Are my eyes really blue?

In the biggest shock in the Valley since…well since I don’t know when, Marissa Mayer – aka Google employee #20, most recently Vice President for Location and before that for Search at the big G – is taking the Chief Executive Officer job at Yahoo, becoming by some counts the fifth CEO in a year (including interims).

Thought one: she’s 37.  FML.

Thought two: this is not another Carly or Meg.  In addition to being young, Mayer brings to the table two Stanford degrees in computer science.  She’s not an MBA or a marketing android (rimshot) or a business turnaround artist – she’s a geek.  More to the point: she is a technical individual taking over a company that has long lost its technical edge.  And this is important.

Contrary to what they might want you to think at B-school at Wharton or Harvard, an MBA is not a universally fungible guarantee of managerial acumen.  What Google became, Yahoo once was, but the big purple exclamation point has long stopped being the company that got an onstage slot at the iPhone launch – in the last five years, they’ve managed to botch the best photo-sharing site on the web in Flickr, throw half-a-dozen shit sandwiches at social networking and miss with all of them (Yahoo 360?  Yahoo Buzz?  Yahoo Meme!?).  A former Warner Brothers CEO was probably not the guy to have in charge in the post-boom era, and Jerry Yang proved that you can’t go home again unless your name rhymes with Sleeve Knobs.  Carol Bartz was entertaining for a while, but it appears that Yahoo could not, in fact, merely cut-and-cuss its way to viability.  More and more it looks like Scott Thompson – who famously didn’t have the claimed degree in CS –  was CEO just long enough to make the mass purge…and now?

It’s not for the money.  Mayer presumably has more money than she could burn through in a lifetime at this point.  Part of it may just be the challenge – between Bartz, Whitman and Fiorina, the strong female CEO has had a rough few years in Silicon Valley, and maybe Mayer just wants to be the one to break the cycle before Sheryl Sandberg stages a coup at Facebook or leaves to take over something else.  If Mayer can bring Yahoo back to relevance, that would be a turnaround for the ages, and not just for the Valley – it would be the biggest comeback since the 2004 Red Sox at a minimum.

Because let’s face it, there are five companies that matter in this industry right now: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, in order of significance.  You’d probably have to dig down another ten or twenty names before you hit Yahoo – hell, the CS department at Stanford probably beats Yahoo in terms of industry impact right this second.  Which then leads to the question: what’s Yahoo going to do?

They don’t do hardware, and they don’t do a mobile operating system, and they’re not selling anything in terms of digital media or even physical goods – which means they’re not playing against four of the five names on that list up there at all.  They are the old-school “pure Internet play” and the only thing like that right now on the list is Facebook, which is itself scrambling to adjust to the post-PC future (and starting by throwing way too much money at Instagram).  So the obvious question is: what’s out there for Yahoo to acquire/sponge from?

Well, there are some interesting independent players out there.  Foursquare is the industry leader in location-based social networking, and location was Mayer’s last billet at Google.  SAYMedia is out there, holding TypePad and MoveableType and a good bit of the blog infrastructure of the web.  For that matter, Automattic is still out there even if they’ve mostly given WordPress over to the eponymous foundation.  There are other smaller players in social networking, like Tumblr or the tech-hipster darling Path.  There’s Evernote, which I quite frankly find indispensable for cloud-based notetaking and general bit-bucketing.  There’s Loopt, there’s Smugmug, there’s all sorts of small companies doodling around Mountain View ripe for the picking if you think you could make something of them.

But that’s not a vision.  What Yahoo should probably be looking at is a future where they’re offering the sorts of things Google or Facebook do, albeit with more privacy, granularity and user control.  After all, most folks over 25 still have a Yahoo account, and there’s some equity in the brand.  And there’s one name that hasn’t come up yet, one which would place Yahoo right in the hot seat of social networking and mobility in one stroke.

Y!Tweets.

Dare to dream, Marissa.

