Category: Hardware

Desktop Hardware Plateau

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:hardware-category ]I’ve been thinking of desktop hardware over the last couple of months as I consider replacing my main PC.

On a day-to-day basis, my primary PC get’s used quite a bit and it stays on all the time.  Some of the various tasks it performs are:

  • E-Mail client
  • Blog writing
  • Web surfing
  • Media player
  • Video transcoding
  • PHP development
  • Perl development
  • Windows Phone development

Currently it’s a AMD 2ghz, dual core processor with 6g or RAM and a 10k RPM 300g hard drive and an ATI 5400 series video card.

At the end of the day though, I don’t find any issue with this PC.  The only task that takes any noticeable time is the video transcoding and that’s just the nature of the beast.  Even the fastest processor isn’t going to make that instantaneous.

Now of course there is one big caveat here, my gaming is done on a console. If you were using your PC to game, then the answer to upgrade is obvious Smile.

This PC must be at least 3 years old, maybe more, so the question is has desktop hardware plateaued?

For most people, I think the answer must be yes.  Why would I replace this much computing power when  even the most strenuous of day-to-day tasks have it spinning its wheels for the vast majority of its time?

So I guess the answer is going to be no for now, until something significant comes along that I need more desktop horsepower for that is Winking smile.

P.S.

On a side note I wonder if the recent slow down in PC sales is less to do with other form factors (phones, tablet’s, etc.) than with the realization that most people don’t need to upgrade their PC’s on the same kind of schedule as they used to.

The future of TV’s

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:hardware-category ]There has been quite a bit of talk over the last few months about the future of TV hardware, Google has tried to get GoogleTV built-in, rumor’s of an Apple branded TV with Apple TV built-in are flying, etc.

But does any of it make sense?  Not really and here’s the fundamental reasons why:

  • TV’s last 10 years
  • Smart TV boxes last about 2 years

That’s a big difference.  Most people don’t go out and buy a new TV every year or two, they buy them only when they need to replace a defunct unit.

Smart TV boxes are like cell phones, you replace them every couple of years because they get outdated.

It makes sense to keep them as separate devices.  It’s easier to replace a $200 smart TV box than a $2000 TV just because someone came up with a new format that is no longer supported by the TV you bought.

I purchased a new TV a couple of years ago, it’s going to last me at least another 5 years or more.  It has some built-in internet functionality, Ethernet connectivity, etc.  But I NEVER use it, it’s slow and doesn’t support the new services I might use on it (like NetFlix) and there’s no update from the manufacture because it doesn’t get them any new sales to do so.

TV started in the 1940’s and remained mostly unchanged until HDTV came along in the 90’s.  That’s 50 years of NO CHANGES to the TV spec and even how those TV’s from the 40’s still work with today’s equipment.  HDTV will unlikely have as long as life, but it will still be significantly longer than any smart TV standard will last.

The smart TV technology will be advancing very quickly over the next decade and I see no reason to try and marry the two technologies in to a single device until it has matured.

A study of contrasts: Microsoft Kin vs. HP WebOS

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]At first glance there are many similarities between MS’s ill fated Kin phones and HP’s WebOS phones and tablets, but when you look a little deeper, the differences far outweigh the similarities.

MS Kin

MS purchased Danger Inc. several years ago and didn’t seem to be doing much with the company until they announced a new generation of phones, the Kin One and Two.  These phones were a radical change from previous Danger products and seemed to be targeted at a different demographic as well.

They were launched with much fan fare and MS was very enthusiastic about them, then just a few months after launch, they were terminated after poor sales.  Microsoft took a billion plus dollar hit in the debacle.

HP WebOS

HP Purchased Palm just over a year ago and immediately announced a slew of new products and plans for WebOS.  Then nothing.  Finally the new hardware was announced, including the Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad.

The launch for the new hardware had a massive ad campaign behind it and HP pushed hard in to the tablet market.  Just over a month after the launch, HP killed the entire WebOS lineup, taking a multi-billion dollar hit in the process.

Seems kind of the same, so what’s the difference?

At the summary level, everything looks the same, new tech, high hopes, billions lost.  But where as MS had a clear strategy with killing the Kin, HP has none.

MS killed the Kin, not because of the poor sales (though I’m sure that made it easier), but because internally MS had two phone platforms, Kin and the upcoming Windows Phone.  The battle royal that went on inside MS as these two platforms competed to survive is the stuff of legends, and in the end the Kin was killed, gutted and consumed by the Windows Phone team.  But at the end of the day, MS was still in the phone business.

