connected...

Who Cares About The iPhone?

I've had a Motorola Droid 2 for several weeks now and I am still gushing over it, marking probably the longest love affair I've ever had with a gadget.  For probably close to a decade I'd been telling my corporate and college students that I wanted a universal handheld device that was a phone, GPS and MP3 player.  After a few products that came close to my ideal (the Q, which drove me away from Motorola for years not just because Verizon disabled the GPS, and BlackBerry), my grand dream is finally realized.  And it ain't an iPhone, which even as a longtime Apple and iPod fan makes me glad.

Yes, iPhones broke new ground and are still wicked cool.  And you can jailbreak them so you aren't trapped in a room in hell with Inez, Sartre and Steve Jobs' controlling vision.  But competition is good, and I couldn't wait for Verizon to get them.

My old phone was toast, and the Android devices were mature enough so I took the plunge.  Never made a better tech decision in my life.

There's a wide array of apps, and most of the apps I want have been/will be ported from iPhone versions.  The biggest app gap forme so far: no CSPAN radio from Jacobs Media yet, and no NASA TV app.  Yeah, I'm a geek.  In that vein, my favorite apps are the Android version of APOD and Galaxy Wire, which provides cool vintage NASA pics daily and This Day in History stuff.

The phone is also incredibly stable.  Not that it doesn't freak out on occasion, but what computer doesn't, especially when you load boatloads of software and hammer it constantly with use?

Battery life is a POS, so I have found myself tethered a bit more than I'd like, but management apps and a little behavior mod makes it bearable.  The overall utility of this thing more than makes up for power weakness.

Ericka wants an iPhone.  Maybe.  We're due for a New Every Two upgrade and she'd been chomping at the bit for one.  Now that it's not just vaporware here in Verizon Wireless Land, she's less passionate about it since she's seen how great my Droid is.  We'll see what happens next month.

ntodd

PS--I was going to blog more about network issues and whatnot, but lost interest.  Gotta get back to Angry Birds...

Phaedrus vs Sabinus

Adbusters:

Seneca...once wrote: “it is one thing to remember, another to know.”
...
For Seneca, the stereotypical Google user would be remarkably similar to Calvisius Sabinus, a rich Roman who Seneca explains mastered a unique type of ignorance and stupidity. Sabinus was a foolish man, unable to remember the facts and literary allusions that comprised the educated culture of that time. But he was also a vain man who wanted to be intelligent. With his great wealth he devised a plan.

Calvisius Sabinus purchased educated slaves, each of whom was tasked with knowing a specific bit of culture. One slave knew Homer, another Hesiod and there were others that were expert in each of the nine lyric poets. It cost him a tremendous amount of money to educate these slaves, but once they were ready he put them to use. If, in the midst of a feast, he wished to recite the Greek poet Pindar then he would simply speak while his slave whispered into his ear. In this way, Sabinus believed he had attained wisdom because as he explained to a guest who suggested it would have been easier to educate himself instead of his slaves, responded that, “what any member of his household knew, he himself knew also.”

From our perspective, Calvisius Sabinus is ridiculous. But one must wonder whether we are not like him. Do we rely on Google to provide us with the knowledge that we lack, leaving ourselves empty of wisdom? Is Google like the retinue of educated slaves, ever ready to insert the proper cultural reference so that we may stay in overall ignorance?

For Seneca, the definition of wisdom was not simply to be one who does not rely on memorization. He went further, and said that wisdom was something that can only happen once knowledge had become internalized, a part of ourselves.

Those quaint objections from a simpler time still hold no sway for me.  I remember something I wrote in 2007:

As James Burke noted in The Day The Universe Changed, for a long time human knowledge and understanding was limited to personal experience that extended no more than maybe 20 miles from home.  True, expanded access to information hasn't necessarily lead to greater wisdom, but how else can we even try to realize our potential as sentient beings if we don't outsource some of our information collection and network our brains?

I think of my memory as merely an initialization vector, a collection of pointers.  I remember some important, more immediate things that are germane to my daily existence, and the rest are links that say "click here for more."  So I know I read something somewhere about a story wherein somebody was bitching about writing fucking with our memories, then I google it and find Plato's scribblings that I once read long ago.  Thus I reinforce this memory as well as bring it to you.

Whether we want to or not, we might just return to a state where parochial concerns are paramount, and memory is limited to storing what's necessary for immediate survival and not much more.  Until then, I'm rather thankful we have Google, Wikipedia and Crackberries.

ntodd

Who Needs A Storm?

I remember the heady days when I got my first Motorola Q. 

