Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • iPhone pragmatism

    Despite working as a digital strategist and creative thinker (whatever the hell that means) agencyside, I have a very pragmatic relationship with technology both past and present from the iPhone to my original Mac. I have had Macs since 1989, primarily because they were the closest thing I found to a computer that just worked.

    I had analogue mobile phones from my time DJing and having friends who worked in cell phone service centres. My first phone that I had to buy was digital, the mobile phone was a Motorola; mainly because One2One (now Everything Everywhere) sold a package where you paid just over 100 pounds and had a phone for 12 months, with a small amount of inbuilt local call time. At the time I used it as a more reliable version of my pager. Even back then SMS proved to be more reliable than the pager that I had used previously

    I went from Motorola to Ericsson, mostly because Ericsson handsets were really well made and then moved to Nokia when Ericsson merged its handset business with Sony. I moved from Nokia to the Apple iPhone and a Samsung feature phone for two reasons:

    • Apple had an address book that worked. My address book didn’t brick the phone. I haven’t had that bad problems with data corruption and it syncs with my computer. It has all the productivity applications I enjoyed on my Nokia phones like MetrO and QuickOffice. The iPhone also has major flaws. For instance, the browser isn’t great, but I put up with it because I can sync my bookmarks for it across from the Safari browser on my Mac. The biggest think that I miss was the Nokia keyboard and laptop layout on the Nokia E90 Communicator
    • My Samsung phone could take two SIMs which is a boon for traveling. This is something that most phone manufacturers don’t provide for markets outside the developing world

    My iPhone was also expensive, like the price of a cheap laptop kind of expensive, which means that I look at it in a different way to previous smartphones. Instead of getting rid of my phone every 18 months, I am thinking closer to three years, just like my laptop.  An additional factor  is that whilst the first iPhones were a radical leap forward,  the iPhone 4 and 4S don’t have sufficient must-have value for me to move on until my current phone dies or the next iteration of the iPhone comes out.

    Now I wouldn’t say that I am an everyman for the iPhone using population; but this has to have some effect on sales. For every iPad that Apple sells there maybe at least a few iPhone upgrades put on hold as an opportunity cost.

  • Sony Discman D-250

    When you think about the likes of the Sony Discman D-250 you need to realise what it was like growing up in the 1980s. It meant that personal music on the move was a ghetto-blaster perched on your shoulder annoying the neighbourhood or a Sony Walkman personal stereo. I was really fortunate in that I had a half decent Walkman WM-24 which whilst bulky gave half decent sound. It was more expensive looking than it actually was but the Dolby noise reduction made a big difference. This eventually died on me and I ended up with a more modern, but poorer quality Walkman WM-36.

    But a CD player was what you really wanted, for decent sound.
    Sony D-250 Discman
    I poured over the Sony catalogues working out which one I wanted (the Sony D-Z555) versus the best that I could afford (the Sony D-250). The Sony D-250 Discman was in Sony’s premium Discman range, featuring a pressed metal chassis and a NiCD rechargeable battery the size of a packet of Dentyne gum. Eventually the battery dying and my not being able to buy a replacement battery would see it do hi-fi duty. Portable music would have me use a Sony DCS901 Sports Discman. This also played CD-Rs full of MP3 files – it was my pre-iPod and had a battery life of almost 40 hours, but more of that another time.

    The Discman D-250 came with line-out connection for a hi-fi and you could attach a wired remote control. It could be programmed to random play, play tracks in a specific order and access CD ‘index marks’. These index marks put you to predefined points in a specific recording and at the time were only used in some classical recordings. As a standard it wasn’t widely supported but would have leant itself well to the mix CDs that started to come along a few years later from Mixmag Live.

    The CD has served me well as a player for my hi-fi system because of its rugged mechanicals and decent electronics long after I started using an iPod for portable music and its more sophisticated brother the D-Z555 is highly prized by hi-fi enthusiasts for the same reason, particularly as it featured a digital output as well.

  • iPhone 4S

    I read through the Apple press materials following the iPhone 4S and iCloud services launch the other day. There was a lot of disappointment out there when the phone revealed wasn’t a massive step-change forward which is probably massively unfair for example Carnegie Mellon University professor or computer science David Farber posted the following message on his Interesting People mailing list:

    After yesterday’s announcement by apple I decided to   explore changing phones and/or carriers. I am specifically interested in the most advanced smartphone with “4G” capability.

