Truncation gone wrong

...and this boys and girls is why it's important to plan for various browser widths and screen resolutions.

Palm Pre Launch Day - A retrospective

Well, here I sit 12 hours after obtaining the hottest new gadget of the day - the Palm Pre. - Am I glad I did it ? - Not really,,, Am I sorry I did it ? - No, I'm not sorry either.

Prelude
When I first heard Palm had a new phone coming out at CES 2009, I thought - "Yawwn." - I don't really miss my Treo 650, but it was my first mobile-mail device and it deserves a spot in my gadget museum.

WebOS - What on earth are they thinking... WinMob, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and,,, oh-yeah iPhone OS. - Does Palm really believe we need yet another OS to need to write apps for ? - Please !

Then came Josh Topolsky on Jimmy Fallon and something clicked. - Wow, there is excitement, buzz, talk about a new gadget, and best of all - IT ISN'T APPLE !!!! Don't get me wrong, this blog is being typed on a MacBook Air, but I really am getting a little tired of Apple being what every possible technology innovation is compared to. - Bring on Google, C'mon Palm - and oh, by the way - do you have a Flip! camera yet ? - If not, go buy one now... please :-)

The Decision
Kristen broke her phone a few months ago and has been limping along on an old Motorola Razr/Krzr. - She's forgotten her phone so many times recently that I told her, "You need to have a relationship with your phone so you don't forget it" - referring to me and my iPhone. - She said she wanted a real keyboard (she has an iPod Touch) and I said - Oooohh, so you want the Pre ? (she showed no opposition and mild interest, so the deal was done...)

This meant I'd be leaving Verizon before our contract is up, at least for her phone - so I called to verify costs and all seemed reasonable. (I know a thing or two about ETF's from my iPhone days). - So today, June 6th couldn't come quickly enough to get the new family member.

Waiting in Line
Wide awake at 6am, I got ready and headed off to the local Sprint corporate/retail store by about 6:20am. I was #7 in line. - It was general chatter about blog postings and rumors for the next 90 mins, when the attention turned towards our goal.

The Sprint employee emerged to set out balloons & pass out sheets of paper with a number on it. #3 was buying 2 phones, so I got Pre #8. - They warned us that we'd need to wait outside while they kept staff ratios in check. - At 8am (not a minute sooner) - #1-5 entered.

After a full hour with #1-#5 in the store, #6 & I finally got to go in and play with their 2 demo units for 15 minutes. - Then 15 minutes later They rang up my Pre, Touchstone & car-charger (while I grabbed cookies for those still waiting outside) and off I went.

Unboxing
It wasn't as magical as I'd hoped. - The Sprint person already cracked the seal and we were in a hurry to an appointment and I wanted the battery to charge while I was away. - That's when I found out about the extra-sticky base on the Touchstone. - I guess it's kinda cool :-/

First Impressions

• Sharp Plastic
• Hard to open/close the slider
• Fingerprint City
• Wow, Apple must really own those multitouch patents
• Small display
• Only 3/5 bars
  

Sure, it's neat - don't get me wrong. - But the Industrial Design excels while the mechanicals and weight left me wishing for more.

WebOS & Setup for use at Work
Associated to our WPA2/Enterprise (PEAP) wireless over ECT - No problem !
Exchange ActiveSync - seemed to go with no problem, but it turns out this is a near fatal-flaw in this 1.0 release of WebOS/Synergy
Personal IMAP & Yahoo mail (this is Kristen's after all) setup easily.

While driving to another appointment accepted the update to WebOS 1.02 (67mb). It timed out over wifi - but finally prompted to install while we were in motion. It took 10 mins, but went fine.

We noticed some signal issues when Kristen got her first call (Hey Katie!). - Not sure yet how much talking on the deck helped or not. - We're still at very low minute usage.

Speaking of the minute plans,,, As someone leaving Verizon, I was pleasantly surprised that Sprint gives you 7pm-7am for nights/weekends, and TeleNav-based turn by turn navigation as well as "Sprint TV & Sprint Radio" which are included for nothing extra/month...

Oh, and it's Navigational maps are in 3D vs. iPhone's Google Maps-only 2D - nice !

Top Complaint -

1. Exchange ActiveSync MUST get working and fast. - I'll talk to some folks closer to the EAS stuff at work to see if we can identify if it is as I expect...
   
