Embracing Chaos

Back in 2007, I predicted that Apple would launch a subscription music service probably around 2010. My logic was based on how long it would take to get enough connected iPods into the world. Having spent a bunch of time with an unconnected mp3 player with a subscription music service I knew this was necessary. I had been using a Sansa mp3 player, which was playing content from Rhapsody’s subscription service. The device was designed to essentially brick itself every 30 days unless you plugged it into a PC. This was necessary to ensure that you were still paying for the music that it had stored, since it couldn’t connect itself. The experience sucked.  Jobs would never let this fly. But now there’s a whole slew of media devices (iPhones, iPod touches, and the new slate) which have their own connection to the outside world and wouldn’t need to be plugged in every month to verify that you’ve paid up.

iSlate is rumored to have a bunch of new content associated with it.  Particularly print content.  Print publishers will probably want consumers to sign up for subscriptions.  So Apple’s probably going to be introducing people to the concept of content subscriptions on their portable devices, likely with iPhone OS 4.0 which probably will run the iSlate and old iPhones and iPod touches too.  So I wouldn’t be surprised if you can get an all-you-can-eat music subscription service available too.  We’ll see.  It’s pure speculation, but it would make sense.  I’d be particularly tickled if my off-the-cuff prediction of dates from 2007 turned out to be right.

There’s lots of hubbub about Apple’s upcoming tablet device, but the stuff people are talking about I’m not actually all that excited about.  A giant iPhone?  Sure, that’ll be nice.  A color e-reader that can run apps.  Okay, I guess that’s better than kindle.  A super-thin netbook without a real keyboard.  Meh.  Actually, I don’t know that I’d want one at all.  Unless…

Unless Apple has come up with a better way to do soft keyboards, that is.  When I say “soft keyboard” I mean the kind of keyboard that appears on a touch screen and has no physical keys.  I’ve complained about the iPhone’s keyboard for a while.  While it’s true that people do get better at using these, I still don’t think I’ll ever be nearly as fast or accurate (even with smart correction) with a soft keyboard as I was with my blackberry.  I think that’s probably true on average for most people.  The basic reason is the lack of tactile feedback.  With a physical keyboard, if my fingers are slightly off target, they are guided to the right place by feel.

I’ve argued for some time now that the way to solve this is by figuring out how to make a touch-screen display with tactile feedback.  How would such a device work?  Physically I couldn’t tell you.  But what we’d need would be a way to electronically manipulate texture in a clear material.  A plastic with a matrix of cells that could expand or contract under electronic control.  So the software could create bumps where each of the keys are.  This would allow a software-reconfigurable gadget that could be almost as usable as a dedicated-purpose device.

This is very different from what is commonly referred to as “haptic feedback” on some of today’s gadgets like the Nexus One.  Here, the phone’s vibrator pulses a bit when you press a soft key.  This is a kind of feedback which is tactile in that you feel it, and it gives you information about your interaction with the device without having to look at the screen.  It certainly helps.  But it is not going to improve basic typing for a critical reason — it can’t help guide fingers to the right place.  The basic act of positioning fingers on controls is still basically open loop, feed forward, without guidance.  What I’m referring to as tactile feedback helps the fingers find the right spots to press without looking.  Today’s haptic feedback can’t do that.

To be clear, true tactile feedback like this almost certainly doesn’t exist yet.  This kind of pure technological innovation basically always starts in universities or government run labs.  The ROI on pure research into unproven technology is so low that it doesn’t make sense for companies to invest there.  Even if a company proved this was possible (which AFAIK hasn’t been done yet) they’d need to figure out how to manufacture it at scale before they could sell a device with it.  Last time I predicted it would be about 2012 before we saw these.  Even though Jobs almost certainly foresees the value of such a system, Apple’s expertise is not in material science.  Wired speculated about such a keyboard based on Apple’s patent filings, but what they describe seems a bit too sci-fi for me to believe.

If they have come up with something new and cool, it’s going to be a smarter way to use basically existing hardware.  I’m gonna guess it’s probably something like a touch screen which is pressure sensitive, so you can rest your fingers on it without indicating a “button press”, making typing more natural.  You could combine this with fixed, transparent dimples on the screen under the positions where the keys are, and you’d do pretty well.  Restrict the keyboard to only work in landscape mode and you only need one set of dimples.  This would be a huge improvement in usability and the biggest technological breakthrough would be the ability to distinguish a soft push from a hard push on a capacitive touch-screen.  Like by how much surface of your finger is on it.

