StenoWeb

In the past, I’ve been somewhat dismissive of issues concerning net neutrality, mainly because I haven’t really thought that it would apply in my lifetime. More or less, I’d always thought that by the time any service provider stopped being “neutral” all of its subscribers would end up jumping ship either to another local broadband provider or to a mobile broadband provider. Maybe not every subscriber, of course, but enough of them to essentially cause the provider either to crater under its decision, or to need to revoke the decision and more or less act as a warning to the rest of the industry. More or less, I thought that it would be one of those issues that would self-correct based on some of the ideas behind capitalism.

So when Google and Verizon announced their little deal and I started reading some of the reactions to it, I started worrying a little bit. The deal suggests completely open “public Internets” but doesn’t say what it means by public, in terms of whether or not there’s some sort of… private Internet going on. The other point that has me worried is the fact that they’re recommending against this kind of openness for wireless broadband, which sucks because I suspect Verizon makes more money from wireless Internet connections these days than it does from wired broadband (especially given all of those DSL properties it recently sold to Frontier) along with the fact that mobile broadband is gaining speed, not only in terms of actual data transfer capabilities and in the markets that it serves, but in terms of the adoption rate and the rate at which it becomes a viable means for somebody to stay in touch with the world of the Internet.

We’ll see what happens. I’m not afraid that suddenly the Internet as we know it is going to crater in on itself tomorrow — but I am interested in my continued and unfettered access to do what I need, where I need to do it and when I need it.

I was browsing through my website with the WordPress application on the iPad, and couldn’t help but notice that I am incredibly popular with spam bots. The unfortunate thing is that most of them say very nice things about the blog, which makes me want to just edit out the URLs and leave the nice comments. Whether or not this would be dishonest or otherwise bad, I don’t know.

The good news, though, is that the WordPress app for the iPad is really sweet.

This is pretty interesting. When the Nexus One first came out, one of the biggest questions was “What will the Nexus Two be?” for two reasons. Firstly, Google had initially indicated that they may produce devices of different form factors for different usages and needs, and secondly, what better way to welcome the first “superphone” by asking what its successor will be.

But, that was back when Google thought their business model for selling a phone exclusively unlocked and exclusively on the Internet was going to be successful. I’ll admit, I very seriously thought about getting one, but the question is “Why should I?” when I can run on down to my local carrier store and get a phone nearly as great (or better, for me, what with the TouchPro2 having a keyboard) for $150 on a contract, which works out since I intend to keep having phone service for awhile. (Although to be fair about the store thing, I knew I wanted the TouchPro2 after having used AT&T’s variant in their store, then I went over to the Verizon store where they weren’t carrying it, and had them order it up and deliver it to me.)

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to the idea of buying your phone unlocked, or at least off-contract, but those benefits are the most noticeable when you’re buying a device to use not as a phone but as a PDA, or if you’re in Europe and you’re going to be switching SIM chips between carriers in different countries. The benefits to buying off-contract involve being able to terminate that contract at will, and of course, being able to get a new device whenever it strikes your fancy. (Although that bit involves having the money for it too.)

I do wonder how long the Nexus One will be available in its current form, and whether or not there are any price reductions pending. As a media device, along with as a device to have just to fiddle with Android, the Nexus One doesn’t look completely terrible, and of course it has the advantages for me of being a) A google-experience device will receive updates far faster. (Because only Google controls the update process on it. Frequently, both the vendor of a mobile OS and the carrier the device is on will need to have their hands in software updates for devices, which slows down the process significantly, especially when you add in manufacturer enhancements such as HTC Sense or Samsung TouchWiz) B) The device is available for a set price, unlocked, willing to run wifi-only.

There are a few other Google Experience devices left. The HTC G1, which was the first shipping Android device is still available, and the Motorola Droid is also considered to be a Google Experience device, however those still have everybody’s hands on them when it’s software update time, meaning that Verizon Wireless has the capability (and frequently exercises this capability) to delay or put influence into a software update that Google and Motorola are working on. It’s annoying, and the Nexus One has been a great thing for people wanting the true, raw, most up-to-date Android experience.

I personally predict that there will be another Google-branded device at some point in time, because eventually the 1GHz Snapdragon will be considered old and slow even for phones and media playback devices. (Although when that’ll be is anyone’s guess: HTC continues to ship devices based on Ye Olde 528MHz Qualcomm 7200-series chips.)

