Amazon’s new tablet device, called the Amazon Fire is set to challenge Apple for Tablet dominance, and just might be the one to expose some chinks in Apple’s armor. I find the software running on these devices effectively irrelevant when done well; it should be easy to use, and effectively transparent to the user as they jump between lightweight applications and content. Apple got this right, but also had the advantage of a strong developer network and existing content relationships, providing a well-executed OS and stuff worth using on that platform. Contrast this with HP/Palm’s WebOS, also well-executed but severely lacking in the “stuff” department.

Now Amazon enters the foray, armed with the leading e-book library, a budding collection of video assets, a few years of tablet-like devices under its belt, and a well-loved brand on par with Apple. Amazon also has the distinct advantage of a compelling store for physical goods in addition to digital content, something Apple obviously lacks. If the Fire provides easy access to this wealth of “stuff” and delivers an OS that gets out of the way, we may finally have a viable iPad competitor.

I commented briefly on this with the Christian Science Monitor, and the full text of their article can be viewed free here. Look for my comments towards the end of the piece.

It has been decades since I’ve been intimately involved with the technical side of IT, but every once in a while I like to reestablish touch with my inner geek. Usually this involves writing an Excel or Outlook macro to accomplish some mundane task, and I get that thrill one experiences when a couple hundred lines of code work together to accomplish something useful.

Recently, my Dell desktop computer went on the fritz, and as these things usually happen, it occurred well out of warranty. The motherboard is a proprietary part, and no longer cost effective to replace, so I elected to build a custom desktop, something I haven’t done in several years.

In my teens, building a computer was usually more economical than buying, and I would map out the number of lawns I needed to mow for that hot new graphics card, or speedier processor. Now, any of the major brand-names beat home-built PC’s on cost, but building allows one to customize the computer to their particular needs, and allows the use of standardized commodity parts that can be quickly replaced. With overnight shipping nearly free, this allows for better service than most available warranties while allowing me to build a powerful computer that is also virtually silent.

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon (who walked to school uphill both ways) modern computer builds are much easier than my middle school days. No longer must one source all manner of expansion cards, wrestle with the nuances of IRQs, and spend the better part of a day connecting component, hitting the power switch, and sighing as nothing appears on the screen for the umpteenth time, or a floppy drive spins endlessly due to an upside down connector.

While not for everyone, assembling a custom computer takes about the same level of effort as most household projects, no more tools than a screwdriver, and is a neat way to reconnect with your inner geek.

After frequently lamenting the lack of a “knowledge worker tablet”, I’ve gone and purchased and iPad 2 after doing my own tablet showdown of sorts. Having a proclivity for rooting for the underdog, I first purchased an Asus Transformer, a tablet running Google’s “Honeycomb” operating system. The tablet reminded me in many ways of the Linux operating system: it seemed technically superior and “slick”, but with an abundance of rough edges, and constant poking and prodding required to accomplish fairly mundane tasks.

The other grave similarity to Linux was the lack of application software when compared to something like Microsoft Windows. Even the most technically superior operating system is essentially useless without compelling applications to run on it.

This effectively drove me towards the Apple product, which hardware gurus are quick to lambast as underpowered and inferior, all while someone that actually needs to get real work done tries to decide between ten competing applications to accomplish any given task. I’ll take a dozen note taking applications versus 1 or 2 over technical superiority any day.

Like the iPhone, I have no particular loyalty towards Apple products, and find the zeal to which some defend the brand borderline frightening, but for the moment Apple seems to be the one company that understands a quality user experience, and broad selection of applications designed to accomplish something, rather than megahertz and gigabytes, rules the day. While this seems painfully obvious to me, a raft of big name companies seem to keep missing the mark.

Six months after switching to the iPhone, in the guise of the iPhone 4, I’m still thoroughly enamored with the device after a long tour of Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and brief Android Romance. Apple seems to be one of the few companies that understand that people don’t want a business phone or a personal phone, they just want a phone that can do whatever they demand.

