Category: Technology

No More Clies

According to Brighthand, Sony is getting out of the PDA business.

I had trouble understanding why Sony felt the need to push so many new Clie models out the door so quickly, so I’m not surprised by the rumors of flat profitability. I’m sure there’s lessons to be learned for other PDA manufacturers. But it’s tough to spin this as even remotely a Good Thing for
the Palm Economy.

It’s also a bummer for me & Scott. We’ve owned 3 Clie models over the past few years, and I loved my 760C so much that I bought a second one when the original was stolen.

Is Graffiti not dead after all?

Longtime aficionados of the Palm OS were very displeased when the entity now known as PalmOne lost a patent infringement suit to Xerox over their single-stroke text entry system called Graffiti.

This time, the good guys finally won one. The suit has been invalidated.

I sincerely hope that PalmOne will now bring back Graffiti as an option in their operating system. The new version, created because of that dratted lawsuit, sucks.

Response to Mena

OK, I’ll add my two cents to the list of “How I use MT” trackbacks. I currently have one author and two blogs. I expect to add one more blog every 6 to 12 months within my own personal blog. Plans are in the works to add two more blogs and two more authors for friends/family members.

But I also want to make it very clear that my personal concern is not ultimately about the number of authors and weblogs allocated to each segment of the license. That’s a symptom of the bigger problem. Simply put, it’s about perceived value for price. The issue is not “I don’t want to pay for MT”. The issue is, I don’t want to pay this particular price for this particular feature set.

I would be quite willing to shell out $ for MT above and beyond what I already paid last fall *if* there were a current and/or future feature set worth paying for. Optimizing existing code is fine but that plus one questionable new feature (spammers have already begun to register over on typekey) is not enough change. Right now there is no compelling reason for the user like me to upgrade except for the fact that if we don’t do it now, it may well cost more to upgrade in the future. Maybe you can get away with that if you’re Microsoft, but not if you’re a startup like SixApart.

Here’s a few examples: Give me a CMS that does not require me to rebuild my site because I add one link to my links list. Give me more and better tools for managing comments that does not force me into a 3rd party service. Give me more and better tools for creating and mangaing templates. Make it easier to integrate graphics into posts, or even a whole photo album.

Give me stuff like that and I’ll get out my credit card again.

Since Mena said she was going to delete trackbacks that are “commentaries on SixApart” this one probably won’t stay in the trackback list for long. But I hope that it at least gets read and the message gets through.

Good news / Bad news

It’s coming up on two years since my last layoff, but even so, news of a layoff affects me deeply. Today it was PalmOne, the company formerly known as Palm, Inc that recently acquired Handspring.

I’m well aware that businesses cannot guarantee employment to their people if the tides of business change. Nor am I enough of a Socialist to think that it’s their obligation to do so. But after having been laid off multiple times in the dot-com implosion and also once back in the recession of the early 90’s, my sympathy is much more with the people being let go than with the companies who make the cuts. Especially so because the trend these days is that jobs which vanish do not come back. Bob Herbert’s latest column is one of many pointing out this trend.

The good news in today’s announcement is that PalmOne is going to be focusing more heavily on smartphone convergence devices like their Treo line. As a longtime Treo fan, that pleases me. But to do so at the cost of people’s jobs also gives me pain.

Ironically, I found the URL reporting the layoffs because the battery on my much-loved Treo 180 is showing signs of permanent failure and I’m starting to think about replacing it. I don’t have the cash in hand for a new Treo 600, and even if I did, there are other things on my “to buy” list that come higher – like a new SLR camera to take with me to Italy.

There’s an abundance of Treo 180s on eBay for about $100, so if necessary I can go there for a replacement. Despite its slow processor and B&W screen, the Treo 180 is an excellent balance between a PDA and phone and I’ve been really happy with it. Faster access to the Internet, a color screen, and other bells and whistles would be nice, of course, but that’s what my Tungsten C is for.

But getting back to my original point, I hope that what comes out of PalmOne in the future is really, really good. Otherwise those people’s lives will have been kicked to pieces for nothing.

Dana, Dana, Dana!

Thanks to the ever-so-generous people at AlphaSmart, a fabulous new PDA landed on my desk today – the Dana Wireless. Now I can blog from anywhere in the house, untethered to my PC.

The only problem is that the DanaWeb browser, which takes advantage of the Dana’s widescreen capability, is quite buggy. The two problems that I find most annoying are it has issues with scrolling and the forms handler doesn’t like extended text entry (a big minus for bloggers!). Eudora’s PalmOS web browser, although not widescreen enabled, seems to handle forms a bit better and is thus more suited for WiFi blogging, although it doesn’t take advantage of the Dana’s ample screen real estate.

Other PalmOS Internet apps I’ve tested seem to work fine too. Verichat and upIRC, my two favorite messaging apps, both work flawlessly with the Dana, although neither had widescreen capability. And SnapperMail, an awesome email app, IS widescreen enhanced and works quite well.

The Dana keyboard is full sized and handles nicely, although some of the keys tend to be a bit sticky. I’m not sure if that’s an issue with my Dana or if I’m pounding the keys too hard (a bad habit). At any rate, I’ve long wanted a simple laptop or laptop alternative that was wifi enabled so I could do some basic online tasks without having to leave the bedroom or living room.

Now I can.

Go Dana go!

Good for business, bad for privacy?

An older article from The Register (a favorite news site) got called to my attention today. RFID, which hasn’t gotten much attention to date, is poised to become a serious threat to personal privacy over the next few years. The potential for RFID to make the lives of retail businesspeople easier is vast – and as one of them, I can’t say that that’s a bad thing. I just got 60 cases of shoes – more than 1,500 pounds of product – delivered to my store in the past 2 days. Comparing the contents of each case to the printed manifest of what’s supposed to be there is a pain in the butt. If I could just wave a scanner over all the boxes and get an exact inventory readout that I could upload to the computer, I’d be thrilled.

However, something is going to have to be done to allow consumers to remove or disable RFID chips once products have left the store, just like we can remove the sales tags and security devices today. The potential for abuse is just way too vast for there to be any wiggle room on this one. “Once you buy your RFID-tagged jeans at The Gap with RFID-tagged money, walk out of the store wearing RFID-tagged shoes, and get into your car with its RFID-tagged tires, you could be tracked anywhere you travel.” says The Register, and it’s not a pretty picture.