What will be different about the next Google Phone is that it will probably be HTC or Motorola or Samsung branded, piece of hardware, with an agreement between Google, the manufacturer and the carriers that Google and only Google actually has its hand on maintaining the software for the device. And then the manufacturer and carriers will be responsible for marketing and distributing the device. But we’ll see.

I recently found out, while browsing various mobile phone news web sites that there had been another maintenance release made for Windows Mobile on my phone. The timing was just about perfect because I’d been working on getting everything organized and cleaned up anyway, and I was also in the “I am looking at cooked ROMs” stage of owning my particular handset, in order to get a more exciting or potentially more useful experience out of it.

It’s my understanding, by the way, that there are a huge number of cooked roms available for most Windows Mobile handsets, which is both nice and terrifying. I was interested in getting one that has some of the features of their newer and more recently updated handsets from HTC, such as the Peep twitter client, and maybe even some of the other nice things from the HD2 such as the Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster clients being built in. The terrifying part about this is that there are dozens, if not hundreds of ROMs for the various releases of the TouchPro2. (Seriously, there’s the unlocked European TP2, the AT&T Tilt2, the T-Mobile TP2, and the Verizon/Sprint CDMA TP2s, all of which have their little differences.)

It was much to my pleasure when I learned then, that Verizon Wireless has actually released a recent update to the TouchPro2. All of the information about it on the Internet has been pretty vague as to what actually happens when you install the update. So, I made the decision to keep cleaning up and archiving things into the Microsoft My Phone service (which is fantastic, by the way) and then last night I finally did the upgrade.

There are a lot of fantastic differences in the new version. For example, the home screen now shows a launcher for three icons, expandable to a grid of 9. These icons can be applications on the device, web site bookmarks, or contacts. The contacts thing is pretty cool, and you can get it to bring up a specific communication method or you can get it to show you their contact card. The People tab has also been updated, showing a grid with up to fifteen spots for various people that, just like on the home tab, you can either select between contact cards or specific communication methods. This is great if I know, for example, that I will never contact my coworker Roger any way other than by sending an e-mail to his school or work email address. I wouldn’t have to bother with the extra click involved. Additionally, the Mail tab in the new version of Sense displays messages in a larger format, and is more responsive to flipping through a pile of messages. The music tab also got a bit of an upgrade, and there are also options all over the place to start up a distinct “Camcorder” app which may have been there before, but it is nice to reduce the amount of clicks and swipes you might have to make in an effort to record video. Other little improvements, or just things that I’m noticing for the first time, include animated backgrounds, a way to preview the weather animations, along with an improved (more consistent) locking screen and action.

After the addition of home screen launcher icons, my favorite part of the new ROM, hands down, would have to be HTC Peep Twitter client. There are quite a few Twitter clients on Windows Mobile, and the simple truth is that most of them are pretty terrible. I was getting by before with PockeTwit, mainly because it was free, and it did a basic set of tasks fairly well. With Peep, it’s right there in the Sense UI, which along with the other enhancements in Sense, are making me very much wanting to continue using it full-time, as compared with my previous habit of switching interfaces on a very regular basis, between Sense, WinMo 6.5 “Titanium” and the classic WinMo 6 home screen.

Other than that, the updated ROM had a few teething troubles as it was installed and then as I tried to do a few things with it for the first time, and there are a few features it has (such as animated backgrounds) that I think will ultimately cause more problems and slowdowns than it’s worth, so I have opted not to use any of those (Even though they are very pretty, and impressive.) However, once those particular issues were sorted out, it seems to be that the new ROM is an improvement in a lot of ways. For example, streaming media, especially with the Slacker Personal Radio application seems to work far better than it had in the past. With the old ROM, it was a pretty frequent occurrence that a station in Slacker would play two songs, come across an ad, and then just stop, until I either switched stations (so I could hear another two songs) or restarted the application. Hopefully it stays working that way.

And, the last difference is mainly that I haven’t put all of my stuff back in. Right now I just have my primary gmail account hooked to it, so I can get alerts/calendars/contacts and my work e-mail (it’s the school account) and I haven’t yet bothered to hook up any of my other email accounts. Whether or not I will is really up in the air, as there isn’t a legitimate reason why I’d need access to all of them on-the-go. They’re nice, but I’m at my computer all of the time anyway. One other thing I’ve noticed is that there must be a new build of Opera included, as now my mobile banking web site displays properly and readably from the get-go.