    Any suggestions?

    Having done my own research, I ended up coming away with questions rather than forming opinions.

    Firstly, iCloud; I read and saw nothing that altered my initial perceptions and concerns when I wrote about the service back in June. So rather than repeating myself it is easier to link out to my earlier post.

    As for the iPhone 4S itself; the updates to the device compared to the iPhone 4, felt as much about feature catch-up as about innovation. The improved camera matched features in top of the line Nokia and Samsung phones. The much-lauded speech recognition application Siri was as much about matching the voice activated features in Android software.

    Unlike many online who were looking for a new thinner form factor, I was glad that the new phone kept the iPhone 4 size as there is already an unhealthy focus on size zero design at the expense of battery life, product performance  and ergonomic design.

    When Steve Jobs talked about the transition to Intel processors for the Macintosh product range, the rationale was mostly around a new focus on processors moving from computing power to computing power per Watt. I’d like to know what effect that Apple’s new electronics design for the iPhone 4S has on power consumption and battery life. Does the faster video transitions come at the expense of usability due to declining battery life?

    Only time will tell if the aerial changes and new electronics have improved the iPhone performance in areas such as call quality and dropped calls. After the initial rush to buy from completists and early adopters the word-of-mouth around these issues are going to be important for iPhone sales. More information about the iPhone.

  • Apple StyleWriter II

    Why I had an Apple StyleWriter II printer

    The mid-1990s were a transitional time for me. I moved from Merseyside to go to college in Huddersfield. Holiday time meant that I did the whole thing in reverse. I needed a printer set up that was light, portable, reliable and provided high quality prints for college assignments and job applications. Costco had opened in Liverpool, so I had access to good quality ‘Conqueror’ paper and needed a printer that could handle it.
    Apple StyleWriter II
    For the princely sum of 130 GBP I settled on an Apple StyleWriter II. The printer came in a ‘platinum’ grey plastic colour that was slightly different to the beige boxes that passed for computing equipment back then. It had a detachable paper feeder and a front hatch that allowed you to access the printer innards it was simplicity to look after.

    LocalTalk interface

    The Apple StyleWriter II connected to my Apple PowerBook via a mini DIN socket and cable which Macs used as serial ports back then. It printed presentation foils with special acetate sheets, and printed three pages a minute at 330 dpi resolution (or about as good as the average office laser printer). Its cartridges were an easy to find variety of Canon cartridge which was a boon compared to trying to get print jobs done on-site at the university computer facilities and print bureau.

    It handled mail-merges from ClarisWorks with aplomb and printed on envelopes as happily as the paper. It didn’t break ever.

    The machine could be disassembled into a compact unit. I even took the printer on my travels to see family in Ireland so that I could continue on with my work and on a trip to Boblingen in Germany; where I printed out extra copies of documents I was likely to need and put together a series of notes from each days interviews that I had with a large American technology company.

    Rise of USB

    In fact, the only reason why I no longer use it is that Apple moved to USB and stopped making drivers for the printer. I couldn’t replace it with a new version as Steve Jobs took Apple out of the printer business; refocusing the company and its product line to try and stem the huge business losses that the company was making in the late 1990s.

    Looking back over the decade and a half; printers haven’t functionally moved on that much. You only need so much speed out of a home printer and the technology in them hasn’t moved at the same space as the computers themselves. I now have a relatively rarely used Konica Minolta colour laser printer and shudder to think how much the likely cost of the new toner is likely to be; in fact I may just replace it instead. The colour laser was a welcome break from a number of HP and Canon printers which were bulkier than the StyleWriter II and seemed to break surprisingly soon after the 12-month warranty gave out. More related content can be found here.

  • Palm | HP portable devices

    I decided to jot down some thoughts on the demise of the Palm | HP portable devices business. I am not going to say whether it was the right or wrong thing to do mainly because other people have been doing that already.

    HP and the mobile device

    HP was arguably the original modern mobile computing device manufacturer, coming out with the HP-35 scientific calculator back in 1972. The company had a long history of being a pioneer in mobile computing; so the move away from mobile devices is actually putting an ending to a long line of devices.

