It is all over the blogosphere and the web in general. Smartphone sales are increasing. That must mean everyone wants one. I am not so sure that is the case because I am not so sure that you can count all of the sales of the iPhone and Palm Pre. If I had been postulating this concept months ago when the idea first popped into my head, it would have been based on the premise that the iPhone is not a smartphone at all. It is a media-phone, maybe even a MacPhone (as it extends the OS X experience), but not a phone designed around PIM, which is what I think of a smartphone as.

Months removed from that random morning thought some time ago, I am now ok with lumping the iPhone into the smartphone category. But I am still not ready to say that the recent sales figures are indicators that everyone wants a smartphone. I still take this stand because everyone who has gone out and bought a Palm Pre or iPhone has not gone because they were in the market for a smartphone.

Now, I realize that the trade researchers can not interview every single buyer to find out why they bought their particular phone. And if they tried to take a sample population of iPhone/Pre buyers, and take a percentage based on how that group responded to a set of survey questions built around "Why did you buy your smartphone?", I am not certain that the statistics would have really proven anything against so subjective of a topic.

The point remains that not everyone who has an iPhone now originally went into the store because they needed a smartphone. I have only been asked on a few occasions what the best smartphone for someone is; that they are considering a Palm, a Blackberry, or an iPhone and want to know which one is best. Usually, I am asked if I think the iPhone itself is the right choice in cell phone for them. I strongly believe that these are people who, had I advised them not to buy an iPhone, would have gone out and bought a "normal" phone. At most, they may have gone in for the slew of messaging phones that are hitting the market-place these days.

It is very dangerous for cell phone manufacturers and carriers to buy into the hype that tons of people now "get it" [how to work and live with a smartphone as part of your core digital life**** and then move to flood the market with tons of smartphones. So far, it seems like the industry understands that. There are far more "dumbphones" or "half-smart phones" showing up than smartphones.

There are an increasing number of smartphones showing up, but not gluttonously so. And as the carriers continue to compete with the $99 everything plans, it seems more and more people are becoming less and less averse to carrying data plans on their cell service package. And yes, this means that there should and likely will be a moderately increasing interest in smartphones. Most recently, the fact that carriers are offering smartphones for $99 will certainly help generate that interest.

What is not true is that every iPhone and Palm Pre sale is a unit-level indicator of a person who was in the market for a smartphone. What the industry needs to therefore understand is that those of us who are in the smartphone market, are not, one-for-one, the same population represented in that group that bought iPhones and Pre's. Therefore the features in those phones are not necessarily market indicators of what people want in a smartphone. The final leap to make is to realize that therefore not every smartphone being rolled out needs to have features that mimic the iPhone and the Pre.

Keep it real. Keep the smartphones smart. And centered around managing personal information and data. At least some of them. The movies and music and photos and games and TwitterFacebookMySpace features are neat. They just don't need to be the focus of every new device. Some of us are still focused on managing documents, memos, email, and schedules in a mobile communications platform. Sometimes keeping it old school is ok.
- Vr/Z

There are some people who just do not get it. Normally, this is not that big a deal because the only people they are capable of hurting is themselves. But in this day of blogging, everyone is a news reporter when it comes to tech, and therefore just about anyone can misinform the masses and have some influence on an otherwise unmolested market. This week, for some reason, there have been a slew of attacks on TabletPCs and digital inking in general. I have a lot of opinions on this sport and its growing popularity. One of these days I will write my own rant and get some of it off of my chest. For tonight, I am just going to comment on two, perhaps, critical reasons, that people just do not get it.

The first is this: handwriting recognition really does not matter. I almost never turn my handwritten notes into transcribed word documents. Most of the time, I ink on other Microsoft data artifacts, like my prof's PowerPoint Presentations of a week's lecture, or an email report from a colleague, or on the notes that came in the meeting notice. I also do not want to slow down my pace at taking notes in a meeting because I am concerned about the PC being able to transcribe my writing well. Additionally, I use a ton of symbols, shorthand, acronyms, and drawings that I can translate into things I understand, but will make no sense to a computer.

So a lot of the naysayers this week have been taking issue with TabletPCs because they do not recognize their hand-writing well. And I am saying it doesn't matter. At least half of us who use Tablets do not use this feature, or use it on a very limited basis. Even if it is true, it is not a sufficient reason to declare Tablets of zero value. How often does anyone transcribe their handwritten notes in a college course to a typewritten document? OK; so what does it matter? What I need is to have my notes in my digital notebook for my own personal reference. If I need someone else to read them, I will write a little neater, but I still am not going to transcribe them. I am going to send the notes, written in my own digital ink, directly to my team for consumption.

The second most prevalent argument that people have been lodging is cost. But the analyses are based on apples to oranges comparisons. No one has championed the use of a TabletPC as a desktop replacement for multimedia and gaming. People have championed a TabletPC platform for use as a business and work primary PC, or as a primary PC for a student. In those contexts, an analysis on their value-added must be based on the relative increases or decreases in productivity of the worker or student. In these contexts, Tablets must be compared to other business notebooks in the same **** or other laptops that are perceived as being suitable for student use.

I could go on and on about why Tablets are good (and eventually I will), but that would take days. For the time being, I will simply say that working and going to school on a TabletPC means that I do not need both my laptop and a paper notebook and pens, and post-its, and a calculator, and all of the other crap that litters the desks of the average cube-monster in America. I can also say that I paid the same for my notebook as I would have for a similarly spec'd PC with a similar minimal footprint.

No; a TabletPC would not be my primary PC at home. But that is because I play games, do tons of multi-media, and other things requiring more graphics processing power. But then, no other PC with an integrated graphics chip would either, which is a spec that characterizes most business notebooks anyway.

Let me also put in a plug for a topic that I will come back and deal with in more detail in a later post. People who do not use TabletPCs, are not suited to render reviews on TabletPCs; or MiDs, or UMPCs for that matter. I can not render decent reviews on fuel-efficient, tiny cars, because I do not drive them. When someone is in the market for a vehicle of that stripe, I responsibly refer them to someone else. If someone is in the market for a muscle car that has in excess of 300HP, then I can offer at least some common frame of reference. I know how such a vehicle is actually used on a day-to-day basis, so I can offer some perspective.

If you have not used a Tablet, extensively, then you are not qualified to say one Tablet is better than another. If you have not weighed the multiple variables that go into selecting the right Tablet for your use (screen-size, weight, construction material, utility features, ports, convertible or slate) then you do not know what parameters make for a good Tablet experience or not. If you can not identify the use-space in a person's work or personal life for any tablet, then you can not judge as to whether or not a Tablet will fit into a person's personal electronic schema or not.

Spending 3 days with a Tablet is not a long-term review. If you look around the 'WERKz, you will see most of my opinions are qualified by a time criteria. Initial impressions, short-term reflections, long-term reviews. Checking out a TabletPC, or any other device for that matter, for a three-day stint, makes a person qualified to provide exactly that...a 3-day review. I guess I would challenge TabletPC naysayers to spend a full semester with one in college or while taking a night **** Or 3 months with one at work.

