The painful side of the mobile bleeding edge

[vivaldirules]

My recommendation for relief from the bleeding edge: W. Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge". A terrific read and completely unrelated to the topic of this thread.

[paulkbiba]

That is why I'm sticking with my iPhone, even though it does less than my Treo or E61i. The thing works perfectly, is ergonomic and the applications are well thought out. Every time I think of going back to my other phones I shudder. I'ts a real pleasure to have technology that just works.

[modsoul]

Originally Posted by watcha

Well, as far as 'readers' go then, the most hassle free, reliable and light weight is the paperback!

I agree that we spend an inordinate amount of time, frustration and stress trying to get our technology to work. But oh, the joy and freedom - not to mention the potential for creativity it can unleash - when it does.

i'll argue on the light weight of paper back.
but i've found the sony reader, once setup and confgigured and gotten used to suppases any laptop, tablet, or even paper back for book reading.

i am now doing everything on it. and for stuff i can't find digital copies i just make my own using the books i have. (that takes time but one weekend to convert books i'll ise for month isn't bad) hence having all my textbooks (a total weight of 20+ lb) on the reader is definatly a plus

[modsoul]

Originally Posted by paulkbiba

That is why I'm sticking with my iPhone, even though it does less than my Treo or E61i. The thing works perfectly, is ergonomic and the applications are well thought out. Every time I think of going back to my other phones I shudder. I'ts a real pleasure to have technology that just works.

have you jailbroken it yet. becasue if not then its the most boring piece of $400 technology i've ever seen.

[paulkbiba]

Nope, I did it once, and the quality of the apps out there wasn't worth the trouble. Besides, the whole point is that it is a high tech unit that actually works - no crashes, resets or strange behavior. It has a browser that is good enough for me to leave my laptop home. Why should I add stuff to it that will make it a resetting pain in the neck like my Windows Mobile phones. I want reliability in my high tech. We'll get reliable third party apps next year. In the meantime I have a phone that doesn't crash, like the Treo, or lock up, like the Nokia or my other Windows Mobile units. I've finally come to realize that reliability is the first thing to look for.

[solitarywolf]

There isn't much difference today than there was in the 80's when the TRS-80 series, Comodore 64 & 128, Timex Sinclair, TI 99, etc all were out. Back then we also had to "figure the workarounds". These computers didn't even have an OS installed. You had to load it each time you booted up.

These companies are out for one thing. To advance technology? No. They want your money before the next company beats them to it.

-Seth
San Francisco, CA

Originally Posted by slayda

Hey Nate, if you get far enough out on the Bleeding edge, you don't even feel the cut it's so smooth.

Hmmmm, we call that "traumatic blood loss" around here. That would be a sure sign that you need to step BEHIND the wild-eyed geek line for a couple months to regain blood.

And money.

Because we all know the first thing susceptible to "bleeding edge" hemorrhage is the wallet.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by solitarywolf

There isn't much difference today than there was in the 80's when the TRS-80 series, Comodore 64 & 128, Timex Sinclair, TI 99, etc all were out. Back then we also had to "figure the workarounds". These computers didn't even have an OS installed. You had to load it each time you booted up.

These companies are out for one thing. To advance technology? No. They want your money before the next company beats them to it.

-Seth
San Francisco, CA

Certainly the Commodor and I believe the TRS-80 had an OS. It was in ROM so the boot time was almost zero. I still have my Pet purchased in 1977. It is PC's that have an OS you have to load each time you turn it on. We've gone backwards.

Dale

[mores]

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

Mac just works? Sorry but that is a lot of hooey.

hmmmmmmmm ... hooey to you too

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

Consider the following.

A few years ago I bought 2 new macs for my studio. Within 6 months the change to system 10 was announced. It did not run well on the "older" machines so we were stuck on system 9, then the next version of photoshop was announced but it did not run well on system 9. Lots of crashes and very slow. The result was 2 machines a year old running software that put me at a competitive disadvantage. Did not cheer me up.

yeah, i can immagine that sucks. i switched after 10 was out and already had the first update to 10.2 or something.

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

A year or so later when I upgraded to new machines again we had a much more expensive fiasco with the change to intel chips. I now run my new MacBook pro on XP. Camera drivers come out quicker for XP and I can use local Garmin GPS maps and my Polar heartrate monitor with ease.

i don't disagree. if you want compatibility, use windows.

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

Don't want to start a religious debate here

too late my god is better than your god.

