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This site is no longer maintained.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...
Friday, October 18, 2002Sprint fires the first shot in the upcoming price war by offering unlimited PCS Vision on all Free & Clear plans for just $10/month, with the first three months free.
Coverage: Press release, CNET.
I would be on the phone with Sprint right now, but the $100 trade-up offer on the Treo 300 has expired and they don't have any Bluetooth handsets...
Thursday, October 10, 2002Steve has a rant on the lack of innovation in the PDA market, spurred by my earlier entry. I had actually started that post as a long rant, and started restating my arguments again just now, but I don't think we really need another long rant. I'll keep this relatively short and sweet.
All of the innovation is happening with non-PPC devices. The primary reason for this is that PPC vendors depend on contract manufacturers for just about everything, following the PC model. Palm OS licensees mostly follow the Apple model, designing nearly everything themselves and using contract manufacturers solely for manufacturing.
The good news is that the decline in prices puts PPC vendors on nearly equal footing with Palm OS licensees. The bad news is that PPC innovations will likely remain few and far between due to the dependance on contract manufacturers, and declining margins will make PPC vendors even more risk-adverse (ie: cool stuff won't be widely available until the costs are low enough to attract Dell).
I think I am slowly convincing myself to go back to the Palm platform. The Sony NX70V makes me drool and the Kyocera 7135 (review) is a highly appealing SmartPhone alternative. I wonder if anyone will come up with a way to directly sync a Palm OS 5 device with a Palm OS 4 phone...
I realized sometime on Monday that it was gonna happen. Too many people reading it, the Network Effect had been triggered, and I was expecting an email any minute. Sure enough, I got an email from a web app engineer at Danger, in response to my rantings the other day. [Anil]
After reading Anil's original rant and posting about Danger's lack of developer information, I sent an email to developer@danger.com asking if they had any "guidelines for creating web content that renders well" on the HipTop / Sidekick. I have received no response.
What good is a web browsing super phone if nobody knows how to design content for it?
Monday, October 07, 2002CDMA, Cell Phone Standards And Who "Wins"
Fubar writes "Former Qualcomm engineer Steven Den Beste, Captain of the USS Clueless outlines why he thinks the US is primed to overtake Europe and Japan as the technological leader in cell phone technology. He argues it stems from open competition and the use of CDMA."
Superior technology is irrelevant. The EU's problem is that they legislated the adoption of a certain technology before it was ready. America's problem is that it takes forever for the market to select a plurality of winners. America rarely sees the benefits of a single dominant standard unless it is legislated (think: color television) or the market is manipulated (think: Microsoft "CPU Tax" OEM contracts).
Toshiba shrinks Bluetooth SDIO Card
A new Bluetooth SDIO Card from Toshiba cranks things down a notch - 9 millimeters in length, and power consumption by 50%, according to Toshiba. Also, it's Bluetooth 1.1 compliant. [infoSync]
Perfect timing from infoSync. I'd seen something about this a week or two ago, but when I had wanted to post about it the other day I could not locate the original source.
Given current trends in the Pocket PC market (few wireless models, many foregoing Compact Flash due to size), why hasn't anyone come out with a dual-SD unit? With Bluetooth SDIO here already, and WiFi SDIO coming, adding another SD slot would provide excellent expansion without adding much bulk or expense.
The probable answer is that Intel's StrongArm / XScale chipsets don't support it. Neither do they support SD's faster transfer modes.
