On Thursday, seeing as we happened to be in San Francisco at the time, we went along to the Mark Hopkins Hotel for the SNS newsletter’s West Coast dinner. Run by Mark Anderson, SNS is a regular mailing list that looks at the near-term future, up to about five years out, with a good track record on predictions both technical and economic.
Mark is always an entertaining speaker, and this time was no exception. One of the topics he touched on was the idea of the BRIC, the “Black Rectangular Internet-Connected” device. Not necessarily black and not necessarily rectangular, it’s a class of devices that includes Apple’s iPhone (and now the iPod Touch), the Nokia N800 web pad and OpenMoko’s FIC Neo 1973 - and to a lesser extent the Archos 605 WIFI and HTC Advantage, which both run Opera. They’re all intended to bring a high quality web experience to the hands and pockets of the man on the street - or on a plane, or on a boat, or in a car, or, well, pretty much anywhere any time.
It was an amusing coincidence that just as Mark was talking about BRICs, iPhones all over the world were turning into real bricks, as a firmware update stopped unlocked iPhones from operating - shutting them down completely. The next morning saw two queues at the Apple Store in San Francisco; one line of people asking if the iPod Touch was finally in stock and the other asking why their iPhone had stopped working.
It was also at that point that my OpenMoko hardware stopped being a brick - as it finally was flashed with a kernel and a filing system. Sometimes referred to as the anti-iPhone, OpenMoko’s hardware is as open as a mobile device can be (the GSM radio is the only hardware that’s locked down, and even it has an open API, so you can write applications that work directly with the radio). With an active community building on (and in) its Linux kernel, there’s a lot of scope for innovative mobile applications.
Out the box there’s no OS, just a kernel and a boot loader. You’ll need to flash the hardware with a kernel and file system paring, before downloading applications and development tools. That can be a bit of a problem - especially if you’re working from inside a VM. It’s best to use a Linux workstation to set up the phone for at least the first time. Consumer Neo 1973s won’t have the same problems as the Phase 1 hardware. At least they’ll come with a working operating system, and won’t need to be flashed before they give you a working device.
I’m getting more and more tempted by the iPod Touch. It seems to do everything I want from a web-pad device (though I’m still holding out for Flash and AIR support), without the phone bits of the iPhone. After all, I have a Blackberry Pearl, and that does voice and email better than most devices - so why would I want another phone, let alone one that misses several features I’ve come to rely on. A portable device with WiFi and a full-featured browser is another story, especially one that fits neatly in a pocket…
The phone side of the iPhone is the weakest side; only Edge for data and you can’t ignore a call that comes in when the interface is locked because unlocking it answers the call. But if instead of claiming to tackle the holy grail of computing, the device that is great as a phone and great as a computer, Apple had produced with great fanfare just another Web pad, the reaction could have been quite different. After all, it’s a class of devices that promised much - and delivered little. Yet when you talk to people here in the US with iPhones, it’s the browsing capabilities that get the highest ratings. They’d never really thought what it was like to access the web anywhere, any time - and they’d found that the real killer application. Despite all that, I suspect if Steve Jobs had stood up and sold the iPhone as the iWebPad, even the famous Reality Distortion Field wouldn’t have stood up to the resulting wave of cynicism- Apple’s stock might have been laughed out of the NASDAQ.
What makes the iPhone more of a Web pad than a pocket computer isn’t the OS - you’ve got most of Mac OS X on there to run Safari. It’s the fact that you can’t develop or install applications that Apple and Safari haven’t blessed. The Archos 605 WIFI has a full version of Linux on, but only Archos gets to put applications on it. Or at least you can’t officially…
Until the updater turned unlocked iPhones into shiny paperweights, you could install other apps on there if you knew how. And if you’ve used Objective C before - says the friend who used to be a kernel engineer at Apple - you can interrogate a function and ask it what interfaces it has, and what with the descriptive naming and the functions you recognize from Mac OS, you have a powerful API. It just sounds like fishing through the bunghole of a barrel with a flashlight and a harpoon…
Intel is going in completely the other direction, asking developers to use the Moblin interface layer to turn Red Flag and Ubuntu applications into Linux UMPC tools and sponsoring a whole Web site to tell you how. You’ll soon be able to run Ubuntu on OpenMoko - or Nokia’s Maemo or Trolltech’s Qtopia (from the Greenphone). Anyone can develop for Windows Mobile. That means a wide diversity of applications - and a huge range of user interfaces and experiences, which may be why Apple locks the iPhone down so much, ensuring you only see the shiny, multi-touch Apple-designed interface. It’s not open, it’s a stretch to call it a personal computer - and it’s certainly desirable.
Now all we need to do is find an Apple Store with an iPod Touch in stock…

