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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, November 04, 2002I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to Movable Type. I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.
My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.
For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002Microsoft's SmartPhone platform is finally becoming reality, thanks to the Orange SPV (aka HTC Canary). Forbes reports a US$260 selling price. infoSync has a thorough pre-release evaluation. InfoWorld says that AT&T will offer SmartPhones in the US by mid-2003.
According to Microsoft's specs, the SPV is tri-band. Probably won't be long before someone starts importing them...
Monday, October 21, 2002nSync synchronizes Newton PDAs with Mac OS X Jaguar. [via Boing Boing Blog]
The Newton MP130 was the first PDA that could read my handwriting. I have noticed that Transcriber's accuracy improves greatly if I write in cursive, but it's still not as good as an ancient Newton.
Thursday, October 17, 2002Standardization vs. Innovation
Frank followed-up on my post on the lack of PDA innovation, writing that "What one calls a lack of innovation, others call standardization." Steve follows-up on that with a list of some things that would provide him with a "more "mobile" digital assistant."
My take is that Pocket PCs have been commodities since Microsoft dropped support for non-ARM processors. Declining component prices have made them cheap, now it's time for vendors to start taking steps to differentiate their products. Better LCDs, faster CPUs, and more memory aren't enough. I want features that will make my PDAs more usable and useful, like keyboards and cameras, not simply more powerful.
Rumour is that HP is working on iPaqs that will be different, offering a variety of wireless and biometric options. Neither inspires me, especially given HP's reluctance to reduce iPaq pricing, but having those features will be meaningful for many buyers. And then there are those Sleeves that iPaq owners seem to love...
PS: One of the things that has shocked me with Pocket PCs is that, while they are commodities made by just a couple of manufacturers with essentially the same guts, everybody designs their own connector to stick on the bottom. And while almost every design includes an add-on chip from Intel that offers USB Host functionality, amongst many other features, very few make use of it.
Saturday, October 12, 2002Bow Lewis of InfoWorld writes that PDAs are here to stay, but Palm may not be:
Two years ago I predicted hard times for Palm. Hard times have arrived, in the form of plummeting market share and negative profits.
It was not a difficult prediction. When I wrote the column, Palm hadn't given customers any reason to buy a new PDA in years, and there are still only two reasons to replace a Palm PDA: (1) You dropped your old one; or (2) you want to upgrade to something better, which means either a Windows CE-based device or a Symbian-driven PDA/telephone combo.
He goes on to dismiss Palm OS 5 as "Yesterday's features tomorrow -- impressive."
I don't have it in me to do any more Palm-bashing right now. They've got problems, they need solutions. Convergence devices are a bright spot for Palm, just look at what Handspring, Kyocera, and Samsung have been doing. Maybe they should emulate Symbian -- exit the hardware business, push heavily for handset licensees. Let Sony and Handspring keep building PDAs, they're better at it anyway.