Regardless of what Apple’s actually managed to achieve, I wish them the best.  They’re really pushing the envelope on human-computer interactions.  If they’ve done anything significant to improve soft keyboards, they will have once again done something that the entire rest of the industry will want to emulate, and I’ll tip my hat to them.

DSLR cameras make very little sense today.  Modern imaging technology is rapidly turning them into dinosaurs.  The forces keeping them alive are a combination of a physical legacy in hunks of glass, and aspirational marketing.  I’ll explain, but first, what’s a DSLR and why don’t they make sense?

Background on SLRs and DSLRs

(If you what “f-stop” means, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)

SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex.  Practically speaking it refers to a camera where you can change the lens.  You look through the same lens that actually takes the picture, letting you put any lens from an ultra-wide angle fisheye to a telescope-length zoom lens.  You can also put filters on the front like star filters or color shifters or polarizers.  Imagine a classic 35mm camera — like what a P.I. would carry to snap pictures of your wife having an affair — that’s an SLR.

SLR’s require a mirror that physically moves to divert the light into one of two places — your eye, or the film / CCD. The mirror was important when the only technology for capturing images was chemical film.  But nowadays we have various electronic devices like CCDs that digitize an image.  DSLR cameras use a CCD to get many of the benefits of digital imaging, but still have the same physical form factor as an old chemical-film SLR.  They can use the old lenses, which is one of their big appeals.  But so many things about these cameras just don’t make sense.

The problems with DSLR cameras

First there’s the noise. The sound of the mirror slapping against its stops as it switches positions is very recognizable. We used to accept sounds like that as a necessary part of taking
pictures.  Today it just annoys me.  Especially when I’m at a small
event and some photographer is there making loud clicking noises all
the time while I’m trying to enjoy whatever it is they’re digitizing
with their dinocam.  In 99% of all use cases, it’s totally unnecessary.  CCDs can continuously capture images and display them on a screen, creating a digital light path that doesn’t require loud expensive mechanical assemblies.  These displays aren’t as good as what a human eye can pick out, so this doesn’t work all the time.  But if you don’t need interchangeable lenses, then the camera can have a second optical path just for the eye, which doesn’t need to be as good.

One argument against a separate optical viewfinder is that youc can’t put filters in front of the lens.  This is very true, but filters are also obsolete.  With few exceptions, everything that a physical filter does can be done later in photoshop with more control and accuracy.  Color tinting, sparkle, gradients, soft, mist, etc — these all used to be rendered in physical glass out of necessity.  Polarizing filters are probably the most important exception to this — since CCD’s don’t record a light’s polarization state, it can’t be adjusted later.  But for the most part, filters aren’t necessary anymore, meaning you don’t need the whole single-lens thing.

But what about interchangeable lenses?  Isn’t it useful to have the same camera body and be able to change lenses?  (I hear you cry.)  Yes, sorta.  There are definitely situations where one lens won’t be able to do everything you want.  But those situations are getting rarer and rarer.  And in the few exception cases, I’ll argue that interchangeable lenses aren’t the right solution.  The reason these cases are getting less and less common is that zoom lenses are getting better.  When SLR cameras first came on the scene zoom lenses basically didn’t exist because they sucked when they did.  You needed a different lens for each amount of magnification you wanted, so people had lots of lenses.  But with computers to help us design the lenses, and vastly improved manufacturing processes, zoom lenses are getting better all the time.  Nowadays a lens with a huge 10x zoom can even win accolades from camera snobs.  And lenses as versatile as 26x cover every situation most of us would ever want, and at a quality we’ll be thrilled with.  So for almost all situations, a single zoom lens is good enough today.

What about the situations where that’s not quite good enough?  Where you need that 14mm fisheye that captures people standing immediately to the left or right side of the lens?  Or that 8000mm super- long telephoto telescope?  It turns out in either of these challenging cases, getting the lens to fit the standard SLR form factor becomes the hardest part.

