[Image credit Tom Sundström]

Whether it’s a security threat, fear of libel or just worries over productivity time it seems more and more places are making efforts to lock down sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter from their users. Smart users, though, won’t need those rules: they know when not to mix business and personal.

The idea of locking down particular websites isn’t new; filters for adult content and games have been around almost as long as corporate internet access. The thing is, I’m not sure it matters that much anymore. At a time when more users are carrying their personal PCs in their pockets (we call them phones but let’s be clear, that’s just a clever euphemism at this point) preventing someone from accessing Facebook.com on their corporate PC just means they need to reach for pocket or purse and fire up their favorite app. This has ramifications for users and their IT folks.

For users, it means that even if you’re not posting from a corporate Twitter account, Facebook page or LinkedIn profile, don’t think that’s going to protect you if you say something inappropriate. Fun exercise. Search Facebook for the phrase “my stupid boss”. You’d be amazed at what comes back at you. If you are posting at work, about work or even just putting yourself out there remember “Once It’s Out There, It’s Out There.” When it comes to social networks and work related topics, it’s a case where discretion truly is the better part of valor. While it’s hard to imagine, as soon as you hit “share” millions of people all over the world have the potential to see your words.

That’s the power of the network but it also means your words are out there and they’re going to last a long time. Thanks to caching there’s almost no such thing as a do over and if you make a mistake, you’re only going to be able to apologize at best and move on. Just as the CNN reporter who expressed in her Twitter feed her respect for a Hamas leader later had to find a new job, so might you. While it’s hard to condense complex political discussions into a 140 characters, when you try – and when it’s your job and credibility on the line – even a longer, in-context explanation won’t save you afterwards. You never know who is going to be reading your Twitter feed, Facebook profile or the other social breadcrumbs you leave behind, and there’s no way to undo whatever damage they may leave in their wake. Forget about your current job, what might your next employer think about your online persona?

For IT folks, it’s not about access but education. The real and proper approach is to balance the needs of users to be social along with corporate concerns about public speech that can affect business. Today’s IT departments need to work with HR hand in hand to create sane policies and help users understand the importance of their actions and words. Simplistic views like blocking access to a website aren’t the answer. Sure, the easy answer is “lock it all down and take it all away”. It’s also a time-tested failure. The real answers come in policies that make sense along with education, combined with recognizing legitimate user needs. Finally, it’s also about common sense and recognizing where business and social don’t meet and shouldn’t meet for every thought that’s desired to be expressed, even if your favorite gadget allows you to do so.

The co-mingling of business and personal information is growing at exponential rates. The old rules of access and policies need to come up to speed with the times, and the responsibility for getting it right lies with both IT, end-users and their gadgets all working together.

Among the plethora of news, one of the highlights is Nokia officially unveiling the N8, their flagship device for the Symbian^3 platform. I’ve been using one for the last week or so and I can safely say it’s the best Symbian phone I’ve ever used. The question remains, though: is that good enough in today’s competitive market?

The hardware is first rate. The N8 packs a 3.5-inch OLED display, anodized aluminum body (my test unit is a great shade of orange) and 16GB of storage with a microSD slot for added expansion. In addition to the standard Nokia charger port there’s a micro USB port that also charges the phone (at last) along with HDMI-out. Like other vendors, Nokia’s gone with a non-removable battery that got me through a hard day with no trouble.

The star of the show is the latest version of the OS which is now fully touch enabled. Unlike the N97, the N8 OS is designed for touch and touch only. In practice it works well. The portrait keyboard is a standard phone layout but a quick turn brings up a full QWERTY that’s about as good as anything I’ve used. Performance is fast and fluid and the OLED display shines bright.

There are three customizable home screens that can be customized with a variety of widgets. The OVI store offers a decent selection of others. Overall, they work well and update quickly. Nokia’s mail system supports a variety of email services including Exchange (but doesn’t work well with Gmail configured as an Exchange client, my inbox would never sync correctly) although there’s support for only one Exchange account, something that feels dated these days.

The UI is cleaner then prior iterations and shows the Symbian heritage which is both good and bad. There are still too many settings buried in too many places for easy configuration, but once configured things work well. Current Symbian users will feel right at home, new users might struggle a bit. The built in 12-megapixel camera works well and could easily replace most dedicated digital cameras for most tasks.

What the platform lacks is apps. While there’s a decent selection of “table stakes” apps in the OVI store, the selection pales relative to the competition. If app selection is important, you might need to look elsewhere.

Overall the N8 is an impressive device. Two years ago, it would have blown everything else in the market away. Today’s competitive landscape is a different story. From a hardware perspective, the N8 can hold up against most of the today’s devices. The software is a different story and while this version of the platform makes great strides in usability and functionality, there’s still much Nokia needs to do to drive the software platform forward.

Current Nokia users will likely love the N8. If Nokia can get the N8 to the US at an attractive price with a carrier, it might be a modest success with users looking for something different. In Nokia’s strong European markets, it will likely sell well. The N8 shows Nokia can keep pace with today’s fast moving market but not as the leader of the pack, and the platform needs to further evolve if Nokia wants to maintain both relevance and leadership going forward.

[Image credit Ken Fager]

Ten years ago there was no…

High Definition – It was promised for a long time but, by 2007, things fell into alignment and there were enough screens and content to make the average user take notice. While HD had been around in the earlier part of the decade, it was limited to expensive TVs and there was little content to be seen except the occasional nature trailer or special event. HD has changed and re-invigorated the TV experience and it’s hard to imagine viewing movies or sporting events in anything but. Of course, the challenge is that now that the market has embraced, the TV folks are looking to get people on to the next thing, 3D, but that’s a story for another column.

iPod – Sure, there were MP3 players that came before the iPod. There were MP3 players that came after it. None caught the attention of the mass market like the iPod and later the iTunes music store did. If at this time, ten years ago, I’d have suggested that (then) Apple computer would become the largest music retailer, displace the Walkman as synonymous with digital audio and become a major force in consumer electronics, you might have suggested to me that I go home and lie down. iPod changed the market not only for music but for digital media as well. Today, I can’t imagine how I ever flew across country, wedged into a middle seat, without having all my music and videos with me and a pair of ubiquitous white headphones to help me kill the time.

3G – Ten years ago, the very first GPRS services rolled out with barely the speed of a dial up connection. It was only enough to power a slow WAP browser on a monochrome phone but it was amazing nevertheless. It would be awhile before we saw the rollout of 2G and 3G services that would not only deliver speed but would do so ubiquitously, relatively affordably. State of the art a decade ago was getting your text emails, sans attachments for the most part on a BlackBerry. Today, it’s hard to think about why we even bothered to carry devices that couldn’t do full email, browse the web as well as you could on a PC and stream or download music, video and applications all in real time. The internet is now ubiquitous, in the pocket and used by everyone.

Smartphones – Once upon a time, phones were made for talking. That was pretty much it. The killer application for mobile was one thing and one thing only. Voice communication. While there were some experiments with BlackBerries that could do voice and data, practically no one used them that way as they required an earpiece. It took the Treo in late 2001 to really combine the PDA and phone together in a way that made sense for users, but it wasn’t until 2007 when Apple took the smartphone to the masses along with an application store that ignited the mobile revolution that we live in today. Once a gadget solely for business users or gadget enthusiasts, the smartphone became the device for the mass market user. Today, it’s not uncommon to see anyone, from any walk of life using a high-end device and taking care of the sophisticated features on it.

Xbox Live – A decade ago this fall, Microsoft defied the industry expectations and launched the Xbox. It was shortly thereafter that it launched Xbox Live, a paid service for gamers who could then play against each other. While online games had been around for a long time on the PC, this was the first time that a console became connected and social. Integrating voice chat along with multiplayer experiences in a paid model, Xbox broke new ground. With the Xbox 360, Microsoft further broke new ground by making it the first console that really needed to be connected to the Internet to get full use of the experience. Adding marketplaces for casual game downloads, music and video and Netflix support helped the Xbox Live experience go from hardcore gamer to bring the live experience to the rest of the family. Over time, Xbox became more than a game console, but rather a way to make the disconnected TV a part of the connected world.

Skype – I’m old enough to recall long distance charges if you called NJ to NY and how we were told as kids to wait until after 5pm or, better yet, after 9pm when the rates changed. Even today, international calls are one of the last places where it can be pretty expensive to make calls to friends or family overseas. Enter Skype, direct communication to other Internet users for free. Skype changed the way we communicate and has become a defacto way of connecting for many around the world. Now integrated on smarphones and capable of working over WiFi and 3G it’s starting to displace to traditional carriers. Last week I stood on my deck talking on my iPhone via Skype on a three way call to friends who were in Sydney and San Francisco while I was in NJ. We spoke for over an hour, conferencing in others as needed and the net cost of the entire conversation was zero. Yep, the 21st century is a pretty cool place.

Twitter – I confess, even though I was an early Twitter user in 2006, I didn’t think much ofthe service. After all, did I really need to know what Robert Scoble was eating for lunch? I ignored the service for a while but came back to it in 2007; something was happening that was clearly transformative. Twitter had gone from a status update service to a backchannel conversation that was happening in real time. Over the years, important stories broke on Twitter first (along with stories that turned out not to be true.) It’s been embraced by both celebrities with millions of followers who use it engage their fans and every day users who use it keep up with each other, share their thoughts and, yes, even what they had for lunch. Another service that I can’t imagine life without.

Facebook – Sure, there were other services for social networking before Mark Zuckerberg brought what was then called TheFacebook online. A few years, a dropped “the” and multi-billion dollar valuation, Facebook brought social networking not only to Harvard and other college students but to their parents, younger siblings and just about anyone else who had a PC and an Internet connection. Combined with an array of features that proved popular with the mass market, Facebook became not only a service but a platform for other social services such as Zynga games like Farmville. Brands regularly not only include a URL but a Facebook page in addition or increasingly in place of it. While other services have come and gone, it appears there’s a center of gravity around Facebook that will keep it here for some time to come.

The last ten years have been a decade of innovation and change. Unlike in the past, so many of the products and technologies introduced have become a core part of the way we live, work and play. It’s almost hard to imagine that we lived without some of this stuff just a short time ago. What are the emerging technologies you see today that will become the next mass market, life changing ones of tomorrow?

While RIM met the bar, they didn’t do much to raise it higher or push the envelope in either hardware or software design. In world where every vendor is working to up their game, raise the bar and drive new innovation in hardware and software, it felt RIM barely stepped up. Among the things I’d have liked to seen would be a widget architecture for glanceable information, a front facing camera for video conferencing (which I expect to be table-stakes on leading edge devices by year end), hotspot capabilities, and a much larger and higher-res screen.

I spent some hands on time with the device this morning but haven’t had the chance to fully put it through its paces. Consider this more of a hands-on first take than a formal review. First, the hardware. The Torch is going be immediately familiar as a BlackBerry, albeit without a visible keyboard. Fortunately, RIM has shelved SurePress, the input mechanism for the BlackBerry Storm and Storm 2 in favor of a vertical slider. The screen slides up smoothly and quickly to reveal a standard BlackBerry keyboard. It’s nicely balanced and feels good. The screen looks a little on the small side compared to devices like the Samsung Galaxy S, the HTC EVO or the Motorola DROID X. It also feels lacking in resolution next to the iPhone 4. In short, the hardware is nice but it’s not pushing the bar in a major way.

Tied closely to the Torch is the platform it runs on, BlackBerry 6. There were a few key features touted at the event this morning. First, universal search. You can search anything on the device as well as get information from the cloud as well; it works as soon as you start typing. There’s a universal inbox that not only aggregates your email but your social networks as well. Drill into the message, Twitter for example, and then that message will get out of the way in your inbox. It’s a good way to balance the desire for integration and making sure the inbox stays usable.

BlackBerry Torch 9800 hands-on:

On the media side, photos can be managed on the device with folders and are geo-tagged with the actual place location. Media now has album art and can be synced via WiFi. There’s also a revamped home screen that allows for more customizations (and sadly comes pre-populated by apps selected by AT&T) along with a very nice detailed notification screen. Finally, perhaps noticing how far behind their users are when it comes to mobile browsing, there’s a webkit browser. In short, BlackBerry 6 offers table-stakes functions. Everything they showed for the most part already exists on other devices or is on the way.

If you’re wondering about security, manageability or other Enterprise IT features, well, they may be there but there was no word from RIM about them onstage. All the features shown, along with their new commercials previewed, were aimed directly at the consumer, not the business user. BlackBerry has always been known for instant access push email and the ability to seamlessly sync my inbox on the go with my corporate mail. Combined with the recent viral growth of BlackBerry Messenger, I was surprised that RIM didn’t mention either of them on stage with the Torch.

According to RIM, this is the best BlackBerry ever and I don’t dispute that. Users who require a Blackberry for work standards will find the Torch the object of their desire. The question is, will the Torch be bright enough to lure users away from the latest and greatest Android devices, iPhone 4 and a newly re-invigorated Microsoft Windows Phone 7? At the moment, if you’re a diehard BlackBerry user, there’s a lot to love but in terms of the state of the art, RIM hasn’t quite caught up to the leaders of the pack in terms of either device or platform. Was this the right move for RIM? I think it was the move RIM needed to make to at least be on par with most of the features we’ve seen in modern mobile platforms, even if they weren’t the first ones there. With the foundations in place, what RIM needs to do now is move quickly to raise the bar even further with more compelling hardware and software features; not merely be satisfied following the leaders but once again taking the pole position.

Treo – I first used a preproduction Treo at the end of the 2001 and wrote my first review in the January of 2002. It wasn’t the first device to merge a Palm OS handheld with a phone but it was arguably the first device that did it well enough to be used on a regular basis. Treo bucked the trend at the time by eschewing multimedia features; there was neither movie-clip playback nor MP3 audio support. Rather, it targeted business users, merging voice and data with personal information management functions and it did it well. Other devices of the era tried to integrate these functions, but they failed because they tried to add either telephony features to PDAs or organizer features to phones and neither approach worked well. Treo was the first device that successfully merged features in harmony, producing a sum that was greater than its parts.

