Standards for chargers: Thank you China

An innocent question about organizing chargers produces and surprisingly good Slashdot discussion of power adapter standards.

Did you know China mandated USB only charging for cell phones (so is that why iPhone 2.0 dumped firewire)? Did you know there are people representing the charger industry who actively campaign against an EU standard? (Ok, so that was predictable.)

The ecology and economics of physical connector standards are fascinating; the irresistible force of consumer desire meets the immovable object of proprietary advantage and lock-in (the physical analogue of data lock). Consider the interesting examples of HP's printer cartridges, Apple's iPod connector, and the "authenticated" NEC battery.

Even though I wish the USB connector supported 12V instead of 5V, I am very grateful for its emergence as the de facto universal charger interface. I make USB charging support a very high priority -- which is why the RAZR's quasi-USB support drove me bats (yay BlackBerry, half-yay iPhone/Palm).

All very well, but what about China? This USB standardization is the kind of thing Singapore would do (smart, tyrannical), but when China does it they do it for the world -- much as California's emission standards become the North American rule.

Those anti-standard lobbyists will need bigger offices in Beijing.

Thanks China.

Progress is non-linear: Palm vs. iPhone Address Book

My iPhone Address book, with about 400 entries, is pretty darned slow ...

Gordon's Tech: iPhone notes you won't read elsewhere

... The Address Book is very slow to launch (4 secs on my phone), but Google Mobile search also searches the Address Book -- and it's fast...

My Palm address book, with about 600 entries, launches instantly. There's no perceptible delay.

Time to select an address on the Palm? Maybe 1-2 sec. On the iPhone? Maybe 6-7 seconds. (Faster if you use Google Mobile.)

The iPhone has, of course, at least fifty times the processor speed and more than 1,600 times the memory capacity of the original Palm.

The Palm had essentially instantaneous responsiveness from day one. It was one of the design goals of the original team. The Palm was to have instant on, no user waiting for a system response, and no crashes. Incredibly, the original Palm team met those goals. Later ... well, that's a sadder story.

Apple will one day fix the iPhone Address Book problems. Heck, Google Mobile already has. It is a good example, however, of the random walk aspect of progress.

The iPhone does a lot that the Palm never could, but the original Palm did a lot of things well that the modern iPhone does poorly or not at all. Technological progress is squirrelly.

Why the undead Palm is great news for my Palm to iPhone conversion

It's a movie cliche.

The demon is dead and the popular kids have returned to their debauched ways, partying by the demon's grave.

A hand thrusts out of the fresh grave ...

Palm sells 2 million Centro’s - John at myITforum.com

So why isn’t this getting much press? The Apple cult media sure played up all the iPhone sales right? Why isn’t Palm getting the same recognition for selling 2 million Centro’s?

Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) today said it has sold its two-millionth Centro smartphone, confirming the $99 [jf: bogus new-contract price] product's growing momentum with traditional mobile phone users who want to move up to a phone that offers more functionality.(1) Palm is now offering Centro in more than 25 countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia Pacific....

Palm Centro growth has been particularly strong among a demographic Apple wants to own - women.

Now why would that be? What does the Centro do that's particularly interesting for women? What can the Centro do with a core OS technology that was old in 1990?

Is it the pretty colors?

Well, my daughter likes pretty colors, and I suspect she'll still like them twenty years from now. Personally, I like lime green -- it's easy to find.

Obviously it's not the pretty colors. The connection is the other way. Vendors with a product women buy always offer more color choices.

So what does the Centro do that's particularly appealing to women?

To answer that question, let's go back before the Palm.

Those were the days, before Palm and BlackBerry and Windows CE/whatever and Getting Things Done, when the Franklin Planner ruled. Emily and I had a matched set -- burgundy and navy.

Back then, the The Franklin Co sold planners, books and courses to mid-level managers (ie. people without admins) - a mix of men and women. They also sold to millions of non-managers, mostly women, who all had one thing in common.

Complex lives. Lives involving lots of people and tasks and things to plan and coordinate. People who needed to plan -- and who couldn't keep it all in their head.

That's why Franklin Covey's front page still features a collection of purses (bags). Most men have simple lives, most women have complex lives.

Now jump to the 1990s, and the PalmPilot. Unlike every other gadget before or since, it was popular with women -- because it was designed to help manage complex lives. Emily used one until Palm began making very unreliable devices, and blew away its market [1]. (She's been back on the paper Franklin Planner ever since, though she uses a BB Pearl for email and map services.)

Fast forward. In 2008 middle-managers use Outlook and a Blackberry, so there's no opening there for the iPhone or Palm device.