Why SLR’s cripple even the extreme lens cases

With ultra-wide fisheye lenses, the problem is the space reserved for that stupid mirror.  In this case, the focal length is very short, so as a
lens designer, you’d naturally want the focal plane to be very close to
the glass.  (Like about 14mm.)  But the place where the lens attaches to the camera body necessarily needs to be a certain distance away from the imaging plane.  That distance was determined by the size of the mirror, which was determined by the size of your chemical film — 35mm, which is more than you’d really want for a 14mm lens.  Even on today’s 2009 DSLR cameras, that distance is exactly the same as it was a generation ago in order to ensure backwards compatibility with old lenses.  The literal tons of carefully polished glass represent a very real barrier to improvement since people have invested lots of money in them.

So if you really want a camera that’s good at taking super-wide angle pictures, you don’t want your lens to have to be that far away from the imaging plane.  You’re better off with a specially built camera.  The lens will be simpler, cheaper and higher quality.  But super-wide starts to look funny, no matter what.  Funny meaning
distorted, because if your eye is more than a couple of inches away
from the reproduced super-wide image, then it won’t look right.  And it’s not super useful to capture 360 degrees in one shot — you can shoot a dozen pictures and stitch them together later in software, and it’ll look more natural.  This is all why people don’t pay a lot of attention to how super-wide lenses get anymore.

On the super-telephoto side of things, the SLR legacy is even worse.  To get a super-long telephoto lens you need lots of big glass.  This gets expensive quickly simply because it’s a large mass of carefully manufactured stuff.  The amount of glass you need for a lens is proportional to the cube of the length of your imaging plane, which for legacy chemical-film is 35mm. But CCD’s just don’t need to be that big.  On almost every DSLR they’re only about 20mm across, and on high-quality non-SLR cameras are as typically about 6mm across.  So that size legacy means you would need literally 200x  the almost 40x the amount of physical glass to make a good telephoto lens for an SLR vs a non-SLR camera.  This ridiculous discrepency is just going to get worse.

CCD’s are silicon devices, so they share manufacturing improves along with CPU’s and follows a Moore’s law-like improvement curve for performance.  A key way they improve is in pixel density, but also by simply getting smaller.  As they get smaller, high-quality zoom lenses get smaller and cheaper too.  But only if the lenses are specifically designed for the new smaller CCD’s.  With an SLR system they can’t be — the size must be fixed in order to maintain backwards compatibility.  So while sensor technology improves at Moore’s law speed, lenses for non-SLR cameras improve as well, but SLR lenses do not.  Expensive zoom lenses for modern cameras just don’t need to be that big or expensive — It’s like having to build a cell-phone big enough to hold floppy disks.

To illustrate this point, consider the popular Canon SX10IS camera which does not feature interchangeable lenses.  It features a zoom lens that goes from pretty wide (28mm equivalent) to really very far zoom (560mm equivalent).  Because its CCD is only 6mm across, it can do all this for under $400 and weigh in under a pound for the whole camera.  For comparison, a comparable SLR lens weighs in at over 11lbs and costs upwards of $7,000, just for the lens.  No doubt this lens can take better pictures than the tiny Canon, but a smaller lens built for a modern CCD could take pictures that are every bit as good for a fraction the price.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the noise floor on these sensors.  When the scene is dark, you need more light to get a good image.  A bigger hunk of glass captures more light.  This all makes intuitive sense and is mostly accurate.  CCD sensors can take more accurate pictures in low light when they are bigger.  But the limits here are electronic noise, which is also improving.  At some point we’ll hit some other barrier like the thermal noise in the sensor, although a piezo cooler could work around that.  Ultimately there’s the the quantization of photons, but if you’re taking pictures in a scene that dark, you probably can’t see what you’re pointing at anyway.  My point is that while there are advantages in low light for larger glass and sensors, technology is erroding away at those too.  We’re seeing ISO equivalents of 6400 as fairly common in cameras these days, with an economic competitive pressure to improve that.

In summary, the problems with the SLR format are that it ties its owner to a physical legacy that denies them the advantages of advancing technology.  There are cases where specialized lenses are still important.  But those cases are dwindling.  Personally, I’m going to be happier carrying around a full featured small camera that can transform itself into whatever I want without needing interchangable parts than a bag full of bits that were standardized before email.

Here I propose an alternative explanation for iPhone scarcity: the difficulty in obtaining a new iPhone keeps people from complaining about problems with it.  I will explore this sophisticated marketing technique that Apple may or may not be employing to cover up quality problems with the new iPhone 3G.  Even if Apple is not doing this deliberately, I assert that it is a valid and potentially very useful technique if your product is lucky enough to have the prerequisites.