My first smart phone, it enabled me to surf at high speeds even from East Podunk, VT, and while it wasn't a an iPhone or even a Blackberry it did offer a good bit of mobile value.  Of course I became jaded with it over time because it uses a Microsoft OS, so it became increasingly unstable, Motorola's notoriously shitty when it comes to batteries and hardware survivability, and the damned thing lacked a few standard features that went from merely annoying me early on to making me outwardly hostile near the end of its useful life.

So Tuesday my InfoSec class was a washout--1 of my 8 students deigned to come in for a night class before break, thus he and I decided to cancel--and after Ericka picked me up early in the rain on campus, we went to the Verizon Wireless store because I'd finally had it with the Q that very night.

[lightning flashes, thunder claps, NTodd stands under a leafless tree in the dark]

I went in determined to upgrade to the Blackberry Storm.  I played with it in the store.  I made earnest love to it in public.  I learned that it would not be in stock until December 15th at the earliest. 

My backup position already was the Motorola Q 9c and I tried not defaulting to that, but Ericka reminded me that the Storm was RIM's first touch-based phone (we'll ignore her distaste for such interfaces) and that it wouldn't be a great product right out of the gate.  Since I'd consciously moderated my self-perceived need to get every new gadget that pops up in our Whack-A-Mole consumerist culture starting with the original Rio MP3 player, I acknowledged her wisdom (a glimmer of emotional maturity on my part). 

Uh...to a point, obviously, since I did still, you know, buy something consumerist.  But useful!  Very useful!  And technologically mature!

Anyway, the 9c is a lovely looking device.  I admit to a certain amount of Blackberry Envy--Ericka and NTodd's Pa each have one--because they are in many ways more aesthetically pleasing than the Moto ala Macs vs PCs.  It's just nice having something that isn't so clunky as an Edsel design stolen by clinicially depressed Soviets on a rainy Monday.

More importantly, my shiny 9c has a new version of Windows Mobile that thus far has refused to take a dive and offers some nice improvements over the worn out model: a full Task Manager, customization that involves less hacking and XMLing, text copy & paste, the ability to jump to the bottom of an HTML page, slimmed-down Office-esque productivity-enhancement tool-dealios, and an interactive Cast List...no, wait, that last one was a "feature" of early DVDs.

I admit that a fair number of swear words have found their way out of my mouth over the past 2 days as I tried to reconstruct some things I liked preference-wise from the old Q and customize other things (the home screen editing capability in particular is still not as evolved as I'd like in my less-patient technical dotage).  That said, I'm pleased to see Motorola really did learn from mistakes and oversights to create an iteration that can compete fairly well with Blackberry and dispel a fair amount of my aforementioned envy.

As a sidebar, I read an article last week that indicated 15% of all gadgets, and 25% of cell phones, never end up getting fixed when problems arise.  Even though my original Q was still under warranty, I ultimately decided I didn't even want to deal with the myriad issues and just took some upgrade credit to get a spanking new toy.  I'm sure that makes John Cleese feel conflicted...

ntodd

I, Repeat, I Repeat

My colleague Michel over at Hill Associates posted about mobile broadband options, which reminded me that I need to follow up on my last post (eek, from February!).

The zBoost YX300 zP zPersonal Repeater Kit I bought has been working great.  I've been enjoying higher speeds up and down, and significantly better reliability.  The only problems I've run into of late are not related to the repeater but typical Windows problems since I'm using XP on my laptop and Mobile5.0 on the phone, which causes it to have context-switching issues when I go from tethered modem to voice phone back to tethering--might be due to the PDAnet software I'm using, but whatever.

As for the more mobile nature of my Q phone--I'm basically sedentary when I use it for "highspeed" access at home--its data capability has been wonderful when I've traveled in airports that don't have free WiFi.  EVDO is available pretty much everywhere I go, and a lot of the services I use (e.g., flight trackers, metro trip planners) have mobile versions so I don't even need to fire up the laptop unless I'm hanging out by a gate waiting for my flight or something.

Lots of people complain about being too connected these days, but as I observe when I discuss electronic tethers in the classroom, there is an amazing feature on my phone that I just discovered: a little red button that turns the damned thing off.

ntodd

I, Repeat

I live about 8 gazillion kilofeet from the tower on Georgia Mountain, which means my wireless is a bit dicey out in the cow pasture.  I've been enjoying the EVDO service, which just popped up back in December and has been giving me about 400kbps down and maybe 40kbps up (topping out at 600/50), but it's been variable and not entirely reliable.

