Go West, Young Blog, Go West!

To anyone that is following along here I am pulling up stakes and moving my blog to my own URL at www.technogasms.com.

My reasons are twofold; I’m using it as further motivation to work hard on updating consistently and as I run another blog using the wordpress.org software I was just getting annoyed by the limitations of being hosted on wordpress.com.

Thanks for reading and come find me at www.technogasms.com.

Droid Shouldn’t

CES has come and gone and it was certainly as many predicted the CES of the Tablet. From Balmer’s keynote through almost all of the coverage I saw there was a tablet in every pot and a slate in every garage.

That’s great, I love tablets and have an HP TC1100 that I use regularly for note taking, sketching and general web surfing. I’m hardly the first to say it, but if HP added touch and put it on a diet down to about half an inch or so it would have a huge seller on its hands. The TC1100 was a brilliant design and it’s spiritual successor was seen to some degree at CES in the Lenovo U1, although I think the multiple OS concept is flawed, it’s missing the Wacom screen and the $1,000 price tag is beyond what the market will bear for that device today.

Now on to my problem with nearly every tablet that we saw at CES; the operating system. Android has no business on a device that is any larger than five inches. I don’t care if it can be done, the point is that it shouldn’t be done. Just when I thought Google’s iron hand was guiding the manufacturers down the “superphone” path and bringing a degree of consistency to the Android Market for developers we see this giant wrench thrown into the works potentially derailing things to a phenomenal degree.

The image of the ICD Ultra courtesy of Engadget illustrates my point perfectly, there is about a 1 to 1.5 inch gap between the icons on the home screen, it looks terrible. I never saw anyone open an app other than the browser or their own in-house developed apps on any of these tablets, but I can imagine that many of them would not scale well at all. As things stand presently there is no way to indicate what device you are using when browsing the Market so there is no way to control whether you are seeing apps that would function well on your device or not.

This is also ignoring the simple fact that the sort of apps you might want on a 9-10 inch device are simply not the same as those that you would want on a 3.5-5 inch device. I don’t really want a shopping list app or flight tracking app on something that is too large to fit in my pocket. This is precisely the reason why I can’t believe that the Apple Tablet is going to be anything so simple as an enlarged iPod Touch, in moving from the pocket to the couch/backpack your usage scenario is changing dramatically.

With a 10 inch tablet it should be nothing short of a full computer. I want to be able to edit photos, I want OneNote or something like it (if you haven’t used it you don’t know what you are missing), I want a digitizer/touch screen and I want solid battery life. Basically I want Windows 7 or OSX assuming Apple has managed to cook in comparable tablet support. Courier seems to be the blessed union of all these features so hopefully the wait there can be measured in months and not years. What I think this tablet should be is a subject for another post though.

To some degree this boils down to not wanting Google spending resources on molding Android to this purpose when Chrome will be here soon enough and seems far better suited to the kind of couchputing that most of these tablets are being designed to serve up. I want all attention in the Android department put toward making it the best smart/superphone OS experience in the land. I recognize that Google has already stated that there will probably come a time when Chrome and Android OS are one, but today is not that day. Do not make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people, down that road lies madness.

My blog has moved to www.technogasms.com, come check it out!

Nexus One and the “Superphones”

We have had about a month of the Nexus One orgy and today is finally the day. Just minutes ago the press conference concluded and we finally now know that the Nexus One will be available on Verizon this spring. We also know that the Nexus One is just the first piece of a larger initiative by Google to bring a series of “superphones” to market by working tightly with a number of manufacturers and these devices will be released on multiple carriers in several countries. It sounds like Google was no longer content to let manufacturers coast with the status quo of Android devices and the only way to ensure that wouldn’t happen was to step in and take a more proactive role.

I like where it is taking them for now, but it does seem that Google is making the switch from kindly benefactor to benevolent dictator with this announcement. I’ll be very interested to see how much Android becomes focused on these “superphones” and whether hardware development outside of this program begins to fall by the wayside. I’m sure if that is the case the developer community will be ecstatic as it will pare down the presently wide variation in screen size, resolution and power.

Lastly I would like to just thank Verizon for finally signing on to something worthwhile and having it apparently go somewhere. After their stupid “Any Apps, Any Device” announcement seemed to yield next to nothing I was beginning to believe that they were just going to forever pay lip service to openness without ever backing it up. I would love for Verizon to take a powerful stake in Android and WebOS and just say the iPhone be damned.

My blog has moved to www.technogasms.com, come check it out!