Hardware and gadgets

Apple's second generation iPhone was released for sale last Friday, and promptly broke every consumer electronics record. Apple and AT&T sold an astounding one million phones in just three days, making it not only the most popular cellphone in history but the most popular consumer electronics device ever. Even more incredible, there are still long lines of buyers waiting for phones--according to numerous reports, all 1800 AT&T stores are completely sold out, and most Apple retail stores are out of stock.

What accounts for the phone's popularity? It is not the hardware; the phone has some incremental improvements over the previous model, but nothing groundbreaking. A combination of lower price and an open platform seems to be the appeal. As the iPhone was released, Apple also rolled out thousands of free and low cost applications and programs for the iPhone, making the phone not just a phone/PDA but a true platform that can be customized by the user. This is the key difference now between the iPhone and most other cellphones. The Palm Treo and the RIM Blackberry have had this ability, but both devices have been relatively expensive. More importantly, both the Treo and Blackberry have small, cramped screens and low quality interfaces. The large, very high resolution iPhone display is startlingly clear and easy to use compared to any other portable device.

Samsung and LG have rolled out new phones that look a lot like the iPhone, and cellular providers like Verizon are advertising them heavily. But you can only have what the cellphone provider will let you have on those phones, and many of the add-ons come with steep per month subscription fees. The iPhone App store offers hundreds of free programs, and hundreds more programs that average about $5 in cost. Over time, the other cellphone providers will have to move to this model, or everyone will end up as an AT&T customer and an iPhone user.

Seagate, a big manufacturer of hard drives, has released a new hard drive that breaks yet another capacity record--the firm now has a 1.5 terabyte hard drive. This is 1500 gigabytes. It was less than fifteen years ago that I agonized over the enormous expense (at the time) of buying a one gigabyte drive. It cost a whopping $1200. This new Seagate drive, with 1500 times the capacity, will probably cost less than a third of that old 1 gig drive.

When I tell people that I don't use a GPS device in my car, they are often shocked. The seem to assume that anybody who has a day job in the telecom business should be using the popular devices routinely.

This article demonstrates perfectly what happens when blind faith in technology replaces common sense. A bus driver, staring perhaps a bit too much at the GPS on his dash, sheared off the top of a tour bus by trying to drive through a low tunnel, apparently because the route was displayed on his GPS. Fortunately, the occupants of the bus received only minor injuries. It could have been much worse.

There is lots of video on the Internet, but you don't always want to watch it in a little window on your computer. If you have ever tried to play a YouTube video clip with three or four people peering over your shoulder, all trying to see the tiny picture and listen to the tinny sound, you know what I mean.

This new device, called a Myka, is just one of a new generation of devices that takes IP-based video, movies, and TV clips and puts them on your TV (bigger, better picture and better sound) without a lot of fuss.

The device looks suspiciously like an AppleTV box, which is no accident--the AppleTV pioneered the Internet-direct-to-TV device marketplace. But the Myka simply takes BitTorrent streams, stores them on a hard drive in the Myka box, and then gives you an easy way to play them on your TV.

This is the kind of box that makes Comcast and Verizon network managers lie awake at night in a cold sweat. As more and more people simply skip TV altogether for the convenience of Internet-delivered video of all kinds, the old copper-based DSL and cable modem networks are groaning under the strain. These networks were all designed for the old, rub two sticks together Internet, where most people did nothing but email and a little light Web surfing. Video increases demand on these networks by a factor of 100 or more, meaning they just don't have enough bandwidth if everyone decides to watch the YouTube dog on a skateboard video at the same time. It's why places like Danville and Galax are building digital roads made of fiber. It is the new community broadband--digital roadways to every home and business.

A new study of mobile Web browsers shows that the iPhone has captured the top spot, beating all other mobile phones and PDAs. The iPhone and the WiFi only iPod Touch not only have extraordinarily sharp and clear screens, they have big screens, and the touch interface makes browsing easy. Overall, the iPhone has a mix of features that makes it a very compelling device.

