Technologizer

“Tech news” and “iPhone news” are synonymous. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. And iPhone-related news seems to have a higher melodrama quotient than the tech news I’m used to covering…
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I’ve attended hundreds of trade shows, but I’ve never been been to one whose spirit is represented by a human spokesmascot. Until now, that is.

I’m in Berlin to attend this week’s IFA, a giant event that’s the European equivalent of the U.S.’s Consumer Electronics Show. And IFA has Miss IFA, who “represents the dynamic and cosmopolitan image of the IFA and the city of Berlin,” according to the show’s organizers, Messe Berlin. “She invites visitors to explore industry highlights, find out the latest information, and discover the vast range of products at one of the world’s leading trade fairs for consumer electronics, and starting in 2008, for Home Appliances.”

Miss IFA has extremely red hair, an extremely red dress, and extremely red shoes–she’s “the young lady with the fiery ginger looks,” according to Messe Berlin. She didn’t have all that much to say when she attended a press conference this afternoon, but she apparently never met a piece of consumer electronics she didn’t like. Here she is in a bunch of stock shots produced for this year’s show, some of which were taken at Berlin landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate. (More pix after the jump.)

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In a real sense, the last major innovation in Web navigation happened back in 1992. That’s when Mosiac, the first graphical browser showed up, introducing the idea of moving around the Web by pointing and clicking on words and pictures. It works really well. But Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs, the research arm of the organization behind Firefox, has come up with Ubiquity, a fascinating new way to use the Web. And it’s fascinating in part because its text-based interface is in some ways a return to the Internet’s command-line origins.

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that works in Windows and OS X (Linux support is still incomplete). Install it, and you can call it up by typing <Ctrl><Space> in Windows or <Option><Space> on a Mac. What you get is a window that pops up above the Web page you’re on in Firefox, with a command line that you can type natura-language commands into.

Type Google and one or more keywords, for instance, and Ubiquity will Google for you, previewing the first few links and letting you press <Return> to go to Google’s results for the words you searched for:

Type Map and an address, and you get a Google Maps preview; press <Return> to go to Google Maps…

Type Weather and a city, and you get…well, you know:

Ubiquity is an open platform that Web service providers can add their services to; already, it includes support for an array of ‘em, including Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Yelp, Wikipedia, TinyURL, Gmail, and a bunch more. If you’re a Twitter addict, you can Tweet from Ubiquity:

In a way that’s reminiscent of the Greasemonkey extension, Ubiquity can modify Web pages on the fly. For instance, if you highlight an address on a page, call up Ubiquity, type Map, and then choose to insert the map in the current Web page, you can turn this snippet of Google’s “Contact Us” page…

…into this:

(This is a nifty effect; I’m trying to think of instances where it might be useful, though…and coming up a bit short.)

Besides the command line, Ubiquity has a context-sensitive menu that you can bring up by highlighting information on a Web page and then doing a right-click. You can use this to translate information from one language to another, for example:

Ubiquity already has a pretty extensive bag of tricks, but Raskin says the real goal is to make it capable of doing extremely sophisticated natural-language mashups that let users take advantage of multiple Web sites and services without ever leaving the Ubiquity window. Here’s his mockup of a fancy travel command:

So what’s my initial take on Ubiquity? Mozilla calls it an experiment, and that seems about right: It’s a neat idea that’s worth exploring. It’ll be interesting to see whether it appeals mostly to nerds–as command-line approaches to computing have for the last fifteen or twenty years–or has more widespread appeal. I know I’m going to leave it installed and try out it out…and will keep an eye on it to see how it evolves.

I’m in Berlin at the moment, where I arrived today to be a speaker at IFA, Europe’s equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show. More on that later this week, I’m sure; for now, here’s some stateside news.
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Over at CNet’s The Digital Home blog, Don Reisinger has posted a plea for Apple to release a touch-screen Mac computer. The meme isn’t new–in part because Apple patent filings have suggested for years that the company has at least thought about making such a beast.

