My New Favorite Gadget

I've been a fan of Star Trek for a while as you may have guessed by other posts. I can't help but compare so many ordinary things today to what seemed so whizz-bang just a few years ago. Think about it: cell phone "communicator" (I love it when William Shatner opens his cell phone on Boston Legal - it makes the communicator sound), doors that open when you walk up to them and voice activated cars - it's all coming so quickly.

Now the PADD has come to life. This is the coolest the coolest gadgetto date, IMHO. It is the iPhone's cousin the iPod Touch. It's about 8mm thick and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. I fell in love with it when I got it just before Christmas. It's got WiFi capability, an Internet browser that lets you zoom in on Web sites so they can easily be read on it's crystal-clear 3.5" screen. It's got a calendar and address book that you can sync with your PC or Mac. Not only that, it plays music and videos! With the WiFi feature you can even buy tunes straight from your iPod!

But wiat! There's more! Just this month Apple "unlocked" the iPod so you can now add email, real-time stock quotes, Google maps, weather and more. It is now truly as cool as it gets. I can do pretty much anything I would normally do on a laptop without ahaving to worry about where I can plug it in or waiting for it to boot. It fits in my shirt pocket (I got it a rubber case so it doesn't slip out of said pocket), it has all my favorite music and videos on it as well as a hundred or so photos. Way cool.

I've been a PDA user since the first Palm Pilot came out, and I've jumped to the next coolest as fast as it came out. Well, that and the amount of money in my wallet. I've had Palm-powered devices and Windows Mobile devices, but this really takes the prize. It's sleek, it's pretty, it is easy to use. I encourage you to check it out.

People are asking why I didn't just get an iPhone. Well, I've heard the battery life isn't too hot for one thing. My iPod will play music all day and still let me surf the Web. I also happen to like my current wireless carrier (and I've still got a contract). But it does make my once-cool cell phone look a litte clunky.

What's your favorite gadget?

Do You See What I See?

I heard that famous Christmas carol in a Chinese restaurant the other day. At the same time I saw a kid across aisle from me busily pecking away at his cell phone. Was he sending a text message to a friend or was he playing a game? I had no way of knowing. But it got me thinking. What does that kid think of me over here hacking away on my laptop? What I do know is that even though we were looking at the same things - a computer and a cell phone - we were seeing different things. I saw a cool and powerful computer in front of me and a kid playing with an overly complex data device. I bet the kid was wondering about the old guy using the clunky old computer (and telling all his friends about it via IM).

It seems that age really does temper our view of technology. For me, texting is a novelty that I've never mastered. Pushing the "7" button on my phone four times to enter the letter "S" is just counter-intuitive. Yeah, I know there are programs that guess what I'm trying to enter and I can select from a list of words. Now I'm trying to read and type at the same time. Nope, not going to happen. I went out and got a phone that has a tiny keypad on it so I can text like everyone else. Now I just have to learn to read what people are sending me.

I think about the discussions I had with my Dad back in the '90s. Desktop computers were starting to show up in his office and he wasn't happy about it. He told me he didn't know a thing about programming and wasn't planning to learn. My assurances that he wouldn't have to program a thing fell on deaf ears. He ended up retiring early just so he wouldn't have to make the change.

A couple of years later my Mom bought a "home computer" and this really irked my father. Today we'd laugh at the 64MB of RAM and archaic processor. But back then it was pretty cool. My brother and I started creating programs in BASIC and my mother started printing out the Help files. Mom became a big fan of email. My wife and I always laughed when Mom would call and ask us if we'd gotten the email she sent ten minutes before.

Flash forward to the present day. My cell phone has more horsepower than my Mom's PC. Now I'm calling my employees wondering why they haven't responded to an email I sent a half hour ago. They get back at me by sending text messages to my phone. Folks half my age are laughing at me when they see my feeble attempts to decipher and respond to these text messages.

What's in store for the kids that are laughing at me? My generation was (and some of us still are) impressed with the hardware and the amazing advances it has made in our lifetime. Younger adults expect the hardware to be cool and fast. They're more fascinated with the content than the device used to access it. We've gone from dial up to light-speed fiber optics right up to our door in less than ten years. We've gone from choppy music videos on the new-fangled world wide web to posting and watching our own videos on YouTube - all in less than 20 years. There are now more than 100 million Web sites on the Internet, and more actual Web pages than there are people on earth.

What will the Internet look like in another decade? What form will the information take and how will we access it? I can pretty much guarantee that whatever your guess is, it's going to be wrong. I'm not even going to try to predict the future. I'm just going to focus on learning to speak "text."

I Am Borg?

For those of you who aren't Start Trek fans, the Borg are an alien race that is part human, part machine. They live in a collective and are incapable of independent thought.

That being said, I'm starting to worry that we are on our way to becoming Borg. The latest tell-tale is the Bluetooth headsets so many of us are wearing. I bought mine because a) my phone is a bit clunky to hold to my ear, and b) I use my phone in the car a lot.

At first I thought it was cool, but the more I see people walking around seemingly talking to themselves I start to worry. These things are maybe not so cool. Especially to the uninitiated. Not only do I hate it when people come up and talk to me when I'm on the phone while using a Bluetooth headset, I hate it when I have to point to my ear and silently mouth "I'm on the phone." Some people still don't get it and continue to chatter away at you, then give you a funny look when you say something totally out of context for the discussion they think you're having with them.

So who's the rude one? The person talking on an invisible phone or the person trying to talk to the person on an invisible phone? I've got to admit it's most probably the person on the invisible phone. And that person is often me. But I always try to let anyone I'm with know I'm taking (or making) a call, just as I would if I were using a regular phone. If the person I'm with still feels the urge to carry on a conversation, I think the shoe's on the other foot.

