Live from Austin!

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.)

Earlier this month, PalmSource (owner of the PalmOS operating system) was purchased by a Japanese company named Access.

Access has now announced that the death of PalmOS is imminent.

As for Palm, they have the right to use PalmOS for another 4 years, and that’s it. So, they’ve started making Windows Mobile devices.

So, farewell PalmOS. You were great at first, but like Classic MacOS you weren’t built to withstand the shoddiness of modern software, and your crashes became tiresome.

Now, will someone hurry up and release a decent Linux PDA? I have hopes for the Nokia 770.

Many people wonder why anyone would want a PDA in the first place. Even on Slashdot, every time there’s a PDA story, multiple people will post about how useless they are.

Well, I’ve tried organizing my life using paper, and it doesn’t work. I’ve tried desktop and laptop organizational tools, they don’t really work either, though they’re close.

My problem with paper is partly psychological, and partly practical. The psychological issue is that I have a pathological distaste for any kind of waste. So much so that I keep printer cover sheets and no-longer-needed printouts, and recycle them as scrap paper for brainstorming, ideas capture, sketching out designs, jotting down shopping lists, and so on. It always drove me nuts that if I had a day with no set appointments (not unheard of, even when I’m working), I would end up throwing away two perfectly good sheets of pre-printed filofax paper. The horror!

I also hate rework, like any good sysadmin or developer. Eventually my to-do list would get messy enough that I’d have to sit and write out the active stuff again. That was fine back when I had weekly time-wasting meetings in a conference room, but now I’m busier and working from home I have better ways to waste my time.

Then there is the first practical problem with paper: it’s passive. You have to remember to look at it. If it gets buried under a larger piece of paper and forgotten, suddenly you owe $20 to the credit card company (for example). No, I much prefer a computer that can start flashing lights and sounding sirens when a really important task is getting to be overdue.

The second practical problem with paper is that it’s unsearchable. You can make it somewhat searchable if you have a filing cabinet and plenty of personal resolve, but I’m sadly lacking in both categories. Plus, filing cabinets are a pain to carry around.

So my abandonment of paper for the joys of electronic organizers was a reluctant one. I tried paper, it just didn’t work for me.

The problem with desktops and laptops is that I don’t think when I’m in front of them. Or at least, I don’t think about anything other than what’s already on the screen.

I primarily think of things I need to do when I’m sitting in restaurants or cafés, or traveling as a passenger in some kind of vehicle and staring aimlessly out of the window. My guess is that the Slashdot people who say that PDAs are useless are the ones who are so irretrievably geeky that they carry a laptop everywhere. Either that, or they have the ability to schedule when they’ll have ideas in advance.

So: PDAs—something I started using reluctantly, of necessity.

Now we’ve got that cleared up, next: choosing my new PDA.

My previous PDA was a Palm V. 16MHz 68000, 160×160 B&W screen that could do greyscale in special modes that most software didn’t use. I didn’t particularly want to replace it, but there were a few issues I was having.

First off, the fact that it was serial based rather than USB meant it was a pain to connect to any modern computer; getting it hooked up to the Mac involved a USB to serial adaptor, special drivers, and a lot of futzing with Palm Desktop, and the end result was painfully slow. As a result, I hadn’t synced it in ages.

Secondly, I’d never liked the screen. Going from the Newton MessagePad to the Palm had been a serious downgrade, necessitated by Jobs killing the Newton. I’d been waiting around for some usable Palm devices with at least 320×480 resolution and a 10cm screen, and they finally started appearing in the last year or so.

Other than USB and a big screen, I didn’t really care too much about fancy features; just the obvious stuff—a beeper you can hear easily for alarms, either Bluetooth or wi-fi with an option for the other one, enough memory for a comprehensive GTD list, and maybe a few games and e-books, and connectivity to Mac and Linux.

I did consider the “smart phone” option (again). I came to the same conclusion as last time I considered it: it just doesn’t work. Generally speaking, I want my PDA screen to be as large as possible, and my phone to be as small as possible. Specifically, I want my PDA screen to be big enough to be usable for reviewing an outline of a hundred or so items, and my phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of my jeans. The Treo 650 fails both tests—it’s too big for a phone and too small for a pocketbook. I’m sure it’s just the right size for some people, but not for me.

Pocket PC devices? Yeah, right. Even if I was prepared to assist Microsoft’s plans for World Domination, the Pocket PC is pretty much crippled unless you run Windows and/or Office, and I don’t run either. So Microsoft eliminated themselves from consideration.

