Live from Austin!

The "cell phone electromagnetic fields are giving you cancer" people have a new target: now it’s hybrid cars that are going to kill you. The NYT gasps:

While Americans live with E.M.F.’s all around — produced by everything from cellphones to electric blankets — there is no broad agreement over what level of exposure constitutes a health hazard, and there is no federal standard that sets allowable exposure levels.

Yeah, that may be because nobody’s ever managed to reliably, scientifically demonstrate a negative health effect from everyday electromagnetic fields applied to human beings.

Testing with a TriField meter led Brian Collins of Encinitas, Calif., to sell his 2001 Honda Insight just six months after he bought it — at a loss of $7,000. He said the driver was receiving “dangerously high” E.M.F. levels of up to 135 milligauss at the hip and up to 100 milligauss at the upper torso.

Who is this Brian Collins? Given the way the NYT quotes his verdict that 135 milligauss is "dangerously high", I hope he’s a scientist. Wouldn’t want to think the NYT was scaremongering, eh?

Let’s go back to 1995 and see what the NYT had to say about electric fields then:

The world’s largest group of physicists, the American Physical Society, has taken a stance on a contentious public health issue by saying it can find no evidence that the electromagnetic fields that radiate from power lines cause cancer. [...]

By comparison, at a distance of one foot, home appliances radiate fields from about 1 to 280 milligauss, the highest figure being for an electric can opener. [...] The earth’s magnetic field, which humans are constantly exposed to, is about 500 milligauss.

Oh well. I guess that means Brian Collins is just a random crackpot with an EMF meter then.

So, if you’re worried about the electric field given off by a hybrid car, make sure you do all your laundry by hand, leave the planet as soon as possible, and for god’s sake don’t use an electric can opener.

Me, I use the phone in the car. I’m crazy that way. Yet my blood pressure has dropped over the last few years. You know what raises it, though? Stupid scaremongering.

I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.

However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.

At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.

I’m by no means a survivalist crackpot–I’m entirely too reliant on modern pharmaceuticals–but the Eton FR1000 is really cool. It’s an FM, AM and GMRS radio (walkie-talkie) with vox activation. It’s an LED flashlight and emergency siren. It’ll charge your cell phone. And it can be powered by AA batteries, rechargeable NiMH, AC adaptor, or hand crank! All it’s missing is shortwave.

In mid November, our contract with AT&T (formerly Cingular) expired. We switched to T-Mobile and got BlackBerry Curve phones.

I was a BlackBerry skeptic for a long time. I didn’t think I wanted a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. This changed when we looked at the phones available. It turned out that the Curve was only marginally wider than the average phone, perhaps a centimeter or so. It’s otherwise comparable to mid-range phones in size. It ends up being pretty much as portable as our Sony Ericsson Z520a phones.

The BlackBerry UI is best described as “retro”. The icons look like 1990s Windows, the text fonts look like 1980s Atari ST, and the general method of navigation most resembles Palm OS. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Starting with the good, the UI is clearly designed from first principles to work well on a handheld device. The central trackball handles scrolling, pointing and clicking. It sits easily and naturally under the thumb. You can do pretty much everything with one hand, including browsing the web and checking e-mail.

This is in marked contrast to the iPhone, which pretty much requires two-handed operation. Windows Mobile devices suffer from having a desktop UI squeezed into a handheld form factor, and also require two hands, and often a stylus. Symbian is designed for phones, but the UIQ interface for smartphones uses a stylus. Overall, then, the BlackBerry works better than other phones I’ve tried when you’re standing in an airport with a coffee in one hand.

On the downside, it’s hard to find the icon you want in a hurry, because of their visual clutter. Perhaps a replacement UI theme would help; I’m a little tempted to grab the theme designer and start working on one, but it’s Windows only. The fonts were initially problematic too; nowhere near as nice as Apple’s, and they took some getting used to.

But when it comes time to reply to an e-mail, niggling issues with fonts were forgotten as I got to grips with the keyboard. Yes, it requires both hands, or more accurately both thumbs. It’s not as fast as a full size keyboard, but it’s faster than Palm Graffiti or Windows Mobile pen input, and much faster and less frustratingly error-prone than I found the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to be. Unless Steve relents and allows a Son of Newton to use the Newton’s non-cursive text recognition, I can’t see it being bettered.

