Author: Stagger Lee

If anything, you’d think Google would have gone to school on the uproar Facebook ran into with Beacon, and modified their plans accordingly. But it didn’t happen.

Google’s main effort at social networking, Orkut, was an abortive effort to compete with Friendster after the original social networking site turned down a huge buyout offer. Orkut turned out to be a huge success…in Brazil. As best I can tell, Buzz was meant to be the long sought-after holy grail that would be the repository for all social media from elsewhere – Twitter, Flickr, RSS, whatever – into one easy-to-read stream that would be right there in your GMail – and everyone uses GMail, obviously, right?

The problem is that unless you were in the Valley, or a total bithead, you had no idea this was coming. And when people opened GMail last week, they found a new splash page asking if they wanted to learn about Buzz. And if you clicked “no” – well, you were just skipping the intro, because it was live anyway. And you automatically had followers. Culled from your email. Pretty much at random. Including, in at least one now-famous case, an abused woman’s ex-husband. And throughout the Internet, a consensus: for the first time, publicly and indisputably, Google shit the bed. Massively.

The state of affairs has reached a point where every time Facebook rolls out something new, you have to go back and look through the settings and make sure your privacy hasn’t been compromised any further. Buzz has now made that a requirement for Google as well. If a company’s business model depends on selling your information, keeping yours private is taking money out of their pockets – and they can hardly be expected to hold them open for you.

If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now – you’d have to be an idiot to stake your data on a privacy policy of “don’t be evil.”

“Junior Johnson Has Left the Building,” by Charles P. Pierce (from GQ, 1996):

From its founding, NASCAR was suffused with the backlash ethos of the 1970s — ambitious people in every field realizing there was money and power to be had in Wallace’s astonishing discovery that (in many ways) the whole country was southern. When the Guv’nah cracked that great secret of the American demographic code, Bill France’s sport was already there on the track, idling heavily. Today, wildly popular and ludicrously profitable, it is nothing like it pretends to be. It is corporate connivance dressed up as populist celebration, careful contrivance masquerading as raucous authenticity. It has become, in short, simply another American sport, and the distance it has traveled is that same distance that got us from Huey Long to Newt Gingrich, from William Faulkner to John Grisham and from Patsy Cline to Shania Twain. How you feel about that pretty much depends on how much you like Gingrich’s thinking, Grisham’s writing and whatever it is that Shania Twain does besides looking like the most popular lap dancer in Dogpatch.

The first thing you have to know – and I think this is a major flaw in Google’s planning – is that you can’t figure out the ins and outs of a phone in five minutes in the cell phone shop. But you can certainly get a better feel from it than you do from, you know, the website. I am lucky enough to know a few people who pack a Nexus One, so I’ve probably seen more of it in action than most folks – but believe me when I say that a Flash graphic to which you match your hand size is no substitute for actually feeling the thing in your hand.

And make no mistake, the Nexus One has the best feel of anything to come along since the original iPhone. It’s metal, it’s tangible, it’s got some heft and feels like a solid piece of work. From the time the cellphone fixation began, the phones I always coveted but never managed to get were things like the SonyEricsson T616 or K700i, or the Moto V635 that I eventually bought in 2005 – all metal. (At least I think the K700 was – couldn’t actually find it in this country.) I know the plastic back of the 3G-capable iPhones was necessary to help accommodate the wide array of antennae but dammit, I want the metal back. Hell, the Nexus One’s even got space for engraving.

Thing is, I haven’t had time to really test drive it, not could I…because it’s only got 1700 Mhz domestic 3G capability. Which is only on T-Mobile. (As far as I know, no other carrier in the world uses 1700 Mhz spectrum.) So if you want to use the full capacity of the phone, you’re as locked to T-Mob as surely as the iPhone locks you into AT&T. That partition of 3G space has done more to undo the past few years of cellphone unlocking than any actual carrier subsidy lock – sure, I could jailbreak the iPhone and use it on T-Mobile, but with no 3G coverage, what’s the point? Using a smartphone on EDGE for anything tougher than email or maybe text RSS reading is a misery.

