In Walmart’s case, it’s generally suppliers who get squeezed.  Walmart demands that manufacturers of goods produce them at the lowest possible price so that Walmart can charge the lowest prices in their stores.  They really do try hard to pass the savings on to you.  Another case that is less well known is with so-called “interchange” fees for debit and credit cards, charged by the card networks like Visa and Mastercard.  Back in 2003, Walmart pushed hard on Visa and Mastercard to charge less for debit card transactions since they are both lower risk (because of pin-code use) and cheaper to process (verifying signatures is expensive).  The cynical will point out that with lower fees, Walmart just gets to keep more profit.  Which is true.  But they are genuinely motivated to lower prices for consumers, since that’s their main selling point.  So it’s a win-win – Wal-Mart’s motivations to lower costs are closely aligned with consumer’s desires to pay less.

Apple has similar desires for their network-connected gadgets like iPhones and iPads.  Apples wants people to be able to connect their devices to the network for as little as possible. Apple has clearly negotiated very hard with AT&T to demand low monthly rates on data plans for these devices.  Next month you’ll be able to buy an iPad with a 3G data plan for just $15 / month.  That is basically unheard of in the US.  For people on a limited budget, the iPad is the cheapest way to get online.  Compare this to other data plans available from major U.S. carriers:

The Apple / AT&T rates are the lowest in each of their categories, except Verizon’s smartphone data plan which ties the AT&T iPhone plan.  The iPad rates are extremely low compared to data plans for laptops, and also when when you consider that tethering plans or phone data plans require paying an extra $30/mo – $50/mo for a voice plan.  The unlimited iPad plan is literally half what it costs to get 3G on any other laptop, and it doesn’t come with the 5 GB limit that other plans do.  You might argue that the iPad can’t do as much as a full laptop, which is true.  So you might then argue that iPad won’t tax the network as much as a laptop, which I doubt considering the propensity to consume video on such a device.  So you can’t trade torrents on an iPad, which from an Intellectual Property perspective is just fine with me.

My guess (and this is pure speculation) is that Apple negotiated these rates by offering AT&T a share of the revenues generated through App Store purchases.

Again, the cynical will point out that Apple is just trying to grab the lion’s share of economic surplus for itself, which is true.  But nonetheless, this is a case where Apple’s desires and our desires as consumers line up well.  In a very real way, Apple is fighting on our behalf for lower prices from AT&T.

Apple products are expensive. Apple gets high margins on its hardware, allowing it to recoup large investments in NRE (non-recurring engineering) to design the hardware and its accompanying software.  This is a great place to be from a competitive standpoint, because as a company they don’t need to squabble over the cheapest parts to try to deliver the best prices to consumers.  So long as they can maintain a sufficiently large customer base to support the practice, it is an easy place to defend against competition from.  Certainly a lot easier than being Dell or HP, who struggle with operational efficiency to compete on price, and try to innovate within a very narrow window defined by their platform.

Apple’s success at selling high-end products has secondary benefits for the rest of the ecosystem.  Because the products are expensive, they tend to be purchased by people with more disposable income. So the segment of the computer market which buys Apple products self-selects to be very attractive demographic for many other reasons.  Advertisers love to get their products in front of people who are more-willing-than-most to buy something expensive / unnecessary / fun.

Similarly, app developers know that if they write an app for iPhone / iPad, the people who are able to buy it are much more likely to be willing to pay a couple bucks for something silly than, say, somebody who bought the cheapest smartphone they could afford because they felt they really need that functionality.  I had previously speculated that Apple’s platform play required a very large distribution base to attract developers, which is not quite correct.  The strategy is successful even with a relatively small market, provided that the market is segmented properly.  Which in this case it clearly is.

Scores of developers have had iPad’s for weeks now. They’ve had to sign non-disclosure agreements, and have the iPad locked in a separate room that random employees couldn’t access. And even that wasn’t enough. The iPads are literally chained to the desk with steel cable and a lock. Apple comes by the office with a suitcase, installs the iPad in a bolted case, chains it to the desk and locks it there. And they they do occasional surprise visits just to make sure it’s still there.

What’s more, Apple has told developers that they are monitoring the location of the device as well.

Apple.  Gotta love them.

Mike says he can type 50 wpm on it.  That’s really quite cool.

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.

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.

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.

My girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys.  One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device.  She is a scientist who is very much an information worker.  Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her.  (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!)  She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing.

So she’s often reading her kindle on the bus.  She’s noted one interesting difference between reading her Kindle and reading a regular book while on the bus.  When she’s reading a normal book, people will ask her what booj she’s reading or will look at the cover and just talk to her about the book itself.  With the kindle the question is always "how do you like the gizmo?"  Which gets old after a while.

Here’s a suggestion to Amazon on how to address this social problzem: offer full-color PDFs of the covers of books that you purchase for the Kindle, so people can print out their own covers.  These could slide into a convenient holder on the Kindle’s attractive leather case.  Long-term it’d be great to have a color e-paper cover for the book, but we’re not holding our breath for that one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

I determined that the problem was not user error.  I had in fact asked it to play the news, not the robots.  But my net connection appeared to be down this morning for some reason.  And when the Sonos failed to connect to KUOW’s streaming servers, it decided that the best thing to do was to play its internal alarm noise.

So I wanted to send some props to the Sonos engineers for yet again building a product that exceeds my expectations in terms of user experience.  Things screwed up, and it still did a fine job.  Now if they’d just add search functionality for Rhapsody content, they’d be 100% there.  As it is to find an arbitrary artist, I need to pop open a laptop, browser to rhapsody.com/(artistname) and add it to my library to get quick access through the Sonos controller.  A bit of a hack, but it works.  Anyway, I’m not here to gripe, but to thank.  And to offer advice for anybody who hasn’t figured out the hack yet.

Good job, Sonos.  Keep it up.

When I was on vacation recently I realized I was close to being put into a similar situation.  When traveling abroad, I’m always keenly aware of what happens to me if my stuff gets stolen or otherwise lost.  I always follow a best practice of keeping my passport, plane tickets home and cash very close to my body in a place that’s not easily accessible.  On this last trip I realized that if I were left with just these things I would likely have no way to contact my friends and family back home.  Where we were, there wasn’t much internet.  Just about the only phone numbers I have memorized were those of my traveling companions.  Mom?  Dad?  Best friends?  Nope.  They’re in the phone.  And the phone could easily get lost or disabled.  (I should be so lucky as to have to replace that piece of junk.)

When I realized this, I copied down some key phone numbers onto a piece of paper in my money belt.  Not a big deal, but an interesting realization about how much of my working set has been externalized.

In the iPhone, Apple has built a completely generic UI.  All the controls are software reconfigurable "soft keys" — you touch a part of the screen that has a picture of a button on it.  This offers a fantastic level of flexibility, allowing them to build a lot of useful functions into a small package.  But soft keys like this are intrinsically limited by the fact that there’s no tactile feedback — you can’t feel the buttons.  Which means you really need to be looking at the device to be using it.  Which means you can’t send text messages from an iPhone while driving.  Some might argue that you shouldn’t even try to anyway, but I’m sure people will try, and I’m also sure they’ll crash trying.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m very excited about this device, and will probably use it as an excuse to ditch my crappy not-so-smart phone.  And I’m guessing that in about 5 years somebody, maybe Apple or MIT or UW, will figure out how to put texture onto a display and solve this problem.  But until then, I maintain that single purpose devices will be better at what they do than generic devices.

My inappropriately named "smart phone" just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset.  But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an hour.  For many months I’ve been using this application as my primary scheduling calendar outside of work, so it’s full of stuff for months into the future.  I really didn’t want to update hundreds of calendar entries by hand (I’m a busy guy) so I broke down and called support.

First tier of VZW support says "that’s a feature of the phone." I called his bluff and he connected me to technical data support.  After hearing the issue, Tim from tech support laughed and apologizesdnicely for it.  After a bit of digging we found a knowledge base article describing this exact problem and the workaround steps.  Like Tim had suggested, plugging it into Outlook will fix all the calendar entries that were originally created in Outlook.  But ever since the Outlook sync application broke for the 17th time I’ve stopped trying to synchronize my calendars between my PC and my phone and have just been using the one that I always have with me.  So essentially all my calendar entries are phone-enterred, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Reading the KB article carefully it says in a roundabout way that for appointments enterred in the phone you have two choices: erase them and recreate them, or adjust them by hand.  I had to point this out to Tim whose casual reading of the KB article had convinced him that all our problems were solved.  When I said this was unacceptable, we finally got a hold of Carlos at Palm technical support, although it was amazingly difficult even with Tim driving.

