Linux

Apple stores have become iPod stores

December 31, 2005 - 1:15pm — David Herron

I started using Mac's a few years ago as an anti-vote against the evils of Microsoft. As a longtime professional geek, it seemed that OS X as "Unix with a pretty face" with high quality web and multimedia applications was the perfect system for me. Especially as they offered zero virus problems (spyware hadn't been unleashed yet, but Mac OS X also has none of them either) and zero hassles with strange quirky incompatibilities.

So far it's been fine but for one thing. Apple's focus has moved squarely to the iPod market.

Web pads, under a new name

May 25, 2005 - 11:24am — David Herron

They say there's nothing new under the sun, just an endless rehashing of old ideas. Kinda like Jung's idea that there's common themes in every story. In this case Nokia is revealing a new gadget, claiming it's a brand new idea, but to my eyes it just looks like the retread of an idea from a now-defunct company.

The company was Metricom, and they offered the mostly defunct Ricochet service. In 2000-2001 Metricom was busily rolling out their service, offering high speed wireless Internet service in a growing stable of cities across the U.S. It was a cool service, offering speed well beyond the cellphone service of the time, and even rivaling todays "3G" service that's just now coming out. The idea was to support mobile use of laptops at high speed.

Today the competitors to that kind of connectivity service are: WiFi (802.11x) and cell-phone based connectivity. Ricochet is a long forgotten asterisk in computer history, and the only reason I remember it is that I lost nearly $40,000 investing in that company.

One of the ideas the CEO pushed was what he called a "web pad". The web-pad concept was a portable display-only device that would be operated with a pen, and provide access to compelling content, etc.

Nokia debuts Linux-based Web device (Published: May 25, 2005, 10:03 AM PDT, By Dinesh C. Sharma, Special to CNET News.com)

Photos

What we have here is a web-pad, simple enough.

The connectivity, since this is Nokia offering it, is to be the cell-phone services.

Modern cell phone services are more of a data transport system, than a telephone system. The difference is in the type of information sent over the system. As a "data transport" system, when you're making a phone call the data being transported can be digitized voice, and for other purposes it can be TCP/IP packets for an Internet connection. Thus, the modern version of the cell phone system could easily be connected to a computer and used to allow mobile access to the Internet.

The rub in the past was that the data rate over the cell phone system was pretty slow. However the newest cell phone system equipment allows speeds up to 300 KBPS, which is starting to be respectable. On the other hand I'll be surprised if that's the speed one actually sees in practice, because the bandwidth available in a given "cell" is shared over a rather wide area (cell phone "cell"'s are 5 miles in diameter).

For comparison, the WiFi network offers 11 MBPS speed, far above the cell phone systems data rate. But WiFi doesn't offer seamless connectivity (yet).

My recommendation for this gadget is to wait. This is a very immature market with a current competition underway to establish the dominant protocol.

If the WiFi systems were to establish seamless connectivity, with the ability to handoff connections from one WiFi cell to another, the cellphone systems could become threatened very quickly. On the other hand, the main cause of death for Metricom was the expense of building a coast-to-coast network by installing a gadget every 1/4 mile.