While the phone is quite good, there are some software improvements I would make if I had my druthers:

The “magical and revolutionary” stuff

Apple always needs some superlative-laden features (often already pioneered elsewhere) to kick things off, so here is what I would add:

• Better Notifications: The notification system (the little blue window that harasses you when you receive an email, text message or appointment) on the iPhone stinks, to put it mildly. Notifications seem to “override” each other, fly out at an inopportune time and stubbornly remain until you react to them at which point they disappear forever. All very “un-Apple-like.” Apple could ape some combination of Blackberry and Android here, put an unforeseen twist on it, and claim they invented notifications, all in the name of fixing this.
• A Less-Lame Game Center: The “game center” feature looks like it was designed by Microsoft. Most of the functionality seems to be there, but the interface and “experience” is weak at best. Make it easy to find a buddy and play the occasional game.
• Google Maps times 5: Clearly Apple is not going to get the latest and greatest from Google on their maps front. Apple has made some pretty lame attempts at social networking, but location could really turn things up. As a baseline, give us navigation and Google Latitude-like functionality, but also crank things up with location-based chats (ape Blackberry Messenger plus Foursquare here).

The Slide 4 Stuff

So after detailing all the wonderful features above, these get second billing (which always seems to come around the 4th or 5th slide in a new release dog and pony show). Perhaps just as useful, but not as sexy:

• Offline Mail: Ever go through a tunnel on the train or try dealing with email on an airplane when the phone is disconnected? At least when working with an Exchange server (the de factor corporate email standard) the iPhone will seemingly wait until you have perfectly ordered your inbox to tell you it could not connect, and will ungracefully resurrect all your filed messages upon reconnecting. This should be a simple fix, and would make all those corporate types Apple is trying to woo very, very happy.
• Smart Suggestions: Recommend new apps based on what I’ve used in the past, or use most frequently.
• Location/Context Sensitivity: After the whole location brouhaha, the phone obviously knows where I am most of the time. Why not build some intelligence into this? Have the phone crank up the volume when I’m at my favorite watering hole, or silence itself during a meeting. Give me a summary of things like the weather when I land at a different airport and turn on my phone.
• Less Reliance on iTunes: Does every minor update really require a 45 minute iTunes dance (open iTunes, see it needs yet another update, download said update while trying to avoid getting other “crapware” the Apple downloader tries to install, backup iPhone, download massive iPhone update, install massive iPhone update)? My Android phone seems quite capable of downloading an installing updates in about a tenth of the time, and without “mating” with my desktop.

Apple’s iPhone iOS is becoming mature, and I certainly don’t miss the old “battery pull” exercise that seemed to plague my Blackberry on a daily basis. Like the old dog learning a few new tricks however, iOS could certainly be improved to remain a major player in the increasingly competitive smartphone market.

In one of the inaugural posts on this very blog I took Cisco to task for its lackluster “human network” marketing campaign. I found the campaign to be well-intentioned at heart, but irreconcilable with the buzzword-laden ad copy, and Cisco’s horrendous website that would lead 99.9% of the humans supposedly targeted by the campaign to total confusion.

While the folks at Cisco may not be known for their marketing genius, they do still know how to build quality network gear, and I’ve been forced to eat crow every time I’ve bought a competitor’s product to save money, which generally dies at the worst possible moment.

Being in consulting, my business is fairly small, but I deal almost exclusively with the big boys and generally must look and act like them. For a company like mine, Cisco gear is difficult to configure and usually requires outside expertise, but once setup, it runs like a tank and only fails when I decided I’ll get in touch with my former technical side by messing with it.

So, to Cisco I say “hats off” as I respectfully plunk down my corporate card to replace an off-brand wireless product with something straight from the human network.