New iPhones are hard to get

The blogosphere is full of speculation about whether or not Apple deliberately made the iPhone scarce on opening day and since then.  Most assume that this is deliberate on Apple’s part for a variety of reasons, mostly to attract more attention, increase demand, etc.  I assume most of these rants are from bloggers who want their new iPhones but haven’t overcome the barriers to obtain one yet.

But if Apple’s goal was purely to meter out their distribution, why not sell them online?  To get a phone you need to place an order for one, wait a week or two, and then you can get it.  This seems reasonable in conditions of scarcity.  But to get an iPhone 3G, you need to walk into an at&t store to place your order, and then walk into the store again to pick it up.  Think about this.  If the limitation was purely lack of supply then there are several ways this could be easier for customers:

1. You could order a phone online to be delivered to your house.
2. You could order a phone to be delivered to your nearest at&t store.
3. You could call the nearest at&t store to place your order, but still have to walk in to pick it up.

Try asking them why you can’t do any of these things and they will answer with one word: policy.  Clearly Apple & at&t have gone out of their way to make it difficult for people to get their hands on a phone.   This goes above and beyond just preserving a limited supply.  You have to work to get an iPhone 3G.

New iPhones have Issues

From all the reports I’ve read, the problems with the new iPhone are in the software not the hardware.  I conclude this because my friends with first generation iPhones are experiencing the same problems as those with the new 3G iPhones.  Moreover everybody seems to agree that these problems only showed up after they upgraded their iPhone software.  Problems include:

• Frequent crashes of applications, especially Safari
• Increased lag in common operations
• Significant problems with large contact lists (>200 contacts)
• Extended delays before placing a call

Apple is legendary for their high quality software.  People buy Macs because they "just work."  It’s really not like Apple to release a buggy piece of software.  But it sure seems that they did in this case.  Why?  Obvious answers of fierce competition for high-end smartphones.  The more interesting question for me is "How did they get away with it?"  Which it sure seems they are.

Escalation of Commitment: The Hush-factor

There’s a well-document psychological principal at play which prevents people from objectively critiquing things that they are personally invested in.  Sometimes called escalation of commitment, or irrational escalation, the idea is the same.  If somebody works really hard to obtain something, they will blind themselves to its faults.  Imagine this conversation:

"Dude, I can’t believe you waited in line for hours to get that phone.  What do you think of it?"

"Actually, it’s just okay.  The applications crash a lot.  And it’s not nearly as fast as I’d hoped it would be — sometimes it just hangs for like 10 seconds.  But at least it’s pretty."

Very few people have the objectivity to imply that their personal sacrifice was not worth while.  This effect is commonly observed in people who buy high-end items. 

The flip side of this effect is buyer’s remorse.  But since the phone itself is not actually at all expensive (when compared to the monthly fees), that’s unlikely.  Also, it has become a positional good, whereby it has value simply because other people don’t have one.  That fact remains regardless of how unreliable it is.

Speculative Conclusion

I posit that Apple knew about the software problems with the iPhone 3G before launch.  They did manage to iron out all the performance and stability problems they encountered before launch.  They felt they needed to launch it this summer to get ahead of other notable smartphones like the Blackberry Bold, HTC Touch, and Android which are hot on their heels.  So they rushed it out the door at sub-standard quality.

In order to partially cover for this mistake, they have made this device especially hard to get.  This covers their tracks in two ways: people make even more noise about scarcity.  And those who do jump through the whoops to obtain one are far less likely to complain about it.

The way I see it, there’s no compelling reason to buy a heavy laptop.  Light laptops are great because they’re portable.  Their processors might be a little slower, but local processing power rarely limits what you can do with a computer these days.  And unless you get a really tiny laptop they’re hardly slower.  If you do get a tiny one then you’re trading reduced HCI-bandwidth for increased access to that bandwidth, which is often worthwhile.  Today I’d probably argue that iPhone or iPod Touch is a pareto-optimal choice (sweet-spot) in this trade-off, beating out things like OQO and FlipStart.