Carlos had the creative suggestion of telling my phone it was in Mountain Time instead of Pacific.  Smart move for a smart phone because now all my calendar appointments actually had the correct time again!  Carlos was hoping this would satisfy me and I’d go away, but I realized that with the phone’s clock set ahead an hour I would still get all my reminders an hour ahead of when they should be.  After a bit more monkeying around like this he admited that my only option was to update them all by hand.  I thanked Carlos for being utterly unhelpful despite doing his best and drove off to school planning my revenge.

I don’t think I’ve yet warned both of you my dear readers, but if either of you are considering buying a high-end phone, stay as far away from the Treo 700w as possible.  Its problems are too numerous to list in this blog post, but I’ll write the first few that come to mind.  Like the CDMA stack crashing periodically so it stops receiving phone calls or text messages with no visual indication that anything is wrong.  Or the fact that the POP3 e-mail plugin is only about 10% reliable.  Or the moronic UI that happens if you accidentally hit the prominent side-of-phone volume buttons while pulling the phone out of your pocket to answer it, producing a dialog which covers up the name of the caller, and because the touch-screen is disabled in call-mode you can’t dismiss the dialog.  Or the fact that the camera can only take about 1 picture every 15 seconds because you almost always need to reboot the camera app between shots.  I could go on for pages.  It really is the worst phone I have ever heard of.  At least it’s bulky and expensive.  I periodically hear rumors about a class-action suit against Palm because of it.

All of this infuriates me with a rage I rarely feel in my oh-so-mature late-early-thirties.  I’m often tempted to smash the thing into the sidewalk but I know my insurance plan would just get me a brand-new but just-as-shitty replacement.  Why am I so upset?  Because I hate Steve and Bill?  I don’t think so — I know myself well enough to realize that I don’t get this way unless I’m hiding from something.  I think the true answer might lie in the fact that I was stupid enough to think buying this phone was a good idea.  I wanted to be cool and on the cutting edge and definitely should have known better than to trust an important part of my personal infrastructure to a v1.0 product. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of energy bitching at VZW or Palm and try to get them to replace my phone with a 700p.  Or to spend a weekend with Ruby on Rails and build a "everything I hate about my Treo" support site.  Or maybe to organize that class action suit.  But few of these things actually add value to the world. What I’d really like is for Palm or MSFT to write a little application that fixes this problem for me.  Instead, I’ll probably spend a few humble hours this week while on the plane to China setting back every entry in my calendar.

Frankly, GOOG is eating MSFT’s lunch on the consumer software front.  But MSFT still dominates in the enterprise, and will for a long time.  GOOG’s model is hosted solutions, which enterprises are really hesitant to deploy.  And with good reason — if you were a CIO would you trust all of your company’s IP to somebody else?  Regardless of what promises they make, I wouldn’t.  So Microsoft continues to turn into IBM.

The two announcements I’m thinking about are Zune and Office Roundtable.  Strategically, Zune is an obvious one: they’re taking on Apple in the music space head on.  And they’re doing it MSFT-style: more features.  I think they’re really cool features and assuming they can make them work in a friendly manner (tbd), will make for a fantastic product.  But it’s worth noting that they’re building it entirely themselves, turning their back on PlaysForSure and their ecosystem of hardware -manufacturing minions.  (Perfect timing for RNWK to release an mp3-player firmware platform — oh wait, we did — but that’s another story.)  So MSFT wants to challenge Apple on their own turf.  Good luck I wish you well you’re not paying your industrial designers enough.

IMHO Microsoft Office Roundtable is exactly the kind of product MSFT should be building right now.  It’s an MS-branded hardware product built for the enterprise.  This is a fertile space that MSFT could completely dominate.  Phones, teleconferencing gear, photocopiers, faxes, whiteboards, etc.  By being the shepherd for all hardware device drivers over the decades, they’ve developed a unique skill-set of interfacing gadgets to PCs.  But more important, selling hardware is a great hedge against GOOG eating into their software business.  Building enterprise office hardware will further cement their hold on the enterprise software market, ensuring that businesses continue to need Windows on all their employees’ desktops.  Even if they’re primarily running Google software!