Textual messaging is where the BlackBerry really shines. It’s quite possible to thumb out fairly lengthy e-mail responses, or even update your web site. As far as IM, there’s support for Google Talk and AIM built in, as well as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ if you know anyone who still uses only those. There are third party clients for non-Google Jabber and other protocols, and in addition, there’s BlackBerry’s own BlackBerry Messenger, previously called PIN messaging.

If you have a friend who also has a BlackBerry, PIN messaging is definitely the way to go. The manual doesn’t cover its benefits, so I’ll digress a little here. Unlike other IM systems, PIN messaging is tied to the BlackBerry device by a unique ID. You connect with another person initially by sending them an invite via their BlackBerry-specific e-mail address, or any other address they access via BlackBerry e-mail. When they reply, their device records the device ID you sent, and sends you theirs.

The primary benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s push-based. The recipient doesn’t need to be logged in. If their phone is switched off, the message will be queued until they log on.

The second benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s reliable. Unlike SMS, messages don’t get randomly dropped. In addition, you get delivery confirmation automatically for every message: when you hit enter, the line you typed appears in the transcript with a small icon next to it indicating that the message is going out over the network. When your device receives positive confirmation that the recipient’s device has displayed the line you sent, the icon changes.

If that’s not enough, there’s a third benefit over IM or SMS: there’s a separate “ping” option. So you can set up your regular notification to be something discreet, and know that your spouse can ping you to set off something more noticeable if necessary.

Other than that, PIN messaging has the usual file transfer, allows you to send voice memos, and looks and behaves like regular IM. For us, it has completely replaced SMS, not least because it doesn’t cost 15¢ a message.

One interesting feature of the BlackBerry is that as well as individual icons for each messaging system, there’s also a unified inbox that shows IM, SMS and e-mail in one place. This makes sense, as they all have pretty much the same UI on the Curve; the protocol is almost an irrelevant detail. I believe that if you attempt to send pictures via SMS, the phone automatically uses MMS, but I haven’t tried it.

Web browsing is a mixed bag. The built in BlackBerry browser has two modes, mobile mode and “desktop” mode. Although there are references to WAP, the browser copes with both, the mode just determines how the page is formatted for display. In mobile mode it works like a typical phone browser, in desktop mode it tries to deal with things like tables, CSS and JavaScript. Overall it makes for a pretty good browsing experience, as phones go. (If you haven’t tried browsing from a phone, the main issue isn’t usually layout–it’s latency. Each page request takes a ridiculously long time to send, compared to a desktop system. I assume this is something to do with the mobile network.)

An alternative is Opera Mini, which takes the “thumbnail of page with moveable active area” approach to web browsing. It works surprisingly well with sites that the built-in browser can’t cope with, like zagat.com. (Yeah, good move, make a web site of restaurant reviews that doesn’t work with a phone browser.)

Maps are another strong point. There’s a map application supplied, but I downloaded Google Maps for BlackBerry, which is free and offers pseudo-GPS location by correlating your active cell to its geographical location. Accuracy can be as little as 50m or so in cities, up to 1km in the countryside. The Google Mail application also works well once downloaded.

The BlackBerry OS appears to be Java based, and is pretty solid. It’s more reliable than a Palm; I’ve only managed to crash it once, which is comparable to Linux on the N800 in solidity. Initial bootup (after inserting a battery) is horrendously slow, but once running it seems to use a soft power off which doesn’t require a full boot. The UI is generally responsive at all times, unlike some Sony Ericsson phones. You can put the phone into standby mode by holding down the power switch. In standby the screen and keyboard deactivate, but you can still receive messages and calls. The same hold-down-button action brings the phone out of standby instantly.

The one bug I’ve found so far is in the BlackBerry web browser. After a while the cache gets full and slows browsing down tremendously. The workaround is to empty the cache once a week.

The phone shows a lot of attention to the details of how a mobile device should best operate. For example, an ambient light sensor behind the notification LED turns the screen brightness down in dark areas, and automatically turns on the keyboard backlight. The LED itself has behavior customizable through the notification options; each event (phone call, IM, SMS) can have any or all of a user-chosen sound, vibration, and LED flashes. You can even set different messaging systems to have different notification; for example, I have IM just flash the LED a few times, unless it’s a PIN message from the spouse.

Mac sync is a bit of a sore point. There’s a package called PocketMac that BlackBerry purchased and now give away for free. It worked for me, more or less, but had some annoying bugs. (For example, syncing with a subset of address book records didn’t work, and editing records on the BlackBerry resulted in duplicates.) The solution is simple enough: Mark/Space have a Missing Sync for BlackBerry, which makes everything work, and even syncs user pictures so you can see the face of the person calling you if you’ve given them a picture in OS X.

