Still Needed for the iPhone: A Great Office Suite

A year into the era of third-party iPhone software, there may be 50,000 applications for Apple’s phone. But nobody needs that many, of course–hey, they’d be a tight squeeze even if you’ve got a 32GB iPhone 3G S. What you want are…the applications you want. One of the ones I want is a solid, simple Microsoft Office-compatible suite for my iPhone. And I’m still waiting for one that’s everything an iPhone suite should be.

Last year, things looked promising: The two major makers of mobile suites, Dataviz and Quickoffice, both announced plans to support the iPhone. Quickoffice got there first, but did so in drips and drabs: First, it released a version that only had a spreadsheet and some file management tools. Then it added a word processor that lacked core features such as autocorrection. Then it finally came out with an update that’s pretty good, but is still hobbled by the fact that there’s no way for it to get at file attachments in the phone’s e-mail application, since Apple don’t permit it. (Instead, you can shuttle documents back and forth via MobileMe or Wi-Fi.)

Yesterday, DataViz announced that its Documents to Go suite was live on the iPhone App Store. And once again, it turns out that it’s less of a suite and more of a work in progress. The current version is a word processor that’s slicker than Quickoffice’s, with two-way file synchronization and optional support for Exchange attachments. But there’s no spreadsheet. DataViz says that people who buy Docs to Go now at discounted prices ($5 without Exchange support, $10 with) will get the spreadsheet for free later.

I’m not sure why it’s taken both companies so long to get their venerable, well-done packages onto the iPhone, other than that building a capable productivity suite that’s compatible with Microsoft Office is a larger challenge than designing even an admirable Twitter client. (Let’s not even discuss fart apps.) I also worry that the pressure on iPhone developers to release apps at the cheapest possible price makes it hard for them to justify investing immense resources in building ambitious stuff: Docs to Go for iPhone may start at five bucks, but the highest-end version of its Palm-based ancestor goes for $90. But maybe suite companies will end up selling enough iPhone products in such high volume that it’ll work out.

Long-term, I remain optimistic: Quickoffice has already made a lot of progress, and a few minutes with Documents to Go’s word processor will tell you that DataViz hasn’t been slacking–it’s just been making sure that what it releases is really good. I also think that Apple will eventually give apps like these the hooks into the OS they need to be integrated with e-mail and other iPhone apps. For now, though, I’m still waiting for iPhone suites to give me everything that came standard on my Psion Series 3 palmtop fifteen years ago.

Six Questions About Opera Unite

Boy, Opera sure has turned the hype knob to 11 for its Unite technology, which puts a Web server inside Opera 11. It’s not just that it keeps talking about how Unite will reinvent the Web. I just watched a Webcast in which Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner said that Unite is an example not of Web 3.0 or Web 4.0, but of Web 5.0. Um, setting the bar that high seems dangerous–Unite could be quite remarkable, and still fail to match the expectations that Opera is setting up.

Right now, Unite is a technical preview. It’s fun to play with. But tinkering with it and watching Opera’s Webcast has left me with plenty of questions about it. Six of ‘em after the jump…

Continue reading this story…

5Words for Tuesday, June 16th 2009

Here’s my Tuesday reading material:

Twitter helps Iranians, reschedules downtime.

The newest BlackBerry: the Tour.

Weird Al takes on Craigslist.

Flash on iPhone via QuickTime?

Atari 2600 for your iPod.

Homer Simpson for your TomTom.

Xbox Live is down today.

A 128GB thumb drive. Pricey!

How AT&T dropped iPhone ball.

ClearWire’s WiMax comes to Atlanta.

Multi-touch Windows 7 netbooks.