Nokia Communicator? Tempting, but Nokia don’t seem to sell it in the USA. Or at least, I’ve never seen one, and I’m not buying one without seeing the screen first.

Psion? They seem to have given up on the consumer market, and they always price-gouged outrageously for proprietary peripherals and upgrades. No thanks.

Sony Ericsson P series? Again, I’d never actually seen one, and didn’t fancy buying sight unseen, especially not after my experiences with the Sony Ericsson t68i. Plus, you know, $700…

Zaurus? Tempting again. I kept waiting for Sharp to start selling the clamshell Zaurus machines. Unfortunately, all they sell in the US is the SL-6000. It’s thick and heavy and has a keyboard that’s too small to use, hidden in a sliding mechanism. I don’t like sliding mechanisms, they’re too unreliable. I met some guys from Sharp at a show, and told them I hated the 6000, and when would they be selling the SL-C7xx series or some other clamshell design? They said that they both wanted clamshell Zauruses too, but the Japanese mothership had decided that we were wrong, nobody in America wants clamshell machines. I wasn’t prepared to pay $800+ to Dynamism for an unwarrantied Japanese import Zaurus re-flashed with a partially translated OS, though clearly the fact that some people are rather puts a hole in Sharp’s official position. Anyway, I waited a year or so to see if Sharp would relent and sell my a PDA I wanted, then crossed them off the list when they failed to do so.

So, my short list of options was: Tungsten T3, Tungsten T5, Sony CLIE PEG-TH55, Tapwave Zodiac.

The Tungsten T3 has a gratuitous sliding mechanism. The slider wasn’t going to protect the screen, and I couldn’t imagine any concievable circumstance where I’d want to make the screen smaller than it already was, so what was the point? The T5 kinda illustrates the uselessness of it. I expect it was purely a matter of wanting to recycle the case of the Tungsten T and just drop in a different screen instead of having to do a major redesign. So, not really very appealing.

Ah, the Tungsten T5. Looks like a fabulous device until you read some reviews. The biggest problem is that Pa1mOne b0rked the OS on the T5 and the Treo 650, so that every single database entry is now allocated in 512 byte chunks, like on a desktop PC. So if (like me) you carry small databases with hundreds of phone numbers, to-do items and scraps of info, suddenly they bloat out to 10x the size. To me, it seems like that rather ruins the point of the thing. Palm say they are going to fix it, but the fact that they’ve given Treo 650 owners free memory cards to make up for it suggests otherwise, and they’re keeping very quiet about fixing it for the T5. The T5 has 128MB, so allowing for bloat of the kind Treo 650 users have observed, it’s like a 32MB machine—and Palm think that’s OK.

Even ignoring the memory issue, though, there are other problems. The T5 has software compatibility issues. Most software developers are scrambling with updates, but good luck getting classic Palm freeware to run on it. The connector for sync is yet another new design, so none of the existing peripherals will work. And worst of all, it has no vibration mode. Yup, if you’re in a meeting, cinema, church or whatever, you can’t have it vibrate instead of beeping for alarms. It’s the same rather anemic speaker as the T3, and it’s mounted in the center of the back of the device, so as soon as you lay it on a desk, put it in a carrying case, or even hold it in your hand, the sound is badly muffled.

So in short, the T5 fails the basic functionality requirements due to some very poor design choices by Palm.

Next to be eliminated was the CLIE. Sony decided they weren’t interested in selling in the US any more. That left the Tapwave Zodiac, and I bought one.

Things I like about the Zodiac:

• It has the biggest rechargeable battery capacity of any Palm device.
• The case is made of metal, not plastic like the T5.
• Because it was designed for gaming, it has two front-mounted speakers for loud stereo sound, and a strong vibration function.
• It has a graphics processor, leaving the CPU free to do actual CPU stuff, so performance is lightning-fast.
• The internal memory behaves as regular Palm memory, with most of the free space being used to simulate an internal memory card. This is important because Palm OS craps out once files get large, so your photos and MP3s and e-books need to go in “card memory”. With the Zodiac, you get some “card memory” built in…
• …and then you’ve got two SD expansion slots, one of which takes SDIO cards.
• A proper navigation joystick and a complete set of application buttons.
• Most color Palm software seems to run, including titles which I know don’t run on the T5.
• Real headphone jack capable of driving a pair of portable Sennheisers.
• It’s black.