So I’ve been limited to reading online reviews, and I’ve had to scuffle some to find reviews that take place after the person’s used the device for a couple of weeks. So far, most of the Nexus One complaints seem to be down to battery life and 3G issues caused by some sort of networking software glitch that has just been fixed. I guess nobody has good 3G when you get down to it.

(Aside here: the Droid is simply not an option. I won’t have a CDMA phone because even if my GSM phones give me gimped portability, the CDMAs give me none at all. Plus, the Droid’s keyboard is a joke and it’s not worth having the physical bulk and mechanical vulnerability. F that Droid.)

The big thing now with smartphones, it seems, is speed. I read one review of a guy who was trying the original G1 for a month – in six days, he’d given up and gone back to an iPhone because the G1 was so damned slow. The iPhone 3GS started the speed wars, Android 2 bumped it up, and the Nexus One – with its famous 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor – really throws down the gauntlet. And in the last six to nine months, the speed factor is starting to show its face – you’re seeing applications, even web apps, that drag when used on the older iPhone processors. Faster proc, more RAM – that’s the biggest differentiator for the iPhone 3GS over its predecessors, and it’s the thing that makes the Nexus One such a star.

As for apps…clearly, the fit and finish of the Android products is not up to scratch with the best of the iPhone apps. On the other hand, you can find pretty much anything you like in the Android Marketplace without any sort of gatekeeper approving apps. You pays your money (or not) and you takes your chances, although personally, the main apps I would use – things like Facebook or Foursquare – are all going to be there. Really, it’s like Mac vs Windows back in the day – the Microsoft fanboys would bag on how many more applications there were for Windows, conveniently avoiding the fact that 85% of those apps were pigshit or worse. The top stuff you wanted – Photoshop, Office, FM Pro, Eudora – that was there for everybody. I have no doubt the case will be similar here – even the most prominent Android-only app, Sherpa, has made its way to the iPhone under the name Geodelic; if you have an iPhone and don’t have Geodelic, stop reading this drivel and go download it now. Now now now.

Right now, it’s generally assumed that the iPhone has a more elegant media playback system, and this appears to be the case based on current chatter. But then, the company that invented the iPod isn’t going to skimp on that. The Android phones in general and the Nexus One in particular give the impression that they are communications devices first and media players as an afterthought. However, 90% of what I listen to these days are podcasts, so assuming an Android app that will let you directly subscribe and/or download, and sufficient room (say, 4 GB or so) for them, I’d say my podcasts would be fine on the Nexus. As for my music, well, before long all of it will be free of DRM by hook or by crook, so portability of my songs in iTunes is no longer a consideration.

The other thing about the Nexus One – and Android phones generally – is that they are well pledged to the cloud in general and Google’s services in particular. There’s not really much provision for syncing it to your PC, because the presumption is that you’ll never *need* to sync it to your PC – and if you had the battery life and a mechanism for streaming your own music library, you might just never need to. The iPhone really doesn’t quite get there, mostly because of the music and media sideloading issue. You can’t sync an iPhone over a network, and trying to download all your content directly onto the phone routinely isn’t the easiest thing in the world even if you’re not having to re-buy media content.

Ultimately, though, anything that tethers too tight to the cloud is a leap of faith – that you trust the cloud service to be accessible, be reliable, and be secure. Right now, my resource of final resort is a system owned and administered by my brother-in-law, who runs a tight shop and has, to the best of my knowledge, never had meaningful downtime on this site or on my personal email. I couldn’t say that for mac.com or Gmail. Nor am I really comfortable with many (if any) of the free services out there – they’ve got your data, and at some point, they may want to monetize it. (Google makes no bones about this, which is a bit discomforting until you realize that a lot of other sources COULD do it and just aren’t telling you whether they are or not.) I realize that asking Apple to make an iPhone with no Apple dependencies is as foolish as asking Google to turn out an Android phone with no Google dependencies – but the first company that can produce such a product, either way, and comparably-equipped, will have my undivided attention.

