Xblog

So, let’s see how the phone compares to an iPhone. Well, it does EV-DO, so it can access the net faster than an iPhone…. just like my PPC-6700 and just about every other web-enabled phone on the market even six months before the iPhone’s launch. It has a full QWERTY keyboard, just like my PPC-6700 which is over two years old. It has a microSD slot, which is minor improvement on the miniSD slot on my PPC-6700, and is commonly found on web-enabled phones these days, including the PPC-6800, which is a refresh update of my phone. Does it have multi-touch? No. Does it have a proximity sensor? No. Does it have video voice mail, AFAIK, no. Oh, and the screen. There are two of them…. and they both suck.

Each of them is QVGA resolution (one in landscape, one in portrait mode). QVGA has been available in phones for years now (indeed, my PPC-6700 has it). I can tell you from first hand experience that that kind of resolution just plain sucks for browsing the web. Yes, specially designed mobile services can work fine with it, but you need more pixels to do the job right. Frankly, I’m embarrassed for the whole US mobile phone market. When the iPhone was first announced, it’s 480x320 resolution seemed to me as too little too late. QVGA phones had been on the market for years, and overseas you could find full VGA phones without looking too hard. It seemed like by the time the iPhone landed on the market, 480x320 was going to seem about as lame as the iPhone’s EDGE network. Wow, was I wrong about that. I don’t know what the problem is, even the OpenMoko project has a VGA phone, but the monopolies powers in the cell phone market seem to be preventing the concept reaching consumer’s hands.

So here’s a new rule: I don’t expect everyone to start shipping VGA overnight, but you can’t call a phone an “iPhone killer” unless it has one screen that is at least as high a resolution as the iPhone’s. You also have to be embarrassed at each new phone announcement where you don’t have at least ONE phone on the market that can match or exceed the specs of the Neo 1973.

I have to say I have an increasing dislike of the TV, and tend to prefer the Internet. I didn’t watch MSN’s broadcast either (bets as to whether it was Linux compatible? ;-), but I saw a few screenshots of the interface. It looked a lot like a TV. ;-)

Two things have become clear to me:

1. The Internet is going to kill TV.
2. TV will have the last laugh, because the Internet is going to look more and more like TV.

So who loses in all this? Well, I worry that the Internet might suffer, but I imagine it is a matter of perspective. I suspect search engines are going to have to work a bit harder to extract meaning from video content, but it hardly seems impossible. I’m thinking probably the biggest pain will be felt by satellite companies (I’m looking at you Rupert Murdoch with your DirecTV and SkyTV networks) followed up with any cable companies whose profit was largely the function of being a licensed monopoly.

Otherwise, it is probably going to be a Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose chose kind of thing. What is also becoming clear to me is that the Nielson ratings are becoming an increasingly irrelevant metric of what the younger generation is interested in, which hopefully explains why TV’s content is getting worse and worse in a way that doesn’t doom us all to extinction in like two generations.

I’m going to have to chat with some of my neighbours (who are overwhelmingly in the TV business) to get an idea as to how the industry is going to respond to this. I thought they were all focused on HDTV, which at this point seems likely to be stillborn. To get an idea just how far off target HDTV is, keep in mind that the younger generation seems more than happy to view TV content on 2.5” diagonal screens with 320x240 resolution. So much so that a good chunk of them will pay money for it. About the only aspect of HDTV that is following something resembling a trend is the focus on thin TV’s, which seems to be following the already so-overdone-it-may-be-losing-its-cool razor thin cell phone trend.

Despite two posts on it, I’m really not interested in getting an iPhone. Beyond that, I’m quite confused about what I want to do. My choices would appear as follows:

Just get a functional PPC-6700. I actually have insurance on the phone, so this is a cheap, $50 option that gets me back to where I was.

Upgrade to the Mogul aka, the PPC-6800. I can get a partial discount on the phone if I commit to another two years with Sprint (which I’m pretty much committed to anyway due to having recently added yet another member of the family on to our plan). This means it’d cost me slightly less than $500, which will require some doing to justify.

Give up on having my cell phone be a full fledged mobile PC, and instead going with some of Sprint’s other phones. Possibly something with basic web browsing capabilities, but the focus would be on phone capabilities.

Finally, there is the Neo 1973 lingering in the background. Honestly, if it wasn’t the first real Linux phone (i.e. where you can really access Linux and mess with it), I wouldn’t give it the time of day. However, it is such a beast and better still it has a nice VGA touch screen, and that makes it incredibly interesting.

Complicating this whole mess is the insane situation with cell phones that is the US market place. You can basically choose between four carriers, all of which basically suck. We ended up on Sprint mostly through the following function: Verizon ticked us off, Cingular had given us trouble before and had been particularly obnoxious to my mother in law who’d been an AT&T customer before the merger, and T-Mobile had horrid reception at my office. This lead us to Sprint (who actually have caused us headaches before too, but we hadn’t dealt with them for the longest so…. ;-).