Sprint is touting a new Samsung phone that is very similar to the iPhone. One of the most notable differences is that the new phone runs on Sprint's EVDO data network, giving it email and Web access speeds 4-5 times faster than AT&T's EDGE data network. Apple has always maintained that it used the slower network to provide better battery life. But this new phone is a good thing; competition always brings lower prices and more features, and this will force Apple and AT&T to get a more capable iPhone to market. Perhaps more importantly, it may force AT&T to improve both its voice and its data networks. The most common complaint I hear from iPhone users is that the AT&T network has poor coverage.

If you have not had a chance to try out an iPhone, stop in an Apple or AT&T store to take a look, especially at the Web and email features. The iPhone is truly revolutionary, and is just the first of an entirely new kind of mobile device that most of us will have within five years.

Here is a handy gadget that Belkin is marketing towards travelers, but would also be very useful at home: it is a small surge protector with two USB charging ports. This can help reduce clutter at home where you need, for example, a surge protector for your laptop charger, a charger for your cellphone, and a charger for your MP3 player. Note that not all cellphones can be charged from a USB port, but in my opinion, that should be a mandatory feature. It is one of the reasons I like the Treo--I don't have to carry a charger for it on trips. In the evening, I just plug it into my laptop.

Apple unveiled the long promised SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iphone, along with serious support for business enterprise applications and services, including Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) support and Microsoft Active Sync support. The latter is needed to make the iPhone work fully with businesses using Entourage and other Microsoft business applications. The SDK allows developers to write and distribute iPhone native software applications, including games.

The iPhone is already the most popular cellphone in the world, but with today's announcements, Apple has unleashed the full power of the device, which actually runs Mac OS X. I wrote in this space years ago that the iPod was not a music player, but actually a new platform. Today, Apple has opened up the iPhone (which is actually an iPod) and has made the cellphone obsolete. RIM stock is off several dollars already (RIM makes the popular Blackberry), and Palm stock is down slightly, although Palm has had stock value issues for some time. But Motorola, Nokia, LG, and other phone makers are also in trouble, because the iPhone offers so much more than an old fashioned cellphone that Apple is well on the way to eliminating much of the competition, just as it did in the music player market.

Hitachi is showing off a table top computer. It is a large, fifty inch display touch sensitive display screen driven by a standard personal computer. Installed in a table, it enables several people to work together comfortably, using the touch screen to interact with the current application--programs like Google Earth are apparently stunning in this format.

The combination of large display screens, which are becoming increasingly affordable, along with more bandwidth and high gas prices, are going to drive demand for business videoconferencing. In the past, videoconferencing was awkward either because the video display area was too small and/or because of limited bandwidth that directly limited the quality of the interaction.

But as HD video equipment prices continue to do down and new display systems like Hitachi's hit the market, it will become easier and more natural to conduct some (not all) business meetings over the 'net. And as usual, if you have the right software and hardware, affordable broadband becomes the limiting factor for businesses that want to save travel money.

Today, every business and industrial park should have duct and fiber to every lot and every building so that these new services can be used affordably.

As I have noted in the past, I could easily have an entire category devoted to nothing but iPod accessories. But there are entire blogs and news sites devoted to the topic. I try to pick out the items that have some broader implications.

The latest iPod accesory is a refrigerator. Whirlpool has released a new model that has an iPod dock, stereo speakers, and interfaces for other gadgets like a digital picture frame and a tablet computer. For years, Design Nine has recommended placing an RF45 (Ethernet) jack behind the refrigerator. The kitchen has always been the central gathering place in most households, and the refrigerator in most homes displays a wild assortment of photos, sticky notes, reminders, grocery lists, and a calendar. And nearby, there is usually a radio for music and news. So it just makes sense to design a "modern" refrigerator that provides better access to things like shared family calendars that might be on a family Web site, printable grocery lists, and digital music.