I’m not sure if this is a conscious choice for MSFT yet or not.  But If I were Ballmer right now I would be thinking hard about how to leverage my device driver and hardware experience into protecting some core aspects of the business.  Not that they should give up on fighting GOOG head on.  I honestly think Live search has a lot going for it beyond Google — for one thing it updates its index really fast, whereas changes on the web take weeks or months to show up in Google.  But that’s just one place where MSFT has caught up because they put a lot of effort and some fantastic people on it.  While GOOG continues to build better more integrated consumer software applications at an impressive rate.

Power management.  It wakes up instantly when you pop the lid, and it doesn’t need to blunder around trying to reconnect to the wifi network — if it was connected when you closed the lid, it will be connected when you open it.  It dims & then blacks the screen pretty quickly.  But unlike a windows machine, I don’t feel a need to stop it, because I know it will wake up again.  It never gets stuck in this half-awake mode that windows laptops seem to love.  And I’m confident I will never open the lid to see it saying "Hibernating…" and then have it shut down.  A friend who works at MSFT once sang me a jingle that goes something like "Power management in windows isn’t very good.  They say it will be better in the next version.  They always do."

Filesystem.  When you erase a file, it goes away.  OS X never sits there pondering "Can I erase this file?  I wonder.  Hmmm.  Maybe.  If I erase it, what could happen?  Hmm.  I wonder.  Let me think about this for a minute."  While I generally don’t think much of unixy/open-source GUIs, having a rock-solid filesystem behind this machine is really nice.

Light-sensitive.  Here’s one of those really nice subtle touches that most people will never notice, but just makes the machine work better.  The MacBook has light-sensors under the grills on the sides of the keyboard.  If you’ve got one, try covering them up with your hands.  The screen dims.  It uses this to automatically adjust the screen brightness to the ambient light in the room.  Nice touch.

MagSafe power connector.  I never need to worry about tripping over my laptop’s charger and having my expensive laptop flung off the table.  That’s a nice patent.  I wonder how broad it is.  Really, alot of plugs could be magnetic.  But honestly I think that most new consumer electronics won’t need any cables in about 10 years.  In about 5 years, Bluetooth (or its ilk) will handle data interconnects, and in another 5 years, we’ll be charging our batteries without plugs either by using inductive battery chargers or smart wire arrays that automatically couple to any device placed on them.  I also have to say that while the magsafe plug is great, Apple has a few things to learn from Dell about how to build the charger unit.

A few annoying things:  The keyboard controls for editing text just aren’t as full-featured in macworld as they are in windows.  You are expected to use the mouse.  It’s hard to type as fast. 

But hands-down the best feature of the MacBook Pro: MacSabre.  Props to my old friend Jon Bell for a nice logo.

I also got Woz to sign it the other day.  Woz is rad!

For everybody else out there who didn’t grow up idolizing Larry Wall, there’s a better solution: Sonos.  They’ve built an amazing digital home stereo solution that blows away every other Digital Audio Receiver on the market.  And to make it even better, they just hard wired it into Rhapsody which means you have instant access to a huge catalog of almost 3 million songs anywhere and everywhere in your house.  If I hadn’t invested a ton of energy into my home-grown system, I would have a Sonos system, because it’s just that well done.  I’m actually tempted to throw away what I’ve built.

At CES a couple years ago I shared a booth with some engineers from Sonos.  They’ve done some amazing things with Wifi.  Their amp units have audio inputs as well as outputs, so you can plug your DVD player into a sonos amp in one room, and have the same audio play simultaneously in another room.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you consider what’s actually going on under the hood.  They’re encoding the audio into some digital format (probably mp3 or aac or some such), and transmitting it over wifi to another amp unit.  Beyond that, they have to buffer the transmission to account for potentially dropped packets.  The truly amazing part is that they can do all this with such a short delay that you don’t even hear an echo in the audio between the two rooms.  Streaming audio over the internet typically requires 5-10 seconds of buffering.  Sonos does buffering and encoding all in I’m guessing <50ms.  Very well done.

This level of detail and engineering skill is maintained in every aspect of the system.  The UI of the remote control will long be held as the gold standard home audio remote control.  As I mentioned earlier, their business team knows how to rebuild the digital home audio market, basically from the ground up.  (Like iPod docks were ever anything more than a pothole in the landscape of consumer electronics evolution.)