This may be the only thing I write on the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky business, so pay attention and don’t skip bits.

The thing about Joe Paterno is that he was the symbol everyone pointed to for college football done right.  Longevity at one school, giving back to the school, graduating his players, never a whiff of NCAA trouble, and winning games (two national titles in the 80s and then a Rose Bowl berth in their first season in the Big Ten, the dawn of the modern age of expansion).  Penn State in the Paterno era was supposed to be proof that big time football and academic quality (Penn State’s an AAU member) were compatible and complimentary.

Except the lesson of the Sandusky affair is that Joe Paterno was bigger than Penn State University, and they suffered by it.  Most people in the football world thought Joe could have gone ten years ago, and probably should have – that the game had passed him by, that it wasn’t working anymore, that he was just too old to be effective as a head coach.  But when the legend becomes bigger than the team, you get what we had at Florida State as well – Bobby Bowden hanging on too long in pursuit of Bear Bryant, of Eddie Robinson, of Joe Paterno.

They said it about Bear Bryant in the late 60s, after a couple of 6-5 seasons, and he came back to win three more titles (and arguably should have been four), but he did retire after  two or three down years, when he famously wished out loud on television that he could get through to Linnie Patrick, when he lost to Tennessee in 1982 and told a drinking buddy in the hotel room after “I can’t coach ’em anymore.”  He put it just that bluntly at the presser: “There comes a time in life when you have to hang it up, and that time has come for me as football coach at the University of Alabama.”

Five weeks later he was dead.

He was friends with Paterno, was the Bear – they played one of the greatest bowl games ever on New Year’s Day 1979 and Alabama staged the goal-line stand that is perhaps the most iconic of all Alabama plays, and they made a deal for a ten-year home-and-home series that produced some epic matches. And I think Paterno knew deep down that if he ever gave up the game, he wouldn’t be alive to see his successor’s first game.  That’s why he stuck around too long.  He wouldn’t go, and nobody would make him go, and…

The word “cult” gets thrown around too casually in this sort of thing.  Every fan base has its fanatics – hell, if they caught James Franklin with a dead girl and a live boy I’d probably need the coroner’s report and the DNA evidence – and it’s not like Ol’ Joe was leading his followers to the big vat of Flavor-Aid.  The administration of Penn State chose to protect Paterno, and what he might have known, and what he might have done, because they willingly decided he was bigger than the school.  Maybe they looked down South and saw some of the nonsense at Auburn and Alabama and decided that University president vs football coach was a losing bet, I don’t know.  But irrespective of their reasons, they chose Paterno over Penn State.

Now they’ll pay.  They’ll have to.  Joe’s dead, Sandusky’s going to die quickly in prison – they are the only ones left with direct culpability to pay the price, to shed blood for the mobs, to be on the wrong side of what Spencer Hall deftly nails as “the Nancy Grace point.”  Their careers are done.  They will face civil and probably criminal liability.  The ones who looked the other way are going to get the wrath of the American gods – media, lawsuits and moral outrage.

So what happens to Penn State?

In a way it’s already happened.  Paterno’s dead and disgraced, the administration is done for, the very phrase “Penn State” now evokes something completely other than peach ice cream at the dairy and Linebacker U.  Now people are saying “the NCAA should do something!”  Other people are saying “you can’t punish the players for something the coaches did, especially when the coaching staff’s been replaced and the new guy took an absolutely thankless spot.” And still other people are saying “if SMU can get the death penalty for paying players they should shut down Penn State!”

First things first: SMU was a special case, the lowest of the low in a conference rife with corruption, and the application of the death penalty not only permanently crippled Mustang football, it effectively led to the destruction of the Southwest Conference (another step toward the modern era of expansion).  The NCAA Committee on Infractions has passed up the opportunity to apply it to USC, to Miami, they threatened Alabama with it for far less but didn’t pull the trigger – there is a growing sense that they’ll never do it again.