Postscript: I know Verizon is moving to LTE, and AT&T as well, while T-Mobile is going to try to hang on with HSPA+ and Sprint is clinging to WiMax like a drunk to a lamppost. Given that the iPhone 3GS and Nexus One both support HSPA with a theoretical max 7.2Mbps throughput, and that commercial LTE isn’t going to be widely available before the end of 2011 most likely, and that Apple almost certainly won’t do an iPhone for Verizon until it’s an LTE phone – I say all that to say this: I can probably buy my next phone, on a contract, and not regret it until it comes around again in 2012. I can also say that the notion of buying an unlocked Nexus One and getting the corresponding reduced-rate T-Mobile service is quite seductive, especially since it would mean no monthly contract. If I’m honest, I do want to keep my options open against the day that somebody decided to start metering phone data and charging accordingly – and you’re a fool if you don’t think that day is coming sooner rather than later, after the bloodbath AT&T is taking in New York and San Francisco.

In the modern world of Silicon Valley circa 2010, the smartphone is more important than a cowboy’s six-shooter was a hundred-fifty years ago. Many are the technology workers who would sooner wander out the door in the morning without pants than without their iPhones or Crackberries or Androids.

I’m one of those, I hate to admit. Have been for years – a vastly overpriced Sony Ericsson P800 from a shady Chinese cellphone shop in the Bowery was my first effort, followed a year later by a Nokia 6620 and then by trying to squeeze J2ME versions of Opera Mini and Google Maps onto an unlocked V635 – an effort that went pear-shaped only when I reluctantly gave up my personal phone and let my employer pay for my service – which didn’t include data. And thus did I drift, lost and lonely for a year and a half, until the iPhone, which not only led to my employer providing data service again BUT which featured Wi-Fi as well. Just like that, I had service most anywhere…and the iPhone became THE indispensable device.

I have lately been running up against the limits of what the iPhone can do, though. I don’t think these are common to the iPhone, either, as I see no evidence that a Nexus One or a Droid or a Blackberry Bold would get around them (and I carried the Bold specifically to try to thwart #1 for a while, to no avail). These are in no particular order:

1) TEXT ENTRY. There is simply no good way to handle long-form entry on a device the size of a deck of cards. I know there’s Swype now, and Dragon Dictate, and some people seem to think the slide-out keyboard on the Droid is usable, but I’m here to tell you: there is no good way to churn out a thousand-word blog post without a mostly-full-sized keyboard that you can operate with more than thumbs.

This is where the netbook still hangs on: even a Dell Mini10 has a 92% full-size keyboard that honestly isn’t any worse than using the old 12″ Powerbook G4 (and in fact the Atom N450 probably beats it for speed and definitely for battery life). If the putative ChromeOS devices are indeed keyboarded, this is a good sign. I think much of the iPad’s early success will rise and fall over the viability of its on-screen keyboard and whether people are willing and able to carry a Bluetooth keyboard with it for long-form text (although an iPad and that wee Apple Bluetooth keyboard with no numeric keypad? Might fit nicely into a 10″ laptop sleeve…)

2) STREAMING MEDIA. This is a combination problem: bandwidth AND battery life. Even if you could watch Hulu on the iPhone, you couldn’t do it *well* and I don’t expect that to get any better anytime soon. Even people using Pandora don’t seem to be crazy about it as a go-to music source on the iPhone – plus let’s face it, you’re basically back to transistor radio days with trying to get coverage and not lose your signal. Buffering is the new static. Given the storage cost of keeping video on the phone (especially with these phones that only come with 8 GB SD cards or such), I think this is one where the ultimate benefit is with the larger screen (and thus bigger battery on the back side of said screen) – one particularly interesting bit is whether the iPad will have some sort of improvement in YouTube, Slingbox, etc. support – and whether the long-rumored Hulu app will come to pass. After all, the screen’s nearly big enough for proper 720p HD…

