Squandering a touch screen

It is sad when such a good idea goes to waste. According to David Pogue's scathing review of the Blackberry Storm and my experiences with the Android G1, both phones fail for different reasons. The Storm is completely right to include expandable memory and an 8GB memory card in the box. Yet, it does not include a fast enough processor, making it seem slow. Insufficient hardware support and poor interface design, according to Pogue, are the Storm's main failings. In a touchscreen device, it is very important to have large targets, and to have the interface designed to act like everyday objects, not like a computer screen. However, the insufficient hardware of the Storm makes a touchscreen not feasable, due to the fact that it does not have the animation capability to make the flick-scrolling lists.

The G1 suffers from the touchscreen not being the main feature, contrary to the Storm which eschews the iconic Blackberry keyboard. The plastic touchscreen on the G1 is not as smooth as the glass on my iPhone; I found myself reverting to using the scroll wheel at the bottom. Including a scroll wheel and keyboard show that HTC, T-Mobile, and Google are not willing to commit to a complete touchscreen experience, and the touch screen probably was not the main feature of testing. Both phones also suffer from poor hardware support; I don't think that the G1 can top the iPhone's 11MB of video RAM, and with five second delays, the Storm sure can't.

All touchscreen phones need to have some perspective on what makes the iPhone great: It is not only the touchscreen, but the touchscreen as the only input source, and the brilliant animation support, and the intuitive interface, and the responsiveness. If I was to predict the iPhone killer, I would predict a touchscreen-only phone with excellent hardware running a stripped-down Linux OS with compositing for animations. And it definitely would not be written in Java, even in compiled Java (way too slow for mobile devices; try a more static language.) Oh, and it will probably cost somewhere around $500.

What's stemming the adoption of 64-bit?

Adobe is going to provide the flash plugin for 64 bit Linux, before it provides it to 64 bit Windows or Mac OS X. Now, Microsoft says that a lack of 64 bit flash is preventing users from wholeheartedly adopting 64 bit, and a great number of macs are running 64 bit just fine (with 32 bit flash, because web applications should never need more than 4 GB of memory.) Now, if they just make the proprietary version easier to install under linux.

On Penguins and Netbooks

Microsoft is expected to start courting users of netbooks soon. A lot of netbooks, including the iconic EEE PC, currently are running a modified version of Linux. Other notebooks are doing a clever dual boot by default: they are running a stripped down version of linux that boots very quickly and are also running a full-blown operating system (most likely Windows). That way, users can run their Windows applications, but are also able to use their computer to quickly accomplish the most common tasks. Microsoft will have a hard time asserting dominance here because the stripped down version of Linux accomplishes all of the simple operating system tasks: IM, email, and web browsing. With the influx of web applications available, a lot can be done in the browser included in the lightweight Linux environment. Thus, Microsoft will need to shorten boot times and provide a compelling reason to boot into a full OS, and they will maintain that reason, as open source can adapt very quickly. Microsoft is no longer the borg. Its speed of adaption is much slower than the myriad of open source apps out there. And when there really is no more need for anything but web applications, Microsoft will need to succeed in a market that they are already in and are not doing well in.

Disclosure: I do not believe that the day will come when we will survive on only web applications and desktop games.