Live from Austin!

Joel Johnson, Gizmodo, 2010-02-03:

It’s taken me a couple of days for me to understand the wet sickness I felt in response to all the post-iPad whining, until it finally came up in a sputtering lump: disgust.

The iPad isn’t a threat to anything except the success of inferior products. [...]

This noxious attitude has permeated our tech culture for the last couple of decades, from a half-decade of open-source devotees crying about Microsoft on Slashdot, on toward the last few years of Apple ascendency. It’s childish. It’s defeatist. And it shows a simultaneous fear to actually innovate and improve while spilling gallons of capitulative semen to a fatuous, dystopian cuckold wank-mare. [...]

Apple is selling a product. They’ve chosen to keep it closed for demonstrably reasonable benefits. And—yes, okay!—several collateral benefits that come from controlling the marketplace that services their products.

Three weeks later, Joel Johnson, Gizmodo, 2010-02-23:

If you need another example of why the iTunes App Store’s walled garden is flawed, Apple has been only too happy to oblige, capriciously and arbitrarily removing an unknown number of “sexy” apps without warning. [...]

With a closed ecosystem comes a lot of responsibility. Apple has taken on the heavy mantle of arbiter, ostensibly to manage quality. I can forgive them for that, even if I don’t like it. But the only reason to ban blue apps is taste. And if these apps were a matter of taste, why were they approved in the first place? What will the next set of apps be that Apple decides are inappropriate long after people have spent hundreds of hours creating and marketing them? [...]

Apple has made a declaration: that sex and sexuality are shameful, even for adults. But only sometimes. And only when people complain.

Unfortunately, they’ve accomplished the opposite. The only thing I’m ashamed of is Apple.

Looks like Joel Johnson was fine when Apple was blocking things he didn’t care about, like open source software and apps he didn’t use; but when they started blocking stuff he cared about, like jiggling boobs, suddenly he started to have second thoughts.

He still doesn’t quite get it, though: He still likes having nanny tell him what he can run on his phone “to manage quality”; he just wants nanny to make only decisions that he agrees with. Good luck with that.

Dear Apple,

I’ve been a Mac user since 1986 or so, and a Mac owner since 1990. I stuck with you through the bad years of the late 90s, when everyone thought you were doomed. I live in a multi-Mac multi-iPod household. I even have an AppleTV. Yet I don’t have an iPhone.

I like the design of the iPhone. You’ve fixed all the major functionality shortfalls, like lack of MMS and instant messaging. But your insistence on controlling what people are allowed to run on the device is slowly stifling it.

I write software for myself, and sometimes for other people. I would like to write software for whatever my next phone is. I also have a small Internet tablet I’d like to replace, a Nokia N800. The iPhone could be a contender, if you’d let it run whatever I want. (No, jailbreaking is not a solution. I don’t want to get into an adversarial relationship with you.)

You’ve got a big event coming up on January 27th. It’s probably going to be the launch of the iSlate tablet. It’s more than likely going to run iPhone OS 4. It’ll be your last chance to win me over.

Like many other people, I currently rate Google Android as the OS I’d most like to run on my next smart phone and my next Internet tablet.

See how the preference for the iPhone has dropped dramatically on that graph? See how the preference for Android has almost quadrupled? Sure, some of that is because of AT&T’s network, but a big chunk of it is the direct result of your user-hostile policies.
Even AT&T can see the writing on the wall.

Your iron grip on the iPhone is strangling the device. It’s time to free the iPhone, before Android takes over. You’ve still got the best UI, and you’ve got almost all the functionality–but that isn’t enough. You’re facing a multi-vendor OS anyone can develop for; you won’t beat that with a locked-down single-vendor appliance only you can approve software for.

By all means keep the iPhone lockable to a particular wireless provider. Keep the app store. Maybe even make people turn on “developer mode” or click through a warning to run unsigned software. But don’t keep trying to stop people from running the software they want to run on their iPhones. You’re driving away developers and driving away users.

If you won’t free the iPhone, at least free the tablet. I’ve wanted a Mac tablet for years–but that’s the point: I want a Mac-like tablet. A real computer that will run whatever software I want, not some locked-down piece of hardware that you control. If a giant iPod Touch is all you have to offer on the 27th, I’ll go with an Android tablet and Android phone, no matter how amazing your new UI is.

Once upon a time, Apple developed an amazing OS with a revolutionary graphical interface. They started selling devices which would run this OS. The devices were practically sealed units, and the OS would only run on Apple’s hardware. If you wanted to develop for the devices, you had to pay money to join a developer program.

Some other companies approached Apple and asked if maybe they would license the OS and software to run on third party hardware. Apple considered the matter, and decided that they were so far ahead in user interface and technology that the competition would never catch up. They decided to go it alone, Apple versus the entire rest of the industry.

The year was 1985. The devices were Macintosh computers. The companies who wanted to license MacOS were Philips and Sony. The people who decided that Apple could afford to go it alone against an entire industry were Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Jobs.

Denied the Mac OS, the rest of the industry settled on MS-DOS, PC-DOS and DR-DOS layered on top of one of a number of competing BIOS programs cloned from IBM’s original PC BIOS. Thus there was basically an open ecosystem of devices from many vendors, running OS variants from multiple vendors, but all able to run the same software, more or less. (I recall that the gold standard at the time was Flight Simulator–if your PC and DOS couldn’t run that, they were considered not-really-compatible.)

