Love the Wikipedia!

Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Wikipedia is an "open source" internet encyclopedia, and blows Britannica away. My favorite use for it is pulling down definitions of new slang that comes my way, always useful in making dialogue sound more "real." Never be clueless again!

Not good enough

Want a Treo 650? Better Sprint | CNET News.com: "Asked why the Treo 650 does not include support for Wi-Fi, PalmOne President Ed Colligan said the company will eventually make its add-on Wi-Fi card work with the Treo 650. However, he said the company still has to write drivers to make that possible, meaning Wi-Fi support won't be there when the device launches. 'We do plan on bringing that out,' Colligan said."

Here's the problem with that. The Treo 650 only has 20MB (!) of usable memory internally. For most people, it wouldn't be too big a deal to just slap a 1GB SD card (as low as $72 at NewEgg) in and run most stuff from the card with ZLauncher. But the game changes if you have to remove that card every time you want to use WiFi.

Sprint has an exclusive on the Treo 650 this year, so there is hope. If Sprint finishes upgrading their data network from 2.5G 1xRTT to 3G evDO, then you won't need WiFi with the Treo 650. You'll have 2.5 megabit anywhere.

Neal Stephenson Interview at /.

Mr. Stephenson answers 10 12 questions. Among them is an attempt to answer why sci-fi writers get no respect.

NaNoWriMo: Use Blogger!

I hope that title was inscrutable enough. NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month (November). The deal is that you write a novel with a length of 50 000 words. That's it. You can post excerpts to your account that you set up at nanowrimo, and you self-report the words you've written. It doesn't have to be pretty or coherent. It just has to be 50k words. It's all about karma. Now blogger has decided to add to the mix by encouraging users to sign up at nanowrimo and to use blogger as the text editing tool.

Which could be somewhat of a windfall for Blogger (google). If I were running things I would archive all of you, sort through the messes, back the horses most likely to win, and parlay this mash of words into a publishing proposition. Start a whole line of digital products: GoogleWares, which would include GoogleBooks. Even more interestingly, share ad revenues with the authors whom Google promotes, since to read the texts you'll have to go through Google. So, you'll have a bunch of authors who will never be printed, but by virtue of having been vetted by Google, they will see some revenues by people clicking through on the ads displayed with the novels. Imagine a knife murder scene, with an AdSense ad on the side for Henckel knives.

Publishers Cafe Blog -- www.PublishersCafe.net

Publishers Cafe Blog -- www.PublishersCafe.net

"Author James Michener liked to write large books, he said, because once, when standing in a store that was being robbed, he was shot in the posterior, and the bullet passed through his back pocket and then lodged on page 450 of his novel.

Ebooks can't do that. But here are some beneficial features of electronic publications that make ebooks an invaluable supplement to the paper-based books we know and love."

This reader runs WinCE 3.0

This is the machine I want! I wonder if it can sync via ActiveSync. It has a 600x800 screen, serial, USB, modem ports, and a PCMCIA slot. Although it doesn't have eReader (and it's strange they do not include MS Reader either), they include uBook and MobiReader. If it essentially runs as a PocketPC, this is THE device for e-book lovers!

Update: Oops. Spoke too soon; the machine costs $750 (that's quite a cold shower upon my ardor.)

Yowza! The Pepper Pad!

Pepper Pad 2 Specification - Pepper Computer

When I decide to upgrade from the Zodiac, this may be the way to go. Linux, SVGA screen, lotsa RAM, 20GB HD, and so much more. This is the most perfect tablet I've yet seen. Wow.

The Rise of Paper

A friend of mine relayed some interesting news from Franklin/Covey today. They are selling more paper planners than they have in years, while their PDA sales have dropped to a trickle.

I think I know the reason for this. And no, before I even get started, PDAs are not dead. The handheld computer is every bit as useful as ever, probably moreso as they get more powerful. The reason so many are going back to paper is psychological, not technical.

Think about a typical Franklin planner. It's big, heavy, bound in sturdy leather. The paper is, well, paper. It'll last for decades with no care or maintenance. And even though readers of this column know that if you lose a paper planner, you're screwed, where if you lose a PDA, all your data is backed up on your PC, most people don't see it that way. In 2004 America, we're in a war that seems endless, caught in a recession with less buying power than we had last year, and a lot of us are scared. A solid, leather-bound planner has a sense of permanence that they don't get from computers.