Things that we take advantage today were part of the Treo experience. Flip it open and your speed-dial list was ready to be used. Tap a few keys and you could instantly find the contact you wished to call. All the familiar Palm applications including an e-mail client, Handspring’s Blazer Web browser and an SMS application were present. Take a look at the iPhone’s dialer and you’ll see the direct descendent of the work Handspring did a decade ago. Treo no longer defines state of the art but most devices that are state of the art today would not be here without Handspring’s efforts and the smartphone you might dread to leave behind is the direct heir to the original Treo.

TiVo – It quietly changed television – and how many of us watch TV today? – but it took a lot to get the mass market to understand the value. We called it the TiVo paradox. It was how you explained something that so many users appreciated and were excited about, but that still sold in relatively few numbers. So what’s the reason for the TiVo paradox? TiVo’s by themselves were not “killer applications”. In fact, there’s a multitude of features in TiVo that are totally contextual, that at a given moment in time BECOME the killer app. Want to pause TV when the phone rings? That was the killer app at that moment. Recording a show using an EPG to simply search for it? That was the killer app at that moment. Skipping commercials when you watch recorded content? That was the killer app at that moment.

Contextual functionality ONLY comes together when you get to see the whole, not a piece or part. When you see only pieces, you just get a very expensive VCR not a DVR. And that’s the moniker TiVo was stuck with for many years, an expensive VCR. The reality is that TiVo and later DVRs totally changed the way many of use consume TV and it’s quickly become on the of those indispensable phenomena.

GPS – Whether it was integrated into your vehicle at the turn of the century at a cost of thousands of dollars or an external unit that might have cost only a few hundred, the GPS totally changed the way many of us drive. Whether we took to the streets with a gas station map, or later Mapquest directions, the GPS forever changed how we got from point a to point b. Today, a full functioned GPS might be well under a $100 purchase and if you’re using a phone from Nokia or Google, that feature has now trended down to free. Like watching a TV with no DVR, I find it hard to drive a car with no navigation system but I discover that GPS has come indeed at a price. Once upon a time, if I drove to a new place (with directions) I found that I could easily get back there anytime in the future. The route was now part of my repertoire. With the GPS assisted driving, not so much anymore. I find that I’m paying more attention only to where the next turn is and not the route as a whole. I may be getting to where I’m going better than ever before but I feel less smarter about it overall.

Kodak DC120 digital camera – It wasn’t the first digital camera. Both Apple, Casio and others had models in the market well before Kodak. But the DC120 was a very special camera in 1997. It was the first consumer 1MP digital camera priced below $1,000. It was no paragon of style with a binocular look and a 3X zoom lens, but also had an optical viewfinder and a color LCD. Crossing the magic 1MP threshold at that price meant for the first time consumers could begin to take photographs and print them out with near film-like quality at sizes up to 5×7. The DC120 wouldn’t hold itself well to the most of the cameras integrated into today’s phones but it helped start a revolution for consumers that ultimately paved the way from analog to digital.

iPod –The first MP3 players I used changed the way I listened to music under certain circumstances. Going to the gym, for example, with a Creative RIO was a fantastic experience that let you take a solid workout’s worth of music in a device a fraction of the size of a cassette player. It was the iPod, though, that helped me rediscover music. When the iPod came out, I felt intuitively that there was more to this product than met the eye. Among the first research projects I did in 2002 at Jupiter Research was to understand what about the iPod was special.

It turned out the iPod balanced three critical features for users: battery life/form factor/sync and capacity. It didn’t have the “best” of those features but it had the best balance of them. Mapping into what was the average size of a consumer’s digital music collection of the era, fitting easily into a pocket and able to sync 1,000 songs in minutes not hours (or days) separated the iPod from the pack. There’s of course much more to this story but the bottom line is iPod brought digital music to the masses and personally helped me rediscover music I’d already owned and neglected.

Those are the five archetypical gadgets that make up the digital world that I value most. While none of them would likely be good enough to use by today’s standards, they each set the tone for a revolution in their space. What are the five gadgets that matter most to you, whose modern equivalents you’d be loath to give up?

1. Network – The EVO is a CDMA device running on Sprint’s 4G network. If you’re in a 4G area, you’ll see some wicked cool speeds that will leave you gaping in amazement. Most likely though, you’re not living in a 4G area so you’ll see very good 3G speeds until Sprint gets to you. Your phone is also US-only, world travelers need not apply. The iPhone runs on AT&T. That means you’ll get 3G speeds and can use the Internet while talking at the same time. Of course, you’ll also be dealing with AT&T’s spotty coverage and sometimes over-capacity network. I’ve had pretty good luck with both for the most part but when I do have network connection issues, it’s usually with AT&T more than any other carrier. AT&T is also based on GSM standards so your phone will roam overseas most places, but you’ll pay a pretty hefty fee for it.

2. Open/Closed – It’s not an issue most users care about but if you’re reading this column, it might well be an issue for you. The nature of the Android OS is that it’s inherently more open than Apple’s iOS platform. That means if you want to install apps that aren’t in the app store you can go right ahead on the EVO. For iPhone users, unless you’re willing to jailbreak your device, you’re pretty much going to use whatever Apple has approved for you. As there are over 250,000 iPhone apps, you won’t be hurting too much. It really comes down to choice and personal risk. Want to use a cool keyboard replacement like Swype? Easy on Android, not possible without a lot of hacking on iPhone. On the other hand, you’re far more likely to find a malicious app on Android (or one that’s just poorly written that does bad things in error if not design) than you will on the iPhone. Apple also has a very impressive lead on apps. While sheer numbers aren’t the issue, it does mean that you’re likely to find the cool app you’re looking on in the Apple store well before the Android marketplace.

3. Battery life – It’s a big issue because the best smartphone on the market is nothing more than a brick in your pocket once the battery dies. The EVO’s been hit with a bad reputation for battery life. I’ve been carrying one for a while and I don’t find the EVO battery life to be worse than any other device in this class. Of course, if you’re on a 4G network, using your EVO as a mobile hotspot to connect four or five devices while you make long phone calls, don’t expect the battery to do miracles. iPhone 4 looks to be a winner in battery life mostly due to some efficiency with the A4 chip powering it and the fact that Apple put in a bigger battery. It’s too early to call battery life just yet but it looks like the iPhone 4 might have better stamina.

4. Widgets – I like widgets, small applications that reference glanceable information without the need to launch an app. It’s a core part of the Android experience and HTC has refined it with their Sense UI. I love quickly seeing my Twitter feed, news headlines, weather, stock reports and other snippets of information customized to my liking. There’s nothing like it for iOS yet.

5. Multi-tasking – Android does it for real but it comes at the expense of performance and battery life. Apple takes a somewhat different approach that might not technically qualify it as multi-tasking but unless you’re an Uber-Geek it won’t matter. Bottom line, both will let you play Pandora in the background while you’re doing something else but at the moment, Apple does it more efficiently preserving performance as well as battery life. The flipside is apps have to be written to take advantage of the feature for Apple’s platform where it’s a given on Android.

6. Screen – Tough call. The EVO 4G has an amazing bright super large display. It’s so large, the phone has a kick stand. One must respect any phone with a built in kickstand. iPhone 4 has a new “retina” display. Whether your eye can discern the pixels or not, Apple’s display is the sharpest I’ve ever seen on a mobile screen. It’s a tough call, maximum size or resolution? It’s worth seeing both and then making the call as to what’s right for you.

Bottom line? Both phones are state of the art and redefine the top end of the smartphone line. Both phones, though, carry a different design philosophy and where you stand on some of the issues I’ve outlined will lead you down one path or the other. The really fun part? Neither company was a major player in the mobile space. If we were chatting about the mobile market just three years ago, neither Apple nor Google would have been an integral part of the discussion. That velocity of mobile just means we’ll no doubt be having this type of conversation over and over again in the weeks and months ahead, and that’s just fine for me.

Still want more? Check out the SlashGear reviews of the Apple iPhone 4 and HTC EVO 4G. Want to share your opinion on the iPhone 4 and the EVO 4G? Head over to SlashGear Roots and leave your own review!

Nintendo evolved the controller somewhat with the Wii but now Microsoft takes it to a whole new level. No controller. None. Welcome to the world of Kinect. Why is this important? Gaming, for the most part has still been the purview of the gamer, people for whom the game controller is a natural extension of themselves for game play. While the Wii most notably made strides to simplify the human/controller input, at the end of the day, it was just a first step. Taking down the third wall between gamer and game is what will ultimately drive more users into the world of video games and that’s what’s going to drive the next wave of adoption.

For those unfamiliar, Kinect is a small array combining cameras, array microphone and other sensors that connect to any Xbox 360. The results are amazing and point to the way of the future. Want to drive a car? Simply place your hand in the air as if gripping a steering wheel and you’re off to the races. Playing a platform game? Just run in place and jump as needed. Totally natural, totally immersive. While gamers have adapted well to the infusion of buttons and triggers, the larger market of non-gamers often finds the array of input choices to be more confusing than intuitive. While I believe that Kinect will offer experiences for the hardcore gamer, the key to long term success will be how well Kinect will deliver the mainstream market. Judging by what Microsoft showed at E3 I’d say they are on the right path.

While Kinect’s game controls are impressive, I’m even more fascinated by how well Kinect enhances the experiences of other Xbox features. Want to do a video chat with another Xbox user or MSN Messenger PC client. Not a problem. Kinect’s ability to focus and frame the video properly make the experience more akin to a conversation, eyes are focued where they should be and the picture expands and contracts properly as people enter and leave the frame. Command and control have also vastly improved. Swiping, speaking and other natural gestures make media consumption easy and more importantly less complex than even the best remotes.

One can imagine a time when I turn on my TV and it not only knows who I am but what content it should present to me. Take it one step further and analytical content might not only tell you what shows I was watching but when I left the room or stopped paying attention to what was on screen. There’s a battle going on for the living room right now. The TV is among the last consumer screens that is not connected. Long term, whoever gets control of input on the TV will win. The Kinect UI shows how a complicated remote control can be replaced by gesture and voice.

I’m less sanguine about Sony’s efforts. Another set of controllers at fairly high cost doesn’t seem to move the genre forward. More than anything, Sony’s Move feels like a reactive move to the Wii of several years ago. Worse, by attempting to tie Move into games designed for controllers it feels that move is more a gimmick than a new approach to gameplay. The net result feels less than revolutionary and looks like it might be offering the worst of all words not the best. While Move may well be adopted by current PS3 owners looking for a new experience, it’s not likely to drive new consumers to the platform the way that Kinect has the potential to do.

The TV and game experience have evolved in major ways over the last decade. How we interact with them has not. Complex remote controls and game pads have alienated mainstream users. Media and core features of Xbox were often beyond the ability of non gamers in the family to effectively enjoy. Kinect demonstrates that there are ways to both increase functionality and reduce complexity. Kinect isn’t perfect but it breaks new ground and differs from Sony’s more evolutionary approach. There’s still a split personality between the normal Xbox UI and the Kinect UI (although one can go back and forth between them) and despite Microsoft’s efforts to position Xbox as a cable ready platform for MSOs, that hasn’t happened yet. There’s also missing details on what the final price will be – tipped at $150 – something that will affect adoption depending on where Microsoft comes out on this.

Nevertheless, in a world where the battle for the living room has become the battle for that all important input one, Kinect shows a strategy how to achieve victory that’s quite compelling. We’ll have to see how the competition attempts to change the game.

I’ve been following the pre release news of the Streak and while there are things to like about it, I think it misses the mark on this class of device. While I suspect it will appeal to some enthusiasts, I don’t think it’s a mass-market device just yet. I don’t mean to pick on the Streak per se, but it appears there are issues with some of the Android tablets coming to market. Here are some things that vendors building Android tablets need to take into consideration.

1. Pick the proper screen size. There are four different aspects to mobility. Devices can go in a case by themselves, in a case with other gadgets, in a pocket or actually become invisible so we don’t notice we carry them. In general, the two most important form factors are devices that go in my bag with other things and pocketable devices I carry with me. The 5-7″ screen therefore makes the worst form factor devices. A 5-7″ screen makes devices way too big to fit comfortably in most pockets and too large to use as a phone holding it up to the face. A screen that size though is too small to convey the advantages that a tablet form factor brings to market in terms of content consumption and creation. Once a device is no longer pocketable, vendors should focus on larger screen sizes and batteries. Once it’s going to go in a bag or case, there’s no reason to skimp on either.

2. Don’t use an old version of Android. It looks like many tablets will ship with older versions of Android but be upgradeable sometime in the future. That’s a red flag for me. One should never buy a device with an outdated platform on the promise of upgradeability. Android 1.5 is not optimized at all for this form factor and despite vendor best intentions, planned upgrades sometimes never appear or appear so late in time as to be useless. Hopefully, we’ll see more devices ship with at least Android 2.1.

3. Support the Android Marketplace. Without full Android marketplace support, devices built on Android will die. A fragmented apps market is bad for Google and Android so expect no support from Google for devices that can’t pass compatibility tests and therefore gain access to Google’s applications and the Android marketplace. Vendors need to beware of creating devices with poor app support where some apps work and some don’t. Vendor-specific Android marketplaces will likely never get the traction they need to support a proper ecosystem and will quickly be abandoned by the market.

4. You need an iTunes equivalent for content. iPad worked in no small part because it tied into both Apple’s app store and the iTunes store. Competing platforms need a place where consumers can obtain legal content – audio, video and print – for their devices. Without that part of the story, consumers’ real world usage will be severely limited.

I think it’s good that we are seeing some heated competition in the tablet space. Apple’s iPad has set the bar and that functionality is now the table stakes for the industry. Vendors must build devices that at least equal the iPad experience, offer clear differentiation and features or exceed what Apple has delivered. Let’s see who will step up to the game and raise the bar.