Apple continued to innovate throughout the 80s and early 90s, but they couldn’t out-innovate every other company combined. If you wanted a pocket-sized PC, you could get one; but there was never a pocket Mac. If you wanted a PC that was portable or had a color screen, you could get one years before you could get a Mac with those capabilities.

The same was true in software. The larger install base of PCs, and the cheaper and easier development process, meant that lots of weird niche programs appeared for the PC that didn’t appear for the Mac. That’s why even today, with the resurgence of OS X, it’s still hard to do CAD, circuit board design, 3D rendering or HAM radio stuff on a Mac. Some solutions exist, but few compared to on Windows.

Ah yes, Windows. Sure, Apple’s UI was years ahead to start with, but over time the rest of the computing world caught up. Windows is still not quite as slick as the Mac, but it’s good enough–the UI alone is no longer a compelling reason to get a Mac.

My feeling is that Apple is repeating the exact same mistake all over again with the iPhone, and then some. At least the Mac was an open platform.

The iPhone didn’t do anything that other phones couldn’t already do; what it had going for it was an incredibly slick UI. But Apple has locked down the iPhone and made it painful to develop for, with mandatory code signing and a bureaucratic approval process. They’ve prohibited entire classes of innovative application, and have a single hardware form factor. Want an iPhone with a replaceable battery, a flip-open form factor, or a hardware keyboard? Hard luck. Want to run Google Voice, a file server or the cult game DopeWars on your iPhone? Apple says no.

Android phones are now reaching iPhone-like levels of slickness. Android phones are being released by HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, and others. There are also non-phone devices running Android, such as the Archos tablet. Every major US cell phone network has Android devices on the way. The dev kit is free, and runs on every major platform. There are also a lot more Java developers around than there are Objective-C programmers.

So once again, I foresee Apple becoming a niche player. It might not get as bad as the days when the Mac had a single-digit percentage of the market, but I don’t see how they’re going to beat 15-20% with closed, locked-down hardware from a single vendor, when they couldn’t even beat MS-DOS with an open Macintosh OS.

Apple haven’t even beaten BlackBerry yet, in spite of the BlackBerry OS’s glaring defects–perhaps because of Apple’s refusal to ship a phone with a keyboard, an ironic move given that Steve Jobs famously ridiculed the Apple Newton by saying “Apple makes computers, computers have keyboards”. In some social circles it may seem like everyone has an iPhone, but the reality is somewhat different.

I’ve been thinking these thoughts for a while, but recently Gartner agreed with me, predicting that Android will come to dominate the iPhone and BlackBerry, because of its openness. Apple isn’t doomed; they can continue to turn a healthy profit with a small slice of the market, as they’ve proved with the Mac. But the iPhone’s days as the hot device where the innovation happens are numbered. Right now it has a lot of software–but then so did the Mac at first, but that changed by the 90s when Mac market share dropped to 5%.

I’m a Mac user. I like the iPhone UI. If they sold the phone completely unlocked, I’d probably have one now, in spite of the lack of keyboard. But instead, I’m looking ahead and predicting that my next phone will run Android. In particular, the Verizon Droid looks interesting. Time to experiment with the dev kit…

iPhone SDK: no wireless network access (WiFi only), and no multi-tasking.

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.

Metasploit on the iPhone:

Every process runs as root. MobileSafari, MobileMail, even the Calculator, all run with full root privileges. Any security flaw in any iPhone application can lead to a complete system compromise.

I really thought Apple had better software developers than that. I guess that explains Steve Jobs’ comments about it being impossible to provide a 3rd party SDK safely.

Yeah, if you made the incredibly dumb decision to have no security whatsoever in your mobile OS, then it’s impossible to support 3rd party applications safely.

More to the point, as soon as someone finds a security hole in Safari or Mail, that’s it—they will be able to pwn the entire system. I’d place bets that someone will find such a bug, sooner or later; and then we’ll see iPhone viruses and trojans spreading by e-mail or web.

As the reality distortion field begins to fade, people are starting to wake up to the iPhone’s shortcomings. I’ve been assembling a list of issues I’ve seen mentioned:

• No SDK.
• No Flash.
• No Java.
• No Bluetooth file transfer.
• No DIY MP3 or AAC ringtones.
• Although the camera takes 2 megapixel photos, the only way to get them out is to e-mail them, which resizes them to 640×480.
• No Bluetooth keyboard support.
• Need a new battery? $80 and you have to mail the phone to Apple and wait 3 business days.
• Poor talk time.
• No instant messaging.
• No modem support for using it with your laptop.
• Recessed 3-pole headphone jack doesn’t work with regular headphone plugs.
• No video support from the camera.
• No MMS (multimedia SMS).
• Glass front invites disaster.
• No unread mark support in mail (IMAP).
• No filters in mail.
• No voice dial.
• Regular SIM cards don’t work, so you can’t get an overseas SIM and avoid roaming charges.

So yeah, definitely not buying one. But I bet iPhone 2.0 in a year or so will rock.

Unearthed via Google Groups: me ranting about phone design and pondering the development of a Mac phone with easy to understand graphical push-buttons. In 1991.

But no, no iPhone for me until it’s opened up and the price is dropped. If I wanted to blow $600 on a piece of overhyped locked-down electronics, I’d get a PlayStation 3.

I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

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.)