That leaves the non-corporate complex life market -- which is largely female.

So what do these women see when they go to buy a phone? They see the iPhone, which is a $500 technological wonder and a completely brain-dead PDA. On the other hand, there's the Centro, a $300 phone that inherits 1980s technology and the skeleton of a once brilliant PDA design. (With a kb, so the horror of Grafitti Two is irrelevant.)

Sold by Franklin Covey, by the way.

The Centro is the only logical choice.

Two million smartphones is a pretty a nice bit of the growing market. It's probably enough to keep Palm on life support. It's also enough to put a crimp in Apple's sales targets.

Good.

I like most things that make Apple miserable and worried.

Maybe Palm's dead-man-walking act will make Apple decide that they need to add 1980s-class functionality to the iPhone (hint: tasks? memos?), fix their broken-everywhere synchronization, and enable multi-calendar publish-subscribe on MobileMess.

Thank you Palm Centro customers. Thanks for making it conceivable that I'l really be able to one day migrate from my Palm to my iPhone.

Keep up the good work.

[1] Palm set some kind of capitalist record for self-inflicted wounds. It's a credit to the astounding work of the original PalmPilot team that the company still exists.

The descent of the PDA: Newton, Palm, Blackberry and iPhone

I turned into the parking lot of my small neighborhood AT&T outlet this morning, and there was a long line.

I didn't expect that. So, no iPhone today. If Apple is true to form they'll run out soon, and I'll have several weeks to wait. Not all bad, since Apple's initial hardware releases almost always have significant defects.

Apple is not a reliability company, just in case you didn't notice that they've cratered their .Mac service in a fumbled transition to Mobile.me. Of course Gmail was out of order too a couple of days ago. I've got to get over my boomer fetish for reliability, and remember how I lived in Bangkok in the 80s.

My pending iPhone transition means I've been working out how to transfer hundreds of notes and tasks, thousands of calendar items and contacts, and hundreds of encrypted passwords from my Palm Tungsten E2 to some combination of the iPhone and the Cloud. My preliminary investigations on the task side have had grim results.

This is going to take a while. A few years ago I confidently pronounced that I was done with my Tungsten E2. Then, after the initial iPhone disappointed, I figured I'd buy one more E2 -- but that was it. Well, now that the E2's power switch has died exactly like every Palm I've bought in the past 6-7 years I'm thinking there may be another cheapo Palm in my future. Maybe their very lowest end device.

The problem is that from a classic PDA/productivity perspective, the incredibly powerful iPhone is a shadow of my first 1997 PalmPilot/Palm Desktop, much less the uber-geek DateBk# Palm productivity app.

Which says something interesting about the nature of elegant design -- it's always contextual. From some perspectives the iPhone is a brilliant design, from other perspectives it's an empty shell.

No joke. Recently I wrote: "Both tasks and global search were well supported in the very first PalmPilot I bought around 1997 or so. From the perspective of native applications that I need all the time, the iPhone is a large regression from 1997."

Which brings me to the interesting bit of this post. The Palm/iPhone regression is part of a longer trend. The Apple Newton was a very serious productivity/calendaring/task platform. The Palm was an elegant but simpler solution to the same problem set. The endlessly incompetent Microsoft Mobile/etc products tried to tackle the same space, but suffered from truly lousy design. The much-worshiped Blackberry is significantly less elegant and competent than the Palm, and today's iPhone is yet another drop down -- even when combined with the Cloud.

I knew that the 1997 Palm Desktop/Palm device combination was exciting and impressive, but I really didn't think it was the best I'd see for the next decade!

We've just about hit bottom, but things aren't quite hopeless. Even with its currently crippled sync connector the iPhone is a powerful software platform. There once were millions of people who loved the Palm approach to basic calendar and task management. There's a niche for a small but (alas, this is essential) brilliant group of people to reverse engineer DateBk4 (for example), fully understand what it does and why, then to create a truly native iPhone/Cloud equivalent. The people who need this functionality this will pay $200 a year for a combination of iPhone and Cloud software and services. (Free hint, think about the work/personal and calendar overlay problem from day one.)

There are a million of us in the english speaking nations alone. $200 million/year, guaranteed, isn't a bad revenue stream for a small company.

Hmm. Maybe I can find a frustrated billionaire who wants a solution ...

Unintended consequences of the iPhone’s DRM requirements – Apple shoots the Mac

In my real life I’m used to hearing the myths that “software shouldn’t change how people work” and “software should adopt to people, not the other way around”.

If only.

The reality for every product is an ugly compromise between optimal functionality, costs, and dozens of stakeholders. Only one of those stakeholders is you, the user.

