Recently in Gadgets & Gear Category
I think the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 looks pretty cool. A 9-inch screen, 2.28 lbs, built-in WiFi, and (unlike the MacBook Air), built-in ethernet and two USB ports. $349 gets you a version with Mini OS (Dell's version of Ubuntu Linux), 512 MB memory, and a 4 GB solid-state drive. Upgrade to 1 GB of memory, a 16 GB SSD and add a webcam and Bluetooth and you're still under $500. Sweet!
I'm down in California - had a good meeting yesterday with our colleagues from UC Berkeley about their organizational efforts, the Kuali Student project, and their collaboration tools strategy effort. Great stuff, and great folks!
Now I'm in Cupertino for a meeting of the higher-ed iPhone task force. Should be an interesting day.
At dinner last night I was complaining to Jason Ediger about not being able to manually manage my music on the iPhone by dragging and dropping songs from iTunes. He told me that I was wrong, and that with the iPhone update from January you could actually manually manage music and video on the phone.
And sure enough, he's right!
If you set your iPhone settings to enable this, which you do like so:
You can then drag and drop songs onto the iPhone - as shown below in this clip:
Watching the blog and chat coverage from Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo keynote this morning. It's nice to see Apple introduce some things I've been asking for - most notably a light notebook (the MacBook Air - 3 lbs, with lots of nice features including being really thin, a mutlitouch trackpad (like the iPhone), and an (exensive) option for solid state disk instead of spinning disk), and the email app on the iPod Touch (though that's a $20 software upgrade).
The other thing they introduced that I think is significant is location awareness in the maps app on the iPhone (and the Touch). Interestingly enough, they're not doing it with GPS (since the devices don't have GPS, which I've heard was a decision based on the power consumption of GPS units), but through triangulation of signal strength from cell or wifi base stations. I know that's an approach that CS faculty here have also been using in their research projects. I wonder if that location info will be available to applications when they release the iPhone SDK next month.
Not a revolutionary set of new products, but certainly some nice incremental progress from Apple.
I didn't listen to the Burton Group briefing on whether or not the iPhone is "enterprise ready" (apparently Burton thinks not), but I agree with Bob Blakeley's view as expressed by Phil Windley:
While you can certainly make a case that encrypting data on the device (even contacts) is necessary for many enterprises, the model that keeps apps and data on the Web–removing the need for these to be remotely managed–is exactly the kind of mobile platform enterprises ought to want.
There are applications you can think of–field technicians in areas with poor connectivity who need access to large amounts of data–but those are probably the exception, not the rule. Most road warriors could use Web-based tools with little loss in productivity. I have been amazed at the richness of some of the iPhone applications that I’ve seen and it’s only been a few months.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, enterprise
When I was in the Apple Store at University Village on Monday waiting to talk to them about my deadened iMac, I noticed that there was not a single Mac Mini nor a Mac Pro to be seen on the floor, nor any mention of them.
Interesting.
Technorati Tags: apple
The day before I left for vacation the screen went blank on our family room iMac (a 20-inch g4 "desk lamp" model). When we got home on Sunday, Michele impressed on me how important that computer is in the life of our household.
The screen had a barely discernible glow to it, so I knew the screen itself wasn't totally dead, and the computer continued to serve up documents to its locally attached printer from other machines in the house, so the computer was working.
So yesterday I trotted it down to the Apple Store to see what they could figure out. The verdict was that the part of the logic board that drives the internal display was dead. The machine works fine with an external display. That's a bummer with an all-in-one device that I bought particularly because of the gorgeous 20-inch wide screen.
Of course the machine's Apple Care extended warranty program expired on June 29. Sigh..
$635 estimated repair bill. Growl.
This boy is not a happy camper. Wail
I'm not about to sink that amount into a three year old computer. More sighs.
I guess I'll buy a new iMac for the family room and stick the old one downstairs with an external display on it (alongside the five year old Dell that has been chugging along with no problem).
But I'm not happy about having to spend that kind of dough right now.
John Welch has a good review online in Information Week titled Two Weeks With An iPhone that talks about the iPhone with a particular slant of using the iPhone in enterprise environments. It's worth a read - though I have to admit to being biased to liking the only other person I've heard of who admits to having owned a Kyocera 6035 Smartphone (which was, not coincidentally, the last phone before the iPhone I owned that had the sense to have a dedicated vibrate/ring button).