But think about the longevity of these devices.  Computers always slow down.  In a few years, any laptop is going to feel really slow, no matter how fast it feels today.  But if it’s a light, small laptop, then you’ll have something which is slow, but at least nice and portable.  Some of my friends’ house has this ancient Pentium II Viao laptop kicking around the living room — it barely runs a browser.  But it’s so small and portable that it’s still a reasonable computing device today.  If your laptop is heavy to start with, then in a few years when it slows down you’re stuck with a heavy, slow laptop, which nobody nobody wants.

At long last, the world’s best digital music system has fixed a glaring UI hole.  With today’s release of v2.5 of their software, Sonos controllers (both hardware remotes and PC/Mac based software) can search for music by artist, composer, album, or track.  This feature works within your own local library or within music services such as Rhapsody. 

Up until now if you wanted to listen to an artist in Rhapsody that you hadn’t previously bookmarked, you would need to guess what top-level genre they were categorized under and then scroll through an enormous list to try to find the artist.  How many times have I scratched my head asking questions like "Is Pink Floyd Rock/Pop or Alternative/Punk?"  Much easier was to find a web browser, pull up http://www.rhapsody.com/pinkfloyd and bookmark music into your library.  That human-writable URL scheme is still one of my favorite accomplishments in the last several years.

I started beta testing this release last week.  As always, the update was fast, easy and works flawlessly.  My biggest complaint is that the search is not interactive.  Considering how fast results typically come back, I would much prefer to have a type-ahead style search where results start to appear as you type.  This would be especially useful considering the somewhat painful scroll-wheel-alphabet typing interface they provide.

Sonos is a great company that makes fabulous products.  They continue to advance the state-of-the-art in digital music systems.  By adding Napster support they have taken another step to commoditize Rhapsody’s music subscription product.  They’ve also released a new product called a ZoneBridge which acts as a WiFi range extender which would address one of my biggest complaints about the system.

I just got a new MacBook Pro of my very own which is undoubtedly the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.  I hear a lot of people saying things like "I don’t think I’ll ever get another desktop computer again."  But to me there is one very good reason to own and use a desktop computer: Desktop computers can provide greater bandwidth connections between your brain and the net than laptop computers can.   I’ll explain what this means.

We’re quickly approaching a world where we’re always connected to the net in some manner or another.  As we all know, the bandwidth with which we can communicate with the net varies tremendously between locations and situations.  It might be
as slow as AT&T’s EDGE network, or as fast as a dedicated office
line with many Gbps of throughput.  But when we’re in the office, the speed of our pipe to the net isn’t the limiting factor.  Usually it’s the servers on the other end which limit how fast we can get things done.  Even when I’m on my DSL line at home, Gmail is so slow that my pipe isn’t the limiting factor.  Effective bandwidth is limited by the smallest pipe in the series from your brain to the information service.

Sometimes the smallest pipe isn’t a network layer at all.  If you’re using your iPhone on the office’s WiFi network, the network will all run super fast.  But your effective speed will be the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and there are many small devices which are way harder to use than the iPhone.  There are multiple places the communications pipeline can get clogged:

1. The physical Human-Computer Interface of your device
2. The UI of the software on the device
3. The local processing power of your device
4. The direct connection from your device to the series of high-speed routers and fiber known as "the net"
5. The processing power of the servers running the information service you’re using

Laptops have totally caught up with desktops in terms of #2 and #3, but not #1.  The reason to use a desktop machine is that you can trick out its Human-Computer Interface to be super high bandwidth.  You can get yourself a really nice ergonomic keyboard, multiple high-resolution monitors, and a real mouse.  A friend of mine even built himself a foot-mouse.  Pretty soon your desktop will start to look like Lain’s Navi.  (Pictured above for those not familiar with it — go watch it.  It’s rad.)

You can do some of this with a laptop docking station if
available, or by manually plugging and unplugging things.  Many laptops
support 2 monitors, but generally one of them needs to be the internal
monitor, which won’t match the second one.  A USB port multiplier can
handle all your input devices which is nice.  So if you’re happy with
just two displays, a laptop can probably get enough HCI bandwidth today.

Looking further down the line, someday Apple will extend the iPhone’s multi-touch UI to iMacs and give us the Minority Report interface.  This will offer far more Human-Computer bandwidth than we’ve ever seen before.  This trend will continue towards direct Computer-Brain Interfaces at which point the line between our biological brains and our "exocortex" will get very blurry indeed.  I can hardly wait.