More to the point, most NCAA penalties revolve around paying players, recruiting infractions, cheating on the field – things that affect the integrity of the contest.  Which is more or less the role of a sanctioning body.  Major League Baseball couldn’t have banned Pete Rose for, say,  cheating on his wife – it’s completely orthogonal to the game on the field.  But if he’s gambling on baseball – which has the potential to impact the integrity of the game on the field – the hammer can be brought down, and twenty-plus years on Pete Rose is still banned from organized baseball.

The horrors visited by Jerry Sandusky on his victims, however outrageous, were orthogonal to the game on the field.  While this is a scandal made possible by football – thanks to the outsized presence of a legendary coach – it’s not, strictly speaking, a football scandal.  Now, if the NCAA wants to make a prima facie case for lack of institutional control, well, the infamous “LoIC” is a fact and it is indisputable.  But it’s not a lack of institutional control that affected what happened between the white lines, which means the NCAA is probably on thin ice to get involved here.

And it shouldn’t.  The NCAA is busybody enough without extending its reach to something like this.  If it does, it’s only because they too have slipped beyond the Nancy Grace point and are joining the baying pack of hounds.  Realistically, Penn State is going to be a radioactive for football purposes for quite a while – they’re going to have trouble recruiting anyone who isn’t a livelong fan, they’re not going to be attractive as a TV opponent, the Big Ten is not going to want them as the face of the conference.  And I think ultimately that means the Big Ten will be the one doing the sanctioning, as it’s always arrogated to itself authority over non-sports matters.  The Big Ten requires its members to all belong to the AAU.  They have academic and library consortia.  They view themselves, quite frankly, as a sort of Midwestern Ivy League – and as such, they probably have much firmer ground and precedent on which to lower the boom.

I suspect that you’ll see conference probation for a while, of some sort.  Penn State won’t be going to any Big Ten-affiliated bowls for a while, won’t be eligible for championships in football, will have some symbolic “probation” slapped on there, and will almost certainly turn over every single individual above “head football coach” in the line of command all the way up to the Board of Trustees.  And then, we wait.  Time has a way of inflicting its own punishment, and the Nittany Lion football program will be admitted into civilized company again when the public is good and ready to accept it.  Self-cleaning.

Oddly enough, the people I feel most bad for are those hardcore fans, the ones who put their trust and belief into a program and a legend for years and years.  I know how this works.  I’m from Alabama.  But as a wise man one said, “put not your faith in kings and princes, for three of a kind will beat both.”  When the legend is bigger than the program, both are doomed.

Andy Griffith, dead at 86.

Someone on Twitter said that Sheriff Andy Taylor and the residents of Mayberry showed television a Southern alternative to Bull Connor. That’s as may be, and inasmuch as it’s true, the South should be grateful. But as with Atticus Finch and George Wallace, the problem of Sheriff Andy vs Bull Connor is that one of them is a fictional character. And tragically for an entire region – maybe the entire nation – it was the wrong one.

I’m watching the original 2007 introduction of the iPhone – streamed via AppleTV from the upstairs iMac – and typing this post on my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. Which is where we’ve gotten to from what was introduced today. But a couple of things strike me:

1) Steve said the iPhone was five years ahead of every other phone out there. If you consider that Jellybean will finally clear up the touch-response UI issues on Android, he nailed it pretty good.

2) He quoted Alan Kay, who long ago said “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Within the last month, you’ve seen Google AND Microsoft introduce their own hardware to run their tablet operating systems, in both cases for the first time. Nailed it again.

3) Five years on it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary this was. There was no other phone, as far as I know, that had staked itself on one big screen. My old SonyEricsson P800 was technically capable of it, but shipped with a physically-attached keypad flip and a stylus dug into one side. And it was as thick as two iPhones stacked. Nobody had multitouch. Nobody had a viable browser that wasn’t a hodgepodge of WAP and proxy browsing. Nobody had visual voicemail.

