With Phones, Simplicity is the Best Innovation of All

[A NOTE FROM HARRY: I'm pleased to say that Technologizer is participating in Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program, which brings journalists from other countries to the U.S. to report on innovation. Afzal Bajwa of Pakistan's The Nation will be contributing articles to Technologizer on mobile phones and other wireless topics during his U.S. visit; please join me in welcoming him.]

Beyond jet lag, what worried me most when I embarked on a U.S.- bound plane at Islamabad International Airport was the possibility of technology lag. As chief reporter for The Nation, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper, I covered technology and communications in a third-world nation–one with both real problems and image problems, especially in what’s traditionally been known as the new world.

Despite the ongoing global recession, the U.S. is still the world leader in innovation and technological advancement. But that is hardly true in mobile phones. It appeared, to me at least, to be the other way round when I finally arrived after covering more than 11,000 miles in over 25 hours of air travel.

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Google Gets a Little More Refined

The two tweaks to Google Web search that the Office Google Blog announced this morning aren’t game-changers. Actually, you might not even notice ‘em unless you’re looking. But they’re both worthwhile refinements that should make some searches go faster.

Tweak #1 is the more interesting of the two: Google’s related searches feature–which suggests queries related to the one you entered–now has a deeper semantic understanding of some concepts, and can therefore suggest additional searches that go beyond slight variations in wording.

Here are a couple of examples:

It’s not magic–in both of the examples above, the suggestions feel a bit random, and other queries I performed didn’t seem to benefit from the tweak at all. But it makes related searches more valuable–and it whets my appetite for the day when Google and other search engines are really smart about figuring out your queries. (What if a search for “famous scientists” could give you a neatly-organized grid with queries for dozens of distinguished scientific folk?)

As Google’s blog post points out, related searches appear at the bottom of search results (when they appear at all) and sometimes, but not always, at the top as well. Google is clearly a big believer in weaving together results in different ways depending on the query, and while the logic behind some of its decisions is obvious–like putting maps at the top of searches with a strong geographic angle–I’m still not sure if I understand the reasoning behind the inconsistent position of the related searches.

Tweak #2 is really subtle: When you enter long, wordy search queries, the snippets of text that show up in Google’s results are now longer in some cases, to provide more information and show more of the words you searched for in context. Such as in this example:

It’s good to see Google continuing to polish up its most important service–even minor improvements to Web search will probably make more people more productive and happy than any number of Google Livelies, Mail Goggles, and pseudo-Undo features ever could. (I’m reminded of the famous story about Steve Jobs arguing that shaving ten seconds off the original Mac’s boot time, times fifty million users, was the equivalent of saving a dozen lives.)

And while I don’t think anyone would ever accuse Google of resting on its laurels, having those laurels does give it the luxury of worrying about small things as well as big ones. Other search engines, from Microsoft’s Live Search to Ask.com to upstarts like Cuil, will only steal meaningful numbers of Google dans if they offer obvious advantages over Google–ideally in the form of breakthrough features and great leaps forward that are very, very hard to come by. Only Google doesn’t have to worry about Google: If it just makes all the users it’s already got a bit happier, it’ll do just fine. And small steps like the ones it took today should help.

5Words for March 24th, 2009

News, hot off the grill:

In defense of Facebook’s redesign.

Dell’s working on smaller devices.

Google Street View: Kill it!

A cloud-based game console.

Skype: biggest long-distance carrier.

A botnet that attacks Linux.

Warner’s made-to-order DVDs.

iPhone keyboard, no jailbreaking required.

Peek’s new not-a-phone.

Voice-driven Eee PCs soon?

MIT Announces Chip Material Breakthrough

Last week, researchers at MIT announced that they used a new material called graphene to design microchips that provide significantly higher data transfers rates than traditional silicon chips. Graphene chip processing techniques currently being used in the laboratory will scale to mass production of compact,  powerful communication devices within a little as one to two years, MIT says.

The MIT researchers used graphene to produce a chip that doubled the frequency of an electromagnetic signal produced by today’s technology. The chip also produced less “noise”–interference that requires filtering by supplementary chips–than its silicon counterparts, enabling more miniaturization and less power consumption in devices such as cell phones.

“In electronics, we’re always trying to increase the frequency,” in order to make “faster and faster computers” and cellphones that can send data at higher rates, said Tomás Palacios, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a core member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories in a prepared statement. “It’s very difficult to generate high frequencies above 4 or 5 gigahertz,” but graphene technology could lead to practical systems in the 500 to 1,000 gigahertz range, he added.

While other laboratories have been experimenting with graphene, MIT says that its work followed standard chip processing methods, and would reduce the time needed to develop a commercial product. The project has attracted the interest of “many other offices in the federal government and major chip-making companies,” Palacios said.