In any case, smart humans, and even groups of humans, are still much more flexible than software. In the medium to long term smart users are much happier if they adopt their workflow to optimal software, rather than use crummy solutions that support current workflow.

This is good by the way; when software becomes more flexible and adaptive than humans we’ll regret it.

So, even though I wrote “I will be buying my iPhone in the next week or so. I approach the date like a condemned man!” I realize that I have no choice but to throw out ten years of Palm/Outlook driven workflow for whatever Apple will choose to support.

No choice but to grind my teeth because the biggest iPhone stakeholder is not me, it’s the movie industry. A movie industry with DRM requirements that have led Apple to lockout the Phone cable connector.

Fair enough, that’s the way the world works. Lowest common denominator Apple iPhone applications and alternatives limited because they can’t sync to the desktop mean I need to look to the iPhone’s one strong point – connectivity and a very good web browser.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

The combination of Apple’s lowest common denominator iPhone native apps (ex. no tasks, no work/home calendar management, no global search [1]), and the disabling of better alternatives by absent desktop synchronization, is going to drive me to Cloud Computing faster than I’d prefer.

So who owns the Cloud?

Not Apple. Google.

In the long run, despite medium term anguish, shifting to Cloud Computing will probably be an improvement on my current workflow. It will also put me in a very good position to switch to Android if Google is able to deliver a working version sometime in 2010. In the meantime I will save money by buying fewer Macs, since the Cloud will be providing my family’s processing and storage.

So, things will eventually work out for me.

On the other hand, I’m not sure this emergent solution is entirely in Apple’s long-term interests. Does Apple really want to shoot the Mac?

[1] Both tasks and global search were well supported in the very first PalmPilot I bought around 1997 or so. From the perspective of native applications that I need all the time, the iPhone is large regression from 1997.

Physicians to go iPhone crazy

This is only the beginning, though it was neat to see Epocrates get Steve (Jobs) Note attention:

Epocrates Search Portal

...it was recently announced that Epocrates is one of a limited number of developers who have been working directly with the Apple team to make our applications available on the iPhone/iTouch.  We look forward to making the product available in the near future...

The iPhone SDK isn't officially out until June, so I don't necessarily expect Epocrates before then. On the other hand, they did demo it.

So much for Emily's BlackBerry Pearl -- ePocrates barely works on it and there's some memory leak besides. Anyone want a cheap Pearl?

Physicians loved the Palm when it worked, and the Newton before that. There are a surprising number of physicians who are perfectly happen to program (some did it professionally in prior lives), they'll be cranking out free iPhone and commercial iPhone apps at an amazing rate.

The iPhone software advantage: strong Digital Rights Management

This is sad.

But it must be said.

I am no friend of Digital Rights Management. I don't buy FairPlay'd music -- because I can't play DRMd music on my car stereo [1].

On the other hand, I remember when there was a large selection of games and children's software for the Apple II and the original Macintosh. There's almost nothing left like that today - on XP or OS X. The CDs we bought 5-8 years ago were the last of that wave, and they no longer work on XP or 10.4 Classic [2].

There are such games today of course. They're on the Nintendo platform [3].

Why is this software on Nintendo, and yet not on OS X?

It's the Digital Rights Management. You can't give a copy of your favorite Wii game to a friend. You can't even move the games you bought at work to your home. This 21st century version of "copy protection" cannot be broken as easily as as the 1980s version.

The iPhone, like the Nintendo Wii, has very robust DRM. It will not be possible to download an iPhone app via iTunes and install it on your wife and children's iPhones and iTouchs [4].

Unlike the Palm, the iPhone and iTouch will combine robust DRM with a single contact built-in delivery mechanism for software developers willing to push through the distribution hurdles.

Guaranteed distribution. Guaranteed copy protection/DRM.

The iPhone will have a very large software advantage over the Mac version of OS X, and over the Palm and Microsoft mobile devices that have preceded it.

Ringtones were once a billion dollar industry, though that's dying now. The iPhone software advantage will be bigger.

We'll have to pay for the apps though.

I'm happy to do that. It's just too bad we need the DRM to make this work.

--

[1] Most know this, but it's worth mentioning that AAC is a format and not a DRM mechanism. AAC encoded music plays on our SONY car stereo and our Nokia and Blackberry phones).

[2] 10.5, of course, doesn't support Classic on any platform, so when our G5 iMac dies so will all our old favorite children's apps. My son collects the old CDs in his desk drawer, hoping, perhaps, that they'll one day come to life again.

[3] It is odd that no other game platform seems to have realized that teen players come from children players, and yet they don't provide entry level game software. Maybe the execs don't have children?