   
2. The slide out keyboard mechanical feels plasticy/cheap.
   
   
3. 3/5 bars in the house : I'd hate to pay $5 a month for the Femtocell (AIRave)
   
   
4. NO Tethering-Hello !?! C'mon Sprint, turn it BACK on as it was listed as a feature leading up to launch
   
   
5. Battery life - 12 hours of modest usage (mainly data- not voice,
   

Top Faves -

1. Synergy - Once I am able to get Exchange into this, I really like the unified & grouped view of all mail accounts
   
   
2. Gosh that keyboard is nice to have back - not as great feeling as a Blackberry, but solid
   
   
3. Brilliant display/resolution UI
   
   
4. Flash on the camera - excellent
   
   
5. Nice that it has a standard micro-USB port along with the Touchstone - C'mon Apple, Play nice someday eh?

I'm sure other things will arise over time, but for now - that's the summary of Day-1.

Prefully yours,
Dave

UPS is Santa Claus

Merry Christmas to All

Like Sands through the Hourglass

Kristen and I are on our way off for what has started to become a bit of an annual tradition of taking an international trip each year. I'll admit that I do enjoy traveling for work, but it does cause problems on the home-front as well with me being gone between 15-30% of the time.

After a great time in Iceland and last year, and south-Australia the year before - Kristen got intrigued by what we were seeing in the media about the growth-boom in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. I was initially hesitant - partly due to the proximity of places like Iran and Afghanistan, but also due to the sheer cost of such a trip. - I really wanted to go somewhere that we could use United miles since I am under a constant fear that should they re-file for bankruptcy we would see those disappear in a hurry.

When we went to book the trip, it become obvious that costs would be prohibitive. I tried to refocus on a potential western-Australia trip and possibly a combination with New Zealand. I hear both are rather incredible. Upon going to book the flights to Sydney/Perth, a new United ad appeared - "Introducing Daily Non-Stop to Dubai" - This changed everything, first off - as a new flight, the free/mileage-based tickets weren't all gone. Secondly, I too had gotten excited by what I've seen happening with the growth of Emerging Markets at Cisco.

So here we sit in the United lounge (5 hour layover) waiting for the 15 hour flight from Washington Dulles to Dubai. - It's a very short trip, only 5 days - but it should allow us to get a quick sense of what it's like. Already I have had a positive response from an old-friend on Facebook telling me that Dubai rocks.

Since booking the trip, we've gotten a lot of "Wow - Dubai ?"; I'm no idiot - I can hear the sentiment of 'why on earth would you go there ?' or 'that sounds scary !' in the voices. - C'mon folks, do you realize how in today's global economy such a US-centric attitude is going to be our biggest barrier towards economic growth and technology innovation ? - I look at this trip as an immersive lesson in how it's not just tech companies that are "Dealing with Darwin" but it's countries as well. - I applaud what I've read about Dubai preparing to evolve from an oil-exporting based economy to a trade, tourism and innovation based economy. - I sincerely hope I enjoy my vacation there, but before stepping foot off the plane, I'm already hoping that I'll be making this trip again for work soon.

I hope to share more from the desert-
David

10 iPhone Improvements or Apps I need ASAP

As many of of my friends know, after 6 hours in line, I'm the proud owner of a new iPhone 3G. (Okay, I know you're all wondering - yes, the white one ;-)

Having now had it for a full week, and having traveled with it from RTP to San Jose on a recent trip for work, here is my top-10 list of things that I need for this amazing device.

1. Cisco Unified Personal Communicator - By far the best Voice/UC application I have ever used - It really is fantastic and I would love to be able to use it with the camera to do full video conferencing while on a WiFi AP in Chicago O'Hare
   
   
2. Turn by Turn Directions - As has been recently reported, the iPhone 2.1 firmware is bringing speed & direction API's to the SDK.  Please TomTom, Please Garmin - Don't get hung up by it not being your hardware, give the app away for free and sell your navigation/maps/directions as a service. (Google's gonna eat your lunch if you don't)
   
   
3. Security Token Application - Secure Computing, RSA, SecurID - We all use 'em; so please port one over to the iPhone to run natively such that it can pass tokens over to that very cool VPN client that's in the iPhone.
   