The very iOS name is significant. Think about it. When the iPhone was introduced Apple pointed out that this was just another iteration of OS X optimized for a phone. Over time, it became known as the iPhone OS and as of WWDC it now has name of its own. That’s because iOS is a platform play and I believe this is the future that Apple is betting on. Betting on big time. In a world of connected devices and screens, phones are only one part of the equation.

Sure, Apple has 29% of the US smartphone market and that’s not trivial and it is important. While no vendor is likely to achieve the dominant position in the smartphone space that Microsoft achieved with their desktop PC operating system, Apple has shown that it doesn’t need to do that. If Apple can maintain a 30 to 40% market share in the phone business and at the same time maintain a strong position in the tablet business and of course the hand-held pocket-sized tablet that we call the iPod touch, Apple can successfully leverage iOS as the next-generation platform for connected devices. With Apple, it’s not about three screens and a cloud but rather multiple screens and connected services within an applications ecosystem that’s leveraged across each device.

At the D8 conference, Steve Jobs compared the PC to a truck. A useful vehicle for sure, but one that fewer and fewer people need each year even though there’s still a market for them. It appears Apple’s goal is to make the PC something they’ll continue to build for those who need them but over time attempt to shift the market away from both Macintosh and Mac OS as well as Windows and Windows PCs as well. I note that this years developer’s conference was the first one that I can recall where was no mention of Mac OS at all. Not a single slide, not a single update on the OS or Mac market. Nothing at all at the keynote. That wasn’t an accident. (in the past, even when OS X was off WWDC from a dev cycle, it still received pretty prominent exposure). This year, it’s all been about was all about iOS and iOS devices and the developer story behind them.

Apple iPhone 4 hands-on:

While I normally don’t speculate on Apple products, one can actually get a pretty good idea where Apple is moving. We’ve heard rumors over the last few weeks of the new version of Apple TV built upon iOS. That’s looking more and more like a likely next product and I expect it could be introduced as early as next fall at the annual iPod refresh. Given the goal of a connected, next generation device platform it’s also easy to understand why Apple might view Google as a greater competitive threat than old rival Microsoft.

While Microsoft talks about multiple connected screens, Windows is a PC platform and Windows Phone a smartphone platform. There’s no unified model, architecture or evangelism to tie those products and services together just yet. Google on the other hand has articulated a similar strategy for Android, a platform for phones, tablets, TVs, netbooks and every other non-PC device. Expect to see more clashes in the months ahead between Cupertino and Mountain View and more companies to look to Microsoft as the new Switzerland for alliances and partnerships (Apple in fact did announce a Microsoft partnership at WWDC and the Bing search engine is now an option on iOS and Safari)

I think we’re seeing a bold strategy in play. A recognition that the PC vs. Mac is a battle for the last century not this one. By marginalizing the personal computer, including Macintosh, Apple sets the stage for where the real battle of the future is and what life might look like in a post-PC world.

Looking for more on the iPhone 4?  Check out the SlashGear hands-on!

Call me skeptical. Very skeptical.

Over the years, the One Laptop Per Child Project has over-promised and under-delivered time and time again. Remember that XO laptop? It was supposed to go for $99. Oops, missed that one by a pretty wide margin. How about those cool dual-screen XO-2s? Well, they never made it past the Photoshop renderings. Even with the help of Marvell, it’s very hard to see how they’re hitting the price point of $75 and still delivering on the promised functionality. Maybe it’s just me but this is starting to feel an awful lot like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. Except the people who keet getting the football pulled away from them have neither the budget nor resources to make the same mistakes over and over again.

I can question the whole concept of the project and debate whether emerging markets need this device or anything like it. I can argue whether emerging countries that lack food, water, medicine and other basic services need devices that can connect to the Internet before they get the basics that developed countries take for granted. (One feature of the XO was the ability to secure it to make sure it wouldn’t work outside of the target network, discouraging people from selling the devices for things they might actually need.)

Even if you think the idea has merit, it doesn’t appear that the OLPC folks know how to deliver. Comments that the XO set the foundation for netbooks are just ludicrous. Sure netbooks came after the OLPC but the idea that the XO was responsible for that phenomena is silly. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is Latin for “after it, therefore because of it”. Except it’s almost never the case in reality and it’s amusing to see people pointing to the netbook as a positive result of the OLPC much like Tang was a byproduct of the US space program.

It’s hard not to appreciate what the OLPC folks are trying to do. It’s aspirational. It’s inspirational. It’s noble. They’re not in this for fortune, fame or glory but the desire to help people. It’s hard to criticize that. It is, however, perhaps time to realize that this is turning into a tremendous waste of time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. I’m tired of the press reporting on one more initiative and program reboot as if there was something of substance. Perhaps I’m wrong and we’ll see come January, but as far as I’m concerned it’s time for the OLPC organization to be quiet for a change. When you’ve really got something real to deliver, let’s talk. Until then, this is just more hype and vapor of the worst kind.

1. Tethering and WiFi Hotspot. This is probably the single biggest feature of the new release. Integrated into Froyo is the capability to share your phone’s data connection either tethered to your PC over USB or as a WiFi hotspot, similar to a MiFi. In practice it works well and I had no problem connecting several devices including an iPad (irony noted). The only question will be as Froyo gets rolled out to carrier handsets, will they keep this feature on and intact? If they do, will there be an extra charge for it? For example, the iPhone has had tethering via USB and Bluetooth as a feature of the OS for nearly a year and you still can’t use it in the US.

2. Enterprise Exchange support. This has been a huge shortcoming of the platform to date. Finally native Android can sync Exchange calendars in addition to email and contacts. There’s also support for PIN requirements and features such as remote wipe. Overall security still isn’t quite up to snuff (for example, content on microSD cards can’t be encrypted) but Google has probably crossed or is getting very close to good enough for business use of Android.

3. Speed. The Javascript engine for Froyo comes directly from Chrome and it’s fast. Overall the whole OS seems much snappier than Android 2.1. Things in general happen much faster with better performance.

4. Enhanced Tweaks. There are some nice little tweaks that just make Android less of a hassle to use every day. For example, there’s finally a view in contacts that lets me sort by last name and not first. There’s also a little button at the top of the Gmail app that makes it easier to switch between accounts (alas, there’s no unified inbox view yet).

5. Flash support. I wrote about it last week and it’s here and it works. Froyo supports Flash. As I prefer to work in applications where possible and not use a web browser, this was less of an issue for me but it was still nice to browse, hit a Flash site and not see an error.

There are also a few things that still need work.

1. Apps break. I had more than a few apps that just didn’t work, including Google’s Finance app (which won’t let me sign in). I figure that developers will get this stuff fixed pretty quickly but it’s always the price to pay for being the first to upgrade to a new OS.

2. There’s still no Android game I’ve seen worth playing. The largest category of apps on my iPhone are games. The ability to now have apps live on an SD will hopefully help this situation somewhat but, at the moment, Android is not a gaming platform IMHO.

3. Sync. Still no easy way yet to get music from my iTunes library to my Android. Google did show some impressive streaming tech that will allow this but it’s not available yet and it’s not clear when it’s coming. There’s also still no way to sync with desktop clients such as Outlook or iCal. Android is more than ever a cloud based system and that either works for you or it doesn’t.

Overall, I’ve been pretty impressed by this release. Google continues to refine the Android experience, making it more usable and more useful. If you have a Nexus One or other 2010 stock Android device, it’s a no-brainer upgrade. If you’re using an older device or have a device with heavy vendor customization, it’s likely to take some time for this release to get to you and I’d probably wait to see how well older devices handle the updated platform. Google’s rate and pace of OS updates has been impressive and there’s no sign it’s slowing down. Next stop, Gingerbread, but we’ll have at least a few months before we get to sample Google’s next dessert.

For the last few days I’ve been testing a build of Flash 10.1 that Adobe calls pre-beta on a Google Nexus One running the newest build of Android, 2.2 (also known as Froyo). (I find the pre-beta naming to be a little strange, isn’t pre-beta really just Alpha? but I digress). First, the specs for running Flash on Android are clear. This is a Froyo-or-above platform. Until your device gets the latest Android release, forget running Flash. Second, Hulu isn’t going to work. I bring this up because Hulu is the poster child for Flash applications users want to run. To be clear, Hulu not running has nothing to do with how well Flash runs on Android. Hulu, at this moment in time, only has the legal right to run on PC screens. In an age of connected screens, I realize this makes little sense but that’s the way it is. No Hulu mobile for now.

Overall, my experience with Flash on Android was pretty good. Sites that did use Flash loaded relatively quickly and effortlessly. It was fun to surf to a site and not get an error message because Flash was being used. In general, the less Flash heavy the site, the better experience and performance but if you’re using a Flash enabled site, for the most part, what the web designer intended is what you’ll experience. Performance worked well and sites loaded quickly and fairly complex animations and user experiences worked quickly and looked good. I didn’t spend enough time to gauge battery life implications but for the most part didn’t see much degraded performance or battery life as a result of running Flash. Adobe has done a good job making the case that Flash is viable for mobile.

The longer term question is, does it matter? It’s great to see a more complete web experience on mobile devices but it’s never going to be fully complete. Let’s face it, most web sites were designed for large screen PC monitors and navigated with mice and keyboards. Even as the PC desktop moves more and more to web based applications, mobile is different. Rich applications are far more important than web browsing. Do you use Twitter on a mobile device? If so, I’ll bet that you use a native application for your phone rather than the Twitter website. Even Google is creating rich, native application and service experiences for Android as opposed to just pushing web applications. In a world of native client, rich applications, the ability to run Flash is simply less critical than it might have been in times past.

At the end of the day, developers will be a key factor. With ten mobile platforms vying for attention and ten not a sustainable number long term, many developers may look at Flash as a way of leveraging their code and IP to a larger number of platforms without making a strategic bet on the success of any one of them. After weeks of rhetoric, Adobe has answered the mobile Flash challenge with a solid demonstration on the technology viability on mobile, notably Android. Developers and users now will make the final call about whether Flash is important enough for them as they make their development and purchase decisions.

1. Traveling with the iPad is liberating. The TSA does not require the iPad be removed from my bag and that makes going through security that much easier. In addition, shedding five pounds of travel weight is wonderful as well. Just those two factors help to make up for some of the shortcomings.

2. The iPad on-screen keyboard still works well for me, better than I might have expected, but it’s still not the best for typing anything of length. I solved this problem by adding a small, fold-up Bluetooth keyboard made by Think Outside. It paired perfectly with the iPad and works amazingly well for getting large amounts of texts. Sadly, this keyboard isn’t made anymore but I have seen several for sale on eBay. If you use an iPad for travel, it’s a must-have for maximum efficiency and portability.

3. iPad battery life is amazing. I have no problem getting across country, listening to music, reading books, watching videos or working and I still have plenty of battery life left. On average, I need to charge the device every other day on the road. That’s far better than any laptop. In the hotel, I have access to the ABC TV app as well as Netflix; as a work/play combination, the iPad works very well.

4. Apple’s iWork leaves much to be desired. Basic features such as word count don’t exist in Pages. Keynote often mangles complex PowerPoint and there’s no way to export to native Microsoft Office formats from Numbers or Keynote. I found that keeping presentations simple was key and Pages is suitable for banging out text but I’m waiting for QuickOffice to get their app on the iPad soon. Tomorrow would not be fast enough for me.

5. The iPads method for dealing with document management leaves much to be desired. Attempting to manage files from the increasingly ill named iTunes is a mess. Worse, there’s just flat file storage for iWork which makes it frustrating if you have more than a few documents. To get around this, I use SugarSync to access every file stored on any of my computers. If I need to work on a file, SugarSync allows me to mail it to myself, where once viewed I can work in iWork to edit or mail to someone else. It’s not perfect and keeping documents in sync takes more work than I’d prefer but it is workable for periods of about a week at a time.

6. The iPad’s screen has really nasty glare when viewed from the wrong angle. It’s easy enough to adjust but it makes it harder to use in certain places. Of course, the glossy screen on my MacBook has the same issue.

7. A case is a must. Not for durability. The iPad seems pretty solid and most stress tests show the glass is rock solid. Rather, a case is needed to get the iPad into a workable angle when using a desk or tray table. Without it, the curved back tends to wobble and looking down on the screen is good for a cramped neck after just a short time.

8. iPads attract attention. If you travel with one, get used to giving demos to those around you. It’s par for the course for early adopters. I expect that the novelty will wear off sometime by the start of fall.

9. I’ve had no issues with WiFi as others have reported but there’s times when WiFi just isn’t available. I’ve been using a MiFi for connectivity and it works well. If you’re only looking to connect the iPad, I’d recommend the 3G model given the attractive pricing being offered by Apple and ATT.

10. Downloading movies in hotel rooms can take forever, stock up on your content before you leave home.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with the experience and find that there’s enough functionality to make the iPad useful for not only content consumption but content creation. So why not just use a netbook? Easy, while netbooks offer much of the functionality I lack on the iPad, it comes at too high a price. Lower screen resolutions, slower than my laptop performance and cramped keyboards are too many tradeoffs for me. The instant on capabilities, fast performance combined with a full XGA screen make the iPad experience unique, not quite a laptop but certainly more than just a large iPod touch. For me, it’s now a valuable travel companion.

Device pricing – The KIN One is $49 and the KIN Two is $99. That price includes a $100 rebate. That’s pretty reasonable and in line with most high end feature or low end “smart” devices. The truth is KIN is neither of those things, although I expect a lot of folks to compare it to one, the other or both. The reality is the KIN is really a cloud phone. Its value is derived from cloud services, as well as the KIN Studio on the web. There’s a lot that’s different about these devices and a good deal of what Microsoft does here will be dependent on how well they can message this to their target demographic.