Throw in to that the joy that is cell phone contracts (we’re effectively locked in to Sprint for two more years). The iPhone may not be cool enough to make me think about breaking contracts or paying for two cell phone services at once, but the Neo 1973 is. Now, the current rev lacks WiFi support, and in general, do you really want the 1.0 version of such experimental hardware? (Answer: YES! I’m a geek.)

Complicating this has been my experiences so far with the 6700. In true Windows fashion, it’s been somewhat unstable. In particular, it seems to react somewhat poorly to receiving a call while I have the phone locked… which is most of the time I receive a call. It also is a little underpowered, it is clear to me that the extra processing power and RAM in the Mogul, while seemingly minor, would actually make a huge difference with end user experience. I’ve actually not installed much software on the phone, but this is mostly because I’ve had bad experiences with most of the installs I have done. I’ve had problems with running out of memory, not having the right runtime installed, problems getting some software to install on the mini-SD card, etc. The browser on it has been handy on more than a few occasions, although it is hard to justify the $15/month service charge for the data service (unless you own Sprint stock ;-). One problem is that as web sites get more and more AJAX-y, they work more and more poorly with the crippled version of IE embedded in it (and yes, I have tried installing a Gecko based browser, with very unfortunate consequences). A number of sites are frustrating close to working completely, like Reddit, which works well enough except the login button, which is the key to unlocking the site’s potential (similar problems with the MTA website). I’ve used the e-mail support a fair bit, but it’s never really worked with work e-mail, and I only get the top 100 e-mails in each folder, which proves to be severely limiting for someone who abuses IMAP as much as I do. More than anything else, I’ve found QVGA to be an extraordinarily limiting resolution for working with anything other than “designed for QVGA” content.

At this point, I am leaning to canceling the data service, going with one of Sprint’s Sanyo phones (they seem to have the best reception and voice quality), and then debating with myself whether I’d really actually use a Neo 1973, and maybe waiting for early adopter reports to filter in. On the other hand, I’d like to *be* one of those early adopters! ;-)

As much as I like the Neo 1973’s openness, and as much as I sometimes question the ROI of my data services, I probably would have gone with the Mogul except for its shortcomings in one particular area: screen resolution. I have to hand it to Apple for not allowing themselves to be confined to a QVGA world. It’s a sad world to be in, and yet it is impossible to get a Windows Mobile phone in the US with >QVGA resolution. Outside the US there are a number of models to choose from, but the insanity of the way the cellphone market works in the US means that we get the latest and greatest last. Indeed, most of what makes the iPhone such a marvelous phone is that it is available in the US first. I imagine when it shows up in some other countries, a lot of people will shrug their shoulds and say, “So what?”. Given what I know is possible with mobile handsets today, I find it incredibly hard to spend >$400 on a cell phone and end up with a display whose resolution is the same as what was available two years ago, and hasn’t been seen on the desktop in like twenty years. Heck, I’d rather have a power-efficient but high resolution grayscale screen than the low-res color crud we have right now. While perfectly fine for scrolling through a list of menu options, it is not really suitable for reading web content that inevitably has 200+ pixels set aside on the left just for navigation links (one could blame the net for this, and I do, but phones that address this are already available, I just want them on my provider’s network).

So, I’m sure if anyone actually reads all this, they’ll have suggestions. Please fire away. I’m all ears.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the don’t walk sign was flashing, so we were both stuck on the corner for a bit. Eventually, the car signal went from green, to yellow, and then to red. For a brief moment, the iPhoner’s brain misfired, and he somehow concluded that the red light meant it was now time for him to cross the street.

I say a brief moment, but he had enough time to get three or four steps out in to the street before he realized his error, and in that hesitant, diffident, and embarrassed manner that only geeks really ever master, he turned around and got back on the sidewalk. I could see the shame in his eyes: he had just exposed how uncool he was.

Now, I am a geek myself, and while I usually don’t walk out in to the middle of the street, I probably have geeky lapses like this several times a day. So I’m not about to poke fun at this guy for that. This stuff happens. What amuses me is what happened next.

In a desperate attempt to regain his composure and air of confidence, he brought up his iPhone to eye level, and started randomly fidgeting with it. As far as I could tell (based on his hand gestures), he was just scrolling through something, probably his contacts. He rubbed his techno-worrystone for a couple of seconds, and then lowered it back by his side.

His self-assured air had returned. He was cool again, because he’d just played with his iPhone. In that moment, I was forced to realize why Apple keeps winning the image battle with the techno-elite.

Apple sells something better than more speed, more capacity and more capabilities. Apple sells cool in a box.

That in itself was not a revelation to me. The painful realization that flowed from this moment, was that we geeks crave/need cool more desperately than any other segment of society, and for the most part we need it to be as straightforward to obtain as opening a box, because the road to cool involves dexterity or social skills, we’re screwed.