An obvious trend in this industry is towards more pervasive internet access with bandwidth steadily increasing.  The build-outs of WiMax networks, 3G cellular networks and metropolitan WiFi efforts promise to offer broadband-class connectivity to all major cities in the US within the next couple of years.  Suburbs and extended metorpolitan areas will quickly follow.  Even airplanes should have reasonable net access before too long — Virgin America will have it next year.

In this environment it’s tempting to design products that assume customers will always be well connected.  It is certainly easier to build compelling services to users that have a good pipe to the net on them at all times.  So this begs the question: If customers will soon always have good broadband net access, why do we need a client-side data store like Google Gears?  For example, somebody working on a subscription music service might conclude that it’s a waste of time building portable mp3-players with local storage since soon enough everyone will have broadband access everywhere, so why not just stream the music off the net?

There are several good reasons why client-side storage is still important and will continue to be important into the future:

• Wireless net access sucks down battery.  Always will.  It’s physics.  Local access to data will always cost less battery.  This won’t change no matter how pervasive broadband is.
• Pervasive net access is expensive. Arguably we’re already in a world where some people have pervasive net access.  Verizon EVDO cards do pretty darned well in this country, for $60/month.  But it will be a long time before most people have it.  Higher speeds will always demand a premium.
• Net access is unreliable.  Especially wireless access, but wired too.  Packets collide.  Transmission patterns have nodes.  Routers flap.  Cables get unplugged.  Laptops wake up and can’t figure out where they are for a while.  Something gets misconfigured.  If your software is designed to gracefully degrade when the network is unreliable, your customers will be happier, because it’s going to happen.  Remember what Outlook/Exchange was like when the entire Outlook UI would freeze while waiting for the Exchange server to respond to any request?  Please don’t do that to your users.

Once web applications are fully embracing it, Google Gears will close most of the functionality gap between native-client applications and web applications.  I believe it’s really important, and I’m really glad that there’s industry consensus around Google Gears and that other offline browser storage projects have deferred to it.  I’d hate to see web app developers trying to choose between several different client-store plugins.

Those of us who have been around the block know that Windows systems accumulate cruft as they age and just generally get slower and less reliable until you wipe the OS and start over.  I realized recently that Windows Mobile 5 is no different.  Here are the steps I took to clean off a machine that was so far down the path of destruction it was almost unusable

Oh, Treo running Windows, how can you suck so badly?

After having my Treo 700W for a while, it started to get noticeably less stable.  First it stopped receiving e-mail.  Then it stopped sending e-mail.  Then incoming calls would cause it to crash (my favorite really).  Then it stopped sync’ing to Outlook, and then it wouldn’t even show up as a USB device on my PC.  Then incoming text messages would cause it to crash.  At that point it was just too much.  The Treo 700W is worse than most WM5 devices because it just doesn’t have enough RAM — somehow Palm failed to implement Microsoft’s recommended minimum memory requirements, which I hear rumors almost resulted in a class-action lawsuit.

Around July I realized that every time I rebooted the thing, it wasn’t storing any new text messages.  After a reboot, June 21st would be the most recent text message it stored.  I wondered if it was just being slow to commit them to memory, but finally I realized it was just full.  So I tried to clear the entire text message store.  I’d let this process run for hours, overnight even, and it would display no progress.  After rebooting, nothing had changed.  I remembered that at some point the "drafts" folder had become corrupt to the point that even trying to display the folder would lock the system hard.  I wondered if that was related.

The Dilemma

So my phone is crashing constantly.  It’s my primary contact database, and social calendar.  I know how to do a hard factory-defaults reset of everything.  But I haven’t gotten it to sync to Outlook since May and I don’t want to loose all the phone numbers and appointments I’ve made since then.  Being Microsoft, there’s no way to get the PIM data out except using Active Sync.  (What’s so hard about exporting to XML or a flat file!?)

So I could rescue my phone by clearing it’s brain.  But my phone is almost part of my own brain, and without backup I’d lose months worth of social data.  Ugh.