Overall, it’s the best mobile phone I’ve used. Whether it’s good for you will of course depend on your use cases. If you’re someone who likes to talk to people or use voicemail rather than IM or e-mail, or if you have little patience for customizing software, the iPhone is probably a better bet. It certainly look prettier. But if you prefer text to voice and prefer functionality to prettiness, the Curve beats the iPhone hands down. This may change once they stop crippling the iPhone and open it up to third party applications; we’ll see. For now, I’d pick the Curve again, even if the iPhone wasn’t tied to AT&T.

Update: Oh yeah, the Curve is also a quad band phone. That’s de rigeur, so I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning.

When I moved to the USA, one of the first things I did was get a cell phone. I was going to be living in a big city, rothko was working in a different part of town, we needed to coordinate things–it seemed to make sense. We went to Omnipoint, got a couple of phones, everything was good.

A few years later, Omnipoint were purchased by Voicestream. We got a phone upgrade. Still no trouble. Later still, Voicestream were purchased by T-Mobile. Another phone upgrade came and went.

Finally, we moved to Austin. I started looking for new phones, as ours were a couple of years old. The requirements were simple enough–quad band, Bluetooth for the car and for sync with the Mac, iSync support.

T-Mobile had zero quad band Bluetooth phones. None at all. On the other hand, IBM had a discount deal with Cingular, who offered some good phones. So, we were seduced to switch providers after 7 years with T-Mobile and its ancestors. This time a contract was involved. And before long, Cingular was purchased by AT&T.

Our contract finally expired last week, and we decided that on balance, we preferred T-Mobile. For starters, AT&T’s bills are utterly incomprehensible. You’ve probably read stories about iPhone users getting 200 page bills. Well, ours aren’t quite that long, but they’re just as impossible to decipher.

Then there’s the pricing. With discount, AT&T isn’t ludicrously expensive; but they really, really overcharge for SMS, web and e-mail. Plus, rothko has perpetual problems with dropped calls.

I saw a good deal at Amazon.com on the BlackBerry Curve. It meant a 2 year contract with T-Mobile, but I was willing to take that risk to get a good deal. I ordered two phones, 2 years of family plan service, 2 years of unlimited e-mail and web. I wasn’t expecting any problems.

A while later, I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I needed to call T-Mobile to confirm my information. I did so, and was told that I needed to fax them a copy of my Social Security card, driver’s license, and a recent utility bill.

Fax? In 2007? Apparently, yes, a company that sells e-mail and Internet access doesn’t actually have e-mail itself. I scanned the requested documents, found an online fax service, and sent everything off.

A few hours later, I got another call. The woman on the other end of the line explained that I had been misinformed. What I actually needed to do was travel to the nearest T-Mobile store and have them fax in the information.

Annoying, but no big deal. I figured they were just being extra careful. So that evening, I drove to the nearest store and had them fax everything in. I took the transmission receipt home with me. The next day, I called back to check the status of my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told that I had been misinformed yet again. A fax wasn’t enough; I actually had to go to the store and have them confirm the information in person.

By now, I was starting to get annoyed, but I decided to humor them. I drove to the store again, and explained the situation. The store called T-Mobile, who told them to fax the information. So they faxed it again, and confirmed that the fax had been sent.

An hour later I called to check on my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told no. They were refusing my order. If I wanted service with T-Mobile I would have to pay full retail price up front for the phones, and then pre-pay for service.

So basically, all that jumping through hoops had been a total waste of my time, as they had never been going to give me contract service in the first place.

I explained that I had been a T-Mobile customer for 7 years, and could prove it. (I still have copies of old paid bills, because I’m that kind of person.)  No dice.

So, I’m still with AT&T, and I’m wondering what to do next. Part of me still wants to switch, but part of me wonders if I should, given the amount of dicking around I’ve received trying to become a T-Mobile customer again.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a third option. Thanks to industry consolidation, the US only has two GSM providers. So I can’t say “Screw you, I’ll go with the good guys”, as there aren’t any good guys.

I wrote a letter to T-Mobile customer service, but I haven’t sent it yet. I don’t honestly know if I want a 2 year contract at this point. Maybe the best thing to do is to buy a couple of unlocked phones from somewhere else entirely, then go to T-Mobile and just get a couple of SIMs and sign up for service with no contract.