Opera’s Web-Changer: Unite, a Web Server Inside Your Browser

In Oslo, the Tuesday workday is well underway, and that means that Opera Software has unveiled the revolutionary technology breakthrough it started touting last week. The would-be breakthrough turns out to be called Opera Unite, and a downloadable version of Opera 10 that incorporates it is available now. As blogger Kas Thomas somehow managed to guess, it’s a version of the Opera browser with a built-in Web server. And while it’s impossible to judge at this early date whether it’ll “forever change the fundamental fabric of the Web” as Opera promised, it’s a very big idea. Continue reading this story…

YouTube Tries Choose-Your-Own Ads

In a clever move by Google, some YouTube content will present viewers with a choice: Select from two advertisements to watch at the beginning, or intersperse a grab bag of ads throughout the video.

This idea, which is being tested on a small number of premium YouTube videos, is far more preferable to those floating ads that slide into the bottom portion some videos. But that’s not the only reason I like the idea.

Allowing user control over the advertisement engages the viewer in a way that television commercials cannot. If marketing groups create Web ads that are worth watching, and sell the ads themselves with a provocative title and screenshot (okay, the examples seen above aren’t what I had in mind, but give it time), we’re well on the way to seeing more value in online advertising.

That’s important, because Big Content’s reservations over online content are due in large part to how little online ads make compared to their offline counterparts. It’s the whole “analog dollars for digital pennies” argument for which NBC CEO Jeff Zucker was famously quoted. This imbalance explains why NBC’s Olympic coverage will be crippled next year and why Hulu’s content providers bend over backwards to prevent you from watching through the television instead of a PC. If it becomes viable for online video to cannibalize cable, sites such as Hulu and YouTube will evolve much faster.

Granted, there are other roadblocks — the thorny issue of licensing agreements between cable and content providers, for example — but choose-your-own ads are welcome in my queue.

Rumor: New Console to Host Microsoft’s Motion Cam

1UP, whose scoop on the PSP Go was dead-on, is now reporting a rumor that Microsoft will release the Project Natal motion-sensing camera standard with its next console. And it’s coming in Fall 2010.

It’s not clear where the information is coming from, but 1UP Editorial Director Sam Kennedy writes that the camera will also be sold as an add-on for the Xbox 360. The new console will only upgrade hardware slightly, and publishers will be able to release games that run on both platforms.

I’ve said before that Microsoft should wait until the next console generation to introduce motion controls. That’ll allow the company to court third-party publishers and launch with the best possible line up of games. However, Don Mattrick , the Xbox division’s senior vice president, said at E3 that Natal allows Microsoft to “leap into a new era of interactive entertainment without having to launch a new console.”

Rebranding the existing wares while offering Natal as an Xbox 360 peripheral represents the best of both worlds. Publishers might be more willing to develop for Natal if they can sell to new and old console owners, and Microsoft could catch up with Sony’s Playstation 3 in hardware power without significant costs.

On the other hand, I’m not thrilled with the possible PC-ification of console gaming. It reminds me of the Nintendo 64′s Expansion Pak, a memory cartridge that improved graphics in some games and unlocked new features in others. Incremental upgrades are exactly what I don’t like about PC gaming. If the rumors come true, I hope Microsoft doesn’t push an upgrade on its existing Xbox 360 user base.

Windows 7 $tarter Edition?

I’m not an expert on how to price operating systems for maximum sales and profit. Microsoft is. So I hesitate to jump in here, but a DigiTimes story (as covered by Ars Technica) is suggesting that Microsoft may want about twice as much money from PC manufacturers to put Windows 7 Starter Edition on a netbook as it currently charges for Windows XP. Says Ars:

This translates to at least a $50 increase in price if netbook makers want to offer Windows 7 as opposed to Windows XP. That typically isn’t a big deal, but for netbooks, $50 is a very big difference, so it’s no wonder OEMs are still trying to negotiate with Microsoft. Most laptops currently offer Windows Vista, which should have a much smoother price change going to Windows 7.

