In addition to the four button concept, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Palm devices is the Graffiti handwrting recognition system. Anybody who uses a palm learns it. It's not that hard to learn, and it's pretty useful. It was one of the reasons Palm caught on, but it was not always that way.

Who could forget the Apple Newton? John Sculley, lambasted as he was, loved it. The "future of computing" he said. With today's rumors of Dell working on a Pocket PC, and the predictions of growth in the next few years that may end up becoming reality. One of the biggest shortfalls of the Newton was it's pathetic handwriting recognition. I used one at a trade show in '94 shortly after the launch. The booth babe kept trying to convince me it was easy, but the more she did it well and I sucked she seemed more like one of those shucksters at carnivals that can do the impossible basketball shot or ring toss that the customer can never do without luck. In the end newton died, and Palm became a standard.

In the book Piloting Palm there is a great description of how hard it was for Jeff Hawkins to convince the other founders that there was nothing wrong with forcing people to learn how to write as opposed to teaching a computer to learn how to read. His mental breakthrough was when he was thinking about the fact that we all have to learn to touch type.

PocketPCs copy many elements: the form factor, the four buttons, and have licensed the graffiti (I don't know about you but it seems to work much better on my Palm705 than the "block recognizer" on my PocketPC). But I really dislike it. I can type so much faster. Yes, graffiti was a brilliant idea. I heard Jeff talk at the Wireless IT event in 1999 in Santa Clara and he had an extension of graffiti that was clever: why not teach people how to speak again using some for of verbal graffiti instead of voice recognition? Anyway, having learned to type in 7th grade at Earl Warren Junior High, I'm sticking with it.

I bought a Pocketop keyboard for my PocketPC and it works fine. It's not as big as a normal keyboad, but I'm able to enter text 10x faster. I'm not a big fan of that aspect of tablet PCs, and believe that they will need some sort of IR or bluetooth keyboard.

Starbucks HotSpot experiment...day 3. As I understand it, they want to fill the void in the day, a void I was unaware of as I was the classic "peak" user who went in before work, at a break, and weekends and evenings. The store I'm in now was packed the other day, and now...that's my brambleberry tea and english toffee bar on the table there. This place is empty. There are a few people (all women, some with kids) coming and going, but not the typical crowd. Is there a market for any of these people, or, are there people who would come here only because there was broadband access...then buy coffee...the cybercafe model? hmmmm Howard Schultz said this was supposed to be the antithesis of the cyber cafe...they make money selling coffee.

From time to time when I go to stores and take digital pictures somebody says something. In Hong Kong I was yelled at (releasing that secret pricing information available to everybody walking down the street...people are funny about photos...off topic, sorry). today the manager came and sat down and asked me what I was doing. While we were talking she told me that there are some people that come in and work on their laptops. One guy came in and worked for 4 months from 8 am to 8 pm on his doctoral thesis. I don't suppose they made money on him. Anyway, she did say that she gets questions "once in a while" about the service, but had noticed many people using it. She did not know what it costs either. I suppose the concept is that anybody who will be doing wireless data in starbucks will have a cell phone to call customer service like I did.

At any rate, as you can see in the photo, this place is MT. On the plus side, there are plenty of tables, on the negative side, this place is Bright! seeing the laptop screen is non ideal. I know...it's worse outside. So is the data speed. Well, the laptop sure works easily enough. The PDA was totally painless today too.

A friend of mine mentioned the recent Doonesbury blogging comic week...check it out

As Tom Wheeler pointed out at CTIA Wireless IT show a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, the use of SMS in the US has gone from 30,000 sent in June of 2001 to over 1 Billion this past June. Sounds like the reverse percentage growth of my stock portfolio over the same period. In pushing a new US/old worldwide trend, Tom took SMS messages from the keynote audience and asked his guests in real time. That's a great idea, IMO, as many great questions are lost due to shy engineering weenies afraid to stand up. In the photo on the left, Intel CIO, Doug Busch's shows a fab guy in a bunny suit wearing a Xybernaut computer with a wireless LAN link. Well, 15 years ago when I designed ICs I thought putting on those bunny suits was hard enough...I cannot imagine adding a Xybernaut computer on top of that. Sounds harder than an Apollo space suite - without the diaper.