I also think most buyers don't realize what handhelds can really do. I recently taught a series of classes for a Fortune 500 company on PDA basics. We gave them brand new Zire 31s and spent a few hours putting them through their paces. In each one of the classes, less than 10% of the class knew Palms could be used for word processing, spreadsheets, email, or audiobooks. The point I drove home at the start of each class was that these were no "digital daytimers" and that to get the best use out of them, the students should think of them as what they were: truly personal computers. A $150 Zire 31 has more computing power than a first generation Pentium, and I made sure they knew it.

So how can the handheld industry turn around this retrenching? By putting more advertising muscle behind what no one thinks of using a PDA to do, things simply not possible with paper planners.

Why the T5 Makes Sense

Okay, so I'm not impressed with PalmOne's Tungsten T5. But you know what? I completely understand it.

The initial reaction to the T5, from myself and most people I've talked to, was, "So they take a Tungsten E, slap a better battery and Bluetooth in it, do a little gimmick trick with flash memory, and suddenly this is their top-of-the-line flagship model? Crazy!" But it's not really that crazy, if you understand the thinking at PalmOne.

For a long time, we've been thinking that the Tungsten line was the "high-end" and the Zire was the "low-end", with the Treos over "there" doing that smartphone thing. This is bad thinking, and PalmOne has said so all along. The proof is right in front of us. The Zire 72 is more advanced than the Tungsten E, and PalmOne told us right up front that this could happen. The Tungsten line is corporate-oriented. The Zire line is consumer-oriented. And the Treo line is phone-oriented.

The T5 looks like a disappointment as PalmOne's new flagship product, only that's not what it is. It's just the top of the business-oriented line. The new PalmOne flagship is the Treo 650.

We're seeing the beginning of a new strategy from PalmOne. Staggered releases instead of simultaneous (the T5 today, the Treo 650 October 25, and the Tungsten C2 later this winter), and a focus on the "connected" market. The new Treo will be the "darling" of PalmOne, at least for a while. The T5 is not much more than the stopgap it appears to be. PalmOne has said for over a year now that they believe that smartphones are the future and it makes sense for them to start de-emphasising handhelds.

So where's the super-cool, Cobalt-based, WiFi-enabled handheld so many power-users have been lusting for? It could be the new C2. I'm starting to hear rumors of a C2 release this winter from other retailers. Details have been nonexistent, but here's my prediction for the next Tungsten C:

• Casing and keyboard identical to an antenna-less Treo 650
• New PalmOne MultiConnector
• 320x320 screen
• 256MB of flash, set up identical to the T5
• WiFi and probably Bluetooth
• 1900mAH battery
• Cobalt 6.0
• $499.99
  

Underwhelmed - The Tungsten T5

I had high hopes for the T5. I really wanted to like it. But really. This is it?

Let me say this up front. With the T5 on the market, the Tapwave Zodiac is still the best Palm Powered device on the market. Why? Because with one notable exception, it does everything the T5 does, only better.

Let's look at the exception first. The T5 is the first PDA to use nonvolatile flash memory. It took until now for this to be financially viable, and I look forward to more devices using flash in the future.

Now let's look at how that flash is actually used. The device has 256MB, of which 41MB goes to partitioning and the system heap. That leaves 215MB. Of that, 160MB is a dedicated Flash Drive, which shows up as a VFS volume in the system. That leaves only 55MB of actual PalmOS system memory. While you can store ebooks, dictionaries, Audible books and music on the Flash Drive, the "256MB" T5 really has about the same memory available for programs and data as the T3, and half that of the Tapwave Zodiac.

The unique gimmick feature of the T5 is that 160MB Flash Drive can be used on any PC or Mac just like the keychain drives so common now. You just have to enable "Drive Mode" on the T5 and plug it in to a USB port with the USB cable you're also carrying around. Even if this weren't lame for making you lug around a cable, it's only 160MB! As many of my regular readers know, I work at CompUSA. We sell 256MB flash drives on sale for $50. On sale days, even 1GB flash drives sell for under $100. So PalmOne really expects people to pay $400 for a 160MB flash drive?