When MS killed the Kin, they made it VERY clear it was to focus on Windows Phone.  It was in the announcements, the executives recited the party line time and again.  When it was all over, no one wondered what was going to become of the Kin, Windows Phone or MS.

HP on the other hand kill WebOS with no plan B.  They simply exited the market, tail between their legs.  The announcement created far more questions then it answered and days later everyone is still scratching their heads.

So what would MS’s announcement have been like if it was the same scope as HPs?

For MS to have made make the same kind of announcement HP did, it would have had to included:

  • The Kin is dead.
  • Windows Phone too, the consumer space is just too competitive.
  • Oh, and we’re dumping all our mice, keyboards, webcams, etc., anyone what to buy that business?
  • But we’re going to keep Xbox because we make a boat load of cash from that.

Not really the same at all when you think about it.

Motorola Mobility and Google?

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]This week we had the big announcement that Google is going to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.  That’s a big chunk of change even for Google, but what is really behind the move?

There have been several theories floating around the net, but the one that makes the most sense to me is the patent portfolio that Motorola Mobility holds.  Google is a late comer to the tech industry and as such doesn’t have a large number of patents.  This puts it at a disadvantage to people like Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Nokia in any field that they compete.

Several articles have suggested the deal was struck very quickly over the weekend and I can believe that as even as late as last week the CEO of MM was hedging his bets about mobile OSs saying he was open to Windows Phone 7.  Truth or shrude salesmanship to get Google to move even quicker?

But none the less, what does it mean moving forward?

From a patent perspective MM is a granddaddy in the mobile space so the patents will be helpful in many aspects of Google’s future, but for the short term, it won’t help them much with the multiple lawsuits that are already in play.  Longer term, it seems likely a good bargaining chip to have the next time someone comes knocking on their door with infringement claims.

From a product perspective, it certainly cuts out Windows Phone from being an option on Motorola hardware and brings in to question the future of Android on other third party vendors.  Yes, I know everyone lined up on announcement day and sang the party line that this was good for Android and everyone was still committed to it being open and free.  But let’s be pragmatic, when Google goes to make its next phone its not going to ask HTC or Samsung to build it when it can do it it’s self.

With Android 3, Google close the source code to everyone and still hasn’t released it, can you image when Google owns MM that they won’t have access to the code first and then everyone else.  It is just in Google’s own best interest to do this, to make sure MM comes out with new products based on new version of Android before everyone else.

So what do Samsung, HTC and the other do?  Sit back and accept they have just been demoted to the second tier of Android vendors?  Or do they start hedging their bets?

Business is business and any Android vendor that isn’t looking to reduce their reliance on Android is not doing their job at this point.  This is probably a really good opportunity for Microsoft all things considered.  Samsung and HTC have long support WP7 and Acer was announced a while ago, but they put out many more Android models than WP7 (which is to be expected up until now) but I think we might see that change over the next 6-12 months.  Should Sony Ericsson or other vendors start up conversations with Microsoft?  Might not be a bad idea all things considered.

Microsoft has always know that you can’t be an OS vendor and a hardware vendor for that OS at the same time, you have to choose what you want to be and run with it.  When Microsoft does make hardware (Xbox, Zune, etc) they build a custom OS and don’t license it out.  It makes no sense as you’re just helping others take you business away from you.  With the OSs they do license (Windows, Windows Phone, etc.) they just stay out of the hardware business.  I can’t imagine the number of times a vendor (HP, Acer, etc. Ok, maybe not IBM) must have gone to MS and asked to make a Microsoft branded PC to put on store shelves and MS wisely said no thanks.

If multiple Android vendors do start to move away, what can Google do?  The most obvious move would be to spin Android out of the company in to some kind of industry consortium.  But that would really defeat Google’s real reason for making Android in the first place as the consortium would no longer be tied to Google’s services and could even select other search engines and advertising providers if they wanted to.  It would just give up too much control to people who aren’t all that interested in Google’s advertising business.  In this scenario, could MS actually pay the consortium to make Bing the default search engine?

Could we see a fork of Android?  Certainly there’s a lot of competition in the marketplace already, with multiple app stores available and several forks of Android , but without the big handset makers behind them they are not really an option at this point.  But if Samsung, HTC and other put their weight behind a new app store and a forked kernel?  That would make it very interesting for Google and MM.