4) Amazing in retrospect that Yahoo Mail was a big feature, especially since it was the only option at launch for push email. Exchange was only supported via IMAP. For that matter, it’s remarkable to see the top left corner read “cingular” – that was long gone by the time the thing actually arrived.

5) On further review, did that split-pane email view ever make it to the production device? I don’t remember ever seeing that at all. Then again, I was busy checking the stock and seeing if we had a winner in the “which rep will demand one of these before the keynote even ends” derby. I don’t recall the flashing phone icon either.

6) Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, part of the iPhone rollout. Times have changed. For that matter, Jerry Yang as Chief Yahoo…five years is an eternity in this valley.

7) “We’ve filed for over two hundred patents and we intend to protect them.” People who bitch about the lawsuits – it’s not like we weren’t warned. I think it’s proof of how important iOS devices were to Steve that he was bound and determined not to have a repeat of Macintosh – this time, the look and feel would be protected to the best of their ability. Which probably explains Steve’s incredible venom toward Android – Steve probably saw another cut-rate knockoff with the potential to take over because it was good enough. And it may yet happen, but not today.

8) Cingular went into contract with Apple without ever seeing the device. Given that they were the only viable carrier – the only GSM carrier in the US with dual-band coverage – Apple really didn’t have a choice without making a hell of a mess for themselves selling abroad. But then again, that’s Steve. We may never see that kind of sell-water-to-a-fish charisma again (although there’s a guy down in middle Tennessee who might just catch him).

9) That exclusivity deal lasted until…when? Late 2010? A three year deal sounds about right; we suspected as much as five at the time and were pretty sure it would be at least two.

10) And the infamous clicker cut-out, which produced about a minute of awkward before Steve went into the anecdote about Woz and the TV jammer. It always warmed my heart to have Woz show up or even be name-checked at an Apple event – respect your heritage.

11) Apple wanted 1% market share by the end of 2008. By 2011, they were making literally half the profit in the entire worldwide mobile phone handset industry.

12) And Apple Computer becomes just plain old Apple. Prophetic, because the iOS devices are the rocket this company rides on now. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.” If you wanted a mission statement for the last five years at Apple, you could hardly do better.

Steve said this product was going to change the industry. Five years on, every new phone is a smartphone, and you can pretty much split the history of mobile into Before iPhone and After iPhone. Again – nailed it. And I know it was on the backslope of my time there – by October I was gone – but it’s still awesome to know that I was there, and it was during my tenure that the game was changed for good.

In January 2006, I scooped up a SonyEricsson Z520.  It was part and parcel of migrating my work-provided phone from the old AT&T Wireless to Cingular, and the Z520 had a lot of things going for it.  It had the SonyEricsson UI, which was the best-of-breed at the time.  It had a loop antenna, so nothing to snag in pockets.  It was compact enough to go in the change pocket of my jeans, it featured Bluetooth and speakerphone both, and it was purported to have greatly improved battery life.  And despite the fact that my personal phone was the aforementioned V635, I was drawn to this one – sure it didn’t have a megapixel camera or EDGE speed, but neither did it have the Motorola problem of the side buttons constantly blipping in your pocket to change the ringer settings unexpectedly.

The funny thing is, within a month at least three of my co-workers had ordered a Z520 for themselves.  Its performance on GPRS was better than the V635’s on EDGE, so looking up scores and things was perfectly viable, and it worked well with iSync on the Mac, so you could actually use it to sort of keep your contacts and calendar.  And the battery life turned out to be around four days in normal usage.  I used the phone for text messaging, for the occasional call, for my alarm clock every morning, and essentially never had to worry about the battery.

It didn’t hurt that the SonyEricsson UI had a very easy-to-use implementation of themes.  I spent many a night downloading piles of themes for the phone, most frequently related to some sort of Euro soccer team.  Tons of Celtic themes, of course, along with Newcastle and Spurs and Chelsea as I cast about looking for a squad to call my own in the Premiership. 