3) CHAT. Again, without a reliable means of text input, IM-type chat is a bit of a pain in the ass – not to mention redundant. After all, when you have SMS *and* the ability to, you know, DIAL THE PHONE…AIM and Y!M and Google Talk become kind of pointless. Now video chat is another matter…but there, as with streaming media, you’re back to considerations of battery and bandwidth. After all, video-calling has been out there on 3G networks in Europe for years…but the uptake just isn’t there. Personally, I’m waiting for Star Wars holographic chat, with the full-body blue-tinged thing happening. Video chat, a la Skype or iChat? Better off with a laptop.

So all in all, your move these days if you need something better than an iPhone is the netbook. You can get a Dell Mini10v for about $250, and for that you get a desktop OS, a full browser with Flash and Java (and thus Hulu or similar), a webcam (and thus support for chat via Skype or maybe even GTalk at some point) a physical keyboard for other than hobbits, and hell, even the prospects of VNC and RDP to get some work done back at base in a pinch. Plus, based on the pricing of the Nexus One, it’s difficult to fathom that Google would release a netbook-type device for much less – in fact, it’s more likely to join Ubuntu, Moblin, Eeebuntu, Sugar, and the other slew of non-Windows alternative netbook operating systems. And hell, you can install the open-source Chromium on your netbook right now if you like.

Long story short: the iPad is still an attractive notion, but in the grand scheme of things, if you already have an iPhone, it may be superfluous. Carrying a device that doesn’t hit all those spots may be a bit much – I have a friend with a Kindle that has infinite battery, a great display, and some rudimentary ability to hit the web from anywhere – but she leaves it at home and uses her iPod Touch (and now, her iPhone) for reading on the road. Based on that, the obvious question is: will you take your netbook (or other Tertiary Connectivity Device) with you or is it for sitting at home on the couch? Where, let’s face it, an iPhone is not the best device for checking IMDB while you watch Leverage.

So instead, let’s get through this in a more practical way: to what extent do I need those things, especially given that I now have a very nice Mac mini at home taking care of the heavy lifting computer-wise and serving as my backup system?

1) TEXT ENTRY. This is the big one. I cannot blog “from anywhere” as it were, nor can I work on things like the NaNoWriMo project. If I go to lunch, or sit on the train or what have you, my content creation is limited to what I can scribble in one of a disturbingly-growing selection of small notebooks. This would be kind of handy, to be honest, because my work laptop is a 15″ MacBook Pro and really isn’t suitable for going anywhere. I certainly would hate to take it with me on vacation (and to be honest, it was only the necessity of my fantasy football draft that led me to take a laptop to the Pacific Northwest. Otherwise, I have gone on almost a month’s worth of travel with zippy laptop in 2009).

2) STREAMING MEDIA. I think this is more theoretical than anything – largely because most of what I listen to on the iPhone now is podcast material. I likely couldn’t use streaming media on a plane, for instance, and I think battery life issues make it impractical to consider otherwise.

3) CHAT. I basically never IM anymore except with my wife and co-workers, during the workday, and mostly on a company-hosted secure IM system. I think it’s probably been 2007 since I was on IM on a routine basis. A combination of SMS, Twitter and Facebook have made IM obsolete for public asynchronous time-wasting. =)

So basically, what I’m looking for in a netbook is something to use for blogging on vacation and reading RSS in front of the TV. Well hell, I’m not about to spend $250 on THAT, let alone $500 for an iPad. So at this point, we’re back to analyzing what may replace this iPhone 3G come September…

There hasn’t been a 44 shooting like that since the Son of Sam.

* Bill Simmons made this point well, but – what if the Miami Dolphins had chosen to sign Drew Brees over Daunte Culpepper? The Saints run doesn’t happen, Nick Saban probably doesn’t take the Alabama job, Peyton Manning probably wins another Super Bowl off the back of three Brett Favre interceptions and Texas probably beats Florida for the NCAA title this year, while the Tide fires Jim Leavitt after three mediocre seasons and some allegations of player abuse. And the Saints are probably the San Antonio Saints.