Regardless of Windows 7 Starter’s pricetag, the whole boom in under $400 netbooks presents Microsoft with one of its biggest challenges ever. There simply isn’t enough profit built into netbook prices for it to charge PC manufacturers what it’s used to getting for a copy of Windows. So far, it’s managed to keep Linux from getting much of a toehold by selling Windows XP for cheap. But the situation presents the best opportunity for alternative operating systems that’s come along in a long time, and as contenders from Android to Jolicloud jump into the netbook market, it’ll be fascinating to see if they catch on…and how Microsoft responds.

5Words for Monday, June 15th, 2009

Good morning. Good Monday. News!

Windows 7 Starter Edition: overpriced?

Dell, please don’t buy Palm.

Sprint: Don’t tether your Pre.

No free iPhone for Microsofties.

Next Firefox will profile you.

Slower SATA for new MacBooks?

Is Google readying Twitter search?

New iPhones start to ship.

Hillcrest’s cool remote finally ships.

Kindle DX apparently selling well.

An excessively thin NEC notebook.

Documents to Go for iPhone.

One Virgin Music Store Dies. And Another Opens.

The timing must be coincidental, but file these two news stories under signs of the times: The last two Virgin Megastores in the U.S. finally closed yesterday–a development which wasn’t entirely due to the slow death of physical media, but was surely be remembered as a significant moment in the ongoing digitization of entertainment. And today, Virgin Media–a UK ISP, phone carrier, and TV provider that’s another arm of the far-flung, loosely-joined Virgin empire–is announcing what may be the first above-board music service that lets you pay a flat fee not only to stream all the music you like but also to download it in MP3 form and keep it, even if you cancel the service. The company has signed up Universal as a music provider, and says it’s working on getting other major music companies on board. It’s going to be available later this year in the UK. But in theory, anyhow, it’s the format of music service we’d all choose, given the opportunity.

What’s the catch? Well, the press release on the new service says this:

The new service reflects the shared commitment of Virgin Media and Universal Music to keep step with growing demand for online music in an increasingly digital world. In parallel, the two companies will be working together to protect Universal Music’s intellectual property and drive a material reduction in the unauthorized distribution of its repertoire across Virgin Media’s network.

This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access. No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media.

Not explained: How Virgin can identify you as a file swapper and suspend your service if it isn’t watching your online activity in some fashion. I don’t have any sympathy for the plight of music thieves whose activities may be foiled by technological means. But I wouldn’t want to give Virgin Media my money as a customer without a clear idea of exactly how it’s identifying file sharers and interfering with their activities. Absent a clear explanation of what’s going on, there’s an Orwellian tinge to the idea. Call it Big Virgin is Watching You.

How to Be a Smart Adopter

BigThink is a nifty site with video and textual contributions by big thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Jim Rogers, Ray Kurzweil, Alice Rivlin, and many others. And I’m tickled to report that it has a contribution by…me. I wrote about being a Smart Adopter, which is what I call the art of buying and using new tech products and services at exactly the right pace for you. In  some cases that means being an Early Adopter; in others, it might make you a Really Late Adopter. Or maybe even a Not an Adopter at all. I can’t claim I always get the timing right, but at least I try–as I mention in the piece, I still don’t own a Blu-Ray player, and it’s possible that I never will.

If you have a sec, check out the post. I share a few tips for being a Smart Adopter, but I’d love to hear yours…

Hunch Goes Live. It’s Neat!

Hunch, a new site from Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake, has just opened its doors to all comers. You might describe it as a sort of mashup of Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia, and any Facebook quiz that helps you determine stuff like just who your favorite member of the Three Stooges is. Except that wouldn’t come anywhere near adequately conveying how clever and distinctive this decision-making tool is. Or how outstandingly good its user interface is.

Continue reading this story…

Google Voice for Any Phone Number?

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has reported the intriguing tidbit that Google is working on letting users of its Google Voice phone service use phone-number portability to transfer their number from whatever carrier they’re using to Google Voice. In both its original form as GrandCentral and still-in-private-beta relaunch as Google Voice, the service has made you sign up for a new phone number. That’s not a dealbreaker–if you’ve ever called Technologizer’s business number, you’ve dialed a Google Voice number–but a lot of folks would be much more likely to try Google Voice if they didn’t have to inform the world that their phone number had changed. And the service’s help system appears to confirm TechCrunch’s report.