Service pricing – No matter how the market defines the phone, Verizon clearly looks at the KIN family as smartphones and therefore they require the smartphone data plan of $29.99. I don’t think this is an issue for the older demographic using the device but certainly might be an issue short term for younger audiences. Ideally, pricing could have been one of the differentiators of the devices as they came to market. At this point KIN will need to separate itself from devices like BlackBerry or the HTC Incredible on Verizon as well as iPhone on AT&T. It’s not a going to hurt the device vision long term but it makes the story a lot harder to tell.

The KIN Experience – I spent the better part of today working through the devices and I mostly like what I saw. Most folks who I showed both devices agreed that the KIN One was somewhat more compelling visually. The KIN Two looks like a nice generic slider. KIN One is 4GB and KIN Two 8GB, and as storage is mostly used as cache, that’s not as big a difference as you might think. Music can be synced through the Zune client. Mac music sync will be available but wasn’t at press time. The camera on K2 is also higher resolution and can do Hi-Def video (but Hi-Def video isn’t synced to the cloud).

The Out of Box experience was pretty straightforward. Enter your Live ID, add in your credentials for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Windows Live and you’re good to go. You can define favorites, add in RSS feeds, and add in mail support for most popular services, including Exchange. Contacts are limited to social networks and there’s no calendar feature. I had no problem seeing my Google calendar through the web interface. Music is handled through Zune Pass and can be streamed live. It’s a great feature and I suspect KIN will do a lot to help drive more Zune users.

Overall performance is pretty snappy, thanks in no small part to the Tegra chip powering the device. There’s great fluidity to the experience and it feels quite natural to use. The social experiences are well integrated but varied. For example I can send photos to Facebook and MySpace but not Twitter. Likewise, basics like @replies must be done from the status bar “command line” style instead of clicking on a tweet and responding. Twitter integration overall is pretty low and is something I hope gets more robust over time.

The KIN camera is excellent on both devices and snapping and sharing happens quickly and easily once you grasp the overall KIN metaphor, which takes a few minutes to get comfortable with.

One of the real beautiful parts of KIN is the Studio, a web based app that gives you a reflection of what’s on your device and is your long term storage option. Content flows seamlessly from the device to web with older content being archived to the web interface. You can mark pictures to stay on the device if you want them there all the time. In practice, the device-res version of the image stays on the phone – only the high res image goes up to the cloud. So, although Favorites keeps the whole image on there and promotes it, the user never has images they took unexpectedly disappear from the device.

The Studio experience is fluid, rich and visually appealing. This is one of the hallmarks of the device and it’s something that Microsoft needs to show off to demonstrate the full value of the KIN experience.

Bottom line? KIN is something new. It’s not a feature phone or a smartphone. It’s something different with aspects of both. I’ve talked in the past at how this is likely to appeal to a specific demographic and psychographic that’s socially connected. Is it the phone for me? Probably not. I’m closer to Gen AARP than Gen Upload and I need my device to do different things. (although I’d love to see a Studio type feature as part of all Windows phones along with Mac music sync). Is there a market for KIN? Absolutely. The key challenge will be how well Microsoft and Verizon can tell the KIN story to the target market. Neither the analysts, pundits or journalists will make or break this platform, the real and only question is how well the message resonates with target audience.

Kin hands-on video from launch day:

1. The market is real. One of the classic mistakes people make when evaluating technology is to apply their own biases toward it. When products were designed and targeted to a mass, horizontal market, it was less likely to happen. As the mobile market continues to grow, we’ll see more and more specialized products designed for either vertical or mass markets, neither of which represent the traditional tech enthusiast. In this case Kin isn’t targeted toward an enthusiast marketplace that’s already using a smartphone and is seeking the next greatest thing. It’s aiming to replace the feature phone audience that’s using those phones by choice (or in some cases cost necessity).

Not everyone needs or wants the complexity of today’s smartphone devices and platforms. That’s a hard concept for us geeks to fathom but it’s true. Kin is much more the heir to the feature phone than it is to the next generation smartphone. The truth is, it’s neither feature phone nor smartphone, it’s something in between.

2. Segmentation makes sense. Mobile tasks segment greatly by audience. Older demographics are far more likely to cite voice communication as their critical function, by a wide margin over every other mobile activity. By contrast, a younger demographic will likely be using fewer voice services and be much more focused on other forms of communication, such as text messaging and looking to tap into their social networks from an integrative perspective. I can understand why some folks think Kin isn’t the phone for them. Frankly, it’s not the phone for me (although there are aspects of it that I love). That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not the phone for anyone.

Microsoft Kin One & Kin Two demo:

Neither, though, does it mean that Kin is a slam dunk. To be successful in the market, Kin needs two things going for it: effective pricing and marketing, two critical details that Microsoft did not discuss at last week’s launch.

1. Marketing must be dead on. Kin’s got a great story but even the greatest of stories needs to be told or it might as well not exist. Microsoft had a great story with Zune HD last fall; sadly, it neglected to tell it and that product nowhere near lived up to the potential that it had. Microsoft and Verizon need to tell a joint story that’s clear, concise and takes the effort to reassure an image sensitive market that it’s ok to use something that’s perceived as different. Microsoft needs to show and demonstrate clearly how Kin differentiates from what potential buyers are using and take the time to teach and educate the market how critical features like Spot and Loop work. Without the proper marketing campaign, Microsoft will have an uphill battle.

2. Pricing needs to map with expectations. Pricing may be the most critical aspect of all. For Kin to work, Microsoft and Verizon will need pricing for both the devices and the service that can map favorably to current feature phone offerings, not comparable smartphone devices. Given that there’s the potential for significant bandwidth use to flow content such as multi-megapixel images to the cloud and streaming music services, it’s a challenge to achieve low enough price points, especially when targeting a younger demographic with less disposable income that older users could afford.

Coupled with a proper marketing and pricing message, I think Kin can be a success for Microsoft and achieve their goal of creating an optimized experience aimed at a very targeted demographic. Kin shows we’re past the phase of one size fits all for mobile technology, and it needs to be looked at and evaluated through that lens, not how well it maps to horizontal audiences.

The biggest problem of the Nexus One, in my opinion, is that it runs stock Android and while 2.1 was nice, it lacked so many things that vendors like HTC had brought to the market with their Sense UI built on top of Android. T-Mobile’s 3G network coverage also left much to be desired (there’s now an AT&T version of the N1 for sale as well.) Wouldn’t it be great if there were a version of the N1 that ran HTC Sense and perhaps was on the Verizon network as well. A super Droid if you will. Well, good things come to those who wait and over the last few days I’ve been testing the Droid Incredible by HTC, running on the Verizon network, and it delivers.

Like the Nexus One, the Incredible is among the speediest Android device I’ve ever used. Even running HTC’s Sense UI, there’s no lag and the interface is as fast and fluid as it was meant to be. Switching from panel to panel is smooth. The overall coverage and speed of Verizon’s network mean that information flows quickly as well so the screens are constantly updated in real time. Sense UI fixes many glaring issues of the Android platform, most notably Exchange integration. With full support of the ActiveSync protocol, it’s easy to get your contacts, calendar and mail on the device. Why Google still doesn’t offer real support for Exchange is a mystery to me but HTC delivers with the best support of the platform making their devices my recommendation for users who need that functionality. Support for full social media integration with Facebook and a built-in Twitter client make the device all that much more useful to me.

I still have issues overall with the Android platform. Applications are still limited to internal storage, which means there still are few, if any, Android games worth playing. Security remains an issue with no support for passwords or local encryption and there’s still no native PC sync to get my content on the device beyond the cloud. That’s disappointing and until these issues get resolved, it’s hard for me to see how Android makes the leap from the enthusiast to the mass market, even with all the HTC enhancements. The good news is the platform is getting better and better over time; the bad news, it’s not fast enough.

Android is now a force to reckoned with in the mobile space and the Incredible is currently what the state of the art looks like. If you’ve been waiting for the Verizon version of the Nexus One, wait no more, the Incredible provides a better experience with all the hardware and Android 2.1 goodness but now with the powerful addition of Sense UI layered on for good measure. This is now the flagship device for Verizon users.

Although Android still feels like an enthusiast platform the Incredible takes us one step closer to a true mass market and mainstream device.

Looking for a second-opinion? Check out our comparison review of the Verizon Droid Incredible by HTC.

It was an interesting set of announcements so let’s break them down. First, the platform is evolving, which is good news for Apple. In short, nobodies’ platform from last year will be good enough for next year. We’ve seen Google update Android and Microsoft announce a new mobile platform. Today was Apple’s turn. Most of the news was evolutionary not revolutionary. Apple says there are now 1,500 new APIs for developers to take advantage of but (for example the ability to access camera, calendar and other stores that were previously off limits) and support for some basic features such as Bluetooth keyboards and CalDAV invitations, but the real focus was on seven core new features.

I’ll list them a little differently than Apple presented them. First are what I consider the stuff that’s totally evolutionary, some of which should have been there from day one.

1. Multitasking, Enhanced Mail, Folders – Multitasking was the most anticipated feature and Apple finally delivered. While I’ve questioned the need for multitasking for most use cases, I think Apple has taken the right approach here with creating core services for developers to tap into that most users want while at the same time keeping and emphasis on battery life and performance. Background music, voice and location are the major cases and for the most that will satisfy most user needs. While some are arguing that Apple’s implementation isn’t true multitasking, I don’t think it matters all that much: users care about getting Skype calls and listening to Pandora, how that magic occurs it irrelevant. Folders and enhanced mail are just long overdue. I’m glad that Apple isn’t just adding more pages to the home screen but there still needs to be a better way to organize and manage the number of applications. Likewise, Mail was simply not up to par as a full mobile email client. It was cumbersome to have more than one email account and the lack of threaded conversations made it much harder to work with busy inboxes. Bottom line? Evolution not revolution, but features that will be embraced by iPhone users.

2. iBooks, Enterprise Security, Game Kit – I’d classify all of these as features that will help drive the platform forward and help open new markets as well as challenge competitors. iBooks was a no-brainer and not a surprise but shows Apple is serious about the eBook market and looking (as Amazon and Barnes & Noble have done) to create an eBook platform not tied to a single device. The Enterprise Security features show Apple is serious about the business space and, more importantly, not afraid to take on RIM. Security features are not user oriented but IT oriented. Apple’s now taken one more step to get past the CIO checklist. Finally, GameKit takes a pretty serious shot at Nintendo and Sony (and also puts more pressure on Microsoft to deliver on their Xbox Live mobile experience). By integrating social gaming aspects to the iPhone platform, Apple’s driving for the next generation of mobile gamers. Without the ties, however, to TV based consoles, Apple is leaving room for Microsoft to make a compelling case for Xbox integration into Windows Phone 7 and offer differentiation. Both Sony and Nintendo are going to face a lot of pressure going forward and are likely to face market share losses.

Apple iAd Nike demo:

3. iAd – Probably the biggest news of today wasn’t directed at end users. As it’s not overly relevant to this audience, I won’t go into great depth. Suffice to say that in the year that changed everything nothing exemplifies that more than Google getting into the business of selling phones and now Apple becoming an advertising platform provider. What’s impactful here is that Apple’s now made their platform even more attractive to developers who are looking for more ways to monetize their applications (and don’t think ads are only going to go in free apps, there’s no reason that paid apps won’t have ad supported content to boost their profitability) they’ve also made their platforms even more desirable for brands. As more companies are in the process of figuring out their mobile presence, expect to see Apple as viewed as a primary platform for applications. While Apple upped the game for competitors in a big way today, the biggest shot across the bow was to Google (Jobs went as far as to downplay the importance of search in terms of mobile advertising as a revenue driver). Both Apple and Google are now effectively playing on each other’s turf, expect this to escalate.

We’re only in the beginning of Q2 and the game just got a lot more interesting. Which tees up next is this coming week’s news from Microsoft. Stay tuned.

While I don’t want to sound like the apocryphal quote Bill Gates was said to have made about no one needing more than 640k of RAM, I feel that the impact of Moore’s Law on processing speed is having less and less impact on more and more users. With multi-core processors the norm and not the exception, multi gigahertz speeds even on entry-level are in mainstream use. In many cases, fast has finally become fast enough. For many consumers doing knowledge worker functions such as word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail or Web browsing, the performance difference in going from a mainstream chip to a state of the art high-end processor just isn’t readily apparent.

I can already hear some of you arguing that this line of reasoning is wrong. For certain classes of users, you are no doubt correct. Sure, if you’re an engineer working on decoding and reengineering genomes, or you’re trying to play the latest and greatest game at resolutions that make high definition seem clunky, fast might not be fast enough. If you’re creating a giant engineering simulation or trying to render “Toy Story 4” in real-time, fast might not be fast enough. But if you’re outside the power curve and primarily use an office suite of products for word processing, spreadsheet, graphics programs, play some casual games, and you run some version of Windows, Mac OS or Linux well, fast is definitely fast enough.

A threshold has been crossed for most users. While there have always been relatively cheap PCs available, no one wanted to buy them because they couldn’t run current generations of applications. It has been this slowdown in the benefits of Moore’s Law that has made cheap PCs such as netbooks possible. It also means that people are rethinking the purchase funnels of the past. In the old days, decision making was easy: you bought the fastest processor on the market and added as much memory and disk space as you could afford. I suspect that’s no longer the best approach. Even sophisticated users don’t need the fastest processor that Intel or AMD offer in their new systems.

So is this the end game for high end computing? Naah! Nothing lasts forever, and I suspect neither will this lull in the benefits of Moore’s Law. Technology tends to move at curves rather than right angles and new technologies will emerge over time to take advantage of what’s next both in terms of new applications and UI enhancements that will finally advance beyond the mouse and keyboard. Real advances will require not just faster processors, but also some software advances that go with them. The good news is that most users can safely ride price curves down and extend the life of older systems. Has Moore’s Law been suspended for you or are you still feeling the need for speed?