[4] On OS X and Vista there is a strong tie between a hardware device and a user identity. Each device must sync to a single account on a single machine, though Apple has screwed up the software/hardware/multi-user integration (See also). Once you start going down the iPhone/iTouch route, you will discover a very interesting set of problems with sharing your music library.

PS. An exercise for the Reader: Consider an alternative path that Google's Android might take, and how that path resembles a future funding mechanism for the New York Times.

Palm OS Obit #245 - and a contrary opinion on the death of the mobile platform

Yet another Palm / Handheld obit, this time focusing on applications: Mobile Opportunity: Mobile applications, RIP.

There are some interesting bits in the essay. Fragmentation of platforms (esp. Microsoft's numerous platforms) made it prohibitively expensive to reach large numbers of users. Java was mentioned in an editorial aside, I think it deserves more attention as a disaster all by itself.

Greedy/incompetent carriers sought funds through "certification", but never seemed to have much interest in building a platform.

I particularly appreciated the discussion on marketing and platforms. I can confirm that the great free websites promoting PalmOS software are largely gone ...

(Elia Freedman): Then there's marketing. Here too there are two issues. The first is vertical marketing. Few mobile devices align with verticals, which makes it hard for a vertical application developer like us to partner with any particular device. For example, Palm even at its height had no more than 20% of real estate agents. To cover our development costs on 20% of target customer base, I had to charge more than the customers could pay. So I was forced to make my application work on more platforms, which pushed me back into the million platforms problem.

The other marketing problem is the disappearance of horizontal distribution. You used to have some resellers and free software sites on the web that promoted mobile shareware and commercial products at low or no charge. You could also work through the hardware vendors to get to customers. We were masters of this; at one point we were bundled on 85% of mobile computing devices. We had retail distribution too.

None of those avenues are available any more. Retail has gone away. The online resellers have gone from taking 20% of our revenue to taking 50-70%. The other day I went looking for the freeware sites where we used to promote, and they have disappeared. Hardware bundling has ended because carriers took that over and made it impossible for us to get on the device. Palm used to have a bonus CD and a flyer that they put in the box, where we could get promoted. The carriers shut down both of those. They do not care about vertical apps. It feels like they don't want any apps at all.

Michael Mace continues:

...I've always had faith that eventually we would solve these problems. We'd get the right OS vendor paired with a handset maker who understood the situation and an operator who was willing to give up some control, and a mobile platform would take off again. Maybe not Palm OS, but on somebody's platform we'd get it all right.

I don't believe that any more. I think it's too late...f you're creating a website, you don't have to get permission from a carrier. You don't have to get anything certified by anyone. You don't have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don't have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won't even be aware that you exist. It'll just be you and the user, communicating directly.
...

Not bad, but I think there's a flaw in his reasoning. He's clearly stating that Palm built an elegant platform, but failed to create a robust business model.

That's not my recollection.

Palm did build a very elegant platform with the Palm III and V, but after the V their quality went off a cliff. Around the same time Microsoft cut them out of the business market with Exchange, and then Palm chopped off its remaining leg by fighting a no-win battle with Xerox over Graffiti One.

As for a developer community, Palm had the Palm Economy -- not a bad idea. I can't speak to their execution on that, but my sense it collapsed because the platform rotted away first.

Microsoft, meanwhile, having destroyed all their competitors without actually delivering anything, developed mad cow diseases and drove the Mobile PC platform into the grave for the heck of it. (Hey, how else can you explain their mobile strategy?)

So now we have the iPhone. The browser experience leads people like Mace to predict that the browser is the new platform.

Maybe.

On the other hand, there are a lot of very, very smart developers who want to create the best possible native experiences for millions of iPhone users. Experiences that work on airplanes, cars, trains and lots of other places where the wireless experience sucks. Sure, you'll be able to create disconnected apps using Google Gears 2009 and Adobe AIR 2009, but they won't have the smooth elegance of native apps.

If Apple can prosper while staying clear of Microsoft's Exchange turf (don't go there Apple, it's a death trap) Mace may discover that he's declared the mobile platform dead at exactly the wrong time ...

Shared family calendars, PDAs and Google Android

A few months ago I tried creating a shared family calendar solution on Google. It didn't work, because I couldn't get come up with a satisfactory Outlook sync solution.

I figured Calendar Swamp and I are the only people in the world trying to implement a shared family calendar solution (including work calendars), but it turns out the "Gphone" company is thinking about this too ...