I ordered other phones, of course – there was a Moto L2 which I got in a vain attempt to get a signal at the desk in my new office, and some sort of Nokia flip that I got out of desperation in spring 2007 – but apart from the brief loan of a co-worker’s SonyEricsson W800i to test out the camera (which was much better as it turns out and a damn good phone all around), that Z520 was my daily carry phone for a year and a half…until the coming of the iPhone.

It dropped five years ago today, although I didn’t get mine for about a month – the 8GB model given to every employee happened at the end of July – but that was the end of my phone glee.  I’ve gotten other phones since, but the only phone other than an iPhone that I have spent money on since that day was a $20 Nokia 1112 as a backup piece and nostalgia device.  (I did get a MOTOFONE F3 as a Christmas present in 2007 and was briefly issued a Blackberry Bold when I started this job, but the Bold lasted less than two months before I dumped it in favor of a stipend for using my own phone.)

It’s hard to oversell what an amazing thing that iPhone was in 2007.  It was unlike anything else out there – just a slab of glass and steel that responded to your touch and had all sorts of bells and whistles, not to mention a legit browser and email client.  There were no apps back then, and even web apps were a bit sketch – you couldn’t even bookmark them on the phone’s “desktop”.  But it was pretty clear from day one that I might never want to carry anything else, and from that day, the phone obsession has dwindled to pretty much nothing.

Meanwhile, that Z520 was my travel phone in Europe in 2007 and 2010, and has kept my UK phone number alive for over 7 years now.  Sadly, it’s beginning to flake out a little bit, and I suspect that its days are numbered; the unlocked iPhone 4S will almost certainly be the travel device from now on.  But I’m going to keep the Z520 as a pleasant reminder of an old hobby of younger days…

Festus Ezili, who at age 15 handled a basketball for the first time and shot it into his own team’s net, is tonight a first-round draft pick…of the Golden State Warriors.

Every year I say I need to start paying attention to the NBA again. It never happens. That just changed. I got nothing but love for John Jenkins to ATL and Jeffrey Taylor to Charlotte (and I hope he does Kidd-Gilchrist in practice everyday like he did every game last season), but to have Fes in the Bay Area is unreal. For him too, I’m sure – his American home is Yuba City, near Sac – but I now have a guy from my school playing in the NBA in my town.

Wow. That just happened. I mean…wow.

I’ll be honest, it hasn’t been the best year.  Work has been all over the place, up and down (and more down than up since about March).  My health isn’t what it was, physically or mentally.  My finances are going shit-shaped thanks to E*Trade deciding that paper is so last century and the IRS not having any sense of humor about paying capital gains on stock sales.  And I turned 40, which I think I’m still recovering from.  As a result, I’ve let a lot of stuff go and am suffering for it.

No more.

Effective July 1, we’re rebooting the year.  New New Years resolutions in effect:

1) We’re going back to exercising no less than three times a week.  Either running or weights, but SOMETHING – I may be running to stand still, but I can at least slow the rate of descent.

2) No more wasting money on junk food.  No stress eating or “this sucks, I deserve compensation” eating or “I really need 50 oz of fountain Coke Zero to survive Monday morning” trips through 7-Eleven on the way in.  This will simultaneously save money and improve my health.  Time to clip the water bottle to the bag again.

3) We’re back to Tuesday night shutdowns.  One night a week without killing time on the Internet isn’t too much to ask. I need the downtime, I need the reading, I need the opportunity to turn away from the allure of the glowing screen that’s always in my pocket or my jacket or my bag or my shoulder holster (!!) – Kindle and MOTOFONE F3 only.

4) Early (-er) to bed and early to rise. I need to get up in enough time to do my own first cup of coffee and bowl of cereal instead of getting sucked into parfait and a venti black every Tuesday/Thursday, and I need to be out cold by midnight instead of refreshing Twitter just one more time.