Sorry; this turned into half of the rant that I did not want it to be. OK; so back to my main point. The problem is that most naysayers are evaluating the use of the TabletPC platform (and other loosely similar computing platforms as well) in direct comparison to other computers. Desktops, laptops, and so forth. But those devices are not the sum parts that get replaced by a TabletPC. They also replace pen, paper, books, document review processes, time management paradigms, approaches to learning in the ****oom, sharing methodologies in meetings, Post-it Notes, telephone message pads...I could go on. When you evaluate their usefulness, it can not be in simple comparison to GHz speeds of processors and GB of hard drive space. You have to ask yourself, how would a Tablet change the way that I work? How would it reduce the clutter on my desk? How much better of a manager or worker would I be if every written memo and "note to self" that I generated were in one place? What if I could write a note on this Power Point Brief and send it back to Frank X for updating?

The take-away from this is that there are radicals on both sides of this line. People who are passionately for or against the Tablet form-factor. Just like there are people who firmly believe in or hate iPods; or Windows PCs; or Ford's. As long as you recognize that in your consumption of content on the web, you will be ok. I will say that no one can tell a person whether or not a TabletPC is right for them. I can tell you why a TabletPC is right for me, or what activities I think it helps out, and computing uses where I think it is not the best device. I can tell you how I use it. People need to determine for themselves whether or not these things are the best platform for them given their life****and work-****

If you can, borrow one. There are companies on the web who have loaner programs for you to try them out. Get some hands on time and really give it some thought.

OK, 'nuff said. Good night.
- Vr/Zeuxidamas

Gaming is a strange past-time. And I do not just mean that it is strange because people still ask why some adults choose to continue playing. It is strange because so many people do it, yet there are so many differences in how various individuals go about it. On many an occasion, I have pondered my own Gaming Philosophy. What drives me to the things I do, why I am not interested or concerned about one item when so many other gamers are. One area in which I differ with a lot of gamers is over whether or not finishing a game determines whether or not you have gotten your maximum return on investment out of a title. Is finishing a game really necessary? Should a gamer feel like they have to complete a title before they buy their next one?

Most recently, I have altered my stance on this topic, at least as it pertains to my own habits. Once was the time that I was more concerned about experiencing, even to the smallest extent, the major titles I was interested in rather than there being a minimum amount of their content that I experienced. I was not wrapped around the axle about completing any specific given title. But guess what? A recession will start making you re-thinking that stance pretty quick when you consider how many ducats are being expended on games in a year. Perhaps more of a factor in my life right now is that I am just not spending as much time gaming as I used to. So much so that it has driven me to the point of re-thinking how I go about my gaming.

So I am buying fewer games. My current criteria is that, unless a title is an absolute blockbuster, or a title in a franchise that I have every iteration for, I am only buying the next game when I complete one that is in my current backlog. This has created its own interesting set of behaviors. One of which is the fact that I am now rushing to complete a game at the end.

When completing a game was not a wicket for me to get through before I allowed myself to buy a new one, I took my time to get through the final stages. If I got hung up, I put the game down. If there was something cool to look at in terms of graphics and eye-candy, I took the time to check it out. I did side-missions. I listened to all of the dialogue.

Now I don't. If it is a title where I have played through some of the opening stages before (I have tons of those), then I have been skipping dialogue and cut-scenes. I do not do side missions. The further I get into the title, the worse this behavior becomes. Once I can smell the ending, I get extremely focused on getting through to the end. Where I used to not be concerned about how many levels a title had in it, I now tend to look that information up on the web before I ever sit down with the title for the first time.

There are a lot of things I blow by in the last stages, and I have been wondering if there are things of value in the gaming experience that I am missing out on. I think back to the ending of the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and the very first Call of Duty, both for the PC. If can affirm that it would have been very disappointing if I had blown through the full experience of those two endings. I can readily say that, now that I am trying my hobby this way, which is a model that I think a lot of gamers operate under, I can not say that I am getting more value out of my gaming experience than I was before. I think I would rather play a little bit of the content of a lot of different titles, than force myself through the entire length of every single one I currently own.

A part of me wonders if, at some point in the near future, I should just reset the clock and blow away my entire game collection and start over fresh with 3 titles or so per system that I game on. What would be the most difficult for me to turn loose would be my PC games. There are just so many of those old titles that I never finished that I am actually interested in finishing; or at least getting through a certain chunk of the content.

Regardless, I am definitely feeling the pinch of not having experienced any of the newest titles on the market while I try to slog through my incredibly deep backlog of games. I'll get through 2009 under the current algorithm, but it will bear looking at again in 2010. Music, books, games, movies...there just seems to never be enough time to consume all of the entertainment content out there that I am interested in. I could certainly use a decent clone about now.
- Vr/Zeux

It is a night to revisit a blast from the past (in other words, an article that I meant to write but never got around to). On my mind tonight is the fact that I do not want people to get confused about what I was saying a few days ago about me buying into Cloud Computing. I am ok with my primary data repository being out in the cloud. This is the data repository that will serve as the ground truth that my devices will sync to. That is fine. What I am not ok with is the concept that my PC will eventually just be a collection of silicon, but that all of my apps and other software, right down to the Operating System itself, are going to exist in the cloud.

Last year, a CNET editor reported on IBM's intentions on the PC Market here. It is a neat little concept, albeit maybe one taken too far. I am absolutely ok with this when we are talking about implementing the "software-less" computer at the network level. I would be ok with a central computer at my job hosting all apps, and me simply having a keyboard, monitor and mouse at my desk. OK; that's more extreme. Still, what IBM is/was talking about are PCs that have no instances of local apps stored on their hard drive.

This might work in the workplace. And then, only for the employees that use a desktop and do not travel. But does it hold together when we start talking about laptops? In my opinion, it absolutely does not. Requiring connectivity for a laptop to function is just asinine. When I am working on a laptop, I need to know that it can stand alone as a mobile workstation, at least for a few hours. This includes not just power, but sufficient storage, and local instances of any app that I use when I am at a desk. Until 3G is configured to offer unlimited data connectivity across all of the major carriers, laptops will need to retain enough of themselves to remain useful devices.

What I fear more is that this idea will extrapolate more into the Commercial model, and that these types of setups will get a lot of press and then the market will shift until virtually no desktops are being sold with pre-installed SW. That would be bad.

In general, I am not a fan of the online-only application model. It particularly torques me off when someone refers to an over glorified widget that acts as an over glorified Safari bookmark as an app. The on board code needs to stand alone and needs to be installed on an owner's PC. IBM's concept of computing needs to not happen until after we have sufficient infrastructure to support it. Business-types will get along ok, because they typically have a help desk that can take the information down until they can get someone to physically stop by an assess the issue. Consumers will not.

The largest point is that I can not afford to not be able to work because there is a thunderstorm and my connectivity is out. Lifting the OS and app layer off of the PC assumes 100% up-time of the network it has to go through to find it. When was the last time that that happened ?
- Vr/GJr.