Calendar Swamp: If my phone could do anything

... About 1:43 into this new video, Nick Sears, the co-founder of Android, the company Google bought to build its mobile phone platform, has this to say: "If my phone could do anything, it would be that we would have a shared family calendar.

Ten years or more ago Palm briefly sold a small device that was supposed to create a family calendar based on individual Palm devices. Shortly after that Palm died.

It's been a long wait and it's not over yet.

Palm - a fiasco in many acts

There are many fiascos in the history of personal computing, but Palm, Inc. formerly palmOne, Inc has a special place in my heart. There's nothing quite like a beer with a fellow geeky Palm veteran, who saw the PalmPilot scale the heights, and fall short so disastrously. There are so many wrong moves, from Grafitti 2 to the Outlook/Exchange data models to the failure to support home/work sync workflows to the quality issues to ...

I think of this tonight as I try to sync my wife's Palm to my XP box (her old PC has been replaced by an iMac). Of course she has a user account (non-admin) and I have a user account (admin -- I can't run XP except as an admin, on OS X I'm not admin).

Well .... the Palm Desktop (version I have, which I think is fairly current) doesn't understand user accounts. There's one set of conduits and one conduit settings. There's one Palm directory, which must be in the Palm application directory if there's more than one user. There's no "standard" way to have me sync to Outlook and her sync to Palm desktop -- and this is with us both using identical devices. Imagine if we had different Palm brands ...

I believe that towards the end of the Palm world, there was an analyst in a dungeon cubicle at Palm banging her head on the cube as Palm piled kludge upon kludge while senior execs cashed in -- knowing that the fundamental issues were festering. My regards, whever you are today (hopefully not at Palm!).

PS. I'll try the Mac Palm desktop and see how that works for my wife.

Lessons in technology: PDAs and the national health information infrastructure

Faughnan's Notes: Technology bites

Another example of why computers still don't work; and a comment on some deeper meanings.

Business need: be able to manage personal and corporate tasks and appointments separately. (Rule: don't intermingle.)

Ideal solution: A PDA/Desktop solution that allows one to identify tasks and appointments as being either work or home related and control their desktop synchronization appropriately.

Best available solution: Run two complete 'organizer' environments on my Palm PDA -- one is the native set, another Chapure is KeySuite. Each has its own synchronization. Integration is limited and occurs only on the PDA.

Problem: Even when the data models are consistent (that's another story, too awful to describe here), synchronization is problematic. Take for example today's story. Due to quirks in Outlook/Exchange I need to change the work desktop folder where I store my tasks.

1. Back up tasks in Outlook to a secondary store prior to surgery.
2. Copy all tasks to new folder. (Don't move, copy. I know from past experience moves are usually tougher for synchronization engines to handle than copies.)
3. Delete all tasks.
4. Synchronize and check.
5. Discover:

• there are two tasks on the PDA KeySuite app that the synchronization engine can't "see". So they can't be dealt with. One is missing completely from the desktop. Not good.
• when I copied in #2 there was an unrecognized filter applied; so the copy and sync didn't work the way I thought they did

Now #5 is a mixture of user error and bugs, but it's worse than that. I know from past experience:

1. In our setting Outlook/Exchange server are consistently messing up filters. Filter settings get lost or misapplied. It's a longstanding bug.

2. KeySuite has problems sometimes with filters -- it's a quirky bug and not replicable.

Fortunately, from years of experience, I know step 1 is reliable and it did indeed work today. So I'll wipe everything out, I'll get the missing task back somehow, and I'll sync and resync until everything is "clean" (for now).

How many people will handle all this? All those who combine servere geekishness with bull-headed obstinacy. I'd guess about five of us.

So once again -- why did the PDA market really collapse? It wasn't Graffiti that killed the Palm. I'd say it was a one-two punch:

1. Microsoft's FUD and well funded market entry incapacitated the few people at Palm who understood what was needed to provide true "profitable value" (vs. "user perceived value at time of buying decision").

2. Without a laser focus on the fundamentally very tough problem of synchronization and data models, the above was inevitable.

Are there broader lessons? Yes.

1. We are ver far from having a reliable personal technology infrastructure. We can only manage simplicity, but the user market demands complexity.
   
   
2. The US and UK are making billion dollar bets we can solve data model and synchronization problems in healthcare. But now I'm wandering into my real job, which I rarely mention on this blog ... This will, however, feature in a lecture I'm giving this Thursday.

Technology bites

Palm is now palmOne and PalmSource - US

My Palm synching had been trouble free for a while. Reassuring to know it's still unreliable! PocketMirror bit me tonight -- all my contacts are in one category.

Some people wonder why the PDA market died. They also wonder why Quicken is fading away.

I could tell 'em!