Things I don’t like:

• The stylus just clips on the back. I can see that getting lost.
• The sync cable is hard to clip on; it tends to feel like it’s clipped on, only to suddenly drop off half way through a data transfer.
• Case and dock cost extra. C’mon, guys, would it kill you to bundle a cheap neoprene carrying pouch?

Basically, it’s the nicest Palm device I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame that Tapwave’s strategy is to sell it as a game console, because it’s not so hot at being one of those. As a Palm organizer, though, it easily beats the competition—at least as far as the hardware is concerned.

As far as work goes, today was a change of pace, as I was asked to travel to Virginia to give a presentation to a bunch of sales account managers. These are the guys who handle the big customer accounts and keep the million dollar deals flowing, and the company needs to make sure they know everything there is to know about Lotus software… so I was asked to go tell them where they can find everything there is to know about Lotus software. Metaknowledge. There’s more to this nickname than mere whimsy.

I had the option of staying overnight at the conference facility outside Leesburg, but I had been advised that it had highly limited entertainment options. I decided to fulfil a dream and make it a day trip, traveling with just a courier bag for luggage. Businessmen are supposed to just carry a briefcase, but a courier bag is close enough.

I got to Logan at a civilized hour, and made my way through security; the line was short. The long line was the one on the other side which snaked across to the Starbucks counter. They were the only coffee vendor on the gate side of the security checkpoint. I queued for a while, and then saw the sign saying that the espresso machine was out of order.

Well, that was that. I walked off. I needed caffeine, but Starbucks filter coffee is the crack cocaine of the coffee world; charred to perfection, it packs 3-4 times the dose of regular home-made filter coffee. Instead, I found some insipid New England Coffee Company stuff at a pretzel and hot dog stand. It had been formulated on the Dunkin’ Donuts principle that if you water it down and add lots of cream and sugar, nobody will ever notice the difference. Pity I don’t add cream or sugar.

The flight down was uneventful. I ended up sitting next to a dark-haired girl from Colorado who was about to start eighth grade, and was traveling alone. She was reading a book on genetics, which looked to me like an introductory college level text. She was very talkative, so we started chatting about genetics. She was also interested in web development, and told me how much better Fireworks MX is compared to the version I use. To round it off, her favorite subject is mathemetics, though she also likes languages and is studying French, Latin and Hebrew.

I showed her the book I’m reading at the moment, which is a biography of Nikola Tesla. I told her about a few of his inventions, and how bad luck and bad judgement had cheated him out of fame and fortune. She thought my noise cancelling headphones were really amazing; I explained how they work. We chatted on and off for most of the flight.

To be honest, she reminded me a little of the geeky Jewish girl on Malcolm In The Middle. I was overjoyed to discover that young girls like that really exist; I hope she goes on to great things. I almost wanted to give her my e-mail address in case she wanted to chat, but of course people would probably think I was a Catholic Priest…

I don’t remember there being girls like that when I was at junior school. If there had been, I might have shown some interest in talking to girls. I also hate to think what she’s going to go through when she winds up in an American high school. But anyway…

The presentation went well, I think: I was the last person to present that day, and nobody walked out. I wrapped up early, making up for everyone else running over schedule all day, which I expect was popular. And a couple of people commented that they’d been with the company years, and had still learnt something.

The week-long training event has a rather tiresome “Top Gun” aviation theme, so I snuck in some extra clip-art of my own. A slide on getting initial bearings was illustrated by the Navy Avengers of Flight 19, which famously disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle. The new giant web portal for all IBM software group content was illustrated with a picture of the Hughes HK-1, better known as the “Spruce Goose”. Finally, a slide of information about bug reporting and technote databases had a shot of the Hindenburg. I didn’t label any of them, so I wonder if anyone got the references.

I’m now at Dulles Airport. I booked a late flight back, which allowed me plenty of time to chat to people after the presentation, get a cab to the airport, have something to eat, pick up a latte, and settle down by a power socket. Good move—if I’d booked the flight before this one, I’d have only just made it, which would have meant a big dose of stress. As it is, I’m pretty relaxed.

Dulles airport seems to be pretty empty after 6pm on a Monday, which made getting through security a breeze. Unfortunately, I read that they’re going to introduce new rules requiring security guards to check the functioning of every single electronic device. I’m not looking forward to traveling with that rule in place. For vacations, typically I have a PDA, digital camera, phone, camcorder, CD Walkman, headphone amplifier, noise cancelling headphones, and I guess we can add the GPS to that list now too. I draw the line at taking the laptop, though the phone does have a web browser.

