Smalltalk with James Robertson

Will Android get to tablets before HP does? If so, they have to move fast. Engadget reports:

We've been trying to find out when HP would launch a webOS tablet since the company first bought Palm, and we're now hearing from several trusted sources that it'll be calendar Q1 2011.

Apple has an even bigger headstart in this space than they did in phones; in the phone arena, they broke out, but other systems (Blackberry in particular) were already there. If HP can get the second mover position, I think it puts them in a great place.

Technorati Tags: tablets, iPad, android, webOS

There's a new thing called Frash out there, which can apparently give you a small subset of Flash on your iPhone, assuming you Jailbreak it. This snippet at the end of the article tells me that Flash still isn't really ready for mobile devices:

Adobe, for its part, has been stating its intention to ship a mobile version of Flash for Google's Android smartphone platform for several months, but a final version of the software is still not available to users.

I think the reality is that Adobe got caught flat footed by the explosion of smart phones - the same way Lotus managed to get steamrolled by Windows when they were slow to migrate 1-2-3 from being a DOS based app to being a Windows based app. The huge installed based of Office (and thus Excel) is a legacy of that long passed miscalculation; I suspect that we'll be living with the side effects of Adobe's mistakes for just as long.

Technorati Tags: flash, adobe, iPhone, android

Samsung has announced a new drive that's pretty close to what the current limits of magnetic drive tech can do:

Samsung announced new hard drives today that feature an aereal density that was questioned just four years ago and we are now approaching densities that are believed to be the limit for the current recording technology. Is it finally time to ditch traditional magnetic recording methods and transition to heat assisted recording?

From the consumer end, these don't look new - they are shipping 1.5 tb and 2.0 tb drives. But:

However, the 2.0 TB model now includes only 3 disks instead of four, which means that the storage capacity has been increased by 33% to 667 GB.

I wonder whether SSD drives will ramp up to the point where these physical limitations don't really matter, or whether there's still life in the classic spinning disk...

Look Mom, no tethering for Droid users:

Motorola Droid users better not get too excited by Android 2.2, also known as “Froyo.” While Verizon Wireless is set to push out the latest version of the Android operating system to Droid users starting this week, two key features will be missing: tethering and Wi-Fi hot spot capability. Verizon says the Droid won’t get these two features, which are built into the Android 2.2 OS, because the device’s hardware isn’t capable of supporting it.

AT&T sed to spin similar stories about the iPhone; now they just throw bandwidth limits at us. Verizon will probably go through the same BS progression.

Technorati Tags: android, verizon

Take a look at how much data gets used by FaceTime over 3G:

As you will see, if you do the math, a 5 minute FaceTime call with lots of movement used 14.7 MB of data. -- That's about 3 MB per minute

Add in some streaming video on the go, and you'll blow through your 2 GB cap pretty fast. Gosh forbid you try that overseas, where the charges can really add up :)

Technorati Tags: 3G, smart phone

Engadget reports that the future of cardless payments might be coming soon - the major mobile players are getting together on it:

Bloomberg reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are about to test the NFC payment waters with pilot schemes in Atlanta and three other cities, potentially aided by partnerships with Discover Financial Services and British bankers Barclays Plc. This would require all-new readers for merchants and embedded NFC chips in phones, but we reckon plenty of people might be happy to pay a small premium to streamline their lives that little bit more and leave the plastic behind.

Technorati Tags: credit card

Katherine Noyes at PC World thinks the mobile future belongs to Android:

A hallmark of Apple's approach has always been putting users in a "walled garden" whereby they are "protected" from having to deal with the computer's nuts and bolts directly. Hand-in-hand with that approach comes restrictiveness; users are only allowed to do things that Apple has decided to let them do, just as they can only buy applications that have been preapproved. Apple insists on controlling the whole ecosystem.

That might be a problem if there were anything really missing from that garden; the reality is, there isn't. The other reality is simpler: with computers, a significant minority of users wants to tweak and hack. Phones, on the other hand, are end consumer devices. Just as there aren't many people who want to hack TV's, there aren't that many who want to hack phones.

I just don't see the controlled nature of the app store being a problem anytime soon - and I'm not at all sure that Google can compete with the user experience that Apple brings to the game.

Technorati Tags: android, iPhone

I think a combination of factors is hurting Nintendo's DS sales:

• The slow economy
• The saturation of the market
• The onslaught from Apple with the Touch and iPhone

It'll be tough for Nintendo to get back into the handheld game.

Technorati Tags: nintendo, DS, iPhone

I think this paragraph from a Cnet story about Microsoft's efforts in the tablet space says it all:

But he added that Microsoft has a lot of software knowledge and intellectual property from the decade it has spent in the tablet business.

Apple spent a long time making sure that what they were going to push out was optimized for the form factor; Microsoft spent a decade pushing the existing Windows OS onto smaller devices. Maybe they get it now, but I have my doubts.

Technorati Tags: windows, tablets

I wonder about the lawsuit claiming that iPads should work better (i.e., not overheat) in the sun - take this rationale from PC World:

This may actually be a very real problem, especially since the iPad is designed for e-book reading and casual computing--a very plausible time to use your iPad would be outside or at the beach.

There's one huge problem with that theory - go out in the sun and just try to read on the iPad. For good or ill, the LCD screen is just not an optimal solution for outdoor reading. Heck, the recent beach ads that Amazon is running for the Kindle play off of that reality.

Maybe the iPad shouldn't overheat as quickly as some claim it does in the sun, but seriously - you aren't going to be using it in the sun anyway.

Technorati Tags: iPad