So far, I have no new plans for ROM flashing, as this new updated one has solved any of the complaints I was having before. Indeed, lame as it sounds to say this, does somewhat make me that much more happy with the TouchPro2 for that much longer. (Not that I’ve ever been unhappy with it, just that I’ve been a bit fidgety and interested in trying out some different mobile platforms.)

I recently used the example of web applications to talk about why non-desktop types of computation devices are probably going to not only be the future of computing, but why they may be becoming so more quickly than we think. It was a bit of an odd situation, actually. I was incredibly excited for the properly working release of the aforementioned web apps, and their promise to bring my data to me everywhere with unbridled freedom of computer movement and otherwise much awesomeness. And then it had struck me: I needed to write about the potential of such apps to become incredibly popular based on the fact that they might work with mobile and other non-desktop devices.

However, I now write (initially on my phone) to indicate that when considering the use of such services, mobile-os devices seem to be the one place where [currently] the data will not really be available in any useful way. The sad thing about this is that it’s not very easy to transition files between the mobile ecosystem (say, I start a composition on my phone while Megan and I are driving to Tucson, or I’ve got my WorkPad Z50 during a class) and I then want to start working on that file on a bunch of network-connected PCs. It’s relatively easy to transition the file, given that I can access a flash drive from where I’m sitting (so it won’t work very well if at all if I’m at a Sun Ray thin client.) However, the question becomes “what happens when I’m not at a network-connected desktop computer?”

The reason this is a problem is because the ease of transition for files tends to be one-way. It’s very easy to put a document into the Windows Live Office Web App ecosystem when I’ve got access to both the mobile device and a desktop computer, and it’s technically possible under the same conditions to go the other way. However it is either outrightly impossible or very difficult to edit documents within most online-office ecosystems on a new mobile or tablet device, and the WorkPad Z50 straight-up does not have network connectivity, for all intents and purposes.

It looks to be unofficially possible to force the iPad’s web browser to open the edit view on the Office Web Apps, however I don’t have the capability to test this so I do not know how well it’ll work, what it’ll look like and what the performance is like, especially given that while it does work in Safari and OmniWeb on the Mac, it is definitely not the fastest it could be in those environments.

Unfortunately, even if it works fantastically on the iPad, it doesn’t help me when the devices I have happen to be the old iPhone and a Windows Mobile phone. I do consider the “Office Live + Windows Mobile” situation to be particularly bad, just given that Windows Mobile should ostensibly be a first-class citizen on the Office Live ecosystem. Indeed, I even think that they should be offering a special app to access these services from Windows Mobile, or offering a way to tie Office Live into my Office Mobile experience, but that’s apparently something that’s coming with Windows Phone 7 and its version of Office Mobile. (Although, there’s an entire discussion there about whether or not I want to wait until the end of this year to have on a Microsoft-branded device what I had with my iPhone when it was new in early 2008.)

I would say something about this being why I am going to upgrade to an Android phone at some point, but honestly, the note-taking and mobile document processing situation on Android is actively worse than on the iPhone. Evernote exists, but that has been losing things and having issues actually staying in sync when I use the desktop client, and of course there’s the fact that Evernote’s desktop client is straight-up terrible.

We’ll see what happens. Part of why this is such a big issue is that I’m still working on the complete solution for the replacement of my paper Steno notebook, which I still carry around for certain situations anyway, as it is just the best way to write and present certain kinds of information. This is therefore a very personal problem, and one I currently have a lot of time to work on solving, and until then I can use (time intensive) manual work-arounds, like Evernote on my mobile paired with “copy and paste” magic on my desktop computer. I have honestly even thought of starting up another physical steno pad as my daily log, or making the decision that my daily log needs to exist only in one device or ecosystem (even if that device remains in the physical realm).

My complaint/point stands overall however, that there is some work to do in the ecosystem of web applications for compatibility with the types of devices that are essentially the future of computing. My thought is that at the moment, it shouldn’t even be too terribly difficult because there are two major players in this scene: iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) and Android (and all of the devices therein on 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and eventually 2.2, most of which just use the standard Android web browser, to my understanding. I suggested in my previous article on the topic that a potential solution is for Microsoft to actually offer an iPad application, with a complete full-screen interface tailored for the device, but that still only addresses part of the overall issue that exists.

Additionally, it’s still just weird that Google Docs doesn’t have mobile editing enabled, given that Docs is a far more “mature” product than Office Live, and that it is probably in Google’s best interest to get it running on Android before Apple or Microsoft extends iWork.com or Office Live to the Android web browser.