I have heard of these families that have made a Three Bears type of investment in iPods. Papa bear has an iPod Touch. Mama Bear has a Nano. The littlest bear has a shuffle. As a techno geek who currently dwells alone, I guess I have formed my own family o'Pods, albeit for my own use. The GearWERKz iPod lineage is a trace that goes through many hills and valleys to bring the collection to where it is today. What is most interesting, though, is how the collection impacts how I listen to music.

At the top of the heap is the iPhone. I no longer carry service on the phone, so I refer to it as my iPod TouchPhone, or iPod PhoneTouch. I use it for listening to my Protected AACs and watching music videos. I also keep a short playlist of television shows on it. It is the first generation iPhone, so it is only equipped with 8GB of memory. Second in line is my iPod 80GB 5G. It is the longest surviving member of the collection, having replaced my first iPod, which I absent-mindedly left on a plane. Third is my iPod Nano. It is from the 3rd generation of the product, the version sometimes referred to as the "fatty". I use it as one of the two 'Pods I use for working out, and also for short trips. Lastly is the iPod Shuffle. The Shuffle is another workout iPod and replaces my first Shuffle, which I dripped sweat on during a work out and shorted out.

I listen to the most music when I am work, where I wear headphones and listen to music as much as I possibly can to screen out background noise. Even with my own office, my "open door" policy still lets in too much noise from the floor. The 80GB iPod is the only device that can hold my entire collection of music files, which is now around 30GB. However, it also has the worst battery life. I tend to be very poor about making playlists. Since I never know what kind of tunes I am going to be in the mood for, I prefer to just globally shuffle the entire collection at random, and skip a song to move on to the next randomly selected one if the first was something I was not in the mood for.

This works fine for the iPhone, Nano, and Shuffle, all of which are equipped with flash-memory. But the iPod 80GB is armed with a very small, spinning, hard drive. Constantly hammering the HD with new seek requests quickly drains the battery life. These days, despite the increased selection the iPod 80GB offers, it is seeing less and less use.

The one playlist I do keep up to date is my Workout Traxx list. Made for obvious reasons, this is the list, or some subset thereof, that routinely gets loaded to the other three 'Pods. So these days, I wind up spending a lot of time listening to very aggressive music. Because I spend most of my music listening time doing other work requiring some degree of focus, I tend to listen to familiar tunes. The most recent tracks I have downloaded from iTunes tend to get skipped at work. Giving them a whirl usually waits until I am at home or doing something where I can afford to be distracted enough to listen to the lyrics. I also wish I had more time and opportunity to listen to PodCasts. I can only listen to them when I am reading something though, or sitting still doing nothing, the latter of which almost never happens.

I was into music a long time before I ever bought an iPod. Had I not joined the military for my short stint, my second option was taking the music scholarship that I had earned to a small school in Atlanta's University Center. What I find interesting is how my mid-life dependency on tech has flowed into influencing even this part of my day-to-day behavior. I will definitely say that since moving to iPods and iTunes, I have definitely been listening to music way more than before. I am also downloading more music, and exposing myself to artists that I would have never heard before if the only means of listening to them was by buying their CD.

A Digital Audio Player, or DAP, has been part of my kit bag now for 5 years. There is certainly no going back to living, working, and traveling without one. I count my renewed interest in music as a good thing. There are a lot of artistic interests that I left behind in my childhood when I went off to college. If iPods are helping me recapture some of that youth, and having more than one of the little music players further accentuates that effect, then so be it.
- Vr/Zeuxidamas

In a much shorter set of prose, having given a long thought trail on my experiences with the Pre, I should also mention my thoughts about my other Sprint phone, the HTC Touch Pro. A WinMo phone is easier for me to cover because there are fewer things I find wrong with them. I am certain that that particular philosophical perspective on mobile technology is going to get me castigated on the interwebs. I am sure that I am in the minority when it comes to smartphones I approve of. But I insist on my work-week smartphone being for work and not for play.

Most of these comments are based on my write-ups on the Palm Pre. In order to gather some of the context from the somewhat choppy **** you may need to briefly skim one or two of those posts. Sorry.

Keyboard: the HTC TouchPro has an excellent hardware keyboard. While Blackberry keyboards used to be the bees knees for me, the recent ergonomic change in the Blackberry Curve series has made those keyboards more narrow, making it tougher for my fat fingers to fly across the buttons. The Pro's keyboard is provided in a landscape orientation much more suited to my large hams. Additionally the five-row layout means having to hit the shift and Fn keys less. It even has a Tab key that acts just like a normal PC's keyboard would, jumping you to the next field of a form in a web-browser.

Battery life is bad. My TouchPro and my Pre are currently battling it out for the worst battery life of them all. I have purchased expanded capacity batteries for the Pro just like I have for the Pre. The Pro's were bulkier than the stock battery and and so came with a custom battery cover to replace the stock cover. This also means that rubberized protective skins for the Pro will not fit when the expanded battery is installed. However, I am still able to use the horizontal leather holster I bought for its predecessor, an AT&T Tilt.

I mentioned in my Palm Pre review about why I insist on a WinMo phone for my work-day life. One of the reasons is that I can write on it, an absolute must in a work-day life that frequently has me on the move, away from my desk phone and TabletPC, and able to speak to some of my guys for only seconds at a time. Another reason is that, good or bad, I need tight integration with MS Office products, and preferably out of the gate, without me having to download third party apps or monkey with the phone. Because I am also a TabletPC user, that means I need integration with MS OneNote, which is only offered on WinMo phones.

The speakers on the HTC Touch Pro are adequate. I would not hold a stand-up teleconference on one like I used to be able to do on my Blackberry 8700c, but I do not have to put the speaker right next to my hear if someone is on speakerphone like I do with the iPhone. I have not used the Pro for prolonged music-playback. I have watched some videos that I recorded on my point-and-shoot camera in an environment without a lot of ambient noise and the volume levels were fine. If you are going to do a lot of media on the TouchPro, synchronization with Windows Media Player is as clean as it has ever been so your needs should be well served.

Accessories for the TouchPro are not as abundant as they were for the Tilt. There is only one case I have found for a phone fitted out with an extended battery, and it is not one that I would use. Similarly, I have only found one skin for it other than the one I was able to pick up right in the Sprint store. There is not even a variant of the poorly designed cradle that I was able to find for the Pre available for the TouchPro. There might be one or two accessories that I have missed because there are a lot of variants of the TouchPro, and some have slightly different form factors when it comes to their edges and such. So I have only searched specifically for Sprint TouchPro accessories. I have fitted myself out with two extended batteries and two regular batteries and the car charger. I am travelling less these days, so the time when I needed every cell phone accessory under the sun may have passed and this set of gear should be enough.

I am not as fond of the Windows Mobile Device Center (deployed as part of Win Vista and Win7) as I used to be of Active Sync (WinXP and earlier). WMDC tends to do things in a more automated fashion and reduces your level of fine control. I had trouble setting up the Pro on my HP 2730p, which runs Windows Vista Business because it insisted on trying to sync to everything the first time around. This despite the fact that I configured the phone and PC to only sync Tasks and Files. Additionally, configuring which machine wins in the event of a PIM file conflict is outside the boundaries of completely manual control, which makes a little nervous each time I connect the TouchPro to my TabletPC.