I disagree with Don, though, that Apple should release a…well, let’s call it a Mac Touch…”as soon as possible.” And while it’s completely true that predicting what Apple will or won’t do is dangerous, I kind of doubt that a Mac Touch is imminent. Here’s why.

–The Tablet PC has been a miserable failure. It’s been almost six years since Microsoft rolled out Windows-based tablets. I remember asking a Microsoft exec at the time how he thought the platform would do; he told me that he thought that most laptops would be tablets within a few years. Instead, it seems more likely that Tablet PC might just disappear, except for vertical business applications.

(Side note: The Tablet PC rollout featured Rob Lowe–yet another oddball Microsoft celebrity endorsement.)

I was skeptical about Tablet PC at the time, and was therefore not the least bit surprised that it failed to catch fire. You can’t build a good general-purpose Windows laptop that doesn’t have a physical keyboard, and if you do provide a physical keyboard, touch becomes a lot less compelling. And to this day, Microsoft’s answers to basic questions about touch-based interfaces remain unsatisfying.

It’s likely that a Mac Touch would be substantially different from a Tablet PC–for one thing, it would likely involve multi-touch and fingertip control rather than a stylus–and Apple would likely offer a much more refined approach than Microsoft. But I think that the failure of Tablet PCs shows that consumer interest in touch interfaces on standard computers is lukewarm, to put it mildly. And while Apple often enters nascent markets before anyone’s had a big hit, it’s rare to see it do anything where other companies have experienced nothing but failure.

–Keyboards and touch don’t mesh that well. Don says that a Mac Touch should have a physical keyboard. But if it’s essentially a normal MacBook with a multi-touch screen, there are all kinds of usability issues. Do you really want to reach over the keyboard to touch the screen? Can you design a MacBook with a hinge that stands up to lots of finger-pointing? Would people be able to deal with finger-smudging? And if the design is more like a Tablet PC convertible, with a screen that rotates around to conceal the keyboard, would Apple be able to provide enough functionality with a touch-only interface to make the experience worthwhile? (Folks are willing to deal with the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard because it has clear upsides in terms of device and screen size; I’m not sure that the same would be true of a Mac Touch.) If the Mac Touch was a desktop–Don doesn’t explicitly say he thinks it should be a portable–would it have more potential than HP’s interesting but nichey TouchSmart PC?

–What could you do with a touch-screen Mac, anyhow? Don doesn’t really address this. Presumably, it might offer some features similar to the iPhone’s touch-driven photo viewer, media player, and so forth. It might even use a touch-screen as a replacement for a standard touchpad (or an alternative–a Mac Touch might sport both). But it’s not clear that a touch-driven interface on an otherwise typical Mac would provide any compelling benefits.

–Apple is so dang busy with other stuff. Even Steve Jobs said that the glitchy rollout of Mobile Me was evidence that the company had bitten off more than it could chew in one big gulp. Doing touch well would be a major undertaking, and I wonder whether Apple would see it as having enough potential payoff to be worth the work involved.

I’m completely willing to be proven wrong here. Maybe Apple has figured out how to make touch make sense. (If it has, I woudn’t be surprised if its device looks less like a touch-screen Mac and more like a hybrid device that’s sort of like a Mac and sort of like an iPhone, and sized in between.) Maybe it hasn’t figured out touch, but is going to try anyhow, just because the idea sounds theoretically cool.

Actually, I’m not just willing to be proven wrong–I’d love to see a Mac Touch that makes sense. One thing’s for sure: Steve Jobs has more vision when it comes to this stuff than I do…

A couple of weeks ago, Best Buy announced that it was working with a company called Zoom Systems to install electronics vending machines inside airports. I blog to you this afternoon from the international terminal at San Francisco’s SFO, where I’m waiting for a plane–and where I just spent some time with one of these “Best Buy Express” kiosks.