So I went to The Repeater Store and bought the zBoost YX300 zP zPersonal Repeater Kit. Since it's all digital these days, you can grab a signal and regenerate it unlike with analog signals (all my students better understand that by now, or I'll be very disappointed).  After a little playing around with position of the receiver and the "mini cell" antenna, I have it to the point where I've gotten up to about 1 meg down and 100k up, with no drops at all today.  I'm not ready to officially endorse the product, but its initial results are promising.

ntodd

Who Needs An iPhone?

I must say I am loving my Motorola Q phone so much I no longer feel sadness about not being able to get an iPhone.  It's a beautiful device, especially for a Windows machine, and I'm finding it's functionality to be marvelous.

I'm also quite happy with the data capabilities.  Even out in the boonies, I'm getting at least 75kbps and up to 110kbps, making it significantly faster than my dial up connection.  I've taken to viewing video on the phone rather than on my PC, which means I can surf with the laptop whilst large files download in the background on my Q without causing a slowdown.

And dayum!  When I'm in an EVDO area like Burlington, I've been getting 755kbps.  Sweet.

ntodd

Down With DRM!

Heard about this on my drive back to the hotel Wednesday:

Amazon.com has announced they will be launching their online music store without copyright restrictions, reports Yahoo News.

The decision will allow consumers to play music they purchase on the site on any device they choose, unlike copy-protected music bought from Napster or Rhapsody, which can't be played on an iPod, for example.

Amazon's vice president of digital media Bill Carr said the move "is helping to pave the way for a much better, much more customer-centric experience in digital music."

The service is expected to go into effect later this year, but no specific date has been set.

John Healey at the LATimes notes:

Though late to the party, Amazon isn't simply following in the footsteps of Apple, Napster, Sony and RealNetworks: it plans to sell songs only in the MP3 format, free from digital rights management restraints. That's moving an important step further than Apple, which plans to offer DRM-free music at a premium price only from EMI and selected independent labels. Going MP3-only is probably the only approach Amazon could take, given that a big part of its business is selling digital music players that don't share a common approach to DRM. If Amazon wants to duplicate the hardware-content synergies that made the iTunes Store the market's Godzilla, it can't afford to have customers confused or frustrated by DRM incompatibilities.

The major record companies would love to weaken Apple's dominance, and Amazon is likely to be willing to do things that Apple has refused to do (for example, sell new releases for higher prices than older titles). But the DRM-free approach has only one adherent so far among the Big Four: EMI, which declared its support for Amazon's new store today. Forbes offers an interesting take on where the other three stand; in short, only Universal seems interested in venturing into the unlocked world. Not having downloadable tracks from at least half of the major record companies would be a big problem for Amazon, but it wouldn't necessarily consign the store to the indie fringes. It all depends on how hard Amazon promotes the downloads it does have to the masses who frequent its site.

I agree that this is the only way Amazon could possibly go, and while I'm not sanguine about the issues with having only one of the Big Four going the non-DRM route, I have to think that this will ultimately be as successful as Steve Jobs' initial foray into leading the horses to water.  They will drink when they get thirsty enough and see that lovely, cool water.

Personally, I'm just totally psyched for this.  EMI's got lots of nice classical content and I would love to digitally expand my collection.  And anything that can help break the DRM hegemony just a little, freeing the music and the people who love it, is inherently a good thing.  If anybody can fight the power, it's Amazon.

ntodd

iSmart

Steve Jobs (via Steve Bates):

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free  and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries.  Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.  For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.  The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company.  EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company.  Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace.  Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Hallelujah! 

Jobs must read my 317 different blogs and listen to all 42 podcasts I do: he's stolen a lot of my ideas in the past, and I've been saying we should kill DRM for a long, long time.  But apparently he carries a bit more weight in the industry than I, so I suspect if he puts forth this vision, the world will follow. 

ntodd

iDumb

Reuters:

New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine.

New York State Sen. Carl Kruger says three pedestrians in his Brooklyn district have been killed since September upon stepping into traffic while distracted by an electronic device. In one case bystanders screamed "watch out" to no avail.

Kruger says he will introduce legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of gadgets such as Blackberry devices and video games while crossing the street.

"Government has an obligation to protect its citizenry," Kruger said in a telephone interview from Albany, the state capital.

"This electronic gadgetry is reaching the point where it's becoming not only endemic but it's creating an atmosphere where we have a major public safety crisis at hand."

Sorry, but this is just stupid.  Pedestrian cellphone and iPod deaths just don't warrant freaking out--it ain't in the same league or even the same sport as Click It or Ticket.  More like that stupid law in NJ many years ago that forbade diners to order eggs sunny side up (IIRC, that lasted all of 48 hours).

ntodd

iWant, Inc.

Perhaps I'll hold off buying a Razr and renewing my Verizon contract this year...

ntodd