The TouchPro is still centered predominantly around syncing the device to a local PC. However, both Google and Microsoft seem to have found middle ground in not restricting WinMo 6.1 phones to that regime. In all honesty, I could get by with never connecting my TouchPro to a PC. Most of the time that I do it is to transfer pictures off of the phone, or to sync the numbers of memos that I keep in MS Word format on the phone.

There are Evernote and Twitter apps for Windows Mobile phones that I use on the TouchPro, so I am able to keep my posts on my micro-blog and my thoughts as collected in my Evernote notebook accessible at all times. Because most of my memos these days are done in MS Word, I am able to store them on my NAS and work with them from any PC. Most of these docs are the non-cloud data items that I retain within my local control as I discussed in the Pre review (part III).

As far as the GUI, this is where the most people will likely have gripes with my approval of the Windows Mobile 6.1 Top End, and HTC's TouchFlo layer that it deploys on top of it. There are tons of ways to configure your Program access icons on the TouchPro, so I do not have the problem that I have with the Pre and the fact that it only presents 4 app icons on the very top layer that is presented to the operator.

I have no problem clearing alerts on the TouchPro. I will admit that there are times that the interface seems to lock up, or at least not respond to input via the touch-screen. But I have experienced mobile phone OS lockups since I got my first Blackberry. I can not say that they are any more frequent on the TouchPro. In fact, I would have to evaluate that it happens less frequently on the pro than it does on the Pre or the iPhone.

One of my pet peeves is not being able to configure a preferred filter in my contacts list so that it will always come up displaying my Personal contacts or some other filter choice. But at least it has filters, unlike the Pre. I will admittedly declare that the iPhone has the best implementation of this on the market. However, I do not have as low an opinion of the Contacts app on the TouchPro as I do of the Pre because when you scroll down on the TouchPro, it jumps letters of the alphabet the same way an iPod click-wheel does when you scroll quickly. So moving through letters of the alphabet is quicker and has a more visible indicator when I am driving. Also, you can scroll the Contacts on a TouchPro by just clicking down on the hardware center-wheel. This is easier to do while driving and one-handed than flicking the screen on the Pre. Also, the TouchPro has a front-end that allows you to designate favorites and have their picture as a big button you can push on the touch-screen to dial.

I have also lost the partnership between the phone and Google on a couple of occasions, just as I have seen once on the Palm Pre. However, this has occurred in the course of changing my login data on my Google account, and then once when setting the phone up to sync with a different PC. Another annoyance of contacts and cloud computing with the TouchPro, though, is that Outlook categories for Contacts and type designations in Google Contacts do not necessarily translate one-for-one. I am still incrementally monkeying around with a few contacts each day to get the Contacts to filter on the right categories, but it is proving a losing battle.

Another thumbs up for the TouchPro and Sprints 3G network connectivity. Bravo.

I have experienced no other incompatibilities between the TouchPro and Google than the aforementioned categorization of Contacts and the note in the Palm Pre review about the fact that appointments do not sync if I have not already accepted them on my desktop. Keep in mind that I am forwarding the appointments as an email, and have my GMail account set up to automatically place emailed appointments into my calendar. This is because the only way to add an appointment to your Google Calendar directly is to accept the invitation. Google Calendar has no way to accept an appointment and not send a reply acknowledgement; the reply ack always goes. In my case, this would result in an ack going from my personal email account to a work contact. So I have to use the work-around that works.

On a positive note, altering an appointment in Google Calendar moves it in Windows Mobile. Dragging an appointment in WinMo 6.1 also synchronizes with Google Calendar. So despite the Calendar disconnects that I have between the Pre and Google, I can at least keep the TouchPro and Google in sync. Of course, Windows can also make a zero-time appoinment, so I do not have an issue with this...as I do in the Palm Pre.

Start-up time on the TouchPro is similar to the boot time of the AT&T Tilt, which is not great, but was faster than my old iPhone and seems like the Flash in comparison to the Palm Pre. Shutdown time is all of 5 seconds; the most impressive I have seen in any smartphone, beating even my Blackberry experiences.

The only apps I have needed to download for the TouchPro were the Twitter (CeTwit) and Evernote apps. Other than that, everything that I needed was pre-baked into the OS. My list of pre-installed apps that see everyday use?:

1. Calculator
2. Windows Live Search
3. Notes
4. Opera Web Browser
5. Word Mobile
6. Excel Mobile
7. MS OneNote Mobile
8. the Camera

Note that both here and in my discussion of the Pre, I do not count the Calendar, Contacts, or email as apps that are worth any note. I expect these apps to be implemented well on any smartphone and to not be broken. I will gig a phone for doing them poorly, but no phone gets extra credit for doing them well. This is expected of any smartphone.

The TouchPro's Outlook Notes will sync with MS Outlook and will do so using WMDC in Vista. However, I do not give the TouchPro a by on this one when the mobile OS, handset makers, and the desktop OS' post-Vista are gooned up on this issue. Whether or not Outlook Notes on a WinMo phone will work or not is a matter of full integration across the three culprits just mentioned. I have seen WinMo phones that will sync with Outlook Notes, and some that will not. What is really aggravating is that it is not written on the box anywhere. I have therefore been forced to not rely on Outlook Notes anymore, and to move my most personal of memos to MS Word format. This buys more ready access to those docs across multiple phones and PCs, but it still does not excuse this point of broken integration. I should not have been forced to create this work-around. Notes sync should work on every WinMo smartphone regardless of carrier and in every instance of a Windows OS that supports the device.

If you read any of my articles from last year during my transition from the iPhone to the AT&T Tilt, you will know that I am tickled pink by the Windows Mobile OS and the advantages I perceive that it offers over other Mobile Phone OS'. The Tilt was a solid phone, but it had its shortcomings. The TouchPro improves on the Tilt in just about every way when observed under conditions of long-term use. I am hoping that MicroSoft's new strategy to get their mobile phone platforms to compete well in the consumer market space does not lead to a dumbing down of the features that make their OS great for business use. Hopefully, the two needs can exist at the same time. I went away from the WinCe/PocketPC/Windows Mobile platform once. These devices fit my needs well enough now that I would not consider going to something else. Unless MS stops servicing my needs.
- Vr/Zeux

The last few weeks have seen a relieving of the old guard by the new. Three new ultraportable machines have entered the force, while two have gone away for either new homes or to be sold on eBay. The Acer Aspire ONE, the only netbook I have ever owned, departed to do duty as my girlfriend's sister's primary PC. It was replaced by the MSI X340. My Motion LE1600, the TabletPC that I used as my primary work machine, has been replaced by an HP 2730p EliteBook. Months ago, I sold my Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium, believing that I had outgrown the need for a UMPC. At the end of last week, I was compelled to rethink that conclusion and then recapitalize that capability via the purchase of a Fujitsu U820. While I have dived back into a network configuration that emphasizes portability, I look around the industry and question some of the products that are being placed in the market ostensibly as machines that meet this ultraportable need.