Zoom Systems has been installing automated electronics kiosks in airports and other locations for years now. (There’s one in my local Macy’s.) So the Best Buy news is more about a marketing partnership than technological innovation of any sort. The machine is the standard Zoom Systems machine, with Best Buy signage and a touch screen that has some of the look and feel of BestBuy.com:

The kiosk I saw was almost always been gawked at by one or more curious travelers:

In fact, the throngs of spectators were thick enough that if you wanted to buy something, you might have had to wait, or elbow your way to the front of the line. In the ten minutes or so that I hung around and watched the scene, several people seemed to ready to buy, but didn’t–one family seemed within moments of buying a Nintendo DS Lite, then walked away. The one real customer I saw–he bought some headphones–seemed tickled. But he also seemed to have trouble with the touch screen: He kept pounding away at on-screen buttons, and they didn’t respond. And at the end of his transaction, the kiosk asked him to take a survey; if I’d been waiting to buy something, I’d have been ticked off. (Seems like anything that encourages people to move at a leisurely pace at an airport is a mistake.)

I suspect that I’m not alone in being instinctively suspicious about merchants of any sort in airports: I assume that the stuff they sell sports rip-off pricetags until proven otherwise. So I jotted down some prices at the kiosk, then compared them to BestBuy.com once I got to my gate. (Yes, I’m a nerd.) The bottom line:

–nearly everything cost the same at the airport and online, including iPods, the DS Lite, a Nikon Coolpix S550 camera, and an unlocked Sony Ericsson phone.

–The Pure Flip DV camera was $149.99 at the airport; that was the standard price online, but it was on sale for $129.99. Apparently, Best Buy sale prices don’t apply out here.

–a FujiFilm J10 camera was $129.99 at both Best Buy incarnations, except it was on sale for $116.99 online.

–A pair of portable Sony speakers were $29.99 at SFO, and $34.99 online. Even a sale price on the site–$33.24–wasn’t as cheap as the airport price. Take a trip, save a few bucks!

I hereby declare my suspicions mostly invalid in this case–for the most part, Best Buy Express prices are Best Buy prices.

A few other notes:

–I’m confused by the idea of buying an iPod at the airport, since it’ll be empty. Do people pick up one for a trip, then realize that it’s useless until they can fill it with music? Wouldn’t it be neat if you could buy a pre-filled iPod for such occassions?

–Anyone who’s ever bought a bag of pretzels or a soft drink from a vending machine has seen instances when a balky product gets wedged in the machine and doesn’t tumble into the dispenser. The Best Buy Express kiosk tries to assuage any fears with a note saying that if your product isn’t properly dispensed, you won’t be charged;

The touch screen provides some buying advice, including something called “Digital Cameras 101.” If you need something by that title, you shouldn’t be buying a camera as you’re about to hop on a plane. And I wouldn’t want to be in line to buy something while another customer in front of me learned the basics of digital photography;

–Right next to the Best Buy Express here, there’s something called Sony Access–an identical Zoom Systems machine that sells only Sony stuff. It was out of order, but people were gawking at it, too;

–This terminal had a third Zoom Systems kiosk that sold mostly snacks–Wheat Thins, Pringles, and Starburst Fruit Chews. Wonder if Zoom has approached 7-Eleven to open 7-Eleven Expresses?

Would I use a Best Buy Express? Maybe. If I did, I’d probably be like that guy who bought the headphones, and pick up something cheap and small I’d forgotten to pack. How about you?

Until July, I used an AT&T Tilt 3G phone, and found that performance was often disappointing. Today, I own an Apple iPhone 3G, and find that performance is often disappointing. Coincidence? Nope!
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OpenClip, the third-party attempt to give the iPhone copy-and-paste functionality, has run into an obstacle that sounds like a showstopper: Version 2.1 of the iPhone system software, currently in the works, closes the loophole that it used to give multiple applications access to the same clipboard.

Actually, the OpenClip folks knew that this was the case around the time they readied the announcement of their project, but decided to go ahead anyway. And they’re not giving up all hope: This blog post says that Apple could still decide to enable the functionality that OpenClip needs, and points out that it will still let an application provide copying and pasting within its own walls…it just won’t be able to share data with other programs.