MIT may be jockeying for funding, but it sounds as if it has achieved a genuine breakthrough in taking a relatively new material from being the plaything of researchers to something that may show up in real products reasonably soon. With silicon chips approaching their physical limits, the announcement is promising news.

iPhone Rumors: Vague, Very Vague!

Phone gossip/rumor/scuttlebutt/leak kingpin Boy Genius has a post at his site reporting on what an AT&T exec is supposedly saying about the next generation iPhone. BG says the tidbits he’s reporting are 100% confirmed. But they’re also, well, 100% obvious:

• There will be a new iPhone announcement around mid-June (logical enough–Apple’s Phil Schiller openly told the New York Times’ David Pogue that Apple tries to follow a June release schedule for the iPhone);
• “New iPhone will be faster and have a more seamless experience” (it would be startling if Apple didn’t put a speedier chip in the new phone, and with features such as cut and paste, the iPhone 3.0 OS qualifies as being a whole lot more seamless);
• AT&T will release an iPhone client for its U-Verse broadband TV/DVR service (the company has said it’s working on one, and I’ve gotten a glimpse of it running on an iPhone myself);
• It’s “becoming a tradition” to release iPhones on an annual schedule (you think?)
• This Summer will be exciting!
• AT&T is working with Apple to create a unified experience across its platforms (a good U-Verse client for the iPhone will certainly qualify as that);
• iPhone 3.0 shows where the iPhone is going (pretty much by definition, surely);
• People should pick their AT&T phone based on personal preferences, not features (Boy Genius then starts talking about an iPhone with a slide-out keyboard, but I think he’s riffing rather than predicting or speculating);
• Higher-speed HSDPA Internet access is being “hinted” at.

Boy Genius himself–who isn’t always right, but who unquestionably has some great sources within big companies–says that some of this stuff is not news. Despite his promise of 100% confirmation, I’m not assuming it’s all going to come true, either–the new iPhone’s schedule could slip, or it could turn out to be no faster than today’s model. Here’s hoping that the next iPhone, whatever it is, is worthy of gossip that’s more scintillating than this–in other words, that it’s something more than an iPhone 3G that’s a little thinner, a little sexier, a little faster, a little cheaper, and preloaded with the 3.0 software…

IE Users Seem to be Returning to the Familiar

With the launch of IE8 on Thursday, a fairly decent chunk of the Web surfing populace at least tried out Microsoft’s latest and greatest. However, it appears many have made the decision to downgrade to IE7. While IE8 reached a high of 2.6% over the weekend, it has since fallen nearly a half a percentage point, says Net Applications.

This drop could be explained by curious surfers opting to return to the previous version. It would not be entirely out of the question — IE8′s new features may be a bit too much for some to take the time to get used to, and some users have reported issues in rendering certain websites properly, even those created with Microsoft’s own Publisher tool.

As a whole, IE has been struggling in the face of increased competition from Mozilla’s Firefox. It’s share of the market has fallen to about 67%, down 8 points in the past year alone and well off its highs of nearly 90% in the early part of this decade.

In other words, IE8 needs to be a hit. I don’t think anybody — including myself — expected Firefox to have much more than a 15 or 20 percent market share. Well, it passed the 20 percent mark four months ago and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.

Add Apple’s increasing popularity, and the iPhone with it, and who would have expected Safari to have an 8 percent market share either?

5Words for March 23rd, 2009

Happy Monday, everybody. Reading material:

Wow, they still make mainframes?

White House sides with RIAA.

Hulu adds 10 million viewers.

Intel chip flaw is theoretical.

New 17-inch iMac: Old!

The art of laptop stickers.

Samsung unveils 11-hour netbook.

IE 8: Losing users. Already!

Dell cancels phone…buys Palm?

The personal supercomputer is imminent.

September: an Acer Android phone?

Apple caters to business buyers.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Storage?

(A NOTE FROM HARRY: We’re pleased to continue Digital Media Central‘s guest appearances with one by Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat, a cool blog about design, technology, and sustainability.)

With the cost of memory cards and hard drives falling almost by the day we’re adding storage capacity faster than can we fill our hard drives up with stuff–even if we are creating more photos, MP3s, emails, videos, etc. than ever (think about how you take more pictures with your digital camera now that you have a 1GB card in there than when you were scraping by with just 64MB). Moore’s Law has been great for processors, but the cost of a megabyte of hard drive space has plummeted. In 1986 it cost about $50 to get 1MB of storage; 23 years later just over fifty bucks gets you a 500GB drive–$2.5 million worth of capacity by 1986 standards.

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Al Gore Opens His CTIA Keynote to the Press After All

Last week, PCMag.com’s Sascha Segan pointed out something unusual about former Vice President Al Gore’s keynote speech at next week’s CTIA Wireless phone trade show in Las Vegas: It wasn’t going to be open to the press, apparently at the request of Gore or his staff. It was a truly jarring bit of news. I’ve been attending tech trade shows for a couple of decades, and can’t remember a single other keynote that the media wasn’t invited to attend.