The iPad is comfortable to hold, and Apple’s design team clearly worked hard to balance size and weight. In practice, I found the 1.5 lb form factor extremely easy to work with and use for hours at a time. The screen is bright enough to work fine outdoors and worked well in the dim interior of a plane as well. Performance remains excellent and on a par with the pre-production units I saw at launch. I had no issue with lack of multitasking or running background applications, with the sole exception of third party music applications, which would have been nice. Backward compatibility works very well; I had no problem running iPhone apps (although text heavy apps look a little blocky and oversized). Even demanding games such as Star Wars Trench Run worked just fine. Titles optimized for the iPad such as NOVA are absolutely amazing and the integration of iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad versions of Scrabble shows the potential this platform has for synergy. Forget the Nintendo DSi XL: the iPad now defines large screen mobile gaming.

Syncing with iTunes worked seamlessly, as one would imagine. I had no problem transferring all my existing content, including music, videos, and apps. The large screen makes watching video a delight, but the lack of true wide screen aspect ratio meant a lot of my content either had black bars on the top and bottom or were clipped a bit when I zoomed in. At some point, I’d love to see an iPad with a real wide screen ratio that’s optimized for video playback.

As I noted in my original hands on, I prefer a backlit LCD display for reading over eInk. The ability to use as an eBook reader in the dark, with no annoying eInk refresh renders the iPad my eBook reader of choice. The iBooks application is wonderful. I had no problem downloading content. The reading experience was excellent, though I did need to tweak the default font and size settings to my liking.

One thing that differentiates the iPad from distant cousins iPhone and iPod Touch is the care Apple took to make the UI true to the form factor. It’s this level of detail that enables the iPad to serve as a ‘tweener device between the phone and the PC. Each of the default apps such as mail, notes, calendar and maps have all been optimized with new user enhancements. The enhanced email view is particularly wonderful and allows me to see more of my mail along with a view of my inbox and switch between different accounts with ease. As more third parties tap into the iPad ecosystem, I expect this to further improve over time.

There’s no doubt that the iPad works well as a media and content consumption tool, but Apple also touts it as suitable for productivity as well. I’ve already mentioned email, but what about office productivity? I’m told there’s a version of QuickOffice coming but for now, it’s an iWork world. iWork – Pages, Keynote and Numbers – for the iPad is a delight to use. Once again, the care that Apple took to optimize the applications for both form factor and user experience delivers a totally different way to work with content. Probably most controversial is the onscreen keyboard. It works well enough in practice for email and shorter documents, but for long form content, you’re likely going to want a Bluetooth keyboard or Apple’s keyboard dock to crank out text. As it’s not available yet, I wasn’t able to test the VGA output adapter to see how well the iPad would work for giving a presentation.

I haven’t done formal battery life tests, but my overall experience indicates I’d have no problem getting cross-country with an iPad and still have plenty of battery life when I land. That means I can get through a full day without a power cord.

What’s missing? Well, I’d still like a camera, in fact, I’d like two, one for photos and one for videoconferencing. While I don’t think the lack of multitasking is a huge issue, I’d prefer the ability to keep apps running in the background and a better way to switch among them other than going to the home screen each time. Finally, while the $499 version is a good value and Apple is to be commended for hitting that point, it’s pretty easy to max out a fully loaded high-end device and accessories and get into laptop range of pricing.

I regularly use a phone and a laptop; in fact, I keep one of each on my nightstand. Neither is suited for places where I’d like to be connected but where a laptop is too large and the screen of a phone too small. Like Goldilocks, I’ve found something for my computing needs that’s just right in places where laptops and phones wouldn’t work. While it’s a different model of computing than most of us are used to, I expect the device to resonate well with both sophisticated and novice users.

Looking for a second opinion on the iPad?  Check out the full SlashGear review.

This is not the first time I’ve traveled sans laptop. I’ve taken day trips and even a European trip with no PC. But those trips were all made safe in the knowledge that I’d need nothing more than email access. In this case, this was hardcore travel, with deadlines and serious meetings. My only ground rules were no PC use. That meant no borrowing colleagues laptops or using business center PCs. This was phones only. Here’s what I learned.

First, there’s something truly liberating about not traveling with a laptop. Yes, there’s the 4.5 pounds it saves me, I wish losing 4.5 pounds were that easy going to the gym. It’s quite fun, far more than it should be, going through security without having to take out your laptop (although, on one leg of the trip, I had to PROVE that there was no laptop in my bag *Sigh* ). When all is said and done, that’s the primary advantage, not having to carry the extra weight and the ability to move through TSA screens faster.

The downside, however, was huge. If you’re planning to leave behind your laptop, here are some issues you’ll have to deal with.

1. Battery life. All my phones failed me at some point. At SXSW, running from early morning to late night proved too much for every device I carried. The Pre Plus and HD2 barely lasted the better part of a day. The iPhone 3GS fared much better, thanks to the Mophie JuicePack Air that let me get through the harshest of days. Even then, topping off now and then helped quite a bit. When you’re constrained to one device, you tend to use that device a lot more. So in addition to phone calls, email and general mobile tasks, I was writing and editing reports, reviewing presentations and spending a lot more time with email in particular as it was my only way to stay connected. Tip: Turn off 3G and rely on EDGE when possible to save battery life. WiFi also uses less power than 3G if there’s a hotspot open. Likewise, turn off Bluetooth and dim the screen as much as possible to eke out more time.

2. Size matters. The biggest issue I kept running into related to screen size. Phones are just too small for content creation (at least for my 40+ year old eyes). Even with the HD2’s larger screen and resolution, creating content was a nightmare. At best I could work with text. Numbers were virtually impossible for me to manipulate. The lack of multiple windows proved time and time to be a frustration. While most of mobile activity does not involve content creation or editing, those with that need are best to avoid the phone. I’m not saying it can’t be done, it just can’t be done well. Likewise, the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is fine for casual email but for real text entry, nothing beats a full sized keyboard. This is where the Stowaway Bluetooth came in handy with the HD2. It would be very nice to see Apple support for BT keyboards in iPhone and iPod Touch soon.

3. Apps Matter. When it comes to content creation, nothing beats Microsoft Office or iWork. While both Docs to Go and QuickOffice worked well enough for casual use, neither was up to the task for real work on the go.

Bottom line? Leaving your laptop is fine for short trips, where the focus will be email, light content viewing and very minor editing. For now, the phone, no matter how good simply can’t supplant a real personal computer when it comes to getting work done. For those that suggested a netbook, to me that’s the same as a PC for all intents and purposes. Now, if only there were some device that lived between the PC and Phone that could replace the PC for heavy business travel. But that’s a topic for another column, after April 3rd…

First, to reiterate my view on the market, Microsoft isn’t doing nearly as badly in mobility as some think. I still think Windows Mobile to be vastly underrated in the market. But that’s not the point. As I’ve talked about over and over, nobody’s platform from last year is going to be good enough for next year. The key to Microsoft’s success in future mobility is exactly their willingness to break from the past and focus on the future. Windows Phone 7 Series devices should not run older applications. Microsoft needs to give developers incentive to get on board with something new, and more importantly to show how developers can leverage their code across multiple platforms, devices and do things they couldn’t do before.

We’ve learnt more about Windows Phone 7 at MIX10 this week, and Microsoft did the right thing kicking off the platform’s launch with some impressive demos showing how a game can be built with 90% shared code working on both an Xbox and a Windows Phone 7 device. That’s huge and something that’s going to appeal to a lot of developers.

Among the most glaring things missing from Microsoft’s consumer strategy was a cohesive message between diverse business units. There needed to be a clearly articulated message that recognizes that mobility features among products are interrelated. That means that Windows 7, Windows Phone, XBox, Xune etc all have to work together. It looks like Microsoft is finally getting that message and taking users to that place. Breaking compatibility with older Windows Mobile devices was a hard decision, but it was the right way how to get where they need to be. Sure, it means older stuff takes a hit but more importantly it means there will much more evangelism and excitement for developers who will be able to leverage Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight and XNA to develop across platforms.

If I were Microsoft, here’s what I would do to really drive Windows Phone 7 forward.

1. Clarify the mobility message but recognize there will be overlap between devices and functionality. Multiple Microsoft devices are good and they work together.

2. Ignore the backward compatibility grumbles (mostly coming from folks who said Windows Mobile wasn’t good anyhow) and focus on getting the new features done right and make them work seamlessly.

3. Maximize the experience of product ownership. If owning a Windows PC is good, a Windows PC and Windows Phone should be better. Add in an Xbox and it should be an even better experience. And so on.

The mobile age is really just starting as we move from the medium of voice communication as the core phone drive to the new age of mobile social context. It’s going to take a lot for Microsoft to get there and a good way to start is breaking with the past.

What’s the TiVo paradox? It’s a term I coined to explain how hard it is to market the contextual value of features. A distinct conflict existed between consumer understanding of TiVo features and their ability to value the functionality. This was the TiVo paradox. While the purpose of TiVo features was clear and consumers valued features exclusive to TiVo, they don’t learn to appreciate the entire package of features until they used them. The net result was a rabid fan base of users who loved and praised the product and other users who couldn’t understand the cost of a $500 “digital VCR”.

TiVo’s features were relevant to the TV viewing experience based on a user’s immediate contextual need; the pause and rewind live TV feature is the killer feature for a sports fan, while remote access to the electronic programming guide is key to the busy traveler’s DVR experience. Without trying these features, users are unaware of their overall value as they come together as a whole. Want to pause TV when the phone rings? That’s the killer app at that moment. Recording a show using an EPG to simply search for it? That’s the killer app at that moment. Skipping commercials when you watch recorded content? That’s the killer app at that moment. Contextual functionality ONLY comes together when you get to see the whole, not a piece or part. When you see only pieces, you just get a very expensive VCR not a TiVo.

This is exactly the issue I think Palm is having right now.

Palm’s features by themselves are not “killer applications”. In fact, they look a lot at the surface like most of the other phones that are out there. There are, however, a multitude of features related to things like Synergy that are totally contextual, that at a given moment in time BECOME the killer app for using the device. It’s something you see reflected in the base of the webOS user. Those who use webOS are totally fans of the experience and don’t discuss issues such as a lack of applications. They focus on the contextual experience that delivers on the notion of mobile social context.

The problem for Palm (as TiVo learned) is this is a nasty marketing problem since there’s no good way to get the message across in 30 seconds. It’s important for Palm to start focusing it’s marketing on getting the message of mobile social context out there; at the same time Palm needs a better way to leverage the fan base that make up webOS users, since those are the folks who have made the leap of faith and for whom the light bulb has already lit up. I don’t think Palm is anywhere close to being down and out but they need to re-think how to tell a great story of engineering and technical achievement and break the Palm Paradox.

The reason for the burial? There was little to no quality control over Atari 2600 video games and any vendor could put out what they wanted to for the system. The result was a glut of mediocre cartridges that no one wanted to purchase and the next result was that the 2600 died as a result of too much content. Too much mediocre and crappy content, that is.

That brings us to last week’s news that Apple was in the process of purging titles from the app store. Most, it seems, had to do with scantily clad men and women basically doing nothing but being scantily clad. Through the miracle of science one could even arrange some of the “models” to remove their clothes and even perhaps jiggle with near realistic fidelity. Of course, this led to a mini-backlash of cries of censorship, first amendment rights and in general another round of Apple bashing, especially as some of these titles appeared to be selling.

With the caveat that I’m not a lawyer, I fail to see where any arguments of First Amendment rights might remotely come into play here. The Apple store is privately owned. Apple can put whatever is wishes into the store or remove what it wishes and there’s no legal argument against it, to the best of my knowledge. Apple is no different than a religious school that chooses to teach creationism alongside evolution, of even a website choosing to close comments when things get out of hand. You might not like any of those things and of course, you have the right not to patronize those institutions or organizations. (perhaps my most amusing email last week was from a reporter claiming that Apple was banning tech site apps and therefore censoring the news). From now on, before we toss around words like “censorship” and “first amendment rights”, let’s at least know what we’re talking about.

I have not spoken with Apple on this issue but let’s go back to Atari and that buried ET game. It’s good to have to have content for your platform. It’s also a double edged sword. Too much bad content hurts that platform as well. In fact, in the post Atari 2600 world game vendors simply don’t let anyone make games for their consoles. Third parties needed to get their content approved, the first party would actually create the cart or disk and then sell them back to the game vendor who was then free to sell them as they wished. It was one way to make sure there wouldn’t be glut of mediocrity killing the platform.

The truth is, while Apple’s system is far from perfect, no supervision sucks. Just look at what’s happening to the quality of other mobile platforms such as Android, where apps can pretty much run amok, including phishing scams, until they’re user reported, vetted and finally pulled. I can’t speak for Apple but it appears many apps were passing through the guidelines but were as a whole bringing down the quality of the experience of the whole ecosystem. Apple needed to take action, especially in light of the iPad close to shipping. Now, it’s unfortunate that developers who have had apps approved had seen them removed but I also understand that when these types of apps start taking over the store shelves, it’s not unreasonable for the manager to make a clean sweep, especially if catering to an family audience. At the same time, it would be good for Apple to come up with a better plan of approving and segregating these apps to make sure this situation doesn’t happen again.

Having said that, and perhaps it’s a subjective view but I do think there’s a difference between Dirty Fingers Sexy Screen Wash and a digital edition of Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition that goes beyond cleavage. In the end, the market will agree and support Apple’s move or find elsewhere to buy. One way or another, the free market (if there really is one for these type of apps) will prevail.

Buzz works by starting with your Gmail address book as your core set of followers and this is where they went wrong almost immediately. On launch (whether you declined to use Buzz or not) Google not only created this list of followers for you from your address book, it opened that list of followers up to for the world to see.

While my email address is not particularly private – in fact, it’s listed at the bottom of this page – for many people email is a private thing indeed and not something to be simply be put out there for others to see. I was less concerned with my privacy than I was with the privacy of those on my email lists. While Google has iterated several times to change the default behaviors to no longer create a de-facto list of followers and make them public, that first move caused me to lose a lot of trust in a company whose core business is built on trust.