I’m also irritated to read that the airlines have won back the customers they lost to Amtrak. Mind you, it probably comes down to price—it costs more to get Acela from Boston to New York than to get a plane. Libertarians will say it’s because Amtrak doesn’t have competition, but I have a hunch it has more to do with the fact that the airlines get billions of dollars more in direct and hidden subsidies.

There’s an Air France Concorde on the runway outside. It bugs me a little that I’ll never get to fly on one. And even after all these years, I can’t look at a Concorde without thinking of Barry Manilow.

The other thing about spending time in airports is that I end up looking at newsstands, which is generally a depressing experience. Arnold Schwartzneggar? Oh, puh-leeze. Already the far right Republicans are denouncing him as far too liberal; I guess they’re still upset that their prefered choice of Austrian to join the party shot himself in a bunker in Berlin years ago.

The flight was delayed. Very delayed. While we were supposed to be in the air, the plane was still on the ground at LaGuardia. I finally got home at 01:30. sara gave me a gentle, welcoming snore as I collapsed into bed.

Well, what a freakin’ disappointment that was.

I joked a while back that since Apple couldn’t shift enough of the current iMac because of the pricey screens, they would probably introduce a new Cinema Display iMac, priced hundreds of dollars higher.

Unfortunately, they did, and it looks kinda ungainly. And that’s it for new hardware, except for a 20GB iPod.

Sure, some of the features in the next OS X release look cool, but we already knew about those. Yes, it’s nice that they’re shipping it ahead of schedule (in 5 weeks), but I do hope they’re not really going to ask everyone to pay full price for the upgrade.

It seems clear that Apple isn’t interested in the handheld market. iPod is now going to let you browse your calendar, but there’s no data input and the screen’s still tiny. The only PDA option is Palm, which hasn’t improved noticably in the last 5 years and doesn’t seem about to either.

There was also a load of wank about how you’d be able to send postage-stamp-sized digital photos and calendar summaries to your mobile phone via GPRS or Bluetooth. Yeah, great. When the Cingular guy said that they hadn’t found a compelling killer app for GPRS, but that maybe this was it, you could hear the desperation in his voice.

Oh, iTools is getting revamped as .mac. It’s going to give you 100MB of storage, anti-virus software, backup software, and a web-accessible shared calendar. The downside is it’s going to be $100 a year. I want to know how much bandwidth I get before I shell out cash for iTools; right now sites get shut down if they get a few hundred hits.

Sara’s Palm III is dead. I decided I could probably upgrade and pass her my Palm V.

However, after careful consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that all currently available Palm devices suck. That is, every model from every manufacturer has some fairly basic flaw that makes it unappealing to me.

Hard to believe? Let’s see…

• Handspring Visor: 2MB RAM.
• Handspring Visor Deluxe: Needs alkaline batteries, no rechargeables. Bulky plastic case. Slow.
• Handspring Visor Platinum: It’s a Visor Deluxe but faster.
• Handspring Visor Edge: Great design, great functionality. Unfortunately, the screen’s 160×160 and only really as good as the old Palm V screen, and the OS isn’t upgradeable to 4.0.
• Palm Vx: Serial only, still OS 3.5, really no better than what I have except for the 8MB. And that’s not worth paying $300 for.
• Palm m500: Great case, great size, good screen, latest OS… Price sucks. I mean, we’re talking about something with less expandability and less functionality than a Visor Platinum ($250), but it costs $400. Sure, I like the aluminium case, but not that much. And it’s still only 160×160 screen resolution.
• Palm m505: It’s an m500 with a color screen for only $50 more. Which seems acceptable, until you see the screen. It’s reflective color, which is the right approach; but unfortunately, you’ll find a better screen on a $150 Nintendo Game Boy Advance. The m505’s screen is murky indoors, and the backlight hardly makes any difference. Plus it’s still only 160×160.
• TRGPro: Yes! A decent screen resolution and a reasonable price. Unfortunately it’s butt ugly and still has no USB connectivity. (And I thought Palm were slow joining the 21st Century.)
• Sony color CLIÉ: The color model with the current Palm OS is only on sale in Japan. The one with OS 3.5 is $400, but there’s no Mac support.

So the best option is $400 for either an m500 or an Edge. I’d probably get the Edge. In fact, I was going to—Handspring were running a promo where you got a free aluminium hardcase with the machine, and that was just enough to make me decide to go for it. So I went into two of the stores where the promo was allegedly happening—and neither of them had heard anything about it. So I went home again.

Of course, what I really want is my Newton back. But with USB connectivity and desktop software that doesn’t suck.