* King cake may be nature’s perfect food. When they invent bacon king cake, we will be able to say as a civilization, “All done.”

* Talk about regression to the mean. Peyton Manning, despite the best efforts of the NFL and its media concubines to force him down our throats as The Greatest Quarterback Of All Time Ever, is – in the final analysis – a .500 career playoff QB who luck-boxed his way into one Super Bowl win three years ago against a Bears team that was lucky to be there. Very pretty numbers, impressive regular-season figures, a regular berth in the playoffs (in a division that couldn’t be more sad-sack – I mean, two expansion franchises and the Titans post-McNair?) but when the big moment comes…a whoopsie-daisy.

* Best actual Super Bowl game since the Rams and Titans. Although last year was not bad. The figures bear it out, too – these last two have been the most-watched Super Bowls ever. And last night’s game was the most watched program ever on American television – even beating the numbers of the M*A*S*H finale some twenty-seven years ago. (WHIMPER. Hold me.)

* That absinthe’s a hell of a drug.

* If nothing else, New Orleans deserved to win because you KNOW that they will celebrate in a manner befitting the accomplishment. They may as well close the state of Louisiana for the week.

* The Skins will always be my #1, tragically, but if the need ever arises, Who Dat Nation – I’m yo’ huckleberry. 😉

It’s not even my team. And yet.
I’m not ashamed to say I was blubbering like a hospital scene in a Mexican soap opera. They say the sign of maturity is when you’re able to be happy for others – well, I have never been this happy for the outcome of a Super Bowl in my entire hyperventilating life, including the Redskins’ last win in 1991-92.
CHA CHING!!!! WHO DAT! WHO DAT! WHO DAT SAY GON BEAT DEM SAINTS!!!!

Plenty of ink has already been spilled about the impending societal implosion of Colorado Springs. At least they have the Air Force Academy, so you know where the guns are.

The phenomenon of modern libertarianism never fails to amuse me. Down South, it basically stands for “the government should only be concerned with paying me my Social Security and killing brown people.” Everywhere else, it boils down to “I got mine, fuck you.” A bunch of people go out and read Ayn Rand and get in their heads that somehow they are the chosen few, the elect of society, and that it is only by their magnificence that humanity carries on.

(The exercise of how vital investment bankers are to the benefit of the American way of life is left as an exercise for the reader.)

What it boils down to is that these people want to live in the Wild West. They want to go armed all the time, because they want to have to go armed all the time, because they want no more restraint on them than can be resisted with the wave of a pricey custom 1911 chambered in .357SIG (which any idiot could tell you is nothing but hopped-up +P+ 9mm anyway). And if left far enough out in the woods, they could be let to do that. The problem is that the Senate gives the same representation to one-cow-one-vote square states that it does to places like New York or California, and the Senate is bound by weird and archaic rules that somehow make 59% a minority…but I digress.

The bigger problem are the ones who want to bring their libertarian paradise to the suburbs – or worse yet, the city. And the problem is that in the 21st century, there is a minimal level of government that is absolutely essential to urban life. In order to prevent the tragedy of the commons, or to facilitate a minimal level of public safety, somebody has to take responsibility for things like running water and trash collection. If you want to take a flight, you want to make sure the plane can take off and land – so there’s the FAA. If you turn the tap, you don’t want rat piss and cadmium coming out – and there’s the EPA. You can quibble about the cost or efficacy or whatnot, and no doubt some of the arguments will have merit, but the practical upshot is, you can’t run a 21st century society on 19th century rules.