You wouldn’t put up with what data goes through; chopped up, spun around, chewed, spat out and lumped back together. There are a lot of jokes about what if cars were like Windows and at IDF Pat Gelsinger came up with an amusing riff on how fast planes would go if they’d sped up the way processors have. Boarding, he said, would only take 12 milliseconds but you’d have to line up in seat order, there wouldn’t be any carry-on luggage to fumble with, “plus smaller people and suction would help”. With that image in mind the new boarding system for Southwest airlines - the much funnier and more pleasant US equivalent of EasyJet - sounds a bit like a square dance.

You can pick your own seat on Southwest and boarding is in three groups; that means three very long lines form and no-one wants to sit down at the gate. Rather than pre-allocating seats, Southwest has decided to preallocate spaces in the boarding queue; the A, B and C groups are both split into two, spaces in the queue are numbered in batches of five. This sounds a lot more complicated than it is - there’s a tutorial at http://www.southwest.com/help/boardingschool/.

It’s rather like the Harpertown memory architecture, with super shuffle packing and unpacking integers at twice the current speed. Byte ordering might make more sense to developers than parallel programming. Just check out the queues to get into or out of a building with four doors side by side, all of which are unlocked but only one of which is propped open. Faced with the complexity of dividing and merging, most people choose to queue up for the easy door. Good software marries hardware advances with process and good user experience - bad software really does make you feel like you’ve been squashed and blown through a tube. 

The latest DARPA Grand Challenge is nearly upon us, and Stanford University’s entrant made a rare public appearance at IDF. Stanford won the previous event, and are among the favourites for this year’s race.

Racing across an empty desert is easier than driving in traffic, and though Stanley managed to overtake one of its opponents, it wasn’t designed for the open road. Junior is a different kind of robot, built into a Volkswagen estate car, and covered with sensors. Its task is to navigate down the open highway, mixing with real traffic. It would be an understatement to say that this is a hard problem…

At a first look, Junior doesn’t look that different to one of Google’s street mappers. That’s not surprising - the equipment racks come from the same source. The sensors also serve much the same purpose. A differential GPS pinpoints the car, while LIDAR arrays find out just how far it is from objects around it. Meanwhile, a high-speed spinning camera looks at the moving objects around it. A display in the car showed just how effective that view was, showing people milling around the car and the show booths.

Two racks of servers sit in the boot, ready to navigate the car through the simulated streets of the Grand Challenge course. There’s a lot of power in there - Intel’s support staff told me that they’d managed to halve the amount of computing hardware in Junior, but still managed to give it 3 times the power of Stanley. That’s power it needs - there are many more sensors, and a much more complex environment to work in.

The Grand Challenge is intended to encourage the development of the tools and technologies that would power military robot logistics vehicles, carrying munitions across dangerous terrain, in completely autonomous convoys. There’s plenty of civilian options, too. It’s easy to imagine using Junior’s sensor arrays to give drivers more information, and to warn of (and even protect from) impending accidents.

Tomorrow’s cars will mix automatic and manual driving. It’s easy to imagine getting on to the M40, putting one of Junior’s descendants into automatic, pulling out the laptop, and getting on with some work. There’d be no need to worry about the roadworks, or the traffic conditions - your car would do all that for you, leaving you more time to clinch one more sale…

Here are some pictures of Junior:

Not your average Volkswagen. Junior pays a visit to IDF.

How Junior sees the world. You can see the vehicle at the centre of the image, with people and show booths around it. I’m the white blob in the rear quarter of the car, crouching down and taking a picture through the door…

Half the rack space of Stanley, three times the power. All you need to go play in traffic…

I’m nearly back with a full suite of tools on my replacement laptop. It’s taken quite a bit longer than I thought it would - and I’ve discovered just how dependent I am on the network resources back in my office.

First I needed to get my OneNote files online. I could easily extract the existing notebooks from the damaged laptop - but that would break the connection with my server store of all my OneNote files. It took me a while to finally give up on that link, as after all, it’s something I can rebuild when I get back to London.