But it’s not just as a courtesy that we press people are normally let into such speeches–media coverage is one of the primary reasons why they exist. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine a scenario in which Steve Jobs keynotes at Macworld Expo or Bill Gates ones at CES were anything but publicity extravaganzas designed to attract as much media attention as possible.

Also, as Segan pointed out, the auditorium where Segan pointed out would have been bulging with folks who could have blogged the event (with photos) from their phones if they chose. In the era of citizen journalism, the only way to truly keep journalists away from a speech would be to bar citizens from attending. You’d Gore–the co-founder of citizen-journalism TV channel Current, not to mention a former newspaper reporter–would understand that.

Besides, it’s not as if Gore hasn’t made plenty of remarks at tech-related events that were open to the media. I first saw him do so (via a special video) at the SIGGRAPH graphics show a couple of decades ago. And here’s fuzzy photographic proof that I’ve encountered him twice in the past five months alone (at the Web 2.0 Summit and Google’s Google Earth launch):

(Actually, come to think of it, maybe it’s photos like those that lead Gore to be publicity-shy.)

Anyhow, Gore has apparently thought better of the whole thing: the CTIA announced today that Gore will let members of the media into his talk after all. Good news. I’ll have left CTIA by the time he appears on April 3rd, but I’m happy for my fellow reporters–and, more important, for everybody out there who’d like to attend the conference but can’t, and will therefore rely on press coverage to learn what happened.

Apple Bids Adieu To Bluetooth Headset

The Cupertino company quietly discontinued its in-house Bluetooth headset, according to Apple Store watchers. The product has been labeled as such since Saturday. It is still for sale, however.

It’s not clear why the headset is being discontinued, and there are several completely logical reasons why this happened. First could be a move to clear old stock for a refresh to the iPhone lineup expected by many later this year.

Another possibility is Apple may be exiting the accessory market altogether in an effort to focus on the phones themselves. With increased competition enroute from devices like the Palm Pre, Cupertino will have its hands full. Makes sense.

There’s not much evidence either that the device ever actually sold very well. It’s initial selling price of $129 in 2007 was rather steep, and Apple actually reduced the price the following year to $99.

It’s also been criticized by some for poor battery life and range, and a lack of voice activated dialing.

There’s also a third rumor, which AppleInsider is pushing (although they are not confirming it yet): there may have been some type of recall. Apple has reportedly been recalling existing inventory, but has not given any reasoning.

Why they may be doing that is not known. Either way, it’s bye-bye to the Apple Bluetooth Headset. I don’t know, but I would have probably opted for a cheaper alternative anyway if I would have needed one.

The Giant iPod Touch Theory: I Don’t Know if I Buy It, But I Like It

Is Apple getting ready to release a tablet that’s essentially an oversized iPod Touch? I don’t know, and neither do you. And neither does media blogger Rex Hammock. But he’d sure like to see such a gadget–and he has a fun post up theorizing that it might show up in the next 45 days. He’s not an analyst and doesn’t run an Apple rumor site, so he’s not declaring it to be fact. It’s just a theory–he calls this piece a “guessay.” But it’s nicely fleshed out, with details like the price point ($500), the size (about the size of a letter-size piece of paper), the primary target audience (college students, who’ll use the device to read interactive textbooks, as well as for fun stuff), and even the launch event (read the post!).

I have no idea if Rex’s guessay will turn into reality, but it would be nice if it did. I do think there’s at least a reasonably decent possibility (how’s that for intentionally vague wording?) that Apple will release something in the coming months that competes with netbooks, at a slightly higher price than a typical netbook, without being a netbook. And I think it’s something close to a dead certainty that there will eventually be devices based on the iPhone OS that are at least a little more like traditional PCs in size and purpose than today’s iPhones and iPod Touches (or is that iPods Touch)?

My biggest question about the device I’m now thinking of as the iHammock (I can’t call it the iRex–there’s already an e-reader by that name) is simple: Is there any way to build one as thin as Apple would make it, and still deliver adequate battery life?

Attention: Everybody. Your Browser is Insecure. Deal With It.

Yesterday’s most significant browser-related event wasn’t the release of Internet Explorer 8–it was the upshot of day one of the Pwn2Own browser-hacking contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The competition offered cash and hardware incentives to attendees who could exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox, IE 8, and Safari.

The results? Chrome was the only browser that escaped unscathed, apparently because of the way it sandboxes Web code to prevent it from doing damage. (Chrome has, however, been shown to be insecure in the past.) Yup, IE 8–which Microsoft says its “safer than ever”–didn’t even get through its first day on the market without being hacked.