5) I think I’m set on jackets, footwear and gadgets.  Stop noodling after that shit. (Exception allowed if Nerf releases the Elite Jolt before review season.  75 feet on a pocket blaster? I’m saving a $20 just for that.)

Right.  Don’t like the way things are going, make a change.  Time to straighten up and fly right again.

Josh Marshall’s tweet summed it all up: “GM (check), OBL (check), ACA (check).”

Obama bet his Presidency on health care reform, and won – but only today did the check clear.  The other big winner today was Chief Justice John Roberts, who successfully averted a decision that would almost certainly have destroyed the credibility of the Supreme Court as anything other than a partisan entity.  The fact that so many Constitutional scholars considered that the law WAS constitutional but expected it to be found otherwise is telling – and quite frankly, after Bush v Gore and Citizens United, the Court was staring at an 0-2 count.  Maybe this is a hit, maybe not, but they fouled one off for sure.

Again, a summation of the mandate: the whole point of ACA is to make health care more affordable.  The easiest way to do this is by economy of scale – if everyone buys into the insurance system, the risk of payout is spread around a lot more evenly and premiums don’t have to go as high.  In addition, now we’re saying that you can’t deny coverage to people for pre-existing conditions, you have to cover a person’s offspring to age 26, and there’s no maximum cap to how much a person can get, lifetime, in insurance payout.  But if you have those rules, everybody has to be in the system.  If they aren’t, people can skip out on buying insurance until they need it – which means that the cost of that insurance will skyrocket because fewer people have bought into it.

For all the ranting and raving about “socialism” and “communism” by Medicare-scooter-riding old rednecks who aren’t capable of passing PSCI 238 Intro to Comparative Politics with a C+, this is actually as minimal an intervention as you could have and still have a shot at expanding coverage.  No single payer, not even a public option.  Hell, this whole concept bubbled up from the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s and was the bulk of the GOP’s alternative to Hillarycare in the grunge era.  The fact that it took a beating from the GOP for these last three-plus years is entirely down to the oft-stated Limbaugh-DeMint objective of making sure everything Obama did would come to failure. Which in and of itself is tied to the GOP’s decision over the last quarter-century that no Democrat could ever legitimately be President…but that’s another post altogether.

The whole point of getting elected isn’t to get re-elected, contrary to what most politicians seem to believe.  The point of getting elected is to change things.  On balance, one has to think Obama has a pretty solid resume to hand in to his next employer if he’s looking for work on January 20, 2013: General Motors alive, Osama bin Laden dead, and an expansion of health care that Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon (!) and Clinton could never successfully get passed.

Well done, young man.  Now maybe the Professional Indignant Left will suck it up and get behind the guy. One thing’s for sure, though – anybody who still says there’s no difference between the parties needs to be shot dead on account of rabid dumb…

The rule on our honeymoon was made by the second day in London: I had to stop and kiss my new bride before I was allowed to walk into a cellphone shop.  Because let’s face it, I was going into all of them.  Vodafone, O2, Orange, Three, Carphone Warehouse, I was even looking at a phone display in Harrod’s for crying out loud.  Partly it’s because I was in the market – my domestic phone of record at the time was the Bibendumesque Nokia 6620, with the Moto V180 as the hastily-acquired travel phone and a couple other random handsets floating around back in California.  I was looking for something that would combine Bluetooth, speakerphone, EDGE speed, a top-notch screen, two-day battery life and quality reception all in one while still fitting in the change pocket of my jeans.

I ended up holding off on a purchase – partly because the dollar was struggling against the pound and we’d just paid for a wedding, but also in anticipation of a forthcoming Apple phone.  Which turned out to be the ROKR, a rebranded Moto E398 with an iTunes-compliant player in the software.  I shook my head and ordered the Moto V635 on the spot, the phone that had drawn my attention everywhere from Kensington to Bath to Edinburgh.

