However, the last few weeks I have been trying to solve a technology problem and an coming to realize the iPad just might fit the bill. I switched companies a couple weeks ago and the IT setup is very different. My old company had an external WiFi network that was outside the corporate LAN, and streaming, video watching, etc, was fine. So, I took my laptop to my office and had access to Pandora, Rhapsody, Hulu, etc. My new company’s IT policy is much more strict and prohibits streaming via the company network and there is no public WiFi.

Like most people I need to be entertained while I write code, so I have been trying to come up with a better solution. Aside from streaming music, I listen to podcasts. So I have been using Pandora/Rhapsody on my Android and then have my iPod for podcasts and other media that I own. But this isn’t all that great… I dont like running music on my phone all day as it seriously hurts the battery, and I’m still using 2 devices.

Side note on why 2 devices – lets face it, iTunes is still king of media programs. The podcasting setup is great… and movie purchase/rental is nice as well. The Zune desktop app comes close, but Zune isn’t an option for my current situation as there is no 3G (yet). And Android podcasting is pretty basic.. with no good desktop app for syncing.

So, I went the netbook route and looked at 3G cards. ATT and VZ offer a 5GB/mo plan for $60, with hefty fees if you go over. Cricket offers a no contract “unlimited” plan for $40 a month. Unlimited in that you can go over 5GB, but they will throttle your bandwidth.

With a 2 year contract I can get a netbook from either ATT or VZ for $50-$200 depending on specs. This works out to be (60*24)+200 = $1640 for the two years. Cricket would be less per month, but you have to buy a netbook at full price, so its about a wash.

The problem is, 5GB wont last long spread over a month with lots of music and some vid use. Plus, the majority of netbooks I tried were just blah. Screens weren’t that nice, etc. There is a Sony with a high res screen that is very nice, but it is about $550 and isn’t carried by ATT or VZ. So that puts you at close to $2000 for a two year contract. Thats a lot just to play pandora…

Enter the iPad. I have all my music and podcasts on one device. I can rent movies, I can play silly games.. and use not so silly apps. The battery should be pretty good… and the web surfing experience will be way better than any phone… and I would bet better than the netbooks (except for the lack of Flash). Add to this the $30 a month true unlimited ATT data plan with *NO* contract! You literally can sign up and cancel service at any time from the iPad itself. No need to go to an ATT store even. This is really.

So, the base 3G model with two years of data comes to (30*24) + 630 = 1350. So not only are we cheaper than a normal netbook (and much cheaper than a good netbook) setup, we aren’t limited to 5GB. Plus, I can turn off the data any month that I dont need it, or want to save some cash.

The bottom line is, while I still think some things about iPad are stupid (no flash, no multitasking), it really does solve my current problem quite well and for less money.

The screen looks great, and this has the new nvidia tegra chipset, so the graphics should be excellent.

Sure it plays music, has an HD radio tuner, video, and all that… but I secretly hope this is just the beginning of the Zune take over of the world. I’m serious. What if they added a UMTS modem? Instant cell phone…. And the Zune OS looks a whole heck of a lot better than the upcoming release of WinMobile…

Ok, and here is the other killer things for Zune (phone or otherwise). Apps. Lets look at programming on Apple vs Microsoft platforms. (For the sake of this exercise, I’m ignoring shell scripts or C++ command line app, etc). For GUI programming and GUI apps you have XCode vs .NET.. and then you have Java on both sides. But Java GUIs are worse than other of the other options, so we can ignore that too. I’ve coded on both sides and I have to say .NET is the easiest development system I’ve ever used, by far. VisualStudio is epic for debugging and development.

So.. Zune goes all app store on us… and you get to use .NET mobile to develop the apps. This would explode overnight. EVERYONE knows C# or VB… but to break into the Apple app store you have to figure out XCode’s development methodology and Obj-C. That sucks. No one uses Obj-C except Apple and I really just don’t like it.

This would be better than Android as well. I’m a big fan of Google and what they are doing with Android, but the SDK is still a bit rough, and the GUI design is no were near as good as what a Microsoft tool would bring.

And the HD has an nvidia chip set. What if we got some mobile version of DirectX? Think about the gaming potential of that too?

So that is my wild dream.. a Zune Phone with a .NET dev tool and an app store… Do it MS… DO IT.

Plus, they have the Guru Bar (shameless knockoff of Apple’s Genius Bar). But what will happen here? If you have a Dell laptop with Windows Vista will they help you? That would be something pretty cool..