Most recently, I came across the Acer Aspire Timeline 8000 series laptop. I am loathe to come at this from the perspective of "just not getting it" with regards to why this device exists and who would want it. I am loathe mainly because they are the questions that I frequently see written by people about TabletPCs and UMPCs. Obviously people who do not ink need not make comments or question the existence of ink-based computing products.

In the same vein, I don't want to call someone crazy who is considering this device. Maybe it is just beyond me because I do not personally have a use-space for it. This device falls into a new product stratum that I have dubbed the razer-top PC. Yeah, ok, everyone does not have to start using it. I just needed to a term to keep this straight in my own head.

This sub-genre of laptop was spawned by the MacBook Air. Despite the fact that the Air was a relatively poor device that I, again, could not see the point of when it debuted, all of the laptop manufacturers have fallen over themselves to compete in the market-space that the Air created. The MSI that I just recently brought into the 'WERKz falls into this category. So does the Dell Adamo, the Lenovo X300, and now the Acer Aspire Timeline series.

These devices range in cost from marginally more than a netbook to astronomically more expensive than a netbook. When the prices on these climb into the stratosphere, they just don't make sense. Their ultramobility is just not on a scale that justifies an order of magnitude greater in expense. This is why I declared the MacBook Air a questionable product. Same for the Lenovo X300 and Dell Adamo. When I was in the market for my own razer-top, I went with the device that was stamped with what I regard as a reasonable price-tag for the capability delta it provided over a netbook. It is a triangle analysis where you need to consider cost, performance, and portability.

One design choice that I fail to grasp is how and why these devices debut at one form factor, and then the industry seems to creep towards putting them in larger and larger packages. It will perhaps sound a bit OCD, but I have a firm concept that 13" is the breaking point for ultramobile products. So, to me, once enter the 14" zone, I expect a high performance PC that has little or no compromises. While the Aspire Timeline series is very thin, I still question the use of the 14" screen for a device that runs a Core Solo processor. Most of us who are interested in ultramobility are ok with a 13" form factor or less. Those who are reluctant to enter into the realm of ultramobility, the ones who when you ask what kind of laptop they are looking for express concern over getting something with a screen that is too small, are not likely to want to go into a 14" screen just because it is razer-thin.

More concerning about the Acer Aspire 8000 is its hobbled specs. I had a 14" Toshiba laptop. That machine ran a full Core 2 Duo processor at 2 GHz. The Acer comes with a 1.4GHz Core Solo proc; the same one that is in my MSI X340, which has a smaller footprint and lighter weight. I have talked about footprint before, and mentioned how it can make more of a difference than weight in terms of portability. For this reason, I had no interest in a MacBook Air because it occupied the same footprint as my 13" MacBook but would not have performed as well. When a device occupies the same footprint as a device that is heavier, but sacrifices performance in the pedigree of its hardware or drops features, I don't get it. I'll carry an extra pound or two if the lighter device is going to take up the same amount of space in my laptop bag but sacrifice performance.

The portability factor in these devices needs to make up for any loss in performance and the prices need to balance it all out. At 13", I can see this math. Between a MacBook and a MacBook Air, the downstep in performance for the upscaled price (I am talking about at the time of the Air's debut, not after the most recent round of MacBook price cuts) did not pass the smell test when considering that the Air would occupy the same footprint as the MacBook.

In my own recent decision making, I considered going back to a MacBook to replace the Acer Aspire ONE. When I had to compare the the MacBook versus the MSI X340, the comparo did pass the smell-test. The X340 lost some in its Core Solo 1.4GHz processor. Memory in the two machines was the same. The X340 doubled the mid-level MacBook's hard drive capacity. This is becoming more and more of an issue these days as my iTunes archive, which includes various seasons of TV Shows, now exceeds 100GB. With only a stock 160GB HD, the mid-level MacBook would have put me in the corner where I would immediately need to upgrade the HD. That would have been an additional $100 off the bat.

Yes, I was presented with the choice of going into a less-performing platform that occupied the same footprint as the higher performing MacBook. But the X340 is just over half the weight of the MacBook. And costs $400 less; $500 if you consider that a HD upgrade to the MacBook (plus the cost of my own leisure time in doing the upgrade) would have been an absolute necessity.

When I tried to subject the other options to this math test, the Lenovo X300 and Dell Adamo (the only other two choices at the time), they were egregiously outside the box in terms of cost.

The Acer Timeline 8000 (14" model) might strike a cord with a certain niche of users who want close to a full-screen mobile computing experience, but do not want to carry the extra weight, and are not bothered by taking the performance hit. I have a hard time judging how large that group of particular user might be. The one thing the Acer has going for it is its price. At that cost, you can almost afford to make a mistake and take it back if it does not suit. With my own experiences in ultraportability over the last few years, I know that at that size, I would personally go with something smaller that has the same performance specs, or something thicker and heavier that blows its performance away.

Truth be told, all of these devices are fighting for extremely thin niches of users and customers. The ones that will win the fight are the ones that offer some unique feature that brings on-the-fence customers who are still necking their choices down across the line. Really, these devices, the razer-tops specifically, are competing less-so against themselves, and more so against netbooks in general. My experience with the Acer Aspire ONE was a pretty good one. But the X340 weighs only a half-pound more, doubles the hard drive capacity, and presents a larger screen for viewing of video. Customer price sensitivity goes up when you get above $1000. Below that, things are muddier. Razer-tops have a fighting chance if the customer base gets tired of the cramped keyboards, small screens, and sluggish performance. I guess the moral of the story is, if you are going to look at a razer-top as an alternative to a netbook, look carefully. Whereas almost every netbook on the market right now has the exact same specs, razer-tops range a little wider. Run the smell test and ensure that what you are gaining makes up for what you are giving up and that the dollars are in-sync with those trade-offs.
- Vr/Zeux..>>

Today I will wrap up my thoughts after my first two months with the Palm Pre. It is certainly a neat little phone. There are some things that it does better than other phones I have owned, and some things it does worse. Let's get started with the wrap-up.

One of my main gripes is the dock, and I am embarrassed to say that I do not like it because it is not like the iPhone's desktop. Four apps is too few to have available on the desktop. If they would just go to eight, that would be a big help. I like my wallpaper, but if I really need to see it, I can look at the actual photo. I am not sure why Palm seems so wrapped around the axle about keeping your wallpaper visible. That being said, the scrollable, uprising dashboard menu (the primary means of accessing your applications) is functional and pleasant. I just wish that I could have more of my most used apps right on the desktop.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Pre is the wonky behavior sometimes seen when you are trying to clear alerts. It took me several weeks to figure out that, for most alerts that are stacked with multiple instances, you can click on the left-most part of the alert and get presented with a listing of all applicable alerts in that category. In other words, if you have had multiple appointment alerts, tapping the left-most edge of the alert bar will give you a list of all appointment alerts and allow you to clear them all at once. The frustration is that some of these stacked alerts are presented with a separate, smaller square on the left side, while others are just presented as a solid bar. Similarly, when presented with single alerts, sometimes you get a shorter route to clearing it by tapping the left-most side of the alert-bar, and sometimes you do not.