With Buzz, Google also offers a mobile version with integration into Google Maps via layers and a mobile optimized website for the iPhone and Android. Looking perhaps to tap into the hype of check-in services like FourSquare, one can check into a location with a few clicks. Unlike other services, your location is now broadcast to everyone in the immediate vicinity, not just people you have followed. Again, this was another privacy issue that seemed to have little or no thought put into it before it was released.

Even getting past those issues, Buzz just doesn’t work the way I do. I like the constraint of Twitter and its 140 character limitation. The ability to type in as much text as one desires is not a feature for me, it’s a bug. Even worse is Google’s attempt to prioritize messages. Instead of seeing things in reverse chronological order, Google bumps messages with new responses to the top of the list, even if the respondent isn’t someone you follow. This often makes it impossible to see new messages from people that are actually followed. Worse still, occasionally Google decides something is a “must see” and actually inserts the message into my Inbox. Sorry but unwanted messages showing up in my Inbox is one reason I started using Gmail long ago. The last thing I want is this kind of spam.

Buzz is a strange product. From a company noted to testing, iterating, and keeping products in beta for years, Buzz felt like something rolled out quickly and with little thought as to how users outside the Google-plex might want to engage and interact with it. Using Gmail and attempting to tie my contacts to my social network might have seemed like a good way to jumpstart but, in reality, all it did was turn off a lot of users. While I know many find Buzz useful, my initial experience and Google’s overall model for use have turned me off on the service. Perhaps I’m just being Buzz-kill but for now, I’ll wait for a few more iterations before I try again.

I don’t understand why I’m still reading people clamoring for a Microsoft “Zune” phone. It’s pretty clear that we’re not going to see a phone from Microsoft themselves, at least not one based on the Xbox and Zune business models. I’ve talked about why we wouldn’t see a Zune phone before but it’s worth repeating.

The business model of Windows Mobile is totally different than Zune and the Xbox (in fact, I’d argue that we’ll see Microsoft get out of the Zune hardware business long before they become a direct handset vendor, but that’s another story).

Zune was a good idea to some extent, since the technology Microsoft was licensing wasn’t getting them anywhere. As it was, hardware partners were taken aback by Microsoft’s actions but at the end of the day, they simply were not delivering on the markets needed by Microsoft to be successful.

Phones are different. Windows Phones are a core platform that is strategic to Microsoft’s other lines of business and built on Microsoft’s traditional business model of licensing technology to partners. The problem is that no one has ever been successful licensing technology platforms to others and then competing with a device of their own. Apple failed (twice, with both Mac OS and the Newton platform), Palm tried it only to have to split the company into two and Nokia tried it with Series 60 (which it’s now open sourced). No matter how creative you are, it just can’t be done. Microsoft now has traction with more than 20 million licenses sold last year and a good collection of partners (many of whom are looking at Google and Google’s hardware aspirations) along with a new crop of phones for consumer and business use. A Zune or any other phone sold by MSFT would potentially hurt all that and for no good reason.

Moreover, how would MSFT bring this to market? There’s no mass market for unlocked phones in the US (just ask Nokia how hard it is to sell a high end phone with no carrier). MSFT as an MVNO? Not happening. A partnership with a carrier as Apple did with the iPhone? Well, it could work but that would alienate licensees and carriers alike.

There’s always some possibility of MSFT exploring a different type of business model for a phone, but it’s far more likely more Microsoft branded functions and services get baked into a versions of Windows Phone and integrate well with other platforms. That is, of course, something we’ve heard Steve Ballmer hint about in the last few months.

So, now that we’ve got the whole Microsoft getting into the phone business cleared up, let’s move on and try and resolve that whole “moon landing is a hoax” thing for our next project.

When Macintosh was introduced it was almost universally panned by the geeks. Monochrome display? A fixed 128k of memory? A PC that didn’t come bundled with a programming language? No expansion slots to add all sorts of tech goodies? For heaven’s sake, there aren’t even any cursor keys! The first Macs lacked all of those things and a funny thing happened, it was a hit with people who would have never viewed themselves as computer users. The original Macintosh slogan, “the computer for the rest of us” made it clear where Apple was going. This was a computer that was aimed at, not the enthusiast market, but the mass market.

Now, that doesn’t mean it was a commercial success. $2,495 computers in 1984 were not going to sell in the numbers that Apple needed to. It was a rocky road to success and finding niche markets and, oddly enough, enthusiasts, who would carry the Mac torch until Steve Jobs returned to Apple and introduced a new product called iMac. The PC as appliance was reborn. Even through several incarnations and evolutions over the last decade, the iMac remains very true to Apple’s original vision of an all-in-one computer that could appeal to a mass market.

Personal computers, however, remain complicated. Most of us who are enthusiasts know this as we field calls from frustrated friends and relatives and help them walk through complex issues of networking, stability, security and the other pains of modern day PC life. While many of us use our PCs to create content with sophisticated tools, most users don’t create content beyond playlist generation and simple image editing. In fact, that’s why we call most users, consumers.

Recently, the success of smartphones with consumers shows that there’s a gap between the desire for simplified appliance computing and PCs. I know many users who use their iPhone as their primary computing device, despite the fact that they’re hampered by the small form factor. They simply are willing to trade simplicity for features and functions as well as complexity.

Which of course brings me to the iPad. Lots of the criticism around the iPad mimics the same criticism that Apple faced with the introduction of Macintosh. Macintosh was the first computer of the era to not ship with a programming language. For the enthusiast of the time, it was a huge issue. For the consumers, the inclusion of MacWrite and MacPaint was far more valuable and useful. I don’t suggest the iPad is a device for everyone. It certainly won’t replace my office setup of multiple, large screen, high resolution monitors and a suite of creativity tools that give me the ability to do things that were merely science fiction a decade ago. For many scenarios, however, I can see how for me it will be the device that will be “just right” where my phone is simply too small and my computer just too big. Appliance computing is important and will open up simpler and more efficient ways to do the things most people want to do, without the complexity and pain of the PC.

It was not that long ago that a generation took shop class to understand how to maintain and repair their cars. My first car was a manual shift that required far more training and practice to be proficient at. While there are still many who desire to tinker with their cars and prefer the “control” of a manual vs. automatic transmission, the vast majority of consumers prefer the simplicity of the cars they drive and don’t need or care to know how to tinker with them or fix them when they break. Likewise, Apple’s iPad bet is there are consumers looking for a better and easier computing experience and the iPad is the first device large enough and sufficiently optimized to offer them the functionality they need without the complexity that the PC carries as a burden. Over time, expect to see more of this model from other vendors. The PC will be around for a long time to come, but it may no longer be the computing model for the masses in the long run.

I know there are some who wail about the Internet splintering with new devices coming to market but personally, I think that’s actually a good thing.

A unified view of the web made sense when pretty much every screen accessing the Internet was a PC with a standard screen resolution on essentially a unified platform. Today, we talk of three screens and a cloud to represent PCs, phones and televisions that are connected. They share neither column platform, screen size or resolution. They’re not used for the same purposes. It’s not realistic to think that the web should or even would look the same on any of them. (it’s also not really three screens either. Count up the number of screens you have in your home, office and along the way and it’s more like 33 screens).

Part of the confusion is what demos well. Things that demo well and are cool get noticed. The more mundane but practical gets taken for granted.

Here’s an example: reading newspapers on the Web on a mobile device. For years Apple, among others, have loved to show the NY Times website in a mobile context. Here’s a test to try. Go to your favorite mobile device and enter the following URL. mobile.nytimes.com (it won’t work on a PC). Now try the same thing with nytimes.com on a your favorite “real” mobile web browser of choice if you have one on your device. Take your time and be patient, it might take a moment or two. Which looks the best and coolest? Well, IMHO the Times classic site. If I actually want to read the Times, however, the experience breaks down pretty quickly for me. It’s hard to read and it’s hard to navigate. The NYT site was just not made for mobile devices. In fact, at the recent iPad launch, Apple once again showcased the NYT home page but also had an NYT app on display to show how reading could be optimized for mobility. I sometimes wonder if anyone ever reads the NYT on a mobile device by going to the “desktop” version, no matter how capable their mobile browser.

I don’t think the mobile web is about brining a full desktop experience to a device or just delivering a stripped down version of the desktop. It’s about making solutions that are optimized for the medium. Does that mean that the web will look differently on different screens? Absolutely. That’s inevitable and it’s actually a good thing not a bad one.

In college chemistry, we learn synthesis is the ability to take product A and combine it with product B and create something brand new that is neither A or B. In today’s world the web experience beyond the PC is more of symbiosis, two things together that don’t quite mesh. It works but it’s far from optimal in a vain attempt to re-create the desktop in places where it doesn’t belong.

Even as web based applications grow in importance on the desktop, on other devices, especially mobile ones, rich connected applications will be a key to deliver information and content in an optimized form. Personally, I like that. As good as the mobile news websites are, I prefer dedicated apps to deliver content. Is it delivering the “full web”? Of course not. But it delivers what I want, an optimized content experience on the device. I don’t care about Flash support on any given device, but I would like the content that’s only available in Flash to be available.

The web is not about the desktop alone anymore. Over time, the web as viewed through the PC lens may in fact become less and less relevant. Instead of trying to re-create an experience that doesn’t fit into the gestalt of a given device, I think we’re going to see more and more content providers focus on delivering an optimized experience, and that works for me. Keep the PC web on the PC and give me what’s device-appropriate anytime. As I move beyond the PC, the browser is rapidly becoming my last resort for accessing information.

First, the iPad is a device that is neither an iPod Touch or iPhone or a MacBook. It does have many elements of each, as would be expected in a device of this category (and a middle of the road price that matches up well with what data shows consumers will pay for devices such as netbooks that are also positioned in this space) and depending on the lens you view through, you might see more iPhone or more MacBook. It’s both. It’s also neither.

The form factor is excellent. It’s not too light to feel fragile and, at 1.5 lbs, it’s also not something that’s going to tire you holding it long term. The screen is amazing with a full XGA resolution. I could easily imagine reading for hours on end on this screen and far prefer this idea to e-ink. For one, there’s no annoying refresh that happens with every page turn and, as a backlit display, it’s perfect for reading in dark places, like airplane seats or in bed without disturbing anyone else. The performance of Apple’s silicon is wicked fast. I was pretty skeptical about running existing apps in a pixel-doubled full screen mode. Action games, I figured, would be pretty much out of the question and Apple came fully prepared to answer that question. Existing games ran ridiculously fast and titles optimized for the device make this the ultimate mobile game device. Personally, I’d buy it just for gaming alone.

App launching is fast with no lag on both older apps that I tried as well as new iPad titles. There’s no multitasking and that’s going to disappoint a few hardcore users but I suspect most users won’t care. Key apps like Mail and iTunes do run in the background as they do on other devices, and apps return to exactly the state they were in when you left them; it mitigates this issue a great deal. It’s a trade off of battery life, performance and multitasking and I think Apple had a hard choice to make here. As a hardcore user, I’d like to decide if an app runs in the background or not.

While all the usual media and PIM functions were there, worked well and were beautifully rendered, what separates the device from being just a large iPod is the optimized experience of the larger screen. The NY Times app (which did not appear to have ads, making me wonder if it’s a paid service) shows that mobile reading can be re-defined and optimized. While the NYT website looked amazing and was totally useable and readable, this proof of concept shows how content companies can deliver. I believe Apple’s iBooks is the best implementation of an eReading application I have ever seen on a mobile device. Expect the iPad to cause many consumers to rethink dedicated eReader device purchases. iWork and both the onscreen keyboard and dock keyboard both worked well for me. While the iPad isn’t going to be replace my computer for many of the content creation tasks I need to do, it could easily replace my 4.5lb MacBook Pro on many of the 100,000 plus miles I travel each year.

So what’s missing? For many consumers, probably not much (although a camera would have been handy for some things). The choice of 3G or no 3G makes sense and allows consumers to choose what’s best for their context. When iPod was introduced, skeptics called it overpriced and just another MP3 player. When the iPhone went on sale, some called it a failure and predicted lack of consumer adoption. Like the iPod and iPhone, Apple did not invent the iPad device category. It has, however, done a better job to date than anyone else justifying that space to the market, and I expect both enthusiast and mainstream consumer demand to be strong.

Apple iPad video demo:

Much as in the business world, the bulk of these PCs did not come into the home in an ordered or planned manner. In addition, like business, they have gone from disconnected to connected, both to the Internet and with each other. I’m not even going to get into the plethora of other devices these PCs are connected to and I’ve talked in the past about the mess that is the home network that ties them all together.

Unlike business adoption of technology, consumers do not have IT departments nor the budget for technology and support. Despite deploying multiple PCs, consumers are often uneducated in working with the underlying technology and making it work together. The result is a consumer environment that is rapidly becoming as complex (and in some cases, far more complex) than a comparable sized business infrastructure. While few business attempt to move video over their networks, a good deal of consumers are engaged in attempting to watch video, music or pictures stored in on one PC on another computer in their home, or even simply figure out what information is stored where.

We know from business use, multiple PCs require ordered management, data version control as well as application and OS version control. Backup in particular is a huge issue. Users need to think not only how to use content today but how to preserve digital content for the future. The real issue is, backed up data. While old family pictures may fade, I never lost a shoebox to a hard disk crash. Here’s the truth about PC hard drives. There are only two types of people in the world. Those that have not lost data to a disk failure yet and those that think that it won’t happen again to them. The rest of us have a backup strategy except that there’s very few of the rest of us. Now, while you might be able to re-install your apps in the event of a disaster and perhaps re-install your music (you never downloaded anything that you didn’t own, did you?) how will you re-create all your digital pictures, papers, poems, e-mails and the like. This is a huge PC management issue (and one that even business users still aren’t good at) and most consumers are putting all their eggs in one very shaky basket.