Getting the files onto the new laptop was easy enough - I used Remote Desktop to map the new machine’s hard drive to the old machine, and using the new machine’s screen and keyboard, I saved out the OneNote notebooks, before importing them into the new system. The enhancements Microsoft has put into the latest versions of Terminal Services are surprisingly useful, and it’s well worth getting to know just what they offer.

Outlook was another story. I usually use its RPC over HTTP option to sync with my Exchange server while out and about. That’s all very well if you’ve already set things up with a direct network connection, sadly it’s not something you can use to set up a virgin copy.

With my DSL router unable to handle VPN connections, I had to find another route. That came through the excellent free VPN client Hamachi, which let me build a managed VPN connection between my home server and my remote laptop. Once that was in place I could start to set up Outlook, and begin an initial mail synchronisation.

Self service systems management works well in the office, it’s when you’re out on the road that systems fall apart and you need to create your own work arounds. At least the tools are there - you may just have to do a little work to get them working…

–Simon

I use the free YouSendIt site for mailing files so large they’d clog up your inbox, but that doesn’t solve all my problems. All my documents and research materials live on the server: too many files to fit on a notebook even if I could get offline files working. If I need them on the road, I VPN in. When the VPN won’t play ball I sometimes mail files to myself by logging into our server via Remote Desktop. That’s for absolute, I can’t think how else to do it emergencies and I don’t do it for big files because they’d clog up my own inbox - so when I needed a recording I forgot to sync to my PC with SyncToy before I left, we decided to compare FolderShare and SkyDrive as alternatives.

FolderShare runs on the server and I can use the Web interface without having to run the FolderShare client - but the user needs to be logged in via remote Desktop on a PC with a FolderShare client on for the server to be available via the Web interface on any PC. Not a problem, just an extra step to remember.

While we’re setting up FolderShare, we upload the file to SkyDrive, into a shared folder to which I’m a contributor. I log into SkyDrive - and there’s no sign of the folder in my Shared Folders and no way to look for it. I start Messenger so I can IM the link rather than mailing it, click the link and get the shared folder, which I immediately add to my Favourites Just In Case although after I’ve visited the folder it shows up in the Also on SkyDrive sidebar - but still not in my Shared Folders list.

As it happens, I can’t remember which of two recordings I need so I have two files to download. There are two icons in the folder and I can click each one and choose Download.

Simple - but oh so primitive.

Why can’t I select with Vista-style checkboxes which files I do or don’t want? Why can’t I see metadata and add tags and ratings to the file and use them to sort or select files? Or see the tags and ratings from Vista along with tags and ratings Simon has added separately from the ones I’ve added? I should be able to slice and dice these files, not just share them and have them sit here on the server like lumps of rock. How about even an MSDN-style download manager? This is the prettiest and most primitive FTP interface I’ve used in a very long time.

Free space is good. Easy sharing is good, but you have to know what’s been shared with you. And an interface that consists of click after click to Web page after Web page with minimal information? At this point SkyDrive is brain dead.

Did you spot the deliberate error in all of this? We run SBS Server 2003 which has Terminal Server, so we could have done it all by enabling drive redirection in the Remote Desktop Client. Click the Options button and under Local Devices and Resources, click More to get at redirection for drives, devices and the clipboard.

That’s hidden enough that you can forget it’s there but it’s a lot better than moving files around like an online game of pass the parcel.

I’m not entirely sure if I should be angry at or grateful to with the gentleman in seat 24E on last Thursday night’s JetBlue flight from New York to Seattle.

There’s one bit of airline etiquette that too many people forget. If you’re going to recline your seat, please remember to turn around and see if the person behind you is working or not. If you suddenly drop to as near horizontal as possible there’s a good chance you’re going to hit your neighbour’s laptop’s screen with the back of your chair. That’s not good for the laptop. The shock can loosen vital components - and even crack LCD panels. A quick check can save a lot of grief - aftwer all, the person behind you may well be wanting an excuse to stop working!

I’m pretty sure it was the gentleman in seat 24E forgetting basic economy class politeness and doing just that which caused the screen on my trusty tablet to start malfunctioning in the middle of a day of meetings with Microsoft Research. As much as I like my old notebook and pen, they’re no substitute for a copy of OneNote and a hard disk full of voice recordings. With a few more weeks on this US trip to go, and those potentially laptopless, I’d resigned myself to living with pen, paper and mobile phone, when the folk at HP came up trumps.