Using existing phone numbers with Google Voice-like services isn’t a new idea–for instance, SkyDeck and Grasshopper, both of which overlap with Google Voice’s features, already let you do it. But Google Voice is the most comprehensive service of this sort: It can ring multiple phones at once, it turns your voicemail into text and lets you get it over the Web or via SMS, it lets you screen and record calls, and a whole lot more. And everything’s free except for international calls (which are cheap). All in all, it’s pretty spectacular.

Arrington also says that Google is working on a way to make Google Voice users’ calls show up on recipients’ Caller ID as the Google Voice number, rather than the primary phone number associated with the phone that made the call. That would solve another fairly significant problem with Google Voice, which is that it’s tough to hide the fact that Google Voice numbers are virtual, and that you’ve still got a real (if in many ways less useful) phone number that you can be reached at.

Of course, the one Google Voice feature that most people are most curious about is a simple one: general availability. Except for a brief period a long time ago when GrandCentral let anybody sign up, the service has been stuck in one of longest private betas I can remember. If the day comes–soon, I hope–when Google lets anyone sign up for Google Voice for free, I’m betting that it’ll prompt one of the most intense mad rushes of new users into a Google service to date.

Is Google Terrified of Bing? Naw.

FEAR GRIPS GOOGLE. It’s a nicely classic New York Post headline for a story about the company’s reaction to the launch of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The Post’s James Doran says that Google cofounder Sergey Brin is so “rattled” by Bing that he’s personally leading a team of engineers who are working on “urgent” upgrades to Google.

Is there any there there? I’m not saying that the article is sheer fantasy. But the Post story’s suggestion that frenzy has descended on the Googleplex and hasty steps are being taken to stay competitive with Bing doesn’t ring true.

Doran says:

Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing’s crucial search algorithm differs from that used by the company he founded in 1998 with Stanford University classmate Larry Page.

I can’t imagine that the question of how Bing’s algorithm differs from Google’s is a subject of high-level speculation and research at Google. For one thing, Bing’s algorithm doesn’t have much to do with why Bing is interesting. It’s the information and tools that the search engine provides in reaction to four types of searches–ones involving health, travel, local information, and shopping–that give it its personality. They don’t relate to its algorithm, and they aren’t particularly mysterious.

Then there’s the notion of Google rushing out new features to respond to Bing. The thing is, Google is in a continuous state of rushing out new features (like, for instance, this one). Every major Google service is in a state of more or less constant reinvention; if Google were indeed throwing together new Bing-killing features in panicky fashion, I’m not sure if we’d be able to tell them from all the other features it’ll roll out over the next few months. And which it would have rolled out even if Bing didn’t exist.

I can believe that Google takes Bing seriously. (It should–this unquestionably Microsoft’s most ambitious and well thought out attempt to take on Google to date.) I can accept the idea that Sergey Brin has taken a particular interest in it. But it would be even sillier for Google to freak out over Bing than it would be for the company to ignore it.

Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes

There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others.  Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public.  Decades later, we can still learn from these multi-million dollar mistakes.  By no means is the following list exhaustive; one could probably write about the flaws of every PC ever released.  But when considering past design mistakes, these examples spring to my mind.

Special thanks to Steven Stengel of the Obsolete Technology Homepage for providing many of the photos in this article.

Apple III (1980)

The Apple III was Apple’s first computer not devised by Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder.  Instead, a committee of engineers designed it to be the “perfect” business system.  With an absurdly high price (options ranged between $4,340 to $7,800–about $11,231 to $20,185 in 2009 dollars) and numerous bugs at launch, the Apple III was doomed to failure.