Let’s not forget general maintenance includes regular OS, application and security updates. Overall, a series of tasks most households are simply not prepared for and sadly there are few tools are available for consumers to assist them with these tasks.

I’ve talked many times in the past how most heads of households do not desire the CIO titles, their spouses do not wish to run a help desk and children do not want to do technical support. The lack of consumer grade management tools is setting the stage for two potential events: a backlash from consumers over the difficulty in managing their home technical infrastructure, or frustration when the irreplaceable is lost and can’t be replaced. There are also opportunities for vendors to fill the gaps with consumer friendly technology, as well as providing other opportunities at retail for consumer level service offerings to manage home complexity. So how do you manage the multiple PCs in your persona life? Leave a note in the comments on how you best manage a problem that’s growing by leaps and bounds with no single solution in sight.

We’re now well past the point where HD-DVD was vanquished by Blu-Ray, and this year at CES we’re finally seeing lower cost devices and content that’s flowing on a regular basis. Yet, in the long run it may well be Blu-Ray has won a Pyrrhic victory and it may well turn out once again that the best is the enemy of the good. I’m not suggesting Blu-Ray has failed or will fail, but it’s the type of technology that faces exactly this type of challenge from the “good enough”

Let’s go back in time for a bit. At the end of the 2001, there was a major effort to drive consumers beyond the ubiquitous compact disk and drive them to one of two new formats, SACD and DVD Audio. Both were optical disk formats designed to replace the existing CD standard and, at the same time, drive replacement cycles for both hardware and software. In the end, neither format prevailed and despite strong efforts from both sides, consumers remained with the CD as a standard while at the same time embracing the MP3 format for music (along with the iPod and other MP3 players), a format of lesser quality than the CD.

So how does a technology shift and cross the threshold for adoption? The ability to drive consumers to new technology is a difficult task requiring several key things to happen at the same time.

First, there requires broad unified hardware support. In the case of Blu-Ray this didn’t happen soon enough. Vendors were split with no unified standard, and instead created a format war that caused confusion among consumers. This initially held back adoption for consumers who waited for the market to sort itself out.

Second, deep content support is required. Even as Blu-Ray content now flows in some numbers at last, there’s far more new content available on DVD than on Blu-Ray, which also sells at higher price points for the same titles.

Finally, there needs to be a clear and visible consumer value proposition. CDs and DVDs both offered a clear value proposition to consumers. There was a visible difference in the experience that was easily grasped. Both were marked by a shift from analog tape format to disk, which was more reliable and offered novel features such as random access to content. Both offered clear quality differences than what came before and the quality was well above the threshold for just noticeable differences. Consumers still do not see the same value proposition with Blu-Ray, especially when cheap, up-scaling DVD players make their existing content look “good enough”.

Even as consumers still embrace their DVDs, the growth and penetration of broadband is facilitating content to be delivered directly to consumers without the need for any optical disk. Combined with portability and the ability to move content from room to room as well as onto portable devices, the market for downloaded video content continues to grow each day and more of that content is in Hi-Def format.

With pressure coming from DVD on one side and the growth in connected TVs and streaming content, consumers may opt once again for the “good enough” experience and never make the mass market leap to high definition optical disks.

The joint effort of HTC and Google, the N1 is a slim device, running a speedy Snapdragon processor with a beautiful AMOLED display. A 4GB micro-SD is standard and it can be upgraded beyond that. The N1 runs the latest version of Android, version 2.1. It’s not overly dramatic a change but the new UI enhancements are welcome, making the device feel much more modern than prior efforts. Speech recognition is enabled everywhere so voice Tweets are now a reality.

The N1 is the speediest Android device I’ve ever used, and it raises the bar over previous devices in a big way. There’s little to no lag, thanks to the work that HTC has done here and, at the moment, this is the most impressive Android device we’ve seen to date. You can order the device from Google for $529 unlocked (and also use it on ATT, although you’ll be limited to EDGE speed) or get it from Google with a T-Mobile contract for $179 with a two year contract. In fact, there’s no other place to get an N1 except in Google’s online store. In short, there’s nothing revolutionary about what Google has done here with the N1 in terms of changing the carrier/handset vendor relationship but it is nice for the enthusiast to be able to purchase sans contract. (I don’t expect that to be a mainstream model, just ask Nokia how easy it is to sell unlocked handsets at full price.)

More importantly, Google upped the ante for device partners. While all Android devices might be created equal, it appears some like the Nexus One are a little more equal than others. Not everyone’s going to get their device into the Google store and that’s got to have some licensees upset. At the same time, Google has upped the game for the partner eco-system, raising the bar and telling licensees to jump over it. It’s a lesson perhaps Microsoft could learn. The bottom line is despite protestations that the N1 is an HTC phone, the only place you can get it is from Google and it’s first phone BRANDED as Google (not comes with Google).

While I like the N1 a lot, I’m a little puzzled at Google’s approach to their partners. One has to wonder how Motorola feels now that the DROID has been eclipsed as the Android device of the week, even though Moto was present at the event. Even more of an issue, there remain problems that I still have with Android platform that don’t appear to have been dealt with the release of the N1. That’s disappointing and until these issues get resolved, it’s hard for me to see how Android makes the leap from the enthusiast to the mass market.

1. Applications. Despite the more than 10,000 apps in the Android marketplace there’s too much stuff still missing, especially in terms of entertainment. For me, that means a some really good games, a better selection of eBook readers such as a Kindle app, and perhaps a SlingPlayer app. Even worse, Android 2.1 still has a small upper limit for application storage, which is one reason we’re not seeing the type of apps that could make Android a first class entertainment device. Even other categories are behind the times. For example I can’t find a Twitter client that comes close to what’s available for other platforms. Apple’s lead in the app marketplace may now be 10x but it’s not the numbers, it’s the depth, breadth and quality of the apps that make the Apple’s store stand out. Right now the best Android apps come from Google, it’s time for that to change quickly.
2. Security. Amazingly, there’s still no password protection, hardware or SD encryption. There’s also no remote management or wipe. That might be okay for consumers but hardly good enough to protect anything important and that’s going to be an issue for businesses looking for Android adoption.
3. Exchange. It’s nice to see Exchange support native (HTC has offered it for their Android devices for some time) to Android but it’s still not a great implementation. Too many issues, especially in terms of calendar management.
4. PC Sync. I know the idea is to move everything to the cloud but the reality is, there’s a lot of folks who still want to do local sync to Outlook or iCal and get their contacts and calendars on their devices that way. Worse, there’s no media sync. I understand some folks prefer to just drag and drop their stuff on their device but I can’t imagine why they’d prefer that. I certainly don’t want to try and replicate my playlists in iTunes or Zune one song at a time, digging through directories on my desktop. Even odder, I don’t even have full cloud sync. Palm for example knows what apps I’ve installed on my device as well as other settings and when I sign in to a new webOS device lets me immediately reinstall them automatically. Android should at the minimum do the same thing.

Even with these issues, I believe Android is going to be force to reckoned with in the mobile space and the N1, if for no other reason than because it’s has the power and weight of Google behind it, is going to be a very popular device. Yet, it still leaves me wanting, the N1 and Android both feel like they’re still playing to an enthusiast market and it’s time for Android to graduate to the masses. Perhaps the next “Android phone of the week” will take us closer.

Looking for more on the Google Nexus One?  Check out SlashGear’s hands-on first impressions and demo video.

Like the mythical predecessors that came before it, the new device is said to have an 8.5 x 11 inch touch screen made by Pixel Qi with an indoor/outdoor display, use inductive charging (like the Palm Pre), will be waterproof and cost no more than $100. Of course, you can’t buy or order one as they’re targeting 2012 for the ship date. I’ve been asked by a few folks how the OLPC project could manage this with their current specifications and the answer is simple: they won’t be able to. In the meantime, some other interim device based on the original model, with slightly more functional specs is to be released. This is another case of more time and money being wasted on a dubious and unobtainable dream.

I’ve talked in the past about why this program is not a good idea but forget that for a moment. Let’s assume we all agree that education in emerging markets is critical. We know that while there’s no silver bullet to cure the ills of society, education comes pretty close. Today, that means education with the ability to be part of the digital community. This project is not the answer.

Look at the issues related to the notion of the $100 laptop (which ended up costing a lot more than a $100 and will continue to do so) such as who will program them? How will they be repaired? What’s the courseware and curriculum? Now listen to the answers (mostly, the kids will do it all) and you realize there’s a real problem as a good deal of this intended market is illiterate. As this project continues to fail, those countries that have gambled and invested in it do not have the money and resources for a “do over”. While there’s been a lot of flaming about those who are bringing up objections to the project, this is something that’s too important to get wrong and it’s time to start thinking elsewhere and thinking in a different way how to solve this problem.

It’s not clear to me that there’s one correct approach to the problem, but it does seem like the one approach that got all the attention and the buzz had the most margin for error and little chance for success. At the same time, there needs to be a re-think on the degree of priority of computers in emerging markets. One of the most talked about features of the first OLPC prototypes were the hand cranks to power them. Did no one ever consider that in places where computers need to be cranked to powered there might be more pressing issues than getting on the internet and using Twitter? Such as; Electricity? Medicine? Clean water?

While a noble concept in the ideal, it’s time to call the OLPC project and it’s all gimmicks, odd promotions (such as the “Give One, Get One”, where US citizens could “buy” an OLPC at double the cost, with the idea that the other one would be given away. It was a failed program two years running and mercifully not repeated this year) what it is, a failure. Let’s get companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and Google among others to tackle the issue of global literacy in the digital age as a product they must all share the burden in and reap the rewards. Education is indeed a silver bullet that can cure much of what ails society, but at the same time focus must be kept on real issues such as clean water, food to eat and elimination of disease. More money spent on a mythical tablet that will likely never see the light of day isn’t innovative, it’s just tragic.

This experience comes to mind as I’m looking at a new phone from Sony Ericsson called the Xperia Pureness, that takes a page from the “less is more” playbook. The phone sells in the US at places such as Saks Fifth Avenue for $990 US. Yes, that’s not a typo, this is a $990 phone. As Sony Ericsson puts it “In an increasingly complex world, an innovative phone is honed down to the essentials. Xperia Pureness is free from excessive features, leaving an exceptionally simplified mobile experience. Talk. Text. Time.” Yep, the theme of the Pureness is “talk.text.time” and when SE says that, they mean it pretty literally.

The Pureness has no camera and very few of the features we’d expect from a modern phone. What is does have is beautiful form factor with a translucent LCD display (the first one of its kind) that glows when active so you can see what’s on it. The keys are invisible when not in use and also glow with a soft white light when you’re using the phone. While in truth, there’s more to the phone than that, it’s got most of the features of any Sony Ericsson phone including a media player, the ability to connect to your Exchange server via the ActiveSync protocol and even a copy of PacMan, none of those are likely to be the selling features of this phone.

A lot of folks have ridiculed the idea of a very high priced, essentially feature phone with fewer features than a Sony Ericsson T610 circa 2002, I might disagree. One user on Twitter commented that the Pureness costs more than a Sony Bravia 46″ HiDef TV set and a PS3 combined. My response to that is, if you’re making that type of value proposition, this is clearly not the phone for you. While I don’t think the Pureness will be a mass market success at the current price, or even at half the current price, I think it’s reflective of important changes in the phone market.

First, mature platforms fragment to meet the needs of niche markets. The phone market now is tracking to what’s happened in the PC space. I’ve often said that it was not long ago when all computers were created equal. PCs, were PCs. If you wanted a server, you turned the PC on its side, if you needed a workstation – you painted it black and if it was a portable you needed – you simply added a handle. Today, PCs are as much about fashion and style as it they are about the core benchmarks or functions. For years, phones were essentially utilitarian devices, optimized for phone calls. Smartphones were voice plus data services and/or apps. We’re now at the point where we will really start to see the concept of one size fits all begin to fade and the device market begin to fragment into devices designed for specific demographics, with different needs and desires for what they want in a phone.

But there’s more to the story, within niche markets there’s going to be room for devices that sell on the basis of form and function but also status.

It’s not a new phenomena. Rolex has made a pretty good business out of selling wrist watches that offer less features and keep time less accurately than a Timex watch that costs a fraction of the price. I could go on but the point is clear, there’s a market that’s looking for something different in their phone. Precisely the audience that’s shopping for phones at Sak’s 5th Avenue for a phone and not at the local carrier, and probably very different from the audience that’s reading this column.

Launched relatively low key last month, the small device built by HTC has a 3.5″ touch screen that works indoors and out and gets a variety of programming including Fox News, CNBC, MSNBC, Disney, Nick, ESPN, MTV, and Comedy Central along with some specials and the like. The device comes with six months of free services, after that it’s $15 a month (which you can lower with a multi-service contract). As with most over the air content, your personal TV won’t work in fringe coverage areas, underground or in many buildings and of course, it’s probably not going to work or allowed to be used on planes.

While I do believe there’s a market for standalone devices such as dedicated media players and digital cameras, this one just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be a mass market success. For one thing, it’s hard to see how this fits in with the consumer “rule of three” for mobile devices. Second, it’s got a tough business model attached to it. Consumers have historically gone in one of two directions with devices. Give me the device for free and I’ll pay you a monthly fee for content (such as your set top box) or sell me the device and I own it but I’m not going to pay for service fees on top of the device (other than what I pay to purchase content I own). Models that fall in the middle, with relatively high costs of devices and significant service fees just don’t do very well. It’s hard to see how the model here for Personal Television resonates with consumers in terms of driving mass market adoption.