Instead of repairing my tablet  (that’ll wait until I get back to the UK), they’ve loaned me a shiny 2710p tablet PC for a couple of weeks. It’s a gorgeous piece of kit - with smooth good looks, and a spec to match. I’ll be blogging about it more over the next few weeks, as it’s an excellent example of how good industrial design can make the business PC experience more than a hefty slab of dull grey laptop and beige desktop PC. There are lots of little features that immedialtely impress, from the built-in keyboard light, to the bar graph charge display on the battery.

There’s one feature about this and many others of the current generation of business laptops that makes them less prone to the airline related issues of my trusty tablet. It’s the difference between a wide screen and a standard screen. A widescreen display gives you all the resolution (and more) of a standard laptop display - and it’s also a couple of inches smaller.

That’s the difference between a crunched screen and several more pages of copy when an unruly neighbour forgets that he’s not in a private jet…

–Simon (in Seattle)

HP must be quietly fuming. The day after its huge launch - five iPAQs, three new business desktops, two new small business notebooks, solid start drives in five ultraportables plus a slew of home machines, including the impressive Blackbird 002 from the Voodoo division - the team at HP must have been hoping for some good coverage in the US papers. The Wall Street Journal did give Blackbird a good writeup - but all the columns where you might have expected to see a discussion of the MediaSmart TVs or the Windows Home Server or the first mainstream portables with solid state drives were filled with the news that Apple had upset existing customers by cutting the iPhone price.

Apple is news. It’s hip, it’s exciting, it’s controversial. And Steve Jobs knows exactly how to get the most press coverage. Asked about customers who’d just paid twice the price for the iPhone he suggested they try their luck asking for a refund from the store. And if they didn’t have any luck? “That’s technology,” he said. Actually it’s typical Apple.

By the evening of the next day Apple was getting even more coverage, making the evening news with a $100 refund for all iPhone owners. If the company really had sold the million iPhones it predicted but couldn’t prove, that’s a hundred million dollars - expensive free publicity, but it keeps the buzz going. I’d expect it to be half that, which is cheap for that kind of exposure.

Apart from the price cut, Apple didn’t have a lot that was new, apart from a version of the iPhone with no phone or camera. If you want to get some work done on the move, HP has the first 3G QWERTY GPS smartphone, which could give RIM a run for it’s money, along with a  4″ Wi-Fi PDA that could be the enterprise equivalent of the Nokia 770 tablet but running the apps you actually use in the enterprise. And those solid state drives; you’ll have to have £500 burning a hole in your pocket just for the drive - and you still have to pay for the notebook, but this marks the start of a real market in serious flash storage. 64GB is still smaller than anyone really wants, but it’s just enough to pay attention to. HP is buying from both Sandisk and Samsung, which means the drives are replacements for a standard hard drive, not proprietary components. And they’re going into notebooks you could do some real work on, unlike Sony’s delightful but niche micro PC.

Whether you measure it by size, revenue, profits, range of products or innovations HP ought to be beating Apple into a cocked hat. But it’s still Apple that has the buzz.

HP’s TV ads emphasis not the products but what the HP achievers - from Princess Fiona to Serena Williams - are doing with them. That’s what matters - but it’s also a marketing tack Apple took ten years back with the Apple Masters - I remember Bryan Adams and Douglas Adams showing off their Mac habit. Satjiv Chahil worked on marketing at Apple before moving to HP and he’s helped revolutionise the image of what used to be a rather worthy industry leader. Apple has switched to showing off industrial design, desirability and how cool its products make you look. And look which of them we’re all talking about.

Are looks everything? Take tablet PCs - I’m travelling with the gorgeous Toshiba R400, all glossy white and good looks, but also a powerful and flexible tablet. Guess which feature draws the compliments?

HP is adding the solid state drive and a sliver-thin battery to its 2710p tablet - I had to think three times to remember the name after talking about it all day and that says something - deliverying10 hours of battery life in something lighter than the R400. The screen is exactly the same size - 12.1″ widescreen - but a superslim bezel makes it look smaller. It has more ports than the R400 - and they bulk large all over the edges. Put the two of them side by side and the R400 looks Apple stylish; the 271p looks like a geek system that needs to go through one more design rev to bring out its inner beauty.