One example of this is in the way that the left-side tap does not work to clear missed phone calls. Tapping the missed phone call alert at the bottom of the screen results in the phone dialing the number back. In order to clear a missed phone call alert, I have to open up the phone app from my desktop, tap the Missed Calls button, and view the list. This sort of defeats the purpose of an alert, which should be presented to show you information that, if sufficient, does not need to be viewed in its entirety. 90% of the time that someone calls me, I just need to know that they called. I do not need to view my Missed Calls log to see what time they called and from where. More importantly, when all of that information is presented in the Master Calls log, which is the first view presented when you tap the Calls Log button, I should not have to drill another level down to the Missed Calls listing just to clear the alert.

The other annoying alert to try and clear is the Alarm Clock. The clock is sufficiently loud, and in fact is one of the few alarms that actually wakes me up by itself. But it seems like every time I try to clear the alarm via the different means, it is questionable as to whether or not the alert icon will actually clear. There are times that I have had to shut the phone down and restart it in order to have the alarm icon clear.

I commented yesterday about how I have jumped onboard the cloud computing train full bore. My vehicle of choice for keeping my smartphones aligned with the same data is Google. I have lost the partnership with my Google account and the Palm Pre at least once so far, and have had to enter the information again. I only sync my Pre with my Google Calendar and my Google Contacts. However, whenever you enter the information for one, the Pre automatically adds synchronization of your associated GMail account, which I do not want on the phone because I do not actually use my GMail for anything other than forwarding work appointments to the phone. As in all things, I do not like having to take an additional step in administering a device because someone assumed they would know how I would want to use it.

On the plus side, multi-tasking on the Pre rocks. One of the things I hated on the iPhone was that if I was going back and forth between apps, I had to wait each time for the app to restart. I have not pushed the Pre to the edge in terms of just popping a bunch of task cards open for the sake of observing performance. I can only say that I have used it in my own normal operations for two months and have yet to have a performance issue due to having too many apps open.

If you do a Google for Palm Pre issues, you will likely come across a few forum posts about the Palm Pre "Phone Offline" issue. This is when, for some reason, the Pre goes to this mode and loses connectivity with the Sprint Network. In some extreme occasions, some customers have been unable to re-establish comms with the network and have had to take their phone into the store after getting no help from tech support. I hope I never get bitten with the more extreme case. Mine has gone to this mode, but monkeying around with cycling it back-and-forth between Airplane Mode on and off eventually cleared it.

My girlfriend lives in a small town in northern Virginia. Her town has 3G. My girlfriend's parents live in a small town in West Virginia. Their town has 3G. I live in a town with a major university, two major corporation facilities, two major hospitals, and a population that is about four times that of the two aforementioned towns...and that is without counting the college's student body. Yet AT&T here does not have 3G. And no one in the store can tell you when it is coming. They claim "soon". Yet, when I called the corporate line (an experiment I ran on numerous occassions before finally deciding to switch to Sprint), where I was attended to as a business customer, the upgrade date for the local AT&T towers was nowhere to be found. One of the reasons that I am on Sprint is because I got tired of waiting. The Pre's 3G performance is superb. I can finally look up online information at more than a snail's pace.

One of the things about computing in the cloud and relying on a third party service to sync my smartphones is that it does not always work. I would say that my occurrence of error is definitely in the single-digit percentile. But I must admit that I have seen appointments that do not sync and do not replicate across both phones. I am not ascribing the fault for all of this to the Pre and docking it points as part of this review. I am simply putting it out there so that others are aware of it. Some of the issue is definitely with Google. I will state, however, that, from my analysis to date, I have evaluated the issues as either having to do with Google or the Pre, never due to the Windows Mobile phone that I also use.

A few anomalies are that appointments do not sync when I forward them to my GMail account unless I have already accepted them on my desktop. The other and more annoying thing is that if I move an appointment in my Google Calendar by editing the start time, the new appointment does not sync with the Pre. I have to make a new appointment to effect that change. I do not have this problem with my WinMo phone; editing appointments in Google Calendar results in replication to the phone. Perhaps the most aggravating glitch is that you can not make a zero-time appointment on the Pre (an appointment that has no duration, ie begins and ends at the same time). I use this method in other calendars to signify go-times for certain events, like my target-time for departing work each day, for instance. Every appointment made in the Pre's calendar app has a minimum duration time of 30 minutes. Again, a poor implementation made by someone who assumed that they knew how I would use the app and has therefore restricted my freedom to employ a reasonable method of use.

The single-most glaring negative against the Palm Pre? The start-up and shutdown times. I am talking "push-the-button-and-walk-away-to-do-something-else" kind of slow. Like watch a movie. Or wash the car. Ok, admittedly it is not that bad, but it is certainly the worst than I have ever seen with any smartphone I have ever owned.

There are only a handful of apps available at this time that are worth anything, at least as far as my needs go. Fandango, AccuWeather, Tweed, and Evernote see daily use when I am carrying the Pre. I also have Speed Brain, SplashID, and NFL loaded, but have yet to use them. One of my marks of approval of the Windows Mobile OS is that I never have to download new apps for my WinMo phones. That seems to me to say that, based on practical, everyday use, the OS is complete, and wants for very little in terms of additions. This is the way I think mobile phone OS' should be. The fact that the iPhone has over 25,000 apps in its App Store is not an indicator of a healthy design, in my opinion. It is an indicator of all of the things that the associated OS was missing when the iPhone initially shipped.

So while I am not happy that there are not new apps pouring into the App Catalog, I guess it is ok since I do not really want to have to add anything to the phone. The one glaring item missing is a document editor, but my understanding is that DataViz is working on bringing their Documents-to-Go app to the Pre later this year.

While I indicated in my part one review that the keyboard was not a show-stopper for me, a major detractor is that Palm expects you to use it. This has the greatest impact on the Contacts app where Contacts are not sortable into major categories, such as Business, Personal, and so forth. Contacts can be assigned a category designation, but there is not way to apply a filter into the Contacts view. Palm expects that when I need to call "Frank", I will start typing his name and the various instances of his name will be presented in the search window, from which I can initiate the phone call. This is fine; except when I am in the car...and need to dial someone with the last name "Zapata". I am then required to scroll through every single one of my contacts (I have 210, by the way) to get to the name.

Further crippling the integration between the Phone and Contacts apps is the fact that there is no mechanism to add favorites, which would at least facilitate a slightly quicker way to get to my most frequently dialed numbers. This is just idiotic.

Another instance of incredibly poor design is the functionality of the Memos app. Memos in the original Palm OS was arguably one of the features that made the original PDA take off like a bottle-rocket. But let me say something for all of the purveyors of smartphone OS'. Please do not bother releasing another operating system that has a Memo or Notes app that can not sync with anything so that I can see and retain my notes on a PC. Both Apple and now Palm have been guilty of this egregious oversight.

Very little of the information I manage on my phones are data-items that I only need access to in one place. And no; including the ability to email the memo does not cut it. That requires me to email it every time I update the memo, download it to a local PC, and then manually delete the old version and replace it with the new. Add to that the added difficulty of then maintaining some form of version control across multiple PCs. Why would the Pre debut with features that accentuate cloud-computing and making all of its data available via the web, and then exclude the Memo app from this umbrella?