This is part and parcel of why I think it will ultimately come down to shooting war – because the differences are being sorted out. Big blanket categories like conservative vs liberal, religious vs less so, rural vs urban, Republican vs Democrat, Dixie vs Everybody Else – the red vs blue divide is getting less purple with every passing year. This is why there’s no bipartisanship – because all those years of “bipartisan” legislation were brought to you by Boll Weevil Democrats and Gypsy Moth Republicans and people like Jacob Javits, who would never be a Republican today, and a whole lot of Southern Dems who either switched parties or retired and were replaced.

And here’s the kicker: almost three-quarters of Senate Republicans are only there since the Gingrich Revolution. They never read Sinclair or Oppenheimer or Fenno or “Folkways of the U.S. Senate” – and they are not particularly committed to any of those folkways. And they’ve been a lot less reticent about using the arcana of the Senate to their advantage, and you see what happens – clowns like Dick Shelby asserting a “blanket hold” on 70 – SEVENTY! – Presidential appointments.

The moral of the story is that the current American political institutions were not meant for a pole-seeking two-party system, similar to what they have in Britain or other parliamentary democracies. They were designed around two center-seeking parties with a degree of overlap in geography, ideology, and the like. And when you try to fit a 19th century system onto 21st century world, you shouldn’t be surprised when it creaks and groans – and ultimately doesn’t start up in the morning.

I’m getting close to doing away with the moral dilemma about selling my old firearms – or rather, my dad’s old firearms. My qualms about taking advantage of other people’s bigotry and ignorance for financial gain are being overwhelmed by the more pressing credo of “GIT MONEY,” and I think I’m pretty much OK with that.*

Of my remaining guns, two are the sort of beginner thing one gets at Western Auto or similar, a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun and a very old .22 which should probably be left for the Alabama nephews for when their father decides to take them hunting. Two more are going to be sold, and the last I’m keeping – a seventy-year-old Browning repeater shotgun that my maternal grandfather left to his son-in-law, which passed to me when he died.

I anticipate realizing a windfall in excess of a thousand bucks selling the two that I want to sell. Which is not a bad little extra to find in your bank account. The problem is, though, I don’t want to waste it, especially given the perspective – after all, that Sweet Sixteen is older than either of my parents, and the pistol I’m selling is basically a downsized version of the same gun Browning sold to the Army as the new standard sidearm in 1911.** If you want to know what kind of engineer John Moses Browning was, consider this: the armaments he designed for the US military in the WWI era were still in standard use into the 1980s, and a pistol he first designed in the mid-1920s (the Browning Hi-Power) is still the standard issue sidearm of about 50 countries to this day, just now starting to be replaced.

So I say that to say this: I don’t want to sell these things and trade the money for something that’s going to be gathering dust in the back of a drawer in four years. Which is not an idle comment – my personal laptop and home desktop computers have both cacked out; the former is no longer functioning (bad motherboard) and the latter is a pre-production design with a bad hard drive that cannot be replaced. The kinds of things I tend to sink money on – laptops and cell phones – are not the sort of thing one can buy and use continuously for twenty years, let alone seventy-five.***

It begs the question, though…what, in the modern world of 2010, can you buy that lasts until the next Olympics? Clothing, I guess, though I have enough DMs and outerwear to last me the rest of my natural life, and the tuxedo gets so little use I can’t imagine needing another one. Nor a suit for that matter; I have my one suit and it does for funerals and some weddings (this being California). Automobile? I have one, and even so, unless you get something superb, are you going to be driving it in twenty years?

Furniture, I suppose. Jewelry? Maybe.**** I could put it on the mortgage and say it’s part of the house, but that hardly feels like accomplishing much when it’s not even a whole month’s payment. Maybe invest in a new washing machine? (Hardly trivial since I do the laundry, but…not really what I had in mind, you know?) It begs the question…are our lives nowadays just that transitory? Are we permanently wed to this sense of impermanence? And is that lack of permanence the very kind of thing that provokes and worries the kind of people who have half a dozen guns?

* Well, maybe not OKAY okay, but I’ll live. Probably kick a hundred bucks to the Human Rights Campaign or something just to salve my conscience and poke a thumb in Cousin Pa’s eye.