At any rate, I sent Tom and SMS to ask Doug, which he did, which basically asked "are you comfortable using IM in the office?"...my question was prompted by the security concerns the IT manager had a company I used to work for who used security as a convenient excuse to shut down IM - of any form. While higher ranking technical people in the company were vehemently in disagreement, he convinced the President (she is not an email or IM person...she is a voice mail and meeting person...otherwise put, how to "maximize ineficiency" with technology) and others to shut it down...and down it went. Anyway, Doug had no problem with IM and said that it was extremely common at Intel. In a related note, AOL announced that it was releasing an enterprise version of AIM...others will follow.

In Allan Reiter's recent blog on the Borders books announcment that they will become part of the tmobile wifi network he makes the some good points about why anybody would want to have high speed wireless connectivity in a booksore. Checking prices, reading reviews, seeing similar titles - even adding a terminal. All good points. However, he must not have kids. I can't remember the last time I actually went to a bookstore to by myself a book, I do that online form amazon and others.

However I do go to Barnes and noble and some other bookstores now and then with my children (especially the younger ones) to purchase them books. I can't imagine buying childrens books online. I've never read a review of a "pop up" book. I do spend lots of time waiting for them to look at each and every book on each shelf though, and while some would shun this idea, I'd LOVE to check email and read news storys in my spare time at the book store.

Success at Last...
It took some doing, but it worked out. With a little help from an anonymous friend (on a message board) I was able to finally connect with Starbucks WiFi as provided by T-Mobile. Turns out you needed to download the 128 bit encryption version of IE. You also need to change the ssid, and some of the connection settings. So, it works, but it's not pretty.

The whole PDA experience with WiFi is not all it will become yet. The support people did not know too much, as I've said. The other flakey thing that kept happening was that the connection kept not working and I could not reconnect and had to release and renew the ip address on the PDA. I tried out my laptop too. That was easier. One issue is that you canot log out with the PDA. They told me that you need to just "turn off" your PDA for 5 minutes and you are logged off automatically. I was easily able to get any of my POP3 accounts on either device, or yahoo mail.

Most people are saying that t-mobile's service is too expensive - $29.95/month for unlimited service anywhere in southern California. That is a lot when broadband is $40/month and can easily be set up to work anywhere in your house - where you probably spend more time than Starbucks. On the other hand, Starbucks is everywhere, like gas stations, but with only one brand. So many in fact that many people go to many different ones in the course of the month. In Califormia alone there looks to be something like 1000, and around 50+_in the local area where I live (San Diego). Boingo, on the other hand, charges $75/month for unlimited access (nationwide) where there less than Starbucks has in California alone. In San Diego, there are only 15 Boingo WiFi spots (including a persons home and couple of cafe's and some hotels). Oh yea, you can use your T-Mobile service in the Admiral's Club (American Airlines) too.

Do you really want to schlep your laptop into starbucks and sit down? If it becomes popular there won’t be a seat for you. CEO Howard Shultz said he this was not going to be a Europe-style cyber café. While he discovered the idea of the “barista” while traveling through Italy and created starbucks as the model, for some reason the crowded cyber-café business model was not what he and others had in mind. HP is a new partner, and with their experience in PDAs (and Compaq’s) they hope to promote these new products as business and personal tools.

But as anybody who has an Compaq iPaq PDA knows, this becomes almost laptop sized when the “sled” and wireless card are attached. Realizing that size matters with portable devices (but here, small is beautiful) device manufacturers have been shrinking and integrating. Toshiba came out with an integrated WiFi PDA in 2002 that the critics raved about: the e740. CNET gave it a high rating – “highly recommended”. Messages boards buzzed. But some user’s experience with Toshiba’s e740 was telling of the continuing issues with wireless data.

Upon purchasing the new, pricey PDA, he went home and fired it up. Worked great with little wireless network in his home. He could access web content at high speed anywhere in the house. But his initial trips to starbucks proved frustrating. Upon entering he was delighted to see he could detect the signal, but perplexed at how to get on the internet. He had the best new expensive PDA on the market, but it was not working. The little PDA could not connect with the internet no matter how many changed he made to the settings. So he called the hotline, but, they are not 24/7, and besides, his friends were getting irritated.

Undeterred, he returned the next day and tried again. This time he got through to customer support who informed him “Oh…you have an e740…those don’t work with our network and Microsoft’s browser”. Huh? I thought Microsoft was behind this partially, and anyway, it works fine at home. He was told to download a new Japanese browser, which he was unable to do once he returned home. With such trials and tribulations it is no wonder MobilStar was not able to succeed last year. Will T-Mobile have more success?