I have not tried the Music or Video apps yet, but will likely do so in the next few weeks. I now have a PC that just has a small catalogue of my iTunes archive; just some of the songs that are in MP3 format. Since the Palm does not recognize AAC files unless they have been brought over via syncing with iTunes, it will be easier to just focus on testing using MP3s. I am not going to get in the mode of syncing the Pre with iTunes because the shenanigans between Palm and Apple are only going to continue.

Despite the negatives I have discussed above, I am happy with the Pre as a smartphone. Happier than I was with the iPhone. One of the reasons why is the great way in which updates are delivered. Additions to the OS are delivered over-the-air (or OTA). This means that I frequently read about a webOS upgrade during the week. I do nothing; my Pre sits on my nightstand quietly. When I pick it up on Friday, the device has already downloaded the OS update without any intervention on my part. I recognize the danger in this; that one day an update might nuke (or, in the popular vernacular, brick) my Pre and I would know nothing about it and would have been powerless to stop it. It is a risk I will take over the 30 minute software update process I was going through for the iPhone.

The absolutely best feature about the Pre is that it is OS agnostic with regards to interfacing with other computing devices. If the machine has a USB port and can recognize external storage devices, the Pre can interact with it. It has allowed itself to be charged by my XBox 360. I have dragged and dropped files both onto it and off of it in various instances of Windows, as well as OS X. This is invaluable when needing to get photos off of the phone. Even my WinMo phone needs Windows and some locally installed instance of a sync application in order for me to extract data out of its memory or storage card (that is, AFAIK; I am not about to risk plugging my HTC TouchPro into a Mac without doing some research on what has happened to people who have tried this in the past).

Overall, the Pre is a solid phone. I overheard one guy complaining about some of its features while I was buying mine and he was in the process of bringing his back. Most of his complaints involved using the phone for play. While I do not mind using the phone for entertainment, at the end of the day the most important thing for me is for the Pre to participate in my PIM ecosystem without breaking anything. For that, the Pre and its associated webOS do well, and bring some forces to the table that other phones and OS' do not. While I have used the iPhone as a foil to lot of points of evaluation of the Pre, the one thing they have in common that Apple can be thanked for is the ability of a phone to evolve via upgrades to the Operating System. Apple has been the most effective in implementing this market model, and I am sure that the Pre will benefit from it. The device will continue to grow and evolve, returning value on the investment that early adopters have made in a phone that should eventually accommodate most of their needs and desires in their day-to-day employment of this smartphone.

When all of the discussion of moving to a Cloud-centric model for computing picked up steam a year or so ago, I was appalled. The pundits would have you believe that cloud computing would especially appeal to those of my stripe; the high-frequency travelers. In my own case, that has been absolutely untrue. The fact that I used to travel a great deal was exactly why I did not want to be dependent on cloud computing resources.

In the air, at least right now, there is no access to the cloud. Yes; I know that we are on the verge of that changing and more and more airlines are offering in-flight wireless access. Still...it is not every carrier and it is not every flight or every route. When I am working on an article on a laptop at 10,000 feet, that document must be on my laptop, not out in the ether.

In the last two or three months, I have reversed that sentiment. I have become so dependent on Evernote, GoogleDocs, and, in fact, this blog engine, that I could not easily cut the umbilical cord to any of those three. Where I used to always draft my blog posts locally and upload them to my blog, I now draft them on GoogleDocs and then bring them over to the blog, if not in the blog engine (which permits saving of posts and keeping them deprecated from public view until I am complete) itself. A constant stream of randomly spawning article ideas pop into my head throughout the day. I used to record those in instances of Microsoft OneNote, or in plaintext documents on local PCs; maybe as a memo or note on a given cell phone. These days, those ideas go into my Evernote notebook, whether it is in one of the local copies on my TabletPC or UMPC that are synchronized with my online Evernote notebook or entered directly via an open tab in Firefox.

The primary reason for this shift has been the Palm Pre. More accurately, it has been the acquisition of the Pre and the presentation of a 4 year old problem that the personal computing industry has only recently evolved to a point where, used in combination, they offer a solution.

My personal computing and communications ecosystem has been evolving in a steady path since 2005. I have posted many articles describing the discrete events in each episode, so I will keep this to the short version. I started with PDA's. Then I finally shifted to smartphones. Then I decided the smartphones that I had owned were too bulky for weekends on the town, so I went to a smartphone and a secondary, slimmer weekend phone. Then smartphones got slimmer and more compact and I insisted on both phones being smartphones.

However, it was very rare that I would ever find two smartphones that I wanted of the same mobile operating system (and even if I had, what would have been the fun in that?). So how do you keep your smartphone information in sync when you use two, that have different OS'? What about when on syncs with Microsoft Outlook and the other one does not? What happens when there is a sync solution for one that works in Windows, but the other phone will either only sync in OS X or, because you are locked into OS X for other items, it has to?

In the midst of the evolution I described earlier, there was one episode that stood out. In fact, despite my later misgivings, and although I did not realize it at the time, I had used and in fact been proud and fiercely dependent on, a cloud computing solution. It was shortly after I had returned from overseas, had rejoined Verizon as a customer, and was using a Palm Treo as my smartphone. Verizon offered access to a server application that permitted your Palm to sync over the air. Using web-based access, you could also log into the server via an HTML front-end and see and edit that PIM data. In other words, instead of having to create my weekly schedule on the PC that I synced the Palm with via Outlook, I could access my PIM anywhere, and create updates on any PC that had internet access. The palm would would then periodically, look at the server app and synchronize with that data.

This was huge, because at the time, while I was still only using one phone, I was using multiple PCs; and my primary PIM PC was not always on or was not always the one I was working on when I needed to make a change. The web-based access solution was an incredible boon. After being forced to leave Verizon due to a geographical move, and joining up with AT&T Wireless (Cingular at the time), I first bugged my new wireless carrier for a similar solution. Then I went hunting for a service that would do it for me since AT&T would not. At the time there was nothing.

Of course, at the time, I did not realize that I was a proponent of the cloud-computing model because it had not been named as such yet.

By the time the name "cloud computing" was being platformed as a marketing ploy, I had either forgotten about my Palm Treo experience, or, having been forced to survive without it, had become violently opposed to it being foisted upon me. I spent the time from then until now consistently arguing against its implementation.

But, recently, I became in need of a new weekend smartphone. I was shifting wireless carriers (from AT&T to Sprint). And the new hotness was the Palm Pre. Which is entirely dependent on a cloud-based model. There are not native solutions for syncing with MS Outlook. You can pay more for a 3rd party app. And some of those are limited in what they will replicate across your PIM schema. Additionally, I had chosen another Windows Mobile phone to replace my AT&T Tilt as my work-week phone. I was again presented with managing two phones that used disparate operating systems for which there was no common solution for synchronizing to a single, local PC.

Fortunately, by this time Google had emerged as the proponent of all things cloud. And they appear, to date, to be OS agnostic, offering solutions for all mobile phone OS'. As long as they can keep that up, I can feel free to choose whatever mobile phone OS I want.