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

but I see far more posts on this forum from mac users having hassles with simple stuff like dos formating cf cards then would leave me to believe they are trouble free and just work.

then you first turn to a bunch of windows users and ask how to format on a mac. sheesh. of course things work different. the close/enlarge/minimize buttons are on the other side of the window, there is no menu INSIDE the window but ABOVE it, the red dot does not actually close the app ...
people will have huge problems if they fail to adapt. compare stick-shift to manual ... sorta similar but different.

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

Before anyone attacks me over this I own 4 G5's, a Macbook Pro, emac, ipod and several pc's. I would not say I am against macs but consider myself realistic. If I was smart enough and interested enough I would give Linux a go.

your main problem is probably that you're using multiple devices. i get confused when i boot my windows pc and keep on pressing the windows-key

anyhow, what i want to say, in my line of work (multimedia) i realized i do not need a windows PC, and i can work better when i actually do not use windows. so we have an XP laptop left in our studio, to do browser-compatibility-checks, use our scanner/fax/printer that does not work properly on a mac (driver issues ) and run win-only software that's sometimes needed for non-business things.

i am completely converted, i am proud to say, but to each his own. i have tried to "convert" a couple of people, some are glad about it, others use win and osX on their macs, and others b*tch and whine about how crappy the apple is and basically blame me for throwing money out the window. (no, not my fault, i just "suggested" politely)

but yes, i do longfully look at windows users when they're playing the latest 3D games, or when they can convert ebooks to mobipocket format etc.

my macs (powerbook g4, now macbook pro) have always worked, i had one busted cd-drive in the powerbook that worked for 3 years almost nonstop, and the cooling fans in my macbook pro needed replacement a month ago. but the system never needed reinstalling, i have no kernel panics, an occasional freezin app is force-quit and restarted, and have never lost any data due to software/os-faults.

i just wanted to voice my position. every time a windows user comes to me and asks me for help, i love my mac a little more. because even if it is not perfect, it is perfecter (?) than all the windows machines i have worked on in my life.

okay, back to topic, bleeding edge et cetera, please continue!

[Bob Russell]

Excellent comparison! I often think of the mobile world now as being very much like the early years of the personal computer. As noted the TRS-80 had a ROM O/S built in, but if you wanted to do "real" stuff you often ended up doing workarounds or hacks. For example, I wrote code to hack the O/S on the TRS-80 Model I just to get a blinking cursor because I couldn't see very well where the cursor was on the screen. Or when I wanted to do special characters for technical writing, I had to create my own fonts. Or when I wanted real sound output, I had to design and build my own sound synthesizer board, and write driver software for it to manage the waveforms. Graphics required converting the coordinates into a character location and showing the character with the dots in the right place. For games you had to address the video memory directly to get performance, and anything fast had to be in machine code. There were many other hacks that I've forgotten completely, but it was very much like what we see with mobile devices now -- you can "almost" do a lot, but it takes a lot of patience, knowledge, and sometimes expense to get it to work decently.

We complain about desktops now, but they are pretty mature and solid in retrospect. We have convenient ways to move data across computers, we have world wide networking with the internet, we have "plenty" of memory and storage capacity, we have USB standards, we have all kinds of 3rd party and open source software to do basic kinds of tasks. Etc etc.

Give mobile computing a chance to mature in similar fashion and we will see something comparable. Not the same, and we will always find limitations in mobile devices that we don't have to deal with on the desktop, but it will get so much better and so much cheaper. I just hope it doesn't become ad-ridden and security compromised. Even on the desktop, we used to know exactly what was happening "behind the scenes", but now it seems like a cat and mouse game for software to get you to share more info that you like and install more processes than you want, and so forth. The mobile device like a PDA used to be a shelter from such things until the smartphone came out with hidden auto update systems and internet connections and so forth. But I digress. What I'm really trying to say is that we all have to realize that mobile computing is in it's infancy, which is exactly what I was trying to say - mobile computing is the bleeding edge. But it's maturing somewhat. You can see that by the fact that it's pretty good if you stick to the basic features. Just like early desktops when you stuck with character based word processing or Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc. Just like solitarywolf says... think of early desktops and you can pretty much sum up where we are with mobile computing. I can't wait to see what it's like when it matures!

Originally Posted by solitarywolf

There isn't much difference today than there was in the 80's when the TRS-80 series, Comodore 64 & 128, Timex Sinclair, TI 99, etc all were out. Back then we also had to "figure the workarounds". These computers didn't even have an OS installed. You had to load it each time you booted up.