What the Google purchase of MM really shows us though is that the smartphone business is still experiencing growing pains, it hasn’t even reached puberty yet.  It’s still anyone’s game to win and everyone is using everything they’ve got to win it.

HP TouchPad

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:hardware-category ]I have, several times, mentioned that I don’t see much use for a tablet.  However, my previous fondness for Palm PDA’s overcame this hurtle this week with the release of the TouchPad.

I haven’t owned a Palm device since WebOS came out so it was with quite a bit of curiosity that I booted up the TouchPad on Friday.  I had heard about the OS and seen demo’s of course, but until you’ve had a chance to play with an OS for a bit, there’s just no way to tell how it will be.

To start with, I picked up the 16g unit, I’ve found in general on my mobile devices that I don’t use all that much storage so I didn’t see any need to spend an extra $100 on 16g of flash.  And what’s with that anyway?  The cost difference at the local store is $30 bucks, tops, why does HP charge $100?

Anyway, getting back to the unit, I pulled it from the box and found the TouchPad to feel quite dense all things considered.  The constructions is all plastic but it feels solid and doesn’t flex.  The documentation that comes with it, is well, mostly non-existent.  Not a hug problem, but first power on seemed to be a little confusing as after you press and hold the power button, all that happens is an HP logo comes up and slowly pulses.  Without any other indication I was unsure if this meant it was coming up or waiting for something else.

The setup wizard is straight forwards enough, though you have to have a network connection in place to complete it.  This promptly came back to the issue I first had with my Windows Phone 7 setup as I use MAC address filtering on my Wi-Fi network.  So there’s no way to find out the MAC address of the device until you’ve completed the setup and you can’t complete the setup without a connection. This forced me once again to disable the MAC filtering, get connected, find the MAC address on my router and then re-enable MAC filtering.

What ever happened to printing the MAC address of the device on the box?  Ah the good old days.

The only other issue I had with the setup wizard was the requirement to have a “WebOS” account.  I know it makes sense so they can bill you In the app store and all, but during the setup process, really?

The Home Screen

Once up and running the interface is quite nice, the primary parts of the interface are the “Just type” search bar along the top, the current applications displayed as “cards” in the middle and the launch bar along the bottom.

The launch bar has six items on it:

  • The web browser
  • E-Mail
  • Calendar
  • Messeging
  • Photos
  • The Launcher

These cannot be changed, so if for example you don’t use the messaging app, then you don’t have a choice to replace it with something you do, like the Music app.  The Launcher app is where all of your other apps reside and can be run from as well as all of your settings.

At the top of the screen is the “Just type” search bar and so far I haven’t used it at all.  I can’t quite get my head around it yet as I have to TYPE on the keyboard to use it and the whole point of the tablet is to avoid using a keyboard… just saying Winking smile.

E-Mail

The e-mail app is divided in to three columns, the folder list, the message list and the message.  This works quite well in landscape mode, but the columns are a little thin in portrait mode.  Adding my Exchange account was straight forward and promptly provided me with all my Exchange folders.

However, as many OS seem to like to do (I’m looking at you Android), WebOS decided to “flatten” my folder hierarchy in to a alphabetic list of folders, though not completely as some of the folders do have their hierarchy in place.  I can’t pin down exactly what the patterns is, but either way it’s annoying.

Trying to select some of my commonly used folders as my favorites (so they display at the top of the account list) was also quite challenging.  Selecting them as a favorite was a simple tap of the star beside their names, however there was no immediate response and so the obvious second tap deselected them again.  Several times the wrong folder was added as a favorite and only after about a 5 second pause did things work correctly.

This seems to happen throughout the OS at times, either no immediate feedback after an action or something counter intuitive happens.  It will be something HP will need to work on in the next release.

After reading a few messages and moved to another application and then came back a few minutes later to see if I had any new mail.  This all was smooth, however when I selected a message to read the message body was not displayed.  After a bit of playing around, I found the only way to read message bodies was to close the e-mail app and restart it.  I’ve had this happen a few more times, but cannot track down an exact set of actions that cause it.

Something that I miss quite a bit in the e-mail reader is auto web linking in the subject line of a message (ie if I get a message with a link in the subject line, pretty much every other e-mail reader will create a link you can tap on).  You also can’t select the subject line to copy and paste in to the web browser.

Web Browser

The web browser is of course the central tool of pretty much all the tablets and the WebOS browser is quite nice if a bit basic in comparison to most modern browsers on the desktop.