It’s a pricey system, but if you can afford it, it’s well worth it.

When thinking about gadget convergence, physics imposes some intrinsic limits.  For example, optics on a camera — right now you need a certain amount of glass to make a decent camera, and this probably won’t change for 5-10 years.  (MEMS mirror arrays will probably solve this problem at some point, but it’s gonna take a while before this is affordable.)  MP3 players are limited by storage or some tradeoff between storare, bandwidth and battery-life.  (Wireless data costs battery.)  But as Apple continues to demonstrate with their disappearing shuffle devices, there’s no intrinsic physical limitation to the size of an MP3 player except for the UI and the headphone jack, and Apple has shown pretty well you don’t need many controls for a simple music player.

But for a great music player it’s all about the controls.  Some say we’re converging on a world where all controls are done through touch-screens and soft-keys.  You certainly can build some fabulous UIs that way.  But until touch screens have tactile feedback, this is not the end of the story.  I operate many of my devices in very sophisticated ways without looking at them.  (Anybody here text while driving?  Be honest.)  Touchscreens can’t give you tactile feedback today.  Sometimes we get fabulous experiences with specialized controls like half-press buttons on cameras or jog wheels with quantized stops.  It’s hard to substitute for holding an ergonomically designed device and knowing how to operate it.  Different devices require different controls, and right now the technology doesn’t exist to genericize that.

Beyond that, when you pick up a generic gizmo, before you can do anything else you need to tell it what personality you want it to exhibit.  "Be a phone now."  When you pick up your dedicated camera, you never need to tell it to stop being an ipod before it will take pictures.  And while some cameras still take a while to boot up, most don’t these days, and they essentially never hang like my crappy "smart" phone does all the time.  These problems of multiple personalities and instability are also major barriers to gadget convergence.  The optimist in me says "these are just software / UI problems and are solvable."  But I don’t think we’ll solve the UI problem until our devices are much better in tune with our emotions, which is pretty far off.  Also, I don’t think we’ll solve the stability problem until we make a fundamental shift in how we write embedded code — something so fundamental I have trouble imagining it.

The single multi-purpose do-it-all gizmo will always have its place.  It’s convenient to be able to carry a single object around that serves many functions, even if it only does a half-assed job at each of these functions.  But until there are several major technological changes, I believe dedicated single-purpose devices will remain the best way for people to satisfy their high-tech gizmo needs.

The designers encourage hacking of both the software and the hardware — I’ve seen chumby-units sown into all sorts of pillows and stuffed animals.  The bread and butter of customization is writing custom flash
modules for displaying information.  For example, right now there isn’t
one for showing the weather forecast — if I knew flash, I doubt it
would take more than a couple hours to fix this.

As a business I really hope Chumby succeeds.  Their challenge will be to make the initial product cool enough that it gets aspirational appeal.  At about $150 retail, it’s going to need some solid functionality or solid other appeal to justify a purchase.  If they succeed there then the company will stick around long enough to bring the price-point down through economies of scale and lower-end models. 

There are a couple of things they could change that I think would make the product more successful.  For example, I think the touch-screen is unnecessary for the majority of useful functions in the chumby, and replacing it with a display-only screen would lower the price significantly.  My personal opinion is that single-use devices will always have a usability appeal over general-purpose configurable devices.  I’d love to see $50 chumby’s that just did one thing.  Then you could put a photo chumby in your living room and a news chumby in the kitchen and a weather chumby in your closet.  Having a battery-powered model that recharded inductively (or otherwise without needing to be plugged in) would also be a great addition to the product line.

The marketing strategy of starting with a fantastic device that is priced high is a great way to define a new market segment.  Sonos is doing this right now to re-define digital living-room audio devices.  Their first product was a $1200 stereo that everybody who used absolutely adored.  Is $1200 too much for a stereo?  That depends.  For most people yes.  But if it’s really great then some people will pay it.  And everybody else will just wish they could afford it.  And then Sonos slowly releases lower and lower end models until everybody can afford one.  Think ipod->mini->nano->shuffle.  It also means that with your first few units your marginal profit is high enough that you know you’ll be able to cover support really well.  This was our big mistake with my first startup.  It’s a solid strategy — a great way to get people to understand a new kind of product. 

The Chumby is a cool idea and I hope they live long enough to pull it off.