Oh and lets not forget the Zune HD.. I suppose those will be out in force. Maybe it is a precursor to a Zune Phone…. hmm.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=043C49DB-E33B-4603-A699-9F1FBA8E9245&displaylang=en

First, the specs lifted from zune.net:

• Zune HD comes with a built-in HD Radio receiver so users can listen to higher-quality sound than traditional radio on the go. Users also will have access to the additional song and artist data broadcast by HD Radio stations as well as additional channels from their favorite stations multicasting in HD. If you don’t like the song playing on your station’s HD channel, switch to its HD2 or HD3 channels for additional programming.
• The bright OLED touch screen interface allows users to flip through music, movies and other content with ease, and the 16:9 widescreen format display (480×272 resolution) offers a premium viewing experience on the go.
• The HD-compatible output lets Zune HD customers playback supported HD video files from the device through a premium high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) audiovisual docking station (sold separately) direct to an HD TV in 720p.*
• Zune HD will include a full-screen Internet browser optimized for multitouch functionality.
• Zune HD is Wi-Fi enabled, allowing for instant streaming to the device from the more than 5 million-track Zune music store.

First, the screen resolution is slightly less than the Touch. How much that matters, not sure. We’ll have to see. But it is OLED, so that should be very nice.

A built-in HD radio is pure awesome. This is something I wish my Touch had – a radio of any kind. Granted with I Heart Radio I can listen to any of the stations here in Denver that I care about, but its not HD and I have to have WiFi for it to work. Score 1 for Zune.

HDMI hi def output! This is killer as well. I download a video from somehwere… I take my Zune to my friends house… hook it up to the flat panel and bam, movie night. Or maybe a slide show of my favorite vacation pics. Score 2 for Zune.

Full screen internet browsing and WiFi. Nice. And then they say “multitouch”… and all the Apple lawyers start salivating. First Palm and now Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how the Apple patents hold up. This is a good feature, but nothing new over the Touch.

Streaming of music from the Zune store is cool too. But since you can get a SUBSCRIPTION to the Zune store, this is even cooler. I could listen and refill my Zune as much as I want, over WiFi.. or stream anything. This model is very much needed with iTunes.

But the biggest question… will there be any sort of “apps” at all. I mean music and such is nice… but if I can’t play Oregon Trail like you can on the Touch, then whats the point?

The first thing you notice when picking up the phone is the unique size. Its very thin (thinner feeling than an iPhone), but the other 2 dimensions are bigger than any other phone I’ve seen. Its almost like someone took an iPhone and used a rolling pin on it. This might be a problem for people with smaller hands, and I’m not so sure its great for the pocket of your jeans. The other thing is the phone is very light. The body seems solid, and feels nice.

The huge standout here is the screen. Its big. 4.1 inches of goodness. And at 800×480, it looks great. The media player supports DivX and other popular formats, so you will put that screen to good use. Also, supposedly the browser will support Flash. But we’ve heard this before about phones, so that remains to be seen.

The demo unit had WinMo 6.1 along with Toshiba’s custom UI layer. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of WinMo, it just looks old compared to the competition. But no big deal. The thing I didn’t like at all was the Toshiba UI. It was just odd and not intuitive. Like most other smart phones, there are icons in a grid, but then there are 3 colored stripes in the background that divide the screen equally. Swiping left to right (or R to L) makes these three stripes spin, and you realize they are supposed to be three “3D” columns that rotate. Each time you swipe across you spin to a new side of the columns and see new icons. This is kind of weird.

I didn’t see much in the way of other widgets to UI improvements, so hopefully something is going to change before launch.

The real win with this phone is the insane processing power and good battery, but if the UI is lame its not going to matter all that much.

Personally I think this article was a little gutsy when the WWDC was going to be the very next week and it was guaranteed that it was going to announce the successor to Leopard: Snow Leopard.  To summarize the competition was close but Snow Leopard was decided as the favored operating system.  The author’s comparison points were interesting and I think it was a fair assessment of the two operating systems. 

However, I thought it was bizarre that they would compare Time Machine to Windows backup.  My first thought was about how I never use windows backup.  I just make a habit to store my important files on a secondary drive and keep the operating system on it’s own drive.  The real backup system is Windows Home Server.  And then a colleague of mine at work pointed out their poll at the bottom of article asks for people to rate the favorite feature about each operating system, and with 10% of the votes Time Machine was the readers favorite feature of Leopard.  Wait, I thought Mac’s were secure and didn’t crash, then why is the backup/rollback system the favored feature? I think I deal more with the taskbar, themes, aero and the file explorer way more than I ever think about my backup.  I am happy it’s there but I tend to go more with the set and forget it method.  But, I guess that is just me.  That’s just my two cents.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple a lot. In fact I’m writing this post on my MacBook Pro with some sweet Mac software called MarsEdit. But I’m just not so sold on them that I overlook the somewhat obvious issues that Apple can have.