It does a fine job to rendering websites and it’s flash support is quite good (I did have a few issues with a couple of flash based video sites).

There are quite a few issues I have with the web browser, but that’s not to say it doesn’t do it’s job, just that my expectations of a web browser are quite high these days due to how good Opera is on the desktop.

The first issues I have is that there is no default home page, so by default a blank browser window comes up.  The browser is pretty responsive but I found a few sites which used “floating” toolbars to be quite jerky while panning and only redraw the toolbar after I had stopped.

You can open multiple browser windows of course and each one becomes a “card” on a stack, which is need way of displaying them, however I found that if I opened multiple pages on the same site, the stack quickly obscured the details to the point you could not tell which card was which.

There’s also no “touch” way to switch between browser cards without going back to the home screen, in this age of tabbed browsing, that seems down right archaic.

In fact, this is one of my biggest issues with all tablets and touch devices, they all pretty much have defined “hard” buttons for features that seem to make much more sense to be included in the touch interface.  Having to click the hard button to bring up the task list seems counter to the basic premise of a touch screen device.

Another feature that’s lacking on the web browser is a password manager, having to type in account information on common websites is a real pain.  Also missing is a find option on the current web page, so if you have a large article and are looking for something in particular, you have to manually scan the whole thing.

Perhaps the biggest issue that comes up in the web browser (and I don’t think it’s limited to it) is that once in a while a line of text will suddenly go funky.  A chunk of text will almost look italicized and slight lower then the rest of the line.

Music

The first content I loaded on to the TouchPad was some MP3’s.  This was easy enough as when you connect the TouchPad to a computer you have the option of presenting it as a standard removable hard drive.  This then allows you to use Windows Media Player to sync your music to the TouchPad.

After moving some music over I found the audio from the TouchPad to be very good, HP as included it’s Beat Audio technology with the TouchPad and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of it.

However once again there seems to be quite a few features missing from the music app, it supports playlist but there doesn’t seem to be any way to sync them from a PC.  Creating them on the TouchPad is hard as there’s no way to do multiple track selects.  You have to drag them one at a time to the playist.  There is an option to drag an entire album across, but that is seldom what I want to do.

Calendar

The calendar app pulls data from all your different accounts and displays them for you and I have to say it’s perhaps the prettiest calendar I’ve ever seen.  In the month view I can just stare at it for minutes Smile.

Of all the apps, this one seems the most polished, I just love it.

Messaging

I don’t really use messaging, but I do find it strange that they don’t support Windows Live Messenger.

Accounts

WebOS supports multiple accounts for various online social networks, etc. and I configured several, including Facebook and LinkedIn.  However Twitter was missing as was MS’s Live.

Of course the WebOS account is also configured and here is my biggest issue with having yet another account, there’s no way to disable it’s integration with pretty much everything on the TouchPad, from Contacts right down to local storage.  There are “slider” options in the WebOS account screen that tells you they are enabled, but they don’t actually slide to the off position.

Another issue I have with the WebOS account is that to make any changes you have to re-enter your password, which is good security, but you don’t have to do the same thing for any of the other account types.

VPN

The TouchPad supports VPN, however unless you have a Cisco VPN, too bad.  How about some OpenVPN love HP?

Other Misc. Items

After using the TouchPad for a while, I’ve found the rotation sensing to be a little be too sensitive, the screen will rotate when I really don’t want it to, HP should include a preference to set how sensitive this is.

The TouchPad supports charging through the MicorUSB port, but a standard USB adapter will not work, HP has decided that the TouchPad requires more power than the USB standard supports and have therefore sent a special power adapter to use with the TouchPad.  I knew this before purchasing the unit, but this seems silly, sure it might have taken longer to charge, but you would have been able to do it from pretty much anything.

I picked up the TouchStone stand with the TouchPad and I don’t understand why everyone hasn’t included wireless charging in their portable devices, it’s just so convenient.

And finally, why isn’t the storage expandable, is a MicroSD slot really that hard to include in the hardware?

Final Thoughts

Reading this review, you may get the idea that I don’t like the TouchPad, but that would be far from the truth.  The TouchPad is great, but it really feels like they rushed it out the door too soon.  Most of the above criticisms I have are easily fixed through OS updates and I suspect many of them will be.

The question remains then, would I recommend it to a friend?  Probably not at this time, it’s a very nice unit, but the I’d recommend waiting until version 2 comes out.

I’ll be adding a review of some of the 3rd party apps and the app store in another post shortly, so stay tuned.