if connected

Yesterday, I was distracted by a toddler falling off a low wall onto concrete… and my new’ish Canon 500D followed the child, dropping about 0.75m from my camera shoulder bag. The lens cap flew off on impact.

Astonishingly, the camera seems to work fine. The 500D isn’t IP-rated, to my knowledge. The only mark is a little scratching on the edge of the (cheap kit) lens by the word ‘Canon’. (Incidentally this photo was taken with the iPhone 3GS, which is a big improvement on earlier iPhones for close-ups).

I wish all gadgets were this robust. Full review of the 500D (Rebel T1i or Kiss X3) is here on dpreview.

I was amazed when this new tiny, cheap’ish, wireless keyboard arrived yesterday to discover it has multi-touch, although it wasn’t advertised as such. This is in contrast to the hype around this feature on Mac laptops, a variety of mobile phones (eg HTC Hero, Palm Pre or iPhone) and Microsoft Surface.

It has two finger scrolling and uses three finger press to ‘right’ click. I’m not sure how useful it will be for controlling my media PC / home theatre PC but I’ll see over the next few days.

Has multi-touch become a commodity already? Or are Keysonic under-selling their kit?

Hutchison Rabbit was a wireless pre-mobile phone that only worked at specific locations where the Rabbit sign was displayed. Years ago when I started advising clients about public WiFi hotspot models I referred back to the weaknesses of Rabbit.

What’s striking to me now is how many so-called current mobile services still resemble Rabbit, and like Rabbit they’ll fail unless they’re available to people 24×7. Some examples from the many:

• iPhone applications that only work on WiFi, rather than 24×7 on the mobile/cellular network (e.g. Slingplayer, Skype, Pandora, etc.). I can’t see this model lasting.
• Handheld games consoles that rely on WiFi for connections and expect their users to search for the right location to go online. Effectively no one is going to bother, except at home.
• WiMAX networks that don’t have national coverage.
• Muni WiFi where the coverage is great in urban centres outdoors, but the signal doesn’t reach reliably into buildings where people are actually sitting.
• Cloud based services that aren’t available when there’s no Internet connection, e.g. Google Docs, the new Office Live.

The following advertising was inside a 1993 motorway guide book I found recently in a friend’s car:
(Click on an image to zoom in to read the text, it’s rather wonderful with the hindsight of just 16 years)

A valued uberreader spotted that a photo of a London bus in a previous post had been distorted by the iPhone camera.

The bus was moving right to left. It appears that by the time the iPhone camera recorded the bottom of the bus, the bus had moved to the left. So, the bus in the photo has an extremely slanted front, rather than the sheer vertical of the original.

The uberreader reader tested this theory by taking a photo of an office fan. The actual fan only has five blades, but in this photo the fan appears to have many more, due to the scan effect. This photo was taken with the iPhone held vertically and the fan must be spinning clockwise to create this visual illusion.

This is yet more evidence that cameraphones can’t be judged on megapixels alone. The lens, sensor, software, aperture control, type of flash and numerous other things are every bit as important.

It’s Thursday, four days after European clocks changed to what others call daylight saving and I’m still finding clocks stuck on GMT.

I’ll forgive those without an Internet connection like the wall clock in the kitchen, but way too many devices should know better. Windows Mobile still seems awkward, probably because I’m still running 6.0. The brand new Blackberry Bold hooked up to my company’s Blackberry Enterprise Server really should have updated itself. Two years ago I wouldn’t have cared.

But iPhone has changed everything. It just worked.

A former colleague wrote recently that ‘save file’ should have no place in this day. Everything should be saved automatically all of the time. I think manually changing the clocks twice a year should follow it into extinction.

Sidenote – This is the first post I’ve written on the new version of WordPress for iPhone. It’s a big improvement and worth returning to if you’ve tried and rejected it in the past. It means I can post more easily from wherever I happen to be:

Today, Amazon announced a new Kindle, as the company continues its transformation from a retailer of physical goods to one that is a major digital content (music, books, video) and Internet service (e.g. S3) company.

Few notes:

Amazon’s strategy is extremely US-centric, unlike their traditional retail reach. By choosing to include a US-specific mobile phone radio under the bonnet — the so-called Whispernet that is used to download books without a PC — Amazon limit their global presence. If Amazon wished to create a foundation for a global strategy then Amazon, like Apple, should have used a GSM/UMTS mobile phone radio. Now, Amazon must release different hardware if they want to offer Kindle in Europe or most of Asia. For consumers, this decision decision hits the product’s convenience: Kindle will only download books in the US, and in the future perhaps a few select countries that happen to use the same mobile technology, such as South Korea and parts of South America.

Kindle demonstrates how mobile strategy is not just a telco thing. Mobile is like the Internet, every company should have a vision for where they are going and how to embrace, partner, or compete, with the mobile market and players.

Amazon has become a device company, and is no longer purely a content play. Kindle is a combined content / hardware business models. What Amazon is selling is content: The latest books, supplied for the relatively low cost of $9.99 for bestsellers. But to sell that content they have become a device company.

Surprisingly, Amazon have not leveraged other ebook companies that they own. Mobipocket supplies both free ebook software and sells ebooks protected by DRM. But to date, Kindle ebooks are not compatible with Mobipocket software. If Amazon does offer ebooks on mobile phones, which was reported on Friday before the Kindle announcement, then Mobipocket will be a core part of Amazon’s toolbox. Syncing reading position between multiple devices — Whispersync, announced today — will certainly help Amazon in offering a great complementary service, i.e. a consumer will be able to use both Kindle and a mobile phone in tandem. Additionally Amazon own Booksurge, which is a an electronic self-publishing company, and yet are not fully exploiting Booksurge via Kindle.

Amazon’s exclusive on a new Stephen King story will test the robustness of Kindle’s DRM content protection. As the content is only available on Kindle, if it suddenly appears online on one of the piracy websites then that DRM has been broken. It will only take one person to break the DRM for numerous people to download a pirated version.

Note – Originally this was going to be posted on the work blog, but for some reason I can’t get Typepad to work now, all it seems to want to do is let me create ‘drafts’….

Way back when, every mobile gadget aimed to fill in little gaps in people’s day: dead times like waiting for a bus, walking to a train, or perhaps when out at lunch.

I’m struck by how the dead time opportunity no longer exists. Every morning I take the tube to work. Ten years ago people read newspapers, or books, or just stood and avoided eye contact. The latter may be just a London thing. Now, everyone is fiddling with their phone, tapping emails on a Blackberry, listening to music on mp3 players, or playing games on Nintendos. I even saw someone with a Sony Ebook reader on the way home last night. Result: There is no dead time left to fill. People already have multiple fun or work options that help them to avoid boredom.

So, 2009′s new mobile phones, other devices or mobile software have to displace an existing digital activity. In fact, they have to compete with multiple digital options as well as books, newspapers and the ubiquitous freesheets. This is hard. For Londoners, it’s never been easier to avoid eye contact underground.

We’re in the run up to MWC, when the great of the mobile industry will make their major 2009 product launches. To succeed, these products have to be: attractive to persuade people to buy them; be easy to take along all the time (so are light, small and have a long battery life); and deliver a compelling enough experience that people reach for that device or launch that application/game/music/movie/website/social network on a regular basis.

The death of dead time means that to succeed, companies have to father the birth of excellence.