** A Colt Government .380, if you must know. It amuses me how many gun-nut types consider the .380 ACP an inadequate cartridge for self-defense. My thinking is – you know what, I’ll take three shots at you with a .380, and then you can spend eternity bitching about how you can’t be dead because you were shot with a wimpy bullet. The “mouse gun” in my pocket trumps the custom match-grade .45 you left at home in a drawer by the bed.

*** To me, this is one of the ultimate indictments of our industry – at best, you can expect something you buy to last eight to ten years, because even if you have spare parts and extra batteries and take care of it, the technology will leave you behind in a decade. A laptop from 2000 might be feasible, if you had the presence of mind to pick up extra batteries and make sure to have the Wi-Fi option installed AND make sure it can run Ubuntu or something so you have a modern browser. A cell phone from 2000 might work IF you were on Powertel or Verizon or Sprint, and you’re in the right area and can get by on one frequency and no data, but if you have an AT&T wireless phone from 2000, you own a brick. I guess the moral of the story is if you want timelessness and permanence, major in history.

**** At this point I have given up on spending it on myself, as the only jewelry I would ever get at this point would be if somebody inexplicably voted me a championship ring. Which I don’t see happening. Then again, there’s always the tattoo option…

Now that we’ve had a night to sleep on it, and (hopefully) finish up with the bad menstruation shtick brought on by the name**, it’s time to take another look at the iPad. Having contemplated and considered, I have some additional thoughts.

* The common thread among those who have seen and touched and used the iPad is that “you won’t truly understand until you handle it; words and specs and YouTube video doesn’t do justice to the experience of using it.” My regard for Stephen Fry is such that I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this front.

* Everyone seems to think that $499 is not a bad price to pay at the entry level for this thing. That’s as may be – no one has ever accused me of having a good sense of the value of money one way or the other, and I will agonize for literally months over a $20 Nerf gun but think nothing of donking off $20 worth of coffee and soda in a day – but my comparisons are to things like a $299 netbook, or $199 iPod Touch, or $200-something Kindle 2 that comes with free lifetime wireless access. Against that, $500 is kind of steep no matter how you slice it.

* I played around with a Dell Mini 10 running Windows XP this afternoon. I think the search indexing was running some of the time, which didn’t help, but the general feel was: OH. DEAR. GOD. SO. SLOW. I wonder if it would be any better with Xubuntu on it instead. The keyboard on the Mini 10 is the best I’ve seen yet on a netbook, and even pwns the keyboard on some of Dell’s full-sized small-business offerings (Vostro 1520, I’m looking at you…and contemplating using the bathroom) but if that’s as fast as it gets…maybe the fundamental problem is that things like the iDevices or the Kindle have a purpose-built Device OS rather than a full-size Computing OS (such as Windows, etc), and as such can run their own apps and things faster on less powerful hardware than trying to coax Windows performance out of an Atom N270. (God help you if you try to watch QuickTime movies on that thing…)

* The thing I always come back to is…blogging. You wouldn’t ever want to blog on an iPhone. Twitter, Tumblr, sure – but nothing over 100 words. Looking at the Kindle, I’m not sure you’d want to blog on it even if you could – the keyboard is made for a long session with a surgeon about the damage you’ve done to the ligaments and tendons in your thumbs. And looking at the iPad, I still don’t see how typing on a flat glass screen is going to work. This brings me to the next point…

* Devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch/Kindle/smartphones generally – they are meant for consumption, not creation. You read on them, you surf on them, you do a little communicating on them, but you don’t use them to hammer out the Great American Novel*** or design your website or handle your taxes. For all their weakness and lack of power, netbooks actually give you some small opportunity to produce; if the iPad turns out to be unsuitable for same (iWork or no iWork), it really will be consigned to the Kindle/overgrown iPod Touch category.

