The next generation of mobile devices

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While logging into T-Mobile’s site the other day, I noticed the new T-Mobile MDA. Looks like a possible Sidekick competitor to me. Features include:

  • Windows mobile.
  • Instant messaging (Yahoo!, MSN, and AIM).
  • QWERTY keyboard.
  • EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution).
  • 1.3 megapixel camera.
  • Bluetooth.
  • SD expansion.

If you’re into Windows products, this looks like a pretty compelling device. I’m completely addicted to messaging features (IM clients and QWERTY keyboards), which the MDA seems to have covered, and I’d love to have EDGE and a decent camera — both conspicuously missing from the Sidekick 2. I wouldn’t mind Bluetooth, either, though I steadfastly maintain that the Sidekick 2 actually negates the need for Bluetooth (the only thing you need Bluetooth for on the Sidekick 2 is a headset, although since I use mine much more for messaging and personal information management than for voice calls, a Bluetooth headset doesn’t buy me much more than just another rapidly depreciating device to try to keep charged).

To be fair, you’d probably want to compare the MDA to the Sidekick 3 rather than the Sidekick 2. Of course, the Sidekick 3 has yet to be released, and there is still no official information available, but according to rumors, it looks like EDGE, SD, and video are all in the works. And I’d be shocked if it didn’t have a significantly better camera than the Sidekick 2. At the end of the day, though, there are all the other things I love about the Sidekick which the MDA just can’t touch.

Microsoft fans might be wise to wait for Project Origami before purchasing their next device. Right now, Origami seems to be a code name for a lot of clip art and technical melodrama, but I suspect it will materialize into something that will compete with the new OQO Tablet. Or if you live anywhere else in the entire world except the United States, keep an eye out for the new Sony Ericsson P990 hand-held powerhouse, proving once again that the US has become the mobile third world.

Why this isn’t another bubble

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If you think we’re experiencing another technology bubble, I have some news for you: we’re not even close. How do I know? Well, I’m no economist, but I know because I was there during the first bubble. I worked at a quintessential .com startup in Dullas, Virginia between 1998 and 2002 while my wife was working at AOL, and believe me when I tell you that there’s no comparison between then and now. While my wife enjoyed all the benefits of working for a big company flush with cash and desperately trying to hold on to employees, I spent my days, nights, and weekends in a little office park wearing Birkenstocks, playing foosball and Quake 3, drinking free Mountain Dew, engaging in Nerf warfare, and working superhuman hours with people’s dogs wandering around the office. In fact, I’m sitting in an Aeron chair right now that used to belong one of the founders who was removed by the board in classic startup.com style. So like I said, I’m no economist, but I know.

Here are all the most common pro-bubble 2.0 arguments I hear:

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How to use more than one computer

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If you use more than one computer on a regular basis, here are five tips to make your life easier:

  1. Consider replacing desktop apps with web apps. Some desktop apps can’t be replaced (especially on Macs), but some can (especially on Windows). If you’re willing to sacrifice a few features and little performance, check out Writely (word processing), meebo (instant messaging), Num Sum (spreadsheets), Backpack (to-dos, notes, photos, files), Bloglines (RSS aggregation), and Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. What do we still need? A good calendar application (actually, personal information management in general), HTML WYSIWYG editor, and a good cross-platform, streaming music solution.
  2. Move your bookmarks online. Use del.icio.us, the Firefox bookmark synchronizer plugin (needs to be updated for 1.5), or get a .Mac account to synchronize your bookmarks across Macs (Safari only).
  3. Move your files online. I’m actually not sure the best way to do this. I’m using a Mac these days, so .Mac is one solution. I tried using Xdrive when I was using Windows more often, and it was a complete disaster. Omnidrive seems to have potential, but I’ve never used it, and it’s still in beta.
  4. Move your music online with something like Rhapsody. Rhapsody is the first service like this I’ve tried, and it was great. Worth every penny. Until I started using a Mac again. Their Mac support doesn’t really even deserve to be called such. I don’t know of a good cross-platform solution except to just cary around a high-capacity MP3 player in your bag. If all you use are Macs, and you are usually on the same network, you can always just share your iTunes playlists.
  5. Work off a USB flash drive. If you need a lot of capacity, use a high-capacity compact flash card and a PCMCIA adapter, especially if you need your computer to be more easily mobile (a PCMCIA adapter sits flush with a laptop case while a USB flash drive obviously needs to be ejected and removed before your computer can be packed up.) For sensitive information that you’re afraid could get lost, create a small encrypted partition on the flash drive. I carry a Swissbit Victorinox USB flash drive everywhere I go. You can even run several applications directly off of flash drives like Firefox and Thunderbird.

Any other good suggestions?

Replace lost USB flash drive caps for free

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I use USB 2.0 flash drives for a lot of different things: backups, moving files between machines, playing music files on different devices. I also tend to lose their caps which drives me nuts because I’m afraid they’ll get damaged in my pocket or backpack. Then I discovered that the plastic USB caps that come on any Apple USB product make nice (and free) replacements. Just use a pair of sharp scissors or a knife to remove the plastic prongs designed to hold the cable, and your USB flash drive is safe and secure once again.

The #1 reason why I love the Sidekick II

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I bought the Sidekick II the day it came out, and I’ve been using it almost everyday since. I tried replacing it with a Treo 650 and a Nokia 6680, but both times, I ended up switching back. I’ve used all kinds of phones, PDAs, and personal information management system, and I’ve found that the Sidekick II offers the best overall experience of them all. But as impressed as I’ve always been with the Sidekick II, I recently gained an entirely new appreciation for it.