The R400 has the same viscerable desirability as the iPhone or the Blackberry Pearl. That tells you nothing about which is the better machine or whether the 2710p finally delivers a replacement for the beloved TC1000 and TC1100 where HP pioneered the tablet category. But it does tell you that Apple has succeeded in making us think good technology is only skin deep.
-Mary leaving New York for Seattle

I’ve just spent a few days in sunny San Jose and a surprisingly sunny San Francisco (Mark Twain is reputed to have described a San Francisco summer as “the coldest winter I’ve ever had”) talking to what’s possibly Silicon Valley’s oldest up and coming little software company.

You probably know them, as their software’s going to be on your PC – whether it’s a Windows box, a shiny Mac OS X machine, or a sleek utilitarian Linux workstation. It might be surprising to hear Adobe described as a start-up, but that’s the feel I get from the folk who’ve just managed to pull off one of the most successful mergers in the history of IT.

Most pundits would have written off Adobe’s merger with Macromedia as a disaster well on the way to happening. After all, these were two companies with a very different ethos, both damaged by the dotcom crash. They’d been vicious competitors, firing off lawsuits, and building applications that directly targeted each other’s sweet spots.

That was yesterday.

Today the new Adobe is a company that’s been refreshed by the merger, and one that’s about to take on the biggest guys on the block – both Apple and Microsoft (adding IBM and Sun into the mix for further entertainment value). It’s planning on doing it with a surprisingly simple concept – turning the ubiquitous Flash player (now on more than 90% of PCs) into a lightweight, cross-OS application platform. Installed with Microsoft and Apple’s browsers, Flash is about to become the IT industry’s most daring Trojan horse.

Adobe’s already used it to deliver its own video conferencing applications, and Macromedia’s Central was an experiment that showed what developers would expect from a Flash-based application platform. There’s been a lot of success with Flex, a developer-centric version of Flash that throws away the timeline in favour of a more understandable state-based approach to application development. Flex is already delivering many effective web applications – including Yahoo!’s Maps. There’s just one problem with Flex (and other Web 2.0 toolkits): the browser.

It’s time, as Adobe might put it, for a breath of fresh AIR. Web 2.0 was only the warm up – the real deal is bringing web applications outside the browser, and turning them into desktop applications. The current beta of AIR is an impressively small piece of code, and it can host AJAX JavaScript applications and Flash applications built using Adobe’s Flex development tools. There’s even a SQLlite database for persistent data. You can build AIR applications from Flash CS3 or Dreamweaver – or if you don’t want to be tied in to Adobe’s design and development tools, you can use my current web development tool of choice: the free Eclipse-based Aptana JavaScript development tools.

I’ve been playing with some AIR applications (as well as building some of my own), and one of the outstanding implementations is eBay’s San Dimas tool. EBay’s in an awkward position – its web site is starting to show its age, but it’s also a tool that thousands of people use as the basis of their businesses. It can’t redesign the site taking advantage of Web 2.0 without alienating at least a large percentage of its most lucrative users. Caught between a rock and a hard place, eBay has been working with design consultancy Effective UI to build a new application on top of its existing web services. Instead of working with OS-specific development tools, eBay’s been able to use one codebase and AIR to produce an application for both OS X and Windows that can help you buy (and eventually) sell online. The result will be a desktop application for eBay’s casual users that lets them search, bid, and make a few sales. The old web site can continue running for years, with pro users happily using their custom tools and power selling features.

There’s more to come with AIR – as well as working with web APIs it can use your PCs file system, and some of your attached hardware. There are still some kinks to be ironed out here, both in warning users just what their latest applications want to do with their systems, and in making sure that files stay in a secure user space.

Developers are going to want more from the AIR development tools, too. The current state model in Flex Builder is a start, but if we’re to build complex user interfaces in AIR, we’re going to need a better way of showing just how states relate to each other, and how applications translate between states.

The best thing about AIR is that it isn’t alone. Sun is developing a lightweight Java client framework, while Google’s Gears let browser applications run online. There’s plenty of competition here, and plenty of choice. It’s a diverse ecosystem that should drive development all the faster. Cross platform client development will be simplified – making it easier and cheaper for businesses to roll out new desktop applications.

It’s a brave new world, and one that’s turned an old man of the industry into a dynamic start up. Let’s see what it does to everyone else.