Problem #1: No Power Supply Fan

The Apple III’s lack of power supply fan caused system to heat up, warping the motherboard and unseating certain socketed chips.

What Were They Thinking?

According to Apple insiders, Steve Jobs’ zeal for a simple and silent computer design forced the Apple III team to exclude a cooling fan for the power supply.  Apple later suggested a simple fix for the heat-warping problem: raise the Apple III a few inches off a hard surface and drop it, hopefully re-seating the chips in the process. Fortunately, that advice wasn’t required for later Apple computers that lacked fans.

Problem #2: Limited Apple II Compatibility

To run an Apple III in Apple II mode, one had to first boot from a special floppy disk.  Once in Apple II emulator mode, the user could not use any of the Apple III’s enhanced hardware, including 80 column text mode or the real-time clock.  Compatibility with Apple II software was not perfect, as many software packages used direct memory writes in the form of PEEKs and POKEs that didn’t line up with the Apple III’s memory structure.

What Were They Thinking?

Like IBM and the PC/PCjr, Apple wanted a clear product delineation between their “home” machine (the Apple II) and their “professional” machine (the Apple III).  As a result, Apple II compatibility on the Apple III was intentionally crippled.
Continue reading this story…

FireWire: It’s Baaaaaaaaaaaack!

Of all the news that came out of Monday’s Apple WWDC keynote, one tidbit that didn’t get much attention is worthy of note: Apple’s refresh of its 13-inch laptop brought back the FireWire port that had been removed when the first 13-inch unibody MacBook shipped last October. In fact, Apple upgraded the connection, giving the new laptop a FireWire-800 port rather than the FireWire-400 one it had done away with last year. The return of FireWire in even beefier form is presumably a big part of why Apple was comfortable in redubbing the laptop that had been known as a mere MacBook as a MacBook Pro. Among Macs, only the MacBook Air, a computer so thin it barely has room for ports at all, lacks FireWire.

It’s a truly surprising development. Apple has historically been aggressive about erring on the side of removing technologies from its computers early, and while it often catches flack at the time, other PC manufacturers tend to fall into line eventually. When it killed FireWire on the 13-inch MacBook last year it made lots of folks very angry, but Steve Jobs himself apparently thought it was not a big deal. And so did I. In fact, I thought that other Macs would begin to lose their FireWire. I was wrong.

I can’t think of another instance in which Apple has moved to retire a technology and then changed its mind. (If there have been any, I know you’ll tell me.) It’s a little as if the second-generation iMac had brought back the floppy drive.

I’m still guessing that the company’s instinct is that FireWire is at the beginning of the end of its useful life, and that we’ll see lower-end Macs without it in the not-too-distant future. But for now, score one for FireWire fans–and for Apple, too, since it showed it was listening.

Me, I’m more excited about the fact that the company is finally shipping laptops with built-in slots for SD cards…

Does Piracy Make Music Better?

Sometimes roundabout logic does makes sense. A BBC feature article published today is arguing that illegal file sharing has exposed a generation of artists to a infinity of influences that makes today’s bands better, strengthening the music business.

Robin Pecknold, who is the lead singer of the band “Fleet Foxes,” told the BBC that file sharing helped him discover music that inspired him–music which he may not have otherwise heard. “As much music as musicians can hear, that will only make music richer as an art form,” Pecknold told the BBC.

I can’t argue with him (well, aside from the stealing part). The Internet has revolutionized music discovery. It is shocking that the music industry never envisioned that broader exposure to music through the Web could yield some positive developments. Where were the music lovers in the business when the industry stood opposed to the Web?

Don’t get me wrong, something had to be done about Napster. There was a substantial loss of intellectual property happening, and piracy is not excusable. However, there was another way: The industry could have embraced the medium instead of going to war with grannies.

That tactic has been successful before. DVDs are a good example of copyright holders working in partnership with technology companies. It’s an obvious conclusion, but the music industry has made some major missteps with how it has handled the Web. Maybe the pirate artists will help save it.