    Compaq had a set of handheld computers in the mid-1990s called Aero. These ran DOS and Windows 3.1, being the predecessors of devices like the ASUS eeePC netbook.

    HP developed a number of PDA devices in the early and mid-1990s including the 95LX, 200LX, 100LX and the OmniGo 700LX which allowed a Nokia 2110 to piggyback on the PDA with a specially molded section on the back of the case.

    The Jornada series of devices was a range of Microsoft Windows-powered PDAs were launched in 1998 and had a number of achievements including the first Windows Pocket PC colour touchscreen device and a UK-only GSM smartphone. The Jornada brand was phased out following the merger with Compaq.

    The iPAQ succeeded Compaq’s Aero line in 2000 and the HP Jornada line after Compaq had been acquired. The last iteration of the iPAQ range was in 2010.

    The Palm range of devices were first launched in 1996, the operating system was tweaked and prodded over the next decade to power various different devices including the iconic Palm III, V and Treo range of smartphones. Ultimately it eventually came up with the webOS after repeatedly fumbling its future.

    This is a long and rich history of engineering innovation for which the Touchpad and Pre don’t stake up as worthy successors.

    Things I never got when the Palm acquisition was first announced

    I wrote up some bullet points of things that I didn’t fully understand when HP originally announced the Palm acquisition:

    • Is HP overpaying for the company? There isn’t that many people interested in Palm and analysts had set a target share price of zero. Is this price as much about emotion as assets?
    • Why is the Palm WebOS going to live up to HP’s faith in it?
    • Much was made of Palm’s cloud services technology in the webcast, but how many extra servers or services will it actually sell for HP?
    • SKUs. I was alarmed at the amount of proposed device variants HP was envisaging in the future on the call with possible support in differing form-factors for Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Android and WebOS in personal devices

    With the benefit of hindsight:

    • Unless HP manages to parlay Palm’s intellectual property assets into a patent war chest either through an auction or successful legal action, it is unlikely to make its money back on the Palm acquisition and its Palm | HP portable devices. There isn’t likely to be licensing revenues from other manufacturers that would make up Palm acquisition. Whilst, the current uncertainty around Android may make manufacturers open to looking at an alternative operating system; but why take on webOS when both Palm and HP couldn’t make it work properly? It’s not like both these brands didn’t have a good reputation and heritage in building mobile computing devices, also in order to license the operating system HP would have to maintain and continue to develop it. What would that road-map look like and why would HP continue to develop consumer-facing software given its renewed focus on the enterprise
    • I never did find out how webOS was going to live up to HP’s leap of faith in the operating system because it evidently didn’t pan out, hence HP withdrawing it’s Touchpad and Pre devices

    The value of the Touchpad and its implications for the webOS

    Many of the eulogies for the Touchpad and the Pre point out that webOS was good software held back by Palm | HP portable devices hardware chops. This was the same criticism leveled at the original Palm Pre; so it begs the question why didn’t new owner HP try and deal with the performance issues second time around? I suspect that the leadership of Palm knew that the original Pre sucked, which why it was kept out of journalist hands for so much of the launch period.

    Given the resources of a large company like HP, I would have thought that the former Palm engineering team and their new HP would not have wanted to continue making poor performing products; and instead would have looked to draw a line under everything with a superior device.

    Yet when you look at the price that the remaining Touchpad devices are flying off the shelves in the US: 99 USD, this tells you a lot about the perceived value of the product.

    The 99 USD price point is some 220 USD below the tear-down price of the HP Touchpad. The tear-down price is a conservative estimate of the total cost of a Touchpad to HP. Now you can allow for the fact that the product has some discount priced in because HP was withdrawing from the market, but even Nokia isn’t taking that kind of bath with its Symbian handsets.

    So a fair amount of this discount must be due to the device experience provided by the webOS software. The risk versus rewards offered to users by this operating system far outweigh the intrinsic value of the hardware on which it runs. I would have to question why anyone would want to license webOS? You can find more more related content here.

    More Links

    HP | Palm deal thoughts

    HP: What Léo Apotheker’s Decisions Mean | Monday Note

    HP gave up on cool webOS devices but promises webOS PCs and printers | VentureBeat

    HP TouchPad Carries $318 Bill of Materials – Teardowns at iSuppli