Never giving up, out intreped electrical engineer consults the handy Toshiba e740 FAQ, which explalins quite clearly how to connect to wireless networks:

Please click Start JSettings JSystem JWireless LAN Utility JScan to view Scan Page where you can find the usable Wireless Network.
If you cannot see all the networks you are expecting, please click “Rescan” to see the list of usable Wireless Networks. Choose one Wireless Network you want and double click the BSSID to connect to the network. Once the network is chosen, you need to configure the IEEE802.11b WLAN adapter. Click Start JSettings JConnections JNetwork Adapters JIEEE802.11b WLAN Adapter JProperties JIP Address to set IP address, Subnet mask and Default gateway settings. Click Start JSettings JSystem JWireless LAN Utility to edit other settings, such as Mode and SSID etc. If the WEP Mode of the Wireless Network you selected is enabled (64bit or
128bit WEP Mode), please choose the proper WEP KeyID and the proper WEP Key value network.

There. Wasn't that simple?

Call me paranoid, but as in an earlier post, I'm increasingly of the belief that China will take over the world much quicker than people expect. I don't know exactly what that means. I do know that they are quietly and rapidly making significant progress on the future technologies that matter most. It's easy to forget about them despite the fact that most lower cost items in your life were produced there. I read today in wired that they are installing fiber everywhere to skip over the copper/dsl thing:

To upgrade the country's technology, Hurley says the Chinese are bypassing copper wiring and laying fiber optic lines instead. Bringing fiber connections to within a kilometer of users' homes and businesses solves the problem of VDSL's shorter range.

It always seemd logical that the US should be about last in high speed wired/broadband connectivity. We live far apart. In Europe/Asia with much higher population density it is much easier to wire up everybody to broadband quickly.

I'm in love. I first saw her over a year ago in a magazine. I met her creators at a trade show, then another, then saw her in person. Finally, yesterday, I touched her for the first time...the T-Mobile Sidekick (aka the Danger Hiptop) what a beauty. I know, it sucks as a phone...but it works ok as one too. But as a PDA/AIM/wireless web device...it rocks. If only...they had a CDMA version!

From the "nice guys don't always finish last" department, I lucked out and got to play golf with Joe Montana the other day. Incredibly nice, calm guy. Good guy to golf with. Big hitter. We played Torrey Pines South, a course recently redone and in perfect shape.

Another good month for KDDI. Never have so many been wrong so often than with 3G and WCDMA. Telecom leaders went from the ground up/miracle timing of GSM in Europe and i-mode in Japan to the "build it and they will come" mentality of 3G. Except this movie has a different ending. While a few people trickle into the new golden baseball field in the middle of nowhere, there's a fireworks show just starting called...cdma2000. The new golden field is real expensive to get into, and the games are not nearly as good as advertised. Meanwhile, over at that whacky cdma2000 field customers find that their tickets to the older field are still good at the new field! bonus!

A friend just sent me a rant from YAEQCER (Yet Another Ex-QUALCOMMer). If you don't know the details, he's added some....

Ever notice that after you buy a car is seems like everybody else has the same car? That is, that while prior to owning the car you did not notice it as often, its distribution was the same. It's just that your filter of "noticability" was modified after your purchased the car to include...your car. Well, no sooner do I read Dr. Barabasi's book, then I see articles referencing itarticles referencing it. Talk about a self fullfilling prophecy! He's becoming his own hub...by becoming a network maven (to quote the tipping point). weird.

Anyway, after not seeing my some of my friends that have abandonded me here in Del Mar, two of them stopped by at the exact same hour. One from Austin and one from Seattle. Fancy that!

In his recent and excellent book, Linked, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi describes in detail "scale-free" networks. Everything from the internet, to the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon follows the laws of this network, which unlike Poisson distributions, match exactly the distribution of nodes on the internet...as well as the Al Queda network. Well, one of the key points he makes is that there is inherent reliability and vulnerability in such networks. The reliability comes from the numerous routes that traffic can take. The vulnerability comes from the fact that there are "super nodes" that carry a dissproportionate amount of traffic. If you have not read about the UUNET router table failure yet, this shows the vulnerability aspect well.