When we went back in 2007, I did take a curious look at the MOTOFONE F3 (which ultimately came to me as a Christmas present) but I wasn’t looking at phones otherwise.  In fact, I donated that V635 a week before heading out of the country – because the iPhone had landed.  It had a real web browser, none of this WAP-stack nonsense, naturally it handled iTunes playback, its email was superior to anything on any other phone not made by Research In Motion – and it basically brought an end to phone glee.

Now that my iPhone 4S is unlocked, I’m dreaming of the Cotswolds again, so I looked at the SIM-only plans out there now.  Three – which started life as a 3G-only provider and was running in a weak fifth place in 2005 – offers a plan on a rolling one-month contract with 300 minutes (outgoing only, remember), 3000 texts, and unlimited data – for all of £15 a month.  Under the circumstances, I can’t fathom using anything else, although there are plans from Orange or O2 that offer unlimited texts, 1 GB of data, and some minutes above and beyond the usual top-up for £25-30, and I believe my current Virgin Mobile could be switched to a pay-as-you-go setup that includes 1 GB of data and unlimited texting with every £15 top-up.

I say all that to say this: there’s really not much out there in the way of alternatives for somebody with an unlocked iPhone in the United States.  You can roll the dice on T-Mobile and hope you spend your time in the parts of San Francisco where they lit up 1900Mhz HSPA+ coverage, but otherwise you’re back to the best speeds 2006 has to offer – and damnably, most of the GSM-based MVNOs in this country are backboned by T-Mob.  The one exception seems to be Straight Talk, a WalMart-based MVNO that offers unlimited everything for $45 and appears to have AT&T as its backing network in some areas.  But then you’re giving up visual voicemail, for one, and the configuration process for data and MMS appears to be less than smooth. Factor in the presumed move to a work-provided Verizon iPhone sixth-gen when it ships, and the juice ain’t worth the squeeze – looking at cost savings of less than $20 a month.

But there’s almost no 4G to speak of in Europe, so an iPhone 4S is ideal for an all-purpose travel phone.  Which is good, because my tiny Sony Ericsson Z520 is starting to flake.  More on it later…

The Nexus tablet is real. Made by Asus, 7 inches and $199 – which is interesting inasmuch as Google appears to be aping the most successful Android tablet of them all, the Kindle Fire.  They’re pushing this as a cheap-and-cheerful consumption device with a pure Android experience in 4.1, aka Jellybean.

This, with Google Play, is apparently meant to put Google on par with Apple and Amazon in terms of offering media and a means to use it – selling music, selling books, the like – and also to give them control over the widget. No more relying on Samsung – this is Google’s own gadget with, presumably, Google’s own schedule for updates.  One less party making decisions – well, two actually, because no cellular carrier to worry about.

This, to me, is the first sign that Google gets it.  Android tablets were a big bag of hurt, the Chromebook is an overpriced joke, and unlocked Nexus phones were far too expensive to be viable in the United States – but here’s a $200 device that lets you get in on Android and the entire Google ecosystem, presumably with more flexibility than the Fire (which is pretty much dedicated to consuming media and maybe gaming).  This is something that I’m looking at and wondering if it’s worth an investment, given that I still haven’t had a chance to work with Android in any meaningful way.  At the very least, I’m going to be banging the drum in the Friday meeting that we need to get a couple of those in the door ASAP.

Meanwhile, the changes to Android for Jellybean look interesting, if a little creepy in spots.  Improved voice dictation and search are always welcome, but “Google Now” trying to use your input and search history and whatnot to find stuff FOR you without asking?  Little too Minority Report for me at the moment.  Wonder how well it’ll work in practice.  Of course, the real question will be how quickly Jellybean gets out to a world where Ice Cream Sandwich still has single-digit adoption among Android devices – thanks to the carriers, the old saw about “Nexus shows you what you’ll have on next year’s high-end Android phone” will almost certainly continue to hold true.

As for the Nexus Q…you know, the new gadget that does for $299 what the Apple TV does for $99 and Roku does for $69…well, Google still hasn’t figured out television yet. Give them time.  Third one’s the charm…