A recent BBC Panorama documentary has suggested that wifi Internet might be a major health hazard. Scary quotes about chromosome damage and radiation exposure have appeared all over the Internet.

Unfortunately, the documentary’s conclusions are junk science.

Let’s start off by noting the inverse square law, a piece of basic physics which applies to electromagnetic radiation exposure. Basically, the strength of a signal varies in proportion to the distance squared.

The people who put together the documentary measured the wi-fi signal at a distance of 1m, and the cell phone tower signal at a distance of 100m. From their measurements, they concluded that the wifi signal was “three times the highest level of the mast”.

Well, no, it wasn’t. Because the cellphone signal was measured 100x further away, it was attenuated by a factor of 100×100 = 10,000×. So an accurate quote would be that the wi-fi signal was “three times the level of the cell phone mast divided by 10,000″. Not as exciting, though, is it?

You might argue that it’s reasonable to measure at different distances because people don’t tend to sit close to cell phone masts, but they do tend to sit close to wi-fi equipment. However, think for a moment about how a cell phone works. Yes, the mast transmits a signal to your phone, which is 10,000× weaker by the time it gets to you. However, you don’t just listen to your phone; hence, it must also transmit your voice back to the network. And the same physics works the other way: the signal your phone transmits is 10,000× weaker by the time it gets back to the mast.

So as you might guess, the radiation your phone emits is much, much more powerful than the radiation that reaches you from any nearby mast. That’s the radiation levels the BBC program should have been measuring and comparing with wi-fi.

While raw power is measured in watts, the relevant measurement for assessing radiation danger levels is the Specific Absorption Rate or SAR, which is measured in watts per kilogram. An adult’s body has much more bulk to dissipate the electromagnetic field, hence it’s less susceptible than (say) a lab rat’s body.

The US limit on radiation from consumer mobile phones is 1.6W/kg. (That’s lower than the European limit, so we’ll take that as our guideline.) The limit for devices like wifi is a mere 0.08W/kg. (Figures are in FCC OET Bulletin 56.)

Those are the maximums. The actual SAR ratings of common mobile phones are well documented. A value of 0.9 is fairly normal, with few phones below 0.5. So already, it’s clear that the average mobile phone actually exposing you to 0.9W/kg is likely far more dangerous than the 0.08 W/kg theoretical maximum allowed for devices like wi-fi.

Let’s look at some actual figures for wi-fi output compared to phones. I haven’t managed to find SAR ratings for wi-fi (if you have any, let me know), so we’ll have to compare power output in both cases. Peak power output from a phone is around 2W, with the average being around 250mW, according to a handy page from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

Coincidentally, 250mW is the absolute maximum power output you can get from my wi-fi router (a Linksys WRT54GS). But to get that, you have to hack the firmware. The default power output for the router is around 20mW, 100× less than the phone. Now add in the fact that mobile phones are held against your head, whereas your wifi antenna is likely at least 30cm away from you at all times, and invoke the inverse square law again. The end result is that the electromagnetic radiation you get from wifi is a tiny fraction of that which you get from mobile phones.

As a UK Health Protection Agency scientist puts it in The Times, “a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile.”

Aha, you say—what if you don’t use the mobile phone much? I’m afraid you still get irradiated. As you travel around, the signal from the nearest cell will get weaker. The phone checks signal strength every 7 seconds. If it drops off too far, the phone sends out an “I’m here!” transmission in order to locate another cell.

Given that each cell covers a square km or two, or as little as a few blocks in cities, taking a quick drive across town can involve your phone transmitting dozens of times. So wi-fi is a pretty negligible concern compared to carrying a mobile phone, let alone using one.

Wi-fi and phones aren’t the only sources of electromagnetic radiation, though. Wi-fi operates at 2.4GHz, which just happens to be the same frequency as your microwave oven. In fact, you may have noticed that your wi-fi signal strength is lower if you’re cooking something in the microwave, especially if your laptop is in the kitchen.

You might wonder why wi-fi operates at the same frequency as microwave ovens. Well, microwave ovens operate at 2.4GHz because that’s the frequency that’s best for heating up water molecules. For the same reason, it’s a bad frequency for long distance telecommunications through damp air, so it hadn’t been grabbed for any major commercial purpose. Hence, it was declared as free unlicensed spectrum for local low-power radio. This lack of regulatory hurdles led to innovation such as cordless phones, wireless video surveillance systems, and (eventually) wi-fi.