   
4. Cut/Copy/Paste - Again, rumored to be in Firmware 2.1; but c'mon - lets get going !
   
   
5. Video Streaming - I'd be live on Qik if I could.
   
   
6. Adium/Pidgin - I really need support for Sametime, MSN, Yahoo in order to full appreciate how terrible it is to try to type on the iPhone
   
   
7. Microsoft RDP Client - Sorry OSS fans - I didn't say VNC (already have that) and I didn't say RDesktop - I think Windows Server 2008's RemoteApp support could be amazing on the iPhone.  Using a TS Gateway, I could run a native Windows Outlook client on my iPhone over SSL. (Oh wait - I almost forgot how much fun it is to  bring up a VPN tunnel every time I want to use corporate resources)
   
   
8. Citrix ICA Client - This client has probably the longest list of supported OS's that I've ever seen in my life, even DOS,  except for one.
   
   
9. Blogger Client - Yeah, I have Shozu; but I've been using Twitter more in the past week than I have in the past 6 months of having an account.  A slick Blogger client would sure wake up DaveStafford.org
   
   
10. Battery Life Improvements ! - Unlike Blackberry who have made battery life expectations that are hard for any device to keep up with, Apple has fallen way short in this area - so if you ever get an e-mail from me that ends abruptly then this might be the reason
    

That's it for now - so dear application developers from around the world - You write em, I'll buy them. (But please don't charge more than a buck)

Anything for a buck

It wasn't long ago that I signed up for JungleDisk and chose to splurge for their "Plus" subscription. - Why did I need more than the free service ? - Well, for the extra features that came for the bargain basement price of $1/month - why not ?  Next I needed to go over to Amazon's S3 service to sign up for my account in order to store my data on Amazon's 'cloud' storage service. - How much is that you might ask -- well, it's about $1.60 per month.

Is the proper term 'micro-subscription' ? - In any case, I've found that I have a horrible weakness. - I'll pay a buck for just about anything, and I think you would too. (See iTunes) - If a gallon of gas costs $4,  why not drop a buck here and there for fun.  When checking out at PetSmart after buying Alex $5 worth of Snausages, their credit card systems asks if I want a dollar to go to homeless pets. - A buck ? - sure, why not. -- Now my addiction to giving up hard-earned dollars has taken a twist - Google Checkout and Amazon's marketplace have made one-click spending and one-click subscribing easier than ever.

Recurring subscriptions are a slippery slope.  Cell Phone, Cable, Internet, Vanity E-mail domain name? - Tivo? -- all have found ways to rope you into paying every month. - Now things we're used to getting for free are getting in on the act:  Satellite Radio and even GPS subscrptions for extra services on devices like the Dash are drawing funds from our pockets. - But we the consumers are onto their tricks, we're aware of the fine print, extra fees, taxes and early-termination penalties.

How quickly we fall back into our old habits - this time - a buck at a time.  I'm very interested in keeping watch as to where these on-line dollar snatchers are striking. - Please post back in the comments if you're hooked to passing a George and how it happened.

Go Wings (Better luck next year Pistons)

Yup, Season is over - My friend over at Statsheet.com asked me recently what my favorite sport was and it was without much hesitation that I told him it was the NBA.  I mean ever since growing up during the 88/89/90 appearances of my beloved Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals (and yes - that would be back to back championships as well) - I loved the Bad Boys of Motown. 

There was a retro-feel this year as well, Pistons vs. Celtics in the East and the Lakers in the West. - Gosh, where's Magic, Bird & Joe Dumars ? (Sorry, not much of a Isah Thomas fan anymore)  -  I've probably been to more Pistons games than Red Wings + Tigers + Lions (they're our NFL team in case you've never heard of them) combined.  Too bad I need to drive to Charlotte to watch the Pistons play in North Carolina. - In any case - we made it back to the Eastern Conference finals and that's it. - As my uncle would say 'It's OVA !"

I was very encouraged by a couple things that makes me hope for another chance in 09.

• Young team - The oldest starter is Sheed at 33 and look at how well Lyndsey Hunter runs around the court at 38 !
• Rodney Stuckey - What a phenom !  For a rookie to step into Chauncey's shoes during his hamstring injury and be such a force; Look out ! - It's just like Vinnie Johnson - Microwave 2.0 Stuckey ! Oh yeah - and he's 22, so he's got a decade of greatness ahead
• And finally - the Pistons are still enough of a draw that Palace of Auburn Hills hasn't become "Meijer Thrifty Acres

Go Wings - Beat Pittsburgh !