Without getting into too many details, my Sidekick got destroyed the other day (let’s just say that Sidekicks are tough, but cars are tougher). For a brief moment, I thought I might try to wean myself from the Sidekick and go with something like the Motorola RAZR which I’ve always really liked, but I ended up walking out of the store with another brand new Sidekick II (I had pretty much worn my old one out anyway, so I didn’t mind replacing it). I took it into the office with me, plugged it in to charge, and that’s when the magic happened.

All I had to do was insert my SIM card, log in, and wait about 30 minutes, and my new Sidekick II was, as far as I can tell, 100% restored to its former glory. All of my PIM data, applications, settings, and configuration had been completely restored, right down to my custom sound profiles and POP email accounts. I knew my PIM information (address book, calendar, etc.) would be preserved, but I had no idea all the additional applications I purchased would not only be automatically restored, but with all the data from my previous Sidekick — every birthday, high score, and preference. I don’t know of any other device in the world that would have made that process so painless.

A couple of things to think about…

  • Why isn’t it that easy to migrate from one computer to another? When I get a new computer, it usually sits in the box for a couple of days until I can find the time to do the painful manual migration.
  • As much as I love the Sidekick, I’d still really love to have a smaller phone like the RAZR for certain occasions. Why can’t I have both (without the pain of switching SIM cards, which is far from ideal)? I’d love to have multiple mobile phones on a single account so I could just grab whichever one is more suitable for the day’s activities.

Stream music to your Xbox 360 (from any computer)

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My Xbox 360 monitoring script worked, and I got a Platinum system from Circuit City. I’ve had it for about a week now, and I think I’ve spent as much time playing with the dashboard and media capabilities as I have playing games.

I don’t have a Media Center PC (yet), but it turns out I don’t need one in order to stream music to my Xbox 360. All you need is a media server that the Xbox thinks is a Media Center PC. I’m using a server called TwonkyMusic from Twonky Vision. I’m running it on a G5 iMac in my kitchen, and it streams music to my Xbox 360 over a 802.11g wireless network perfectly. The server automatically starts when I log in, and indexes all the MP3 files in the /User directory. It even runs a little web server on port 9000 that you can use to administer the music server from inside or outside your network. The TwonkyMedia server will stream photos, as well, but I’m only interested in music since all my photos are on Flickr (who I hope is working on some sort of media streaming solution of their own).

The one issue I’ve had with the server is that I ended up having to shut off the firewall on my iMac (but not the firewall between me and the outside world). I tried opening all the ports that TwokyMusic claims to uses, and that let me connect to the server from my Xbox, but not browse music for some reason. I have to look into that further, but otherwise, it’s been working great, and my Xbox 360 has been playing music just about nonstop ever since.

The Twonky server products are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and will allow you to stream music to about 34 different devices. I’ll still probably end up getting either a Media Center PC, or whatever Apple announces in a couple weeks, but in the meantime, this is a great solution.

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Why web apps will move offline

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Have you noticed all the downtime lately? Del.icio.us had serious database problems, Bloglines was moving to a new data center, and TypePad had problems with their storage system. Even MXNA, the Adobe aggregator I wrote and maintain, was down for a couple hours Saturday morning while I was forced by database errors to upgrade MySQL. Moving all your applications and data online certainly seems like a good idea until either the service you need isn’t there, or your own Internet connection is down. Yesterday, I accumulated about half a dozen URLs that I needed to add to del.icio.us, but couldn’t, and I was forced to use Google Reader while Bloglines was on vacation. Of course it could have been worse. It could have been Writely or Num Sum that was down, and I might have needed access an important document or spreadsheet.

As more and more applications move to the web, and as we all come to depend more and more on being able to access those applications, two things are going to need to happen:

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Playing with the Yahoo! Mail beta

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I finally got on the new Yahoo! Mail beta after applying three times and even asking some friends at Yahoo! to put in a good word for me. You see, I’m a big Yahoo! Mail fan. Back when Gmail launched, I created a Gmail account like everyone else, and I still use Gmail sometimes, but I decided to stick with Yahoo! Mail as my primary email solution. I’ve been using Yahoo! Mail for several years now, and I’ve always been happy with their feature set, and I always knew someday they’d release a revolutionary new interface.

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Using Firefox Live Bookmarks with del.icio.us

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I’m a big fan of del.icio.us. In fact, I’ve come to rely on del.icio.us because of how easy it is to organize and access my links. But I also like the convenience of having bookmarks in my browser. I realized yesterday that I can have both, without installing any extensions.

The key is Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Live Bookmarks track a site’s RSS or Atom feed to show you updates as though they were actually bookmarks. In other words, you can bookmark a feed rather than a site, and Firefox will aggregate the contents right into your browser, treating each item in the feed as a bookmark. And it just so happens that del.icio.us generates all kinds of RSS, just like any good Web 2.0 application should, so by live-bookmarking my del.icio.us tag RSS feeds, I now have all my most important del.icio.us links in my browser, and they are automatically updated as I add new links.

For even more Firefox and del.icio.us integration, check out the del.icio.us Firefox extension.

Xbox 360 hunting

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No, I haven’t gotten one yet. Yes, I want one. In fact, I want one badly enough that some friends of mine (Danny Dura and Mike Chambers) and I put together a script that keeps constant tabs on 13 different sites who we believe are mostly likely to get more in stock. The script pulls the source of specific product pages, checks to see if one or more strings are either present or not present, and if it looks like there’s a hit, sends email and SMS messages. Initially we got several false positives, but at this point, the script is refined enough that when we get a ping, we know it means something. In fact, last weekend, Circuit City was selling a couple of different bundles for about an hour, but it was between five and six AM Pacific time, so we were all sound asleep. I dare one of these stores to get a shipment while I’m awake and sitting in front of my computer.