The Solution

Here are the steps I took to recover the thing:

1. Copy all files out of ‘My Documents’ folder onto an SD card, and back them up on a real computer.
2. Erase everything in ‘My Documents’
3. Uninstall all user applications.  (Except Active Sync!)
4. Keep plugging it into different Windows PC’s until one of them makes the USB ding-DING noise.  (All my desktop and laptop windows machines have degraded to near uselessness too over the last few months, so this was a challenge.)
5. Make sure that PC has Active Sync and Outlook on it.
6. Create a new Outlook profile (Start->Control Panel->Show Profiles) to back up the phone to without messing with other Outlook stuff
7. Tell ActiveSync to just backup the Contacts and Calendar. 
8. Copy them into Outlook.  (This can take a while of futzing with Active Sync on both sides.)
9. Reset your phone to its factory defaults
10. Active Sync the useful stuff back into your phone.

How do to a hard reset of your Windows Mobile 5 phone:

I’m not actually sure if this works for all WM5 phones, but it works on the Treo 700W.  Here’s what you need to do:
1. Pull out the battery
2. Wait for 15 seconds or so  (look closely at the screen — it slowly fades out even without power)
3. Press and hold the red Phone Hangup / On-off button
4. Insert the battery
5. Keep holding the red button until a screen asks you if you want to reset?
6. Press the up arrow to clear all memory from your phone.

It took weeks to actually accomplish this, but I’m really glad I did because my phone is so much more stable now.  It’s still a complete POS but at least it doesn’t crash every other time somebody calls now.

Next step: get the calendar to sync with google calendar.

At Foo Camp this past weekend, I took notes using three different technologies.  The results have led me to some interesting conclusions.  Here’s what I used:

• Day 1: I took notes on my Treo
• Day 2: I carried around my MacBook
• Day 3: I scribbled in a paper notebook

My notes from the first day are brief, but useful.  They are generally just names and short phrases.  They remind me of things that I found interesting and that I want to follow up on.  I used the notepad function in my PDA.  It was pretty easy to pop it open and jot something down.  Windows crashed on me of course, which prevented me from capturing a few things.  But overall it was pretty handy.

My notes from the second day are very sparse.  I have a few blog entries that are 5% written and an e-mail draft.  There isn’t a lot here.  I carried my laptop around because I was presenting that day, and wanted to be able to practice and tweak my slides.  I also saw some other people engaging in really high-bandwidth communication with the net using laptops and thought I could too.  The real thing that got in the way was startup time.  Even though OS X is really pretty good at this, the several seconds it takes to turn on and connect to the net got in the way of capturing ideas.  I think another problem was my own fault — I tried to put information in the form that it would be ultimately used rather than just quickly jot down reminders.  Having the ability to author the content in the format it would be ultimately used tempted me to do so, but it wasn’t the best choice in retrospect.  It’s also somewhat anti-social.

My notes from the third day are fabulous.  I have many names and URLs and ideas and drawings and numbers.  The paper notebook took no time to boot up, to load a writing app, a contact management app, a drawing app — they’re all instantly available.  It never crashed.  Switching contexts in it was as easy as flipping a page.

My conclusion is that for this kind of fast-paced environment, reducing barriers to capturing ideas is critical.  A critical measure is the latency from deciding to record something to being done recording it.  By this measure, the paper notebook was the hands-down winner.  As Tim noted, fewer people were carrying laptops, maybe for this reason.

Digression into personal projects…

This problem is what inspired me to build Offbrain, which allows you to record ideas in the cloud using a cellphone for later retrieval.  I’ve seen people using Twitter for this, which I think is a great application.  I might switch to that technique, but it requires looking at twitter in a slightly different light, since very few of my friends want to be plugged into my random-idea-stream that closely, and I often want to capture ideas that I don’t want to disclose publicly. 

I’m re-inspired to finish the SMS gateway for Offbrain.  Since we always have our cell phones and we’ve co-evolved (with our handsets) the ability to quickly jam out li’l notes very fast, SMS offers a great low-latency way to capture ideas for a lot of people.  I think I’m going to borrow Gina Trapani’s command-line interface for task tracking as an SMS command language for Offbrain.  (Thanks, Gina!)  I was impressed with her talk about it — this UI has clearly evolved through a lot of iterations to become a simple, effective, powerful way to record and categorize action items.  Offering a todo.txt export should be an easy and useful hack too.  The obvious follow-ups are hosted todo.txt in the sky with multiple access methods including web, web services, SMS, etc.  Beginning to sound more and more like twitter.  Hmmm…

Thanks to Steve Garfield for the picture.  Yay for CC saving me the trouble of taking my own.