It has been a few weeks since I wrote Part 1 of this story, and I am still quite happy with the move to the iPhone. What is often touted as Blackberry’s core strength, email, is quite capable on iPhone. It has a few features I like more (it is significantly easier to navigate around folders and generally does a better job with HTML email) and a few I miss from Blackberry (mainly some of the keyboard shortcuts) but the email is competent enough that I would call it a draw between the two devices. I have even become fairly effective with a screen keyboard, although I have sent my share of strange comments due to iPhones occasionally baffling auto-correction feature.

I had heard that Blackberry’s push email service was faster than iPhone at receiving email, and I can confirm that is indeed the case but the order of magnitude is 1 or 2 seconds at best when synchronizing to my Exchange server. With the Blackberry I would hear its email beep, then my desktop beep a half-second later. With the iPhone, its beep falls a half-second after the desktop. If you are that important that a one second delay is a matter of life or death than I certainly don’t envy you. For a small business like mine, I’ll readily sacrifice the half-second since iPhone connects directly to our Exchange server without any additional setup, unlike Blackberry which requires additional (free) software that must be installed, configured and maintained (not free).

So, do I miss anything about the Blackberry? Not really. The shortcut I find myself missing most is the ability to post pictures from the camera application directly to Facebook, but this is something that I did fairly rarely. I really don’t miss Blackberry Messenger, or the superior notification system of the Blackberry all that much when it’s couched against the smooth navigation and general speed and ease of use of the iPhone. The mythology states that Blackberries are business tools and optimized for speed, but I have found that is not really true. With the wildly compelling selection of business applications, there’s really no comparison.

So where does RIM and its Blackberry go from here? I’ll cover that in the next installment…

After several years of relatively faithful service I have traded my Blackberry Bold in for a shiny new iPhone 4 as my primary business and personal phone. A good portion of the impetus for using Blackberry in the first place was its purportedly superior messaging capabilities, and for my year living in Europe, the option of an unlimited international data plan.

The Blackberry was a good albeit frustrating companion. Many features like email and telephone “just worked,” and Blackberry Messenger was fantastic for keeping in touch with my wife and avoiding the per message charges from our local French and Italian phones. Our source of frustration was things like both our Blackberries shutting off at the most inopportune time (think being lost in a foreign city, hoping for Google Maps to guide us home) without warning. The low battery feature giving up the ghost early in the lives of both our ‘berries.

Beyond email, messaging (primarily BBM and twitter) and my most-used application, a task manager called TodoMatrix, the application experience was incredibly frustrating. Die hard Blackberry fans will tell you about how the BB “App” experience is “good enough” and that most of the iPhone applications are games and fart apps, but I have found neither to be true during my three weeks with the iPhone.

Most Blackberry apps were poor cousins of the iPhone or Android equivalent, and the store and installation process was painful at best. To install or upgrade most applications, a reboot of my Bold was required, which was literally a 7-8 minute process, inexcusable with a modern smartphone. The selection is also paltry. For a given task, even something business-focused, the iPhone will have 5-50 different applications to choose from, where the Blackberry has 2-3 at best, and 0 at worst.

In the next part of this series, I’ll look at the transition away from Blackberry, the things I miss, and where Blackberry might go from here.

We’re a few hours away from Apple’s well-hyped event that many are speculating will result in the unveiling of an Apple tablet device. As an owner of an Amazon Kindle, a Microsoft Tablet-PC and general gadget person I thought I would speculate on what would get me to shell out for an Apple tablet:

• Pricing around $500
• A battery that will last through a 17 hour trans-pacific flight when reading books, and last through an 8 hour workday otherwise
• Access to Apple’s app store, and iPod/iPhone apps
• Easy access to new content (i.e. books, movies, video) irrespective of what country I am in, and without having to deal with iTunes
• The ability to consolidate my iPod Touch and Kindle into one device that is a high-quality eBook reader, video/movie player, gaming device and music player
• Very easy ability to transfer PDF files to the device (i.e. no strange email addresses or “processing delays” as with the Kindle. It would be great to have reams of work-related documents available to read on a lightweight tablet-type device

What would get you to shell out for Jobs’ latest tech toy?