I don’t think the concept is all wrong, just too limited in scope at the moment. If I were FloTV with the investment I’d made in broadcast technology, I’d want to get this service on to as many screens as possible. Sure, phones are a obvious fit but a dedicated device like this could be a success; but it’s going to need a lot of work. First, there’s got to be more content to watch, the current line up isn’t enough. It also needs DVR features to time shift, pause and skip. Think TiVo in my pocket. Finally, there’s got to be some better pricing. I already pay quite a bit to watch CNBC at home on multiple screens, and with a Slingbox I can even take that content to my PC and phone directly, with no additional costs. Give me a pricing model that fits in line with what I’m already paying and you won’t need to make the television personal, you’ll make it tailored perfectly to me and that’s what it’s going to take to make this idea work.

What’s Lala? A little background. Lala’s been around for awhile, gone through iterations involving free online listening before settling in on a hybrid model. First. Lala lets you listen to any song you currently have on your PC that it matches to its database (a concept based on the idea of music fingerprints and a digital locker that goes back to the early days of mp3.com) and upload any song you may have that they don’t know about. Once completed, you’ve now got access to all your music any place there’s a computer with a web browser and an internet connection. There’s also an additional model that lets you listen to any song for free but only once. After that the song must be “purchased” and can only be streamed from the web but not downloaded to a computer or any other offline device.

So why would Apple be interested in such a purchase? There’s been some speculation that this purchase would mark Apple’s entry into the subscription music business, something that’s been predicted often and never come to market. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Lala’s business was not about subscription music and there’s still way to much evangelism and explanation required to bridge the consumer gap between the two current forms of music purchase today, namely free via radio or radio-like experiences and purchase to own.

I believe Apple is looking at more fundamental trend that will be critical in 2010. That mobile apps will be important but mobile services leveraged against an application perhaps even more so. Apple pioneered the model of the $0.99 song purchase tied to a computer and transferred over a cable to a portable device. When most users collections had well less than a 1,000 songs, the model makes perfect sense. But what about when a users collection far exceeds the reasonable capacity to put in a device? Or when the device the consumer uses has a ubiquitous, “always on” connection? It’s these types of fundamental shifts that went into the thinking of a Lala purchase.

Not long ago, Lala demonstrated an app that would allow users to access their entire music collection on their iPhones, without the need to connect back to a computer, as well as streamed content. Perhaps it was this very demonstration that sparked Cupertino’s interest in buying the service. The net is a differentiated music offering that’s easily tied to iTunes as it currently exists and, at the same time, opens up an entire new offering that takes advantage of today’s market conditions. More importantly, it’s a service offering that’s easily understood by the mainstream market and needs far less evangelism than a subscription service would require.

The Lala acquisition is important not only because it offers a new model for music consumption and purchase but that it has the backing of the largest music retailer, Apple Inc. At the same time, a close look shows just how important mobile services are going to be next year as both a sea-change and a major trend. Vendors that are looking to play catch up to Apple in the mobile app space, who ignore the potential of mobile service offerings are going to be in for a challenging year.

1. Style. The Booklet’s got style. It’s small, thin elegant and doesn’t feel like it’s made out of plastic. The metal construction of the body, the solid heft and firm click of the keys make it feel like it’s a product that came from Cupertino, CA not Finland. In fact using it at Starbucks, several people asked me if I was using an Apple (even though the lid CLEARLY says Nokia). If your product gets confused with something made at 1 Infinite Loop, that’s a good thing. Almost every other netbook on the market feels cheap and toy like by comparison.

2. Quality. The quality of the Booklet is excellent. Nokia has really worked hard to make everything from the beautiful blue packaging and out of box experience to using the Booklet a delight. There’s very little bloatware installed and no need to spend hours “flattening” the hard disk and trying to either remove junk or just re-installing Windows from scratch. The 3G experience was a delight. I just popped an AT&T SIM into the Booklet and it immediately recognized it and connected to the network. No configuration or ATT connection software required.

3. Indulgence. Yep, it’s a little indulgent to spend $599 for an un-subsidized Booklet but that’s not a bad thing. The best products we purchase should feel a little indulgent; the Booklet’s quality of materials and overall build justify that feeling.

4. Battery Life. Battery life is excellent. With the screen on 40% brightness and WiFi or 3G on, the Booklet can easily go for 8 hours or more. That’s a full day of computing with no power adapter, or enough juice to get you from the east coast to west with enough battery life left to still check your email when you land. Sorry, 2-3 hours just doesn’t cut it these days and the Booklet delivers.

The Booklet is a product with a lot of contradictions. On one hand it’s fairly slow, booting took me a good two minutes (but once booted, sleep and/or suspend take very little time) but on the other hand has amazing battery life. There’s an HDMI connector but no way to connect a VGA projector out of the box. It is a netbook class PC but carriers a pretty hefty price tag. On balance, it’s not a machine for everyone but there’s a lot here to like. If I were looking for a small, light companion machine to take on day trips and cared about form factor, build quality and battery life, I’d probably spend the extra money and go for the Booklet and not a cheaper netbook. I could also take some comfort in the fact that Booklet isn’t the most expensive Atom based device on the market. I could by two Booklets for the cost of one Sony VAIO X and still have enough money left over for a smartphone, an eBook reader or one of those cheap, plastic netbooks.

Want a second opinion on the Nokia Booklet 3G?  Check out the SlashGear review.

I’m constantly amazed at the number and the degree of badly designed products out there that come to market. I’m talking bad stuff. I mean stuff that had to go from concept, to design, to prototype and eventually make it to the retail channel. Stuff so bad that it’s impossible to imagine that anyone in their right mind signed off on the process and the steps along the way. The stuff that makes you scream…”what were they thinking?” You don’t need to be a genius to know that some of this stuff just won’t work. It isn’t rocket science, it’s just focusing on the basics and this is why much of the criticism is warranted.

If it takes three days to configure a music phone to get music on it, or if your media player deletes all the content on your hard drive, you don’t need to be an engineer to critique the process that allowed that product to come to market. I understand hitting the mark of super excellence is hard, but it is possible and reasonable to get the basics right. Maybe if more vendors just spent time on the basics, they would do better overall and perhaps other players would shine less by comparison. I’m also tired of mediocre stuff that gets the table stakes stuff wrong that comes from vendors that, in theory, should know better.

There is, however, another side of this discussion and over the last few weeks I’ve had a recurring set of conversations of users critiquing product designs and the suggestion that the user should become the product designer. Think of it as “citizen gadgetry” Sorry, I just don’t agree with the concept of end users as designer. It’s simply not as easy as it appears (as we’ve seen with the difficulty of getting devices like the CrunchPad to market). There’s a complex iteration between features, form and cost that is more than just trivial.

It’s easy to create niche products that are only designed for a few users. You all know my longstanding view that there’s a market for about 50,000 of anything (except perhaps MIDs). Designing something for the mass market of fifty million or more though requires lots of work. It also requires talent, training, thorough understanding of the market and retail channels and more talent. Perhaps not necessarily Jonathon Ive level talent in every case, but real talent nevertheless. As a user and a pretty technical one at that, I can appreciate good design and I can tell you what works and what doesn’t work and why. The idea, however, that people can go from user to creator in one small leap is an entirely different story. The notion that the majority of people in our society enjoy the creative talents of others and don’t create their own work is so prevalent we have a word for it. We call these people consumers and the gadget industry is more formally known as consumer electronics. The democratization of gadgets might sound like a good idea but I highly doubt we’ll see it happen any time soon or any great gadgets that do eventually come from these sources.

Consumers don’t really care about things like Snow Leopard, Macintosh, iPods or iPhones. They care about music, web browsing, e-mail and the associated services that go with them. The platform is a means to that end, as is the store. Consumers do care a great deal about the experience they go through in buying these products and they care about the customer service they receive after the purchase.

Over the last year I keep hearing more and more anecdotes about Apple’s customer service and particularly the experience at retail. All the stories were tales that bordered on the stuff that urban myths are made of. They were repeated over and over to groups of people. They dealt with things ranging from MacBook keyboard problems, iPod failures and customer service during the purchases of back to school systems. In each case Apple did not please these customers, Apple delighted them. Even more interesting, none of the people who told me their story fit the traditional Apple customer demographic, none were die-hard techies nor Apple fanbois. They were all just customers trying to work with the devices they purchased or trying to purchase technology to solve a need. The funny thing is that they’re not customers anymore, each and every one of these folks is now an Apple fan. To the core, if you will.

Apple has made the technology buying experience something that rivals the best consumer retail experiences. I used to postulate that Apple had become the Nordstrom for technology retail. Ever shop at Nordstrom’s? If you haven’t, you should just for the experience. In fact, if you run a support organization, you should go to Nordstrom’s and shop for training purposes.

I don’t think Apple is the Nordstrom of technology any more. I just think they’re the new Nordstrom as defined by level of service. I mean, why don’t GAP salesfolks have little handhelds to let me check out wherever I am in the store? How about the idea of going into Eddie Bauer and the ability to get the coat I bought there cleaned and pressed?

Apple’s retail experience is one major reason why Apple is a real threat to many folks and it’s also the reason why Microsoft is working hard to emulate the model Apple has created.

What’s making the difference is just how much mindshare Apple is building as a result of these types of tales of support love. There’s a great urban legend about Nordstrom’s that they actually took a return on snow tires. Years ago, I did a presentation for Nordstrom’s in Seattle and had a chance to chat with some of the family members who still are active in running things. Of course, I had to ask the question: is the story about the snow tires really true? There was a pause in the room and folks looked at each other and smiled. Finally, one of the family responded. I won’t tell you if it’s true or not, but here’s the thing, they’re not telling that story about Macy’s.

They’re also not telling them about Dell, Sony or Microsoft. Regardless of whether they’re exaggerated over time or not, these stories help further build mindshare today, and mindshare today leads to market share tomorrow.

The HD2 is marked by two features not usually found on most Windows Mobile phones. The first is a capacitive touch screen. This is the first Windows Mobile device that has no stylus and is totally designed for input by touch alone. The second is a 1GHz Snapdragon processor that makes Windows Mobile and especially the HTC Sense UI fly. Finally, add in a gorgeous 4.3″ screen and you realize this is not your father’s Windows Mobile device.

While all the goodness of Windows Mobile 6.5 is there, HTC has taken thing to a new level with this latest version of their Sense UI. The ability to see quick information such as Twitter updates, stocks, weather, email etc without the need to go into an app is wonderful, and the speed with which one can move from screen to screen is amazing. Even better, the HD2 fully supports multitouch so zooming in and out of web pages, photos and word documents is simple, fast and fluid (it’s getting harder and harder for me to use a touchscreen device that lacks multi touch). HTC has replaced the stock Windows Mobile keyboard for their own and, combined with the large screen and fast processor, typing was easy and fast. I was able to get about the same speed as I get using the iPhone, something that I’ve not been able to do on any other devices.

Media is fantastic and HTC offers a cool music player (with an Apple-esque cover flow that’s smooth and fast) and of course the photo and video viewing. There’s also Windows Media Player for those looking for Microsoft sync from the desktop. The default browser is Opera which is fantastic and supports multi touch. (IE is much improved but pales next to Opera).

I did run into some legacy issues. One odd missing feature is there’s no way to add a user name to the device as in prior versions of Windows Mobile (including stock versions of 6.5) That’s an issue as that’s a vehicle older apps use to register and validate. No user name, no registration. Word is there will be a fix for this sometime shortly. There’s also no d-pad buttons so older titles that depended on physical buttons won’t work well or work at all. The good news is that I had no problems downloading new titles from Marketplace that all worked fine on the device, including classic games such as Galaga and Tetris. Finally, given that this is a European device, there’s no 3G here in the US which tends to slow everything down including web browsing. Using WiFi or MiFi fixed that problem and of course, any device that makes it to the US will likely have 3G on board.

HTC proved an important point with the HD2. It’s possible to take Windows Mobile 6.5 and make it a tier one mobile experience. No doubt it was hard work (for example, HTC had to implement multi touch on its own as there’s no native support for it in Windows Mobile). Oddly, despite all the buzz this device has garnered it seems the only people not talking about it are Microsoft folks. One reason for that is the HD2 is only available in Europe (and remember if you’re thinking about finding one and bringing it to the US note you’ll be stuck on EDGE as there’s no US 3G support). The good news is HTC says it’s bringing the device to the US early next year (no carrier was named as of this point) and perhaps we’ll see Microsoft start promoting it properly as they should. HTC has done an amazing job showing what one can do with Windows Mobile. The question is will see other licensees getting in the game and raising the bar higher?

Want a second opinion on the HTC HD2?  Check out the full SlashGear review with hands-on video.

And that brings me to the point of today’s post. Technology should be aspirational, because the ability to aspire is what causes consumers to spend. Nike understands this. It’s not a subtle message, the only thing separating you from Michael Jordan and his ability is a pair of Nike shoes.

In days gone by, PCs were sold with a programming language, the notion being you could use this tool to create great things. Later, it was HyperCard with Macintosh that took the creative paradigm one step further. Apple’s CEO at the time, John Sculley, was reported to have said when he saw HyperCard for the first time, “at last, I can program”. Programming computers might not be what most aspire for these days.

Today, the most that many folks aspire to is to create playlists of their favorite songs or lightly edit a photo. It’s good to see both Microsoft and Apple extending their platforms with tools that can do more. There’s a reason that Apple ships iLife with all of their Macs (Hypercard itself is alas, no more) and Microsoft offers Windows Live Essentials. It’s to help create the inspirational environment.

I’ve often argued that consumers consume content and don’t create it, that’s why they’re called consumers. It’s true, but that doesn’t mean that the industry shouldn’t strive to create products that fire the imagination and further spark creativity. Many may never care, others may aspire to the goal and in the end, never take advantage of the power to create and others may come up with the next big idea. Aspiration is good even if potential is never totally unleashed and frankly, I’d rather see more about companies telling me why their stuff is good and what it enables me to do as opposed to why their competition is bad or overpriced or hurts puppies and kittens.

As the poet Robert Browning said, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or else what’s a heaven for?” Let’s think the same way about consumer tech. So tell me, what do you aspire to?