at something and these new apps can figure out what it is and tell you. Check out the videos in the first "augmented reality" link. Okay, you've got to use your imagination, but this is some seriously cool stuff. In short, I'm excited again. I couldn't see it for a while, but this is the next big step.
On a side note: in my little game I play watching the stock market - I guess like some people follow a sports team - I've started rooting for ARM (ticker: armh). I think Intel has missed a bit with Atom and the ARM A9 Cortext (the heart of the iPhone) is going to be tough to catch. At $6.30 it's up a bit in the last week but still pretty cheap.