Which wasn’t a surprise in the least–really, it would have been more startling if a bunch of enterprising hackers with money, prizes, and publicity dangled in front of them weren’t able to break into the majority of browsers they tried to attack. Every browser company has smart folks working on making software safe, but it’s painfully obvious that the people who want to show that software is insecure are just as smart.

I don’t look at the people who enter Pwn2Own as white knights–they are, after all, tampering with products to get a chance at monetary reward, and bad guys can and do learn from their attacks. But ultimately, the contest and similar stunts do the world a favor: It’s important that browser companies know about the holes in their products, and if it takes a contest to find some of them, that’s okay. (Pwn2Own’s organizers turn over information on the vulnerabilities that are discovered to the companies in question so they can fix them.)

And the results of day one of Pwn2Own are also a useful reminder to all of us who use browsers: There are less secure browsers and more secure browsers, but there’s no such thing as a fully secure browser. (Even houses with deadbolts on all the doors and pricey alarm systems get broken into.) Remember that when you hear browser companies brag about their safety measures.

Day two of Pwn2Own, incidentally, included a competition to bust into mobile-phone browsers: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. They all survived, apparently–mostly because almost nobody even showed up to try and attack them. Betcha phone browsers come under a lot more scrutiny from Pwn2Own contestants in years to come…

5Words for March 20th, 2009

Lotsa iPhone-related news today:

Gmail gets undo send. Kinda.

SpiralFrog free music service folds.

Google removes Street View images.

“$500 Mac tax” helps Microsoft?

Nokia E71x hits AT&T stores

SanDisk player includes 1000 songs.

Palm: More WebOS phones someday.

Nintendo creating an app store?

iPhone Moviefone! (Moviefone’s still around?)

Magic tricks for your iPhone.

Now TomTom’s suing Microsoft back.

iPhone 3G speed lawsuit filed.

Apple’s intentionally stoking iPhone gossip?

Ballmer Takes on the “Apple Tax”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can’t seem to help himself when it comes to talking smack on Apple. His latest comments came at a media summit in New York held by publisher McGraw-Hill, where he claimed Apple consumers pay an extra $500 for the Apple logo. He seems to infer that the economic conditions have helped Windows turn the tide against the Cupertino juggernaut. He also took the opportunity to prove both his Microsoft and American gravitas too.

We now know that the Ballmer family does not own a single Apple product, and he drives American cars. I don’t know, but that almost seemed a subtle dig in and of itself towards the Apple faithful. What does the stereotypical user drive? Volvos, Volkswagens, BMW’s… in other words, foreign cars.

Yes, Ballmer is outspoken. But sometimes I look at this guy, and am reminded of this video — and I just don’t take some of what he says all too seriously.

IE 8 Web Slices: Great Idea! Mediocre Execution!

Now that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 has officially launched, I wanted to take a look at the final incarnation of what may be the browser’s most strikingly new feature: Web Slices, which let you add buttons to your Favorites bar that provide little snippets of Web content when you click them. Here, for instance, is one that lets you peek at your Hotmail inbox:

Back when I reviewed the RC1 version of IE 8, I said that Web Slices were an intriguing idea, but that they didn’t live up to their potential–in part because there weren’t enough of them, and those that did exist were poorly explained. The good news is that Slices have launched with a bunch of examples that weren’t there when IE 8 RC1 appeared. The bad news is that they still don’t come anywhere near living up to their considerable potential.

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iPhone Games? Sony’s Not Worried

Oh, Peter Dille. The Sony Senior VP of Marketing has a great acid tongue (he recently said game publishers want to “sell razor blades” while Sony shoulders the net loss on console sales), but his latest attempt to bolster the Playstation Portable in the face of the iPhone is off the mark.

Dille said Sony’s not worried about the iPhone’s potential as a gaming device, calling Apple’s game support a “seperate business.”

“The iPhone games and apps are largely diversionary, whereas we’re a gaming company and we make games for people who want to carry a gaming device and play a game that offers a satisfying 20+ hours of gameplay,” he said in an interview with GameDaily.

It’s not clear whether the interview happened before or after Apple unveiled iPhone’s 3.0 operating system, complete with micro-transaction support to the delight of publishers, but I wonder if Dille is singing a different tune now. Downloadable content isn’t necessarily the key to 20-hour gaming — us hardcore players used to get along fine without it — but it’s an indicator of where the iPhone is headed as a games machine.

See, for example, LiveFire, a first-person shooter in development for the iPhone that will offer additional weapons for purchase. If an online shoot-em-up with voice chat isn’t an example of complex, non-”diversionary” gaming, I don’t know what is.

And besides, what’s the harm in supporting simpler games as well? Sony and Microsoft were quick to regard the Wii as a non-competitor, and look where that got them. If I were Sony, I’d be coming up with a strategy to beat the iPhone — and perhaps the company is doing so, and Dille’s comments are just posturing — instead of ignoring it.