These companies are out for one thing. To advance technology? No. They want your money before the next company beats them to it.

-Seth
San Francisco, CA

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

... think of early desktops and you can pretty much sum up where we are with mobile computing. I can't wait to see what it's like when it matures!

I have pretty good ideas about that but I won't tell before my novel comes out. All I'll say is pretty obvious; there won't be a difference between mobile and desktop...

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

The only odd thing about it is, we've had mobile computers for almost as long as we've had desktops. Remember the Newton? Or the Casio Zoomer? It's not like PDAs were just invented last year. So why the heck are they still bleeding edge?

The biggest drawback to the computer age is the fact that companies insist on releasing the latest and greatest, just because they know people will pay for the thrill of having "bleeding edge" tech, before its real value has been established. As fast as one HW/SW package is mastered, a new one takes its place. There hasn't been enough standardization to allow the industry to settle down and get the heck off that razor.

Laptops were a prime example of this problem, with their many years of trying out a new display technology seemingly every 8 months or so... manufacturers and programmers were going crazy keeping up, and prices were through the roof. Now that hardware is reaching standardization, prices are coming down, and overall build quality and performance is going up across the board.

Windows (yeah, I'm gonna say it) kicked off a software standardization that has stabilized the SW market... now no OS is released that doesn't adhere to the standards of an established OS, whether it's Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, etc, and we're all better off.

The PDA market has been in flux, I think, because of the "all things to all people" syndrome... nobody can decide once and for all what should and should not be standard issue on a PDA. And now, with cellphones added to the mix, it's even more confusing. This is why I'd prefer separate devices with specific tools on-board, as it would speed up standardization of each device. If a device had to have a specific set of features to be a PDA, say, it would be much easier to standardize the tools, HW and SW accordingly.

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Windows (yeah, I'm gonna say it) kicked off a software standardization that has stabilized the SW market... now no OS is released that doesn't adhere to the standards of an established OS, whether it's Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, etc, and we're all better off..

Windows seemed to kick it off but actually there were already millions of Macs out there with a graphical interface. But I agree that Windows made it more popular due to the huge 'clientèle' Microsoft brought to it. Hey I forgive you because you're such a nice guy.
Remember we're a lot of Macheads around!

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

The PDA market has been in flux, I think, because of the "all things to all people" syndrome... nobody can decide once and for all what should and should not be standard issue on a PDA. And now, with cellphones added to the mix, it's even more confusing. This is why I'd prefer separate devices with specific tools on-board, as it would speed up standardization of each device. If a device had to have a specific set of features to be a PDA, say, it would be much easier to standardize the tools, HW and SW accordingly.

I've never had a PDA, my work doesn't justify I do. I could have had one for the heck of it just like all other toys but what actually killed it for me is what made it for most actual users; size. It's too small, I would have prefered a PDA to be iLiad sized and stylus driven. There is still not much existing in a format between a tablet and a PDA. Computing power wasn't there either. If only UMPCs were just... slimmer!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Certainly the Commodor and I believe the TRS-80 had an OS. It was in ROM so the boot time was almost zero. I still have my Pet purchased in 1977. It is PC's that have an OS you have to load each time you turn it on. We've gone backwards.

Oh, dear. I can't even wrap my brain around the sort of furor that would result if MacroHard announced that they were working with Intel to develop a processor that had Windows built into it!

I can see perhaps selling OS's on Rom Chips that were inserted into slots on the Motherboard, but even that would be hideously complicated compared to the approach we have currently.

I see where you're coming from viewing it as a step backwards, but I'm afraid I just don't agree that it is. I think we're better off with the OS approach we have now.

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Oh, dear. I can't even wrap my brain around the sort of furor that would result if MacroHard announced that they were working with Intel to develop a processor that had Windows built into it!

I can see perhaps selling OS's on Rom Chips that were inserted into slots on the Motherboard, but even that would be hideously complicated compared to the approach we have currently.

I see where you're coming from viewing it as a step backwards, but I'm afraid I just don't agree that it is. I think we're better off with the OS approach we have now.

Just imagine when someone finds out all those ROM chips have a bug in the OS burned to them. Nice but not quite practical. Os's today have to interact with user specs and software to be installed. And sometimes you have to be able to configure an OS to a slower smaller machine.

But it would be great to have a 5 second bootup. With all the junk I have it takes about 6 minutes to fire on.