One of the first things he talks about in the review is calendar syncing, and he agrees with what I've been guessing at, which is that we'll see over-the-air calendar synchronization via CalDAV when Apple releases the Leopard version of OS X. He also takes a guess as to what that might mean for Exchange users, who currently can't sync calendar entries to the iPhone, and he thinks it likely that the iPhone will also do LDAP in that time frame, which would be lovely:
The truth is, until Mac OS X Leopard is released, I doubt that there will be any options for over the air (OTA) sync of anything other than e-mail. Currently, Apple doesn't have a calendaring solution. They don't have a really good way to deal with networked user contact databases. Since there's no provision for OTA sync of contacts and events to any kind of server, third-party support for this is, shall we say, tricky.
However, come October and the release of Leopard Server, that changes. Apple will have a calendaring/group contact solution. I'll give you 80% odds right now that within a few weeks, if not days of the release of Leopard, you're going to see an update to the iPhone which will allow for OTA sync to CalDAV servers, and probably some OTA LDAP love, too. After all, why would Apple keep the iPhone from connecting to its own products? I quote from the Chewbacca Defense: "It does not make sense."
Once you have published ways to get contact and event data in and out of the iPhone over the air, then dealing with Exchange/Domino-style connectivity becomes far simpler, as you only have to make your server act in a way that's compatible with the iPhone. So I'll hazard that, post-Leopard, iPhone connectivity will get a lot easier.
We know that Apple is using CalDAV for its calendar client/server protocol in Leopard, and that Oracle will also be using CalDAV for Oracle Calendar (along with others like Novell and Kerio). Hopefully as this new protocol gains adherents we'll see Microsoft engineer CalDAV functionality into Exchange and Outlook, or at the very least we're likely to see third-party vendors build add-ons for those products that speak CalDAV. It's interesting to think that the impact of the iPhone could end up driving the adoption of this new open protocol.
Technorati Tags: apple, calendaring, iphone, mobile-sync, wireless
The network folks say that in the first two weeks of the iPhone's release we saw 124 people with iPhones authenticate to our campus WiFi network, which they need to do to access off-campus resources. Given that it's summer, that's a pretty quick ramp-up for a new device. The breakdown was about two-thirds employees, one-third students.
There've been reports of iPhones causing network problems at Duke University - we're not seeing those problems here, so it may be specific to some types of network equipment in use at Duke.
Jason Ediger from Apple points out these iPhone Tech Talks that Apple is hosting - none in Seattle yet, unfortunately.
Josh Larios showed me the site for WebShell, an ajax-based ssh client for the iPhone. I haven't got it to work yet.
There's another twitter client designed for the phone, this one from thincloud.
Gizmodo likes JiveTalk as an IM client for the iPhone - does AIM, iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber - currently in a free alpha.
Technorati Tags: iphone
I have to say that so far the iPhone is the first handheld I've used that I like more as I use it, rather than less. I think it's a game-changing device because it's primarily a WiFi enabled handheld computing device that also happens to have some well integrated phone features, rather than a phone with a bunch of computing features tacked on.
While lots of folks are complaining about the lack of ability to install native third party software on the phone, it may actually be that Apple's strategy of relying on rich web-based applications will pan out to be smart in terms of allowing lots of people to develop apps that work while keeping the core configuration of the phone stable. I am pretty impressed by some of the apps I've seen so far - check out Andrew Mager's list of the top ten apps that came out of last week's iPhone Dev Camp. I've already started using AppMarks. PocketTweets looks good for those of you who are looking to use Twitter from your iPhone.
David Pogue is working on the Missing Manual book for the iPhone and has some great tips up on Favorite iPhone Tricks page.
So far I haven't found battery life to be a problem, though I do plug it in every night, and I admit to being a very light phone talker in general.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mobile-devices
We had a chance last week to try recording our regular weekly jazz trio (sax, bass, drums) get-together with Sony's new-ish PCM-D1 portable recording device. The Sony device is probably the most high-end of a new class of recording devices that record from built-in microphones directly to common digital formats in memory. In this case we recorded at regular CD-quality resolution (44.1 Khz) to wav files.
Mostly I was trying to figure out if the sound from a single set of stereo microphones would work for this type of music. Our ears have become used to years of hearing recordings that are created with multiple microphones placed extremely close to instruments, so that the sound of microphones that pick up some of the quality of the room the music is played in tends to sound more hollow and "unnatural" at times. I have to say, I came away impressed. The quality from the built-in condenser mikes was really good, and while the mix isn't perfect, I think that by spending some time working on the placement of the device we could come away with perfectly useful recordings.
One of the tunes we recorded is available for listening as an mp3 from http://homepage.mac.com/oren.sreebny/ned-oren-kurt.mp3 - it's only a 128 bit converted file (and we didn't play great) but you should be able to get the general idea. Many thanks to Tony Tudisco from First Choice Marketing for arranging for the demo!