“The goal is to bring the usefulness of copy/paste to light,” says the blog post of the OpenClip initiative. Seems to me that that was apparent already, and has been since the Mac popularized the notion of cutting and pasting between apps back in 1984. But I still admire the gumption of anyone who’d try to add basic system-level functionality to someone else’s operating system. Especially when that someone else is Apple, who’s famous for releasing software updates that happen to disable programming tricks that other folks have devised to get around limitations in Apple software.

It’s dead certain that Apple will add copy-and-paste to the iPhone itself at some point; what’s completely up in the air is whether that point might arrive in weeks, months, or years. It’s not the number-one item on my personal iPhone wish life–that would probably be a to-do list that syncs with the one in iCal. I’ll still be happy when copy-and-paste shows up. though, if only because it’ll free up all the energy folks are spending talking about it to think about new iPhone features that go beyond the profoundly mundane…

Pity the poor Mac Mini. After being unveiled with plenty of hoopla in January 2005 as “the most affordable Mac ever,” it departed the limelight with surprising swifness. The glossy white micro-Mac has received only minor updates such as CPU upgrades and actually got less affordable when the base model went from $499 to $599. Last year, there were even premature reports of the Mini’s imminent death, and most Mac enthusiasts didn’t seem too griefstricken at the prospect of its demise.

But the Mini lives–and even though $599 is no longer anywhere near a dirt-cheap price for a computer, it remains the cheapest Mac. It also comes in a super-small package that’s still fun and distinctive. So it’s the subject of my fourth excessively in-depth Mac-vs.-PC price comparison. My goal, as always, is to gauge whether you pay a “Mac Tax” when you buy a Mini instead of a roughly comparable Windows PC.

Before we get started, here are links to earlier comparisons in this series, just in case you missed ‘em:

Round one: A mid-range MacBook vs. custom-configured Windows laptops.
Round two: The cheapest MacBook vs. cheap Windows laptops.
Round three: The iMac vs. Windows all-in-ones

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Digg’s Kevin Rose has blogged that new, cheaper iPods will arrive in the next two or three weeks. That I can believe. (I’d bet on the outer edge of the prediction timewise or even a bit later, since Apple will almost certainly need a little time to invite journalists to a press event to roll out the new line.) But Rose has also posted a photo of what is supposedly the new iPod Nano in a skinny form factor that looks more like the original Nano than the current, more squarish design:

Like all alleged spy shots of unreleased products, this one is conveniently fuzzy-wuzzy…actually, it appears to be in black and white. (How come nobody with access to a top-secret product ever has a decent digital SLR handy?) But the shot is clear enough to see that the touch wheel has a menu button, backward and forward buttons, and a play/stop button.

And that’s why I think this photo is a fake. Presumably, the design involves holding the iPod in portrait mode when listening to music, and rotating it into landscape orientation to watch video. But in landscape mode, the orientation of the touch wheel doesn’t make a lot of sense: Backwards becomes up and forward becomes down, and the “Menu” label is sideways. Yes, you could figure it out. But I have a hard time believing that Apple would do anything so apparently ungainly and inelegant. (The iPhone’s rotating screen makes perfect sense, since the touch-screen controls rotate, too–and note that the one button on the iPhone’s face was designed to look exactly the same no matter what the orientation.)

Full disclosure: I’m probably predisposed to hope that this isn’t the new Nano, since I think the current square one is one of Apple’s nicest industrial designs ever. (I’m not sure why, but think of it as being a little guy; there’s something human about the proportions and styling.) If this one looked like an improvement, I might be more inclined to suspend my disbelief. For now, though, I don’t wanna believe.

Let’s end with a flashback to late 2006: Kevin Rose said that the iPhone was on its way (right!) but said it would be released on all carriers simultaneous, would have a slide-out keyboard, and would sport dual batteries (wrong, wrong, wrong)!

I hope that once again, he’s right on the timing and wrong on the details…