The Pre did not just push me back to the cloud-computing world because Palm refuses to directly support a local-PC sync solution, but also because of the available apps that strengthen access to cloud-based PIM management, including a mobile version of Evernote and Tweed (which permits access to my Twitter feed). Other apps have also provided a supporting foundation, including Flickr's ability to accept photographs via email.

I continue to keep some files locally. Passwords, financial documents, pretty much any document that contains my actual name or the names of any of my loved ones, are strictly forbodden from interwebs existence. So the cloud is certainly not good for everything. I also have a note in my tasklist to investigate mechanisms for periodically downloading my cloud-based archives so that if they were to be destroyed online somehow I would have some semblance of a backup copy; another con of being completely dependent on the cloud.

While I give the Pre a lot of credit for pushing me back to this, the truth is that it [cloud computing] is also a more perfect solution for managing the multiple PCs that I use and coordinating some of their data. My previous solution was a NAS. But with the multiple operating systems in play, the different apps I would use to manipulate files, and the amount of time I spend working away from NAS access (yes, I know I should have setup VPN access to my home network by now; but I haven't), the cloud makes certain efforts easier. The fact is that a NAS is great for multimedia storage and personal documents of a secure nature, but not for other things. The reason it is good for those types of files is that these documents are either large in size or are rarely updated.

When it comes to my website, and project ideas, and article thoughts, those documents are being updated all the time. I need to be able to access them, and not just via every PC that I use, but also from both phones. Cloud-computing makes this possible. I used to do all of my blog posts in MS Word, sometimes in OneNote, but this meant that articles existed locally stored on a machine. Now, using the cloud, I start an article and can access it from any web terminal. I can now switch PC usage as I see fit without it impacting the site's flow, or leaving a started blog post unattended for days while I am on another PC.

I will not know if this cloud thing is a good idea until it either fails, or Google, Evernote, Yahoo (Flickr) or any one of the others starts charging a fee for the use of their cloud products. Or, in Google's case, if they decide to not support a given mobile OS. Given the eye-scratching that is going on right now between Google and Apple, I may want to steer clear of any thoughts of going back to an iPhone any time soon (which is not hard to do).

If you are a one or two PC person, who does not collaborate a lot, has limited travel or time spent computing away from home, and you are a normal human being and only use one smartphone (or use a Blackberry), I can not say, resoundingly, that the cloud is for you. At the least, I certainly could not say that it would absolutely be a significant time-saving or organizationally benefiting solution. For others, there is some benefit. Right now, I do not know how I got along without it. I am still not ready for applications that I pay for and come on optical media to be reliant on an internet connection to function (looking at you, Microsoft, and your impending new Office suites). But there are some applications where using a cloud solution is best. Not all; but some mix of leaning on both a cloud-based data management solution, combined with local resources is more likely to become the model that we all become dependent upon.
- Vr/Z..>>

My ****in Java Programming is over at the local community college. I aced the Final...woot!!! Now I finally have time to get back to keeping up with this atrociously behind blog. When last we left each other, I was relating my mid-term impressions after about two months of using my Palm Pre as my weekend warrior phone. Here are some more notes from that stream of consciousness.

The Palm Pre has one of the better speakers I have experienced. Better than the iPhone's, which seems to blare out music, but can barely output a telephone call with more than a measley volume level. Better than the HTC Touch Pro, which seems to have good days, and bad days. The jury is still out on that phone's speaker. The Pre's is loud; loud enough to listen to voice mails while it is sitting on the night stand and I am getting dressed or changing.

Accessories: I have somewhat struggled to accessorize the Pre. I have scored a few wins, and had more than one loss.

The fact that the Pre is a slider phone immediately injects it into problem world when trying to find decent slip-cases for it, and I suspect it has given more than one manufacturer a hard time trying to make them. A slip-case needs to fit over the edges of both halves, while also not interfering with the sliding mechanism. So far I have only found one case that is working well, out of the three I have tried. The one that works is the smoked-plastic type that has two discrete halves that clip seperately to the phone's front and rear sides. The other two cases that I tried were the hard-rubberized type, both of which were nearly impossible to get over the individual corners of the phone without taking a screw driver to the Pre. Not something I desired to do every weekend.

The crystal case has two drawbacks. The first is that it covers the rear-swipe area of the Pre. So when I am editing documents, instead of swiping to close out of the editor and return to a viewer panel of the same file, I actually have to hit the home button, swipe the app off the screen, and re-open it if I want to look at what I just edited. The other issue is that the inner edges of the front of the case sometimes penetrate the proximity sensing zone of the Pre's display. This only has an impact when the sensor is active, which is while making a phone call. The resultant behavior is that, as the case slides around, you'll see the screen go off and on because it is thinking that it is your face that is close to the phone. The end result is that I have gotten into a comical game of cat-and-mouse when I have been on a headset trying to hit the keypad or end a call as the screen kept disappearing on me, rendering me incapable of interacting with the screen.

Holsters and belt clips have, however, been absolutely no problem. Despite its unusual shape, the Pre's footprint is roughly identical to a lot of other phones on the market. In fact, I can use it with the old leather horizontal slip-holster I used to use with my iPhone, as long as the Pre is not in the crystal case. It also fits in a Blackberry leather holster. I think I have about 6 leather holsters that will work with the Pre, so no issues there with variety.

I went for larger capacity batteries early. The only ones on the market at the time were 1350mAh batteries from Seido, the one company that I implicity trust when choosing an aftermarket battery to place in a $200 phone. There are now 2800 and 3400mAh batteries on the market, requiring a replacement backplate to accomodate the battery's bulge. Seido now has a 2600 mAh battery it is shipping, albeit in limited supply.

I am going nuts over the state of the wireless industry and the fact that, for some reason, the presence of charging cradles in the market seem to have dried up. I used to always buy a cradle that was capable of charging both my phone and a spare battery simultaneously. Finding one for a recently released cell phone seems to be a major Sherlocking exercise. What is even more infuriating is that when I find them, it seems to always and only be cradles that charge the spare battery from the included adapter, but do not concurrently charge the phone in the cradle. To charge the phone, you need to plug in a seperate USB Sync cable to the computer that the phone is associated with. Seems to defeat the entire purpose in a cradle, which is to only have one cable run anywhere to charge everything.

So here's a kick: the Pre does not socaialize with one computer in particular like Blackberry's, WinMo phone's, and iPhones want to do. The Pre accepts any USB input pretty much. So if you want to do something just to claim geek-cool points, plug your Pre into your XBox 360 and charge it from that. I can not guarantee what will happen if you choose anything other than the "Just Charge" option that is presented on the Pre when you do this. It might be interesting to see what would happen if you hit the options to synchronize media or have the Pre appear as a hard drive. If you are brave enough to try this with your 360 or other device, please let me know. I'm not that brave myself.

That's it for this installment. Next round I will talk about syncing with the cloud and its practical day-to-day impact, as well as some of the things I do not like about webOS and/or the Pre's GUI. Until then, take care.
- Vr/Z..>>