Whichever side of the fence you're on, more and more people are plugging these devices into their ears. They're light, and some are even stylish (in a geeky sort of way). Mine's so light I sometimes forget to take it off sometimes, which really tickles my wife. Everywhere you go you see people having conversations with the air. And I think the ease of answering calls with these nifty little ear buds makes people forget just where they are and who's around them. In other words, people carrying on conversations about things you don't know or don't care about while you're trying to carry on with your business. Rude?

You've got to admit there's a lot of potential for humor in these situations. I'm surprised there hasn't been more attention given this phenomenon by comics. But it really isn't all that funny to me. I try to turn mine off and put in my pocket or at least take it off my ear when I'm in meetings or in a situation where I wouldn't normally answer a call. Is that proper?

Share your thoughts on Bluetooth etiquette or your funny story about a conversation or situation you've run into.

Really Fast Internet

I remember when I went from dial-up to DSL. I was simply amazed. Then I upgraded from DSL to cable. Once again I was amazed. Now I get to play with customer networks connected to fiber and T-1. Very cool stuff. Now it's all about streaming media and downloading songs. I can download a song in seconds and an entire album in minutes. Who could need more speed? I had gone from Kbps (thousands of bits per second) to Mbps (millions of bits per second).

Well, I read an article in the paper a couple of weeks ago about Internet2. It's being developed by academics for academics (and government and big businesses). At least for now. It has a theoretical limit of 10 Gbps (that's 10 billion bits per second). You could download a full-length movie in about 30 seconds. This Internet 2 parallels the existing Internet and was largely completed this past August.

But wait, there's more. There is now a 100 Gbps backbone. Downloading The Matrix just went from a butt-dragging 30 seconds to about three seconds. It's all done with fiber optics. Multiple strands using multiple colors allowing much more data to be sent simultaneously over the same cable.

With more and more content on the Internet, more applications becoming Internet-based, the need for consumer bandwidth is going to keep growing. With TVoIP (high-quality streaming video over the Internet) just over the horizon, I don't think it will be too long before average folks like you and me are going to start looking back at Mega bit speeds as quaint. Where do you see the Internet going as the speeds increase expopnentially?

Surprise! New and Improved!

I just read an article. More of a rant, really, by Stephen Manes of PC World in their November 2007 issue. In this article he goes off on the recent change Comcast made to their DVR software. The I-Guide software on the Motorola DVR's is actually worse than the old Microsoft-based programming guide. I didn't think that was possible. The system is often unresponsive. If, in your frustration, you press multiple buttons you will likely find all of them responding at once several seconds (or more) later.

Comcast gave us a little warning - a vague note that the change to I-Guide would occur sometime in the fall timeframe. Oneday we came home to watch a show and POOF there it was. Our saved shows were pretty much gone, scheduled shows erased and new ones (Jerry Springer and Tales From the Crypt) scheduled daily ad infinitum. Which only served to reinforce the weaknesses of their system. Trying to see what is scheduled and when involves scrolling through the daily schedules looking for shows that are or are not scheduled. Not very helpful - especially with some of the casble stations that re-run shows at unpredictable times.

Speaking of re-runs, they did keep one feature: recording shows that you've recorded previously, even when it's clearly marked as a repeat.

The Comcast forum is full of complaints about this no-choice "upgrade" that we got without any opportunity to weigh in. And it would certainly appear no one at Comcast tried it before it was deployed. The scary thing is that so many of our programs and products connect to the Internet and install updates with little or no input from us (think AOL).

Have you been surprised by an unwanted or unexpected update? Tell us all about it here.

BlackBerries Everywhere

I was just reading that RIM (Research In Motion), maker of the infamous BlackBerry phone, email reader, etc. all-in-one device just broke the 10-million subscriber mark in the second quarter of this year. And the company's prediction is that sales will continue to be brisk for the rest of the year. Given there are plenty of other similar devices such as the Treo, the Q, the Dash and others, that means that there are a lot of people checking their email or browsing their favorite Web sites from virtually anywhere.

I'm sorry, but that scares me. That means people walking - or driving - down the street might be so absorbed in their virtual world that they might not see that car, that tree, or you. It was bad enough when you had to worry about the idiot talking on the phone while trying to drink coffee and drive a car. Now you have to wonder if the person next to you is trying to read (or even worse write) an email.

And let's not forget that person at the end of the conference room table staring at the tiny screen of their handheld device, thumbs flying across the miniature keyboard. Instead of being a part of the meeting, he or she is now off at some other place and totally missing the point of what you're saying. Or maybe that message is to one of your competitors. You just don't know. Even if it's just a love letter to a spouse or a quick check of the stock ticker, I think it's just plain rude (although I'll cop to checking mail during the drier parts of a meeting).

So what's your pet peeve about those that choose to be on line all the time?

XP Lives On

There was an announcement earlier this week that Microsoft is going to keep Windows Xp alive - as in still selling it until the end of January 2009. While retailers and manufacturers such as Dell will probably stop selling XP earlier than that, it seems strange to me that the folks in Redmond would be willing to launch what appears to be a vote of no confidence in its long-awaited and highly touted new operating system.

Most companies pull the older version of a product off the shelves when the new product is launched. I can understand that they may want to give the general public a chance to learn and embrace the new product, but it's unheard of (at least to me) for a company to keep offering an older product for more than a year after the new one is released.

Of course, if you read my article in the Snohomish County Business Journal about Vista, you know where I stand on the subject. And I can guarantee you won't find a single copy of Mac OS X Tiger on shelves for a moment after Leopard is released.

What do you think?