* What do we do with these devices, anyway, aside from using them like you would a $20 prepaid phone? Let’s see…reading blogs and RSS feeds. Reading big amounts of text. Following Twitter and Facebook. Checking in with Foursquare or Gowalla. Checking out ball scores and train schedules. Buying movie tickets, checking the bank balance, reading Texts From Last Night (DON’T YOU DARE JUDGE ME), reading and replying to the email…which begs the question: can’t you do all of this in a browser?

With that question asked, the next one has to be: what about Google? After all, Android is a device-agnostic OS, and if the iPhone OS can be scaled up to tablet size, you have to think Android could as well. More to the point, Google has the Chrome OS, which is basically a browser and enough Linux kernel underneath to drive the accompanying hardware, and there’s no reason THAT couldn’t be turned into a web-tablet sort of format as well. It might not be as elegant as the iPad, but then, if elegance were everything – or anything – Windows would have died in the crib. Windows 7 is the best version of the OS ever and it still isn’t as elegant as System 7 was in 1993, but every version of Windows has been “good enough.” I think Google could easily turn out a “good enough” web tablet and come in well under $500, if they have a mind to do it…

* With that question asked, we turn to the big one for me: the form factor. See, my current PDA is a “Rite in the Rain ™ All-Weather Field Book” which is a 5×7 water-resistant notebook. I can stuff it in the hip pocket of my jeans and roll out just fine, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to dump notes and thoughts and quick ideas and fax numbers with a ballpoint pen than to launch Notes or Evernote or what have you and peck it out on the keyboard.

Thing is, if it were 8×10, I couldn’t do that. I would need a bag. And once you have a bag, you might as well have a laptop. The limiting form factor for me is the size of an inner jacket pocket; anything bigger than 5×7 is going to be problematic at best, especially over half an inch thick. I’m a guy. I hate carrying the bag if I don’t have to, and I have enough back issues that it’s a good idea if I don’t. (The murse is right out.) So something the size of the Kindle 2 is probably at the upper limit of what I could tote around with me. Which leads to the other problem: when I worked in DC, my normal loadout went something like: cell phone, pager, iPod, pipe, tobacco pouch, lighter, Leatherman… you get the idea. (Some years, add Blackberry to that. Pre-phone Blackberry, natch.) I don’t want to go around with the HURT-ting Bat Utility Belt, and adding a 5×7 tablet on top of an iPhone (or Nexus One, arguably) is a pain in the ass I don’t really need.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is “horses for courses.” You’re never going to do video chat or watch entire shows on Hulu with a smartphone – the processor and battery just aren’t there. You don’t want to try long-term web surfing on a Kindle (and you sure don’t want to pay per feed if you’re reading a hundred RSS feeds a day). And while a netbook might be a good compromise if you’re just running down South for a week and don’t want to drag your 15″ MBP, it’s the best of a bad lot for serious computing tasks.

Add it all together, and the iPad still isn’t for me as currently constituted. The sex appeal may be off the chart, and I reserve the right to be amazed in person when it finally hits the local Apple Store, but right now, if I was starting from scratch, I think the choice would still be iPhone 3GS + white plastic MacBook, rather than stringing together some combination of iMac + iPad + phone or what have you. Even the netbook is a tough thing to justify. That said, right now my computing environment consists of a 15″ MBP that belongs to my employer (and don’t think my private account isn’t FileVaulted and passworded to a fare-thee-well) and a long-term-loaner pre-production iMac that may or may not be circling the drain…the only thing that’s legit mine is my iPhone 3G. So right now, I have $75 on account and another $150 in wellness bonus**** coming from work next month…and while I’m not close to running out and buying anything, I have to say I’m in the market. But for what?

** Although “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Marketing” may be the greatest joke of all time.

*** RIP to JD Salinger, who has the same problem as Harper Lee or the makers of Avenue Q: what do you do when your first work is among the greatest things ever written? In Ms. Lee’s case, you hang it up and walk away on top…and could you blame her?

**** STOP LAUGHING AT ME IT IS NOT A JOKE I AM GETTING HEALTHY STOP IT I SAY.