The T5 also introduces the new Multi-Connector, the successor to the Palm Universal Connector as PalmOne's proprietary, only-buy-our-brand-accessories connector. It would seem that PalmOne's brief flirtation with the standard five-pin Mini-USB connector and standard round DC power jacks was just a low-end, cost-saving thing. They don't actually plan on passing on the savings and convenience of using industry standards to the customer. The Treo 650 will also sport this new "innovation."

The T5 looks a lot like the runaway-success Tungsten E, but a darker gunmetal gray color. It's a plastic housing, making the T3 the last of the metal-bodied Palms. It's a bit thicker than the E, probably to make room for the 1300mAH battery. While this is about half again the size of the T3's battery, it's still smaller than the 1540mAH battery in the Zodiac. It comes with Bluetooth, but no WiFi, so you can spend even more money on PalmOne's WiFi SD card.

This would have been a stellar E2, but as the flagship of the PalmOne line, it's just a lackluster disappointment. The sad thing is that the PalmOne faithful in the web forums (a decided minority after this announcement) sound remarkably like Republicans after the first Bush/Kerry debate*. They're resigned, apologetic. "Yeah, we know this was a dud, but we'll do better next time." The question is, will there be a next time? Tapwave, HP and Dell are going to slaughter the T5 on either price or features. We know PalmOne is focused on the Treo, but are they really ready to make their flagship product a smartphone?

* I tried to keep mobile tech and politics separate now that I have LiberalMedium.us, but a good analogy is a good analogy.

Pile it on

The first impressions of the new Tungsten T5 rates a ho-hum from various pundits. One developer, Paul Nevai, wrote the T5 rates as useless for him since it continues to lack Wi-Fi. From readers of WOYP to various techheads, the verdict for PalmOne is too little, too late, and for too much. I tried to take the opposite view, because what I wanted was so little: a 320x480 screen in a workpad format -- no clam shell, no slider. But I find myself piling it on, that PalmOne had misfired.

The unit has 256 MB of RAM -- non-volatile, no less. The purpose of this gimmick is that the device is meant to be used as a portable storage device (termed "Drive Mode"); any SD memory card that is inserted into the unit will appear as a drive when the T5 is plugged into a computer, along with the 160 MB set aside as card storage (the T5 also treats is as a separate, "external" memory). This means that one does not need conduits anymore to sync to the SD card; one can copy files directly using File Explorer onto these drives. The unit can be plugged directly into a USB port, obviating the need for PalmDesktop software. About 55 MB is reserved for users and the remaining 40 MB is used as heap memory.

That is a great advance in how memory cards are treated on PDAs. But that's the only innovation on the machine. The form-factor has been what various PDA users have clamored for; it includes BlueTooth; it has a half-vga screen; it has only a single SD slot. This, unfortunately, is everything the Zodiac 1 already has, and for $300, instead of the $400 the T5 costs. If part of the internal memory is to be treated like a memory expansion card, then I might as well just buy the cheaper Zod1 and add an SD card, with one slot leftover for expansion. As a matter of fact, I did just that.

For $500, I can buy one of the new VGA PocketPCs. Here, I think PalmOne didn't realize that it landed on the downside of the marginal cost of upgrade divide. For $100 more, I can get a VGA PocketPC, that has 2 expansion slots, and in one case, a 1.3 megapixel camera. For $100 less, I can get a PalmOS machine (the Zod1) that has everything the T5 has. For the same price, I can get the same PalmOS machine (but the Zod2 has 2 expansion slots) or a PocketPC (also with 2 expansion slots, albeit with a quarter-VGA screen.) If Dell comes out with their putativeVGA machine, the X50, and knowing Dell, they'll likely put it at the lowest price point possible - $450 - then the T5 is dead in the water.

The T5 is too little, too late. Aside from the WiFi or Bluetooth question, nothing else in the unit recommends itself as being superior to the competition. It is a "yet another" PDA. It could have distinguished itself on price: $300-$350 range. And I think $350 is too much; considering that one would like need an upgrade on peripherals - no more Universal connector! - PalmOne should have had the courtesy to charge less to encourage users to dip into a molten vat of Tungsten.

However unfair it may be (and I think we geeks tend to think that new machines ought never to cost the same as the machine we're using), I think Kent Pribbernow of PocketFactory made a good observation: PalmOne thinks its T3 is a $400 machine, except that it isn't. I think that same observation holds for the T5.