This also means that the effect of microwave exposure at wi-fi frequencies is simply heat. It’s not like nuclear radiation, it doesn’t mutate your genetic material; it simply warms up your water molecules a bit. From a scientific perspective, people are having a hard time coming up with theories to explain why localized warming of the body might cause damage. (In fact, it’s reported anecdotally that sailors on night watch on deck during WW II would stand in front of the radar in order to keep warm. They got hundreds of times the electromagnetic radiation warming you could ever get from a phone, yet they apparently didn’t suffer major damage.)

But let’s head back to the kitchen. Microwave ovens are allowed to leak up to 5mW/cm² at 5cm distance. A leaky oven may expose you to 0.256W/kg, at the same 5cm distance, according to measurements of leaky microwave ovens from the Australian Radiation Protection Agency. So at typical watching-lunch-rotate distance, it’s about the same level of danger as the radiation from your wifi router. So if you’re worried about wi-fi, you should be worried about your microwave oven too.

But there’s a much larger source of microwave radiation in your life. It’s called the sun. Summer sunlight at ground level can be up to 100mW/cm² of electromagnetic radiation. So standing outside on a sunny day irradiates you with 20× the radiation of a leaky microwave or wifi router, and a good chunk of it is microwave frequency.

So if you’re worried about electromagnetic radiation, perhaps the rational thing to do is what us computer scientists do—stay inside and browse the Internet via wi-fi, but never emerge blinking into the daylight…

Meanwhile, there are a growing number of people who believe that they are sensitive to low levels of microwave radiation like that found in wi-fi and sunlight. They call the phenomenon “electrosensitivity”. They claim that wi-fi and mobile phones give them headaches, make them nauseous, and so on, after just a few minutes. So, what’s the evidence?

Well, so far there have been at least 7 separate scientific trials in which allegedly electrosensitive people were asked to tell researches whether a mobile phone signal was present. In proper double-blind trials, “electrosensitive” people were unable to detect a mobile phone signal even after 50 minutes of continuous exposure. (Update: Here’s a very recent one.)

And even if they could have detected the signal—which they couldn’t—that wouldn’t have proved that the signal was responsible for their reported symptoms.

So if you believe wi-fi or mobile phones are making you ill, please do see a doctor—specifically, a psychiatrist. You may have a psychosomatic illness, you may be schizophrenic and believe you are picking up radio waves with your teeth, but you are not being made sick by people’s wireless Internet. If you truly believe you can tell when a mobile phone or wi-fi system is transmitting, sign up for a research study and prove it. You’ll be the first.

The sad thing is, though, that there are crackpots in even the highest levels of government. So expect to see more scare stories about wi-fi in the next few years.

I’m old enough to remember that back in the 80s, the scare story was about overhead power lines. They were making us nauseous, giving us cancer and leukemia, causing headaches. Funny how that risk seemed to vanish.

I bought a Nokia N800. It’s an Internet tablet, about the size of a large PDA or a small thin paperback book; almost exactly the same size as a Nintendo DS Lite, in fact. It runs Linux. It connects via WiFi or Bluetooth.

I bought it because I spend a lot of time reading web pages, PDFs and other electronic documents. In particular, my “killer app” was to be able to read the electronic edition of The Guardian with my morning coffee—ideally, in bed.

Yes, there are laptops. However, if you’ve ever tried to casually read the newspaper in bed using a laptop, you’ll probably agree with me that a kilo or so of hardware gets tiring on the arms, and trackpads aren’t conveniently located for use when the computer is propped up.

The N800 is the first portable device I’ve used that has a decent web browser. It’s Opera, in fact. The Guardian’s web site works on it. So do Google Mail, Flickr, Slashdot, Google Maps, and Wikipedia. While the text starts off small in order to squeeze a whole web page on the screen, it’s crisp and readable, and buttons on the top of the device make it easy to zoom in and out. For web browsing it easily beats a Palm handheld, Sony Ericsson P9xx Smartphone, Windows Mobile device, or Blackberry. (I’ve tried ‘em all.)

Note that the N800 is’s not a phone. The assumption is that you already have a mobile phone with Bluetooth; if you want to use expensive mobile data plans, you just pair your phone with the N800. This is an assumption I agree with; in general I want my mobile phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans, which precludes giving it a screen big enough to browse the web on.