Lets start with the MacBook announcement. Better price, this is good, especially given all the “I’m a PC and I’m cheap” commercials of late. Also, finally removing the ExpressCard slot was nice. I’ve never used mine, and don’t think I ever will. But an SD slot would be so nice. Maybe not nice enough to pay for a new system, but this is a win. But a non-removable battery?? Seriously Apple, why? Every other notebook on the planet has a user changeable battery. So now I have to make an appointment with a “genius” and wait around while someone does this for me. Lame, not a win.

Snow Leopard. Big win here with the $29 upgrade price. Microsoft should really remember this someday. But then again, the list of new features is fairly tame. Sure there are under the hood improvements, but we’ll have to wait for the upgrade to see if its noticeable. The inclusion of OpenCL is pretty cool. I’ve been a fan of GPGPU for a while now and the usefulness of this could really be big, especially for compute intense apps like video processing or graphics apps. Not that it hasn’t been available before. NVIDIA’s CUDA package has been out for Mac OS, and could have easily been used to do much the same thing. The win with OpenCL is that it is a common standard that NVIDIA and ATI are at least somewhat on board with. So this could be a win if anyone writes apps to take advantage of it.

And now for the iPhone. I love the iPhone for many reasons, even though I don’t have one. It really kicked the wireless industry in the pants and finally got other companies really thinking about a true mobile computing platform. Unfortunately I still think there are some issues, most notably ATT. Verizon really screwed up when they passed on this.

With that said, the new 3.0 software seems like a good move in a few areas, although not as far as I would have liked to see it go. MMS support (finally) is nice, but is this really something to get excited about? I mean I’ve had MMS on cheap phones for years. Add to that that ATT won’t actually support MMS when 3.0 launches means this does nothing for anyone right now (well at least in the US).

Notifications is an interesting take on having “background” apps without fearing battery loss. Some of my friends who are rocking their 3Gs complain about battery life, so I can see where this might be an issue. But my Android phone has true background apps and I don’t have battery issues. I digress. So essentially you can register with some apple server and get push notifications on the phone that can be read with whatever app. This will be great for IM and the like where you can finally stay logged in and actually do anything on the phone. The big issue I have with this is that Apple controls the notification path. So crippling or removing services they dont like or don’t want you to have is easy. Also this is a single point fail for everything. Its better than nothing, but real background apps would have been so much better.

The 3G-S is interesting. No cosmetic updates at all, but then again the design is pretty much the coolest phone out there right now. The only thing that comes close is the new Palm Pre, but still. The 3MP camera upgrade was long long overdue. I wouldn’t even say this is a win, its a catchup. And video recording? My 9 year old little brother has a cheap Verizon phone and he takes pics and vids all the time and MMSs them to me. So no win there.

The compass is nice I guess. My Android has one, but I never really use it. I mean with GPS enabled Google Maps, why would I try to navigate on my own?

The claimed performance increase would be a big win if it is actually true across the majority of apps. But the biggest thing I read about the 3G-S was the improved battery life. This is the single biggest issue with mobiles, and the iPhone was hurting in that area as it was. So this alone would make me more interested in the phone if I was thinking about it. Which I would be, if I didn’t have to go to ATT.

Oh ya, the HSDPA+ addition. Meh. This isn’t cutting edge, many other phones with this support. The bigger question is can ATT’s network handle all these phones all wanting that much bandwidth. Will you see the 7Mb speeds in real life? Most likely not, unless you live in a small town in Kansas and are hugging the base station at midnight when everyone else is in bed.

Apple needs to be careful going forward with the iPhone. They are no longer the far and away winners in the smartphone world. The Palm Pre is a gorgeous device with a nice OS and a lot of good features, and once Android gets a better handset, it will be right up there too. So Apple needs to innovate, not just sprinkle some “updates” and hope to keep gaining market share. While they still hold the edge over Android in handset design, UI quality, and amount of apps, I think the Pre wins over the iPhone in several areas – background apps, better app management in the UI, and real background apps. If the Pre can get a sizable app base, this could be a bg problem for Apple.