Here are some other high points:

• XMPP/Jabber chat client.
• Google talk for voice and video chat.
• Streaming MP3 support.
• It’s Linux. If Nokia lose interest, you won’t be totally stuck; the community can continue to fix bugs and improve the OS.
• Want to run Nethack, SCUMMVM, or SSH into it and explore via the shell? You can.
• Assuming you switch it off entirely, it still only takes 10 seconds to boot. Mostly, though, you’ll just let it sleep, in which case waking up is instant.
• Flash works, mostly. It’s not the latest version, however. (Threadless seems to work, bleep.com doesn’t.)

And in the interest of balance, the low points:

• The built in camera is terrible. It makes the camera in my cell phone look good. Forget about using it for anything except video chat.
• PDA basics like address book and calendar are totally absent. I guess the assumption is that you use online services for such things. However, this does mean the device’s usefulness is totally crippled without an active network connection.
• The Maemo platform is currently in the early stages of its life. This means that OS updates often break existing applications, and the selection of applications isn’t great to start with.
• The handwriting recognition is horrible, at least compared to Palm OS or the Apple Newton.
• No Java. WTF? Even my mobile phone has Java. Maybe this will change once Sun finishes making Java available under the GPL.

So the executive summary is: if you want something you can keep in your satchel and use to browse the web at the café, this is currently your best bet. If you like the idea of the iPhone but don’t fancy paying about $2k and being locked out of running your choice of applications, the N800 plus a tiny GSM phone in your pocket is a good alternative, and has more than double the pixels.

(And yes, LiveJournal works on it. If you must.)

In Part 1 I took a “from first principles” look at the spam problem, and concluded that the only way to actually solve the problem was to make people pay to send e-mail.

Now, it’s time to look at what I mean by that—because there are almost as many ways to implement “pay to send” as there are ways to implement filtering.

This is going to be a bit more technical than part 1. I’m going to assume you know basically how SMTP e-mail works. If not, there are tutorials available.

Continue reading »

[Update: Looking for a more positive story about ubiquitous cameras?]

David Brin wrote about the coming social revolution at length in his book The Transparent Society. Momus provided some handy tips in his song The Age of Information. Now Dog-Shit-Girl has demonstrated the dangers of not picking up the courtesy cluephone.

We live in a world where increasing numbers of people have digital cameras. In fact, in a few years the majority of people will have a mobile phone with built-in camera and Internet connection. This means that if you are going to be an antisocial ass in public, there’s a good chance that you will be recorded, your antics will be publicized, and you will be mocked. The worse your behavior, the more widespread your infamy. If what you do is bad enough, you might get threats; you might find that people recognize you, point at you in the street and yell at you.

You can whine all you like about privacy and rights; it won’t do any good. The Internet and digital cameras are not going to go away. Legislation won’t stop it, the transparent society is coming. My advice is to learn to live in it. People will be able to publish facts about you to a massive audience, so it’s probably a good idea to make sure the facts on offer are favorable ones.

In a way, it’s a return to the past. When we lived in villages where everyone knew everyone else, the antisocial would become outcasts. Now we’re headed back that way; the only difference is the size of the village.

2003-10-11

I saw the Nokia N-Gage today. I confidently predict that it will be a dismal failure, based on the following features:

• The size of an original Game Boy Advance.
• Needs about 2x the pocket space of a Game Boy Advance SP.
• Tiny screen, about 2/3 the size of a Palm device, half the size of a GBA-SP.
• Complicated. I fiddled around with it for a while trying to work out how to make a game start, then gave up.
• Bigger than any other phone on the market, and you’ll look a complete tool if you try to use it as one.
• $300, meaning you could get a GBA-SP, a mobile phone with organizer built in, and still have just enough money for a refurb iPod, instead of buying this monumentally ill-concieved toy.

I love gadgets, but the N-Gage is an even dumber design than the Nokia 3600 or the Nokia 3595. Those at least were functional and reasonably sized, even if their keypads were carefully designed to be unusable.

It’s not just Nokia employing specialists in user-hostile industrial design; take a look at the HP-33s. What’s with this idiotic diagonal keypad crap? It was a pretty bad idea when Atari did it in 1985 for the ST’s function keys, it’s a really stupid thing to do to an entire keyboard.

Update 2004-10-04

One year on, and Nokia are still getting crack-smoking monkeys to design their phones. I think the 7610 is the worst yet. The 7280 at least has the benefit of looking like something from a Gerry Anderson TV series, even if it does lack any reasonable way to actually enter phone numbers. I would have thought that was a fairly basic requirement for a telephone, but apparently not.