Please don’t avoid being informed.
Seth says it better than I could have. But I’ve been thinking basically this for a while. Please: take at least some of your valuable TV watching time, and become better informed.
Entries Tagged as 'Ideas'
Tablet/laptop dock for my phone?
So, I was talking to a friend today, and it occurred to me that my phone is quite adequate, in terms of power, for the majority of my computing uses. Sure, not for development or hard-core gaming, but it’s almost as fast as my laptop, and has much more GPU power (and so is better for casual gaming), and the new dual-core 1.2 GHz versions of the snapdragon should negate the extra core advantage. With a bit more RAM, my phone could be a full replacement for my (admittedly ultra-portable) laptop. Additionally, the iphone 4 is better in every hardware respect than the ipad, except for it’s CPU being downclocked a bit.
So, here’s my proposal: someone should make a tablet doc for my phone. It should have a touchscreen in the 8-13″ range, a battery, and a hole in the back where I can dock my phone completely flush with it. That way, I can carry that and my phone. When I need ultra-portability, I can take my phone out. When I need a large screen, I can dock it, and the extra battery can even allow the phone to run faster when docked. Maybe turn off one of the cores when undocked, for example. This would give me all the advantages of a tablet and all the advantages of a phone, and none of the dis-advantages of either, right?
But why stop there? Why not have a dock in a laptop form-factor? Or maybe just a keyboard + touchpad + battery with space to dock the tablet dock. Now I have the advantages of a laptop as well. Add in a hard drive/ssd in the laptop base that automounts when you dock the phone, and it’s just about as perfect as it can be.
Of course, all this needs software support, as well. Apps have to be able to detect when the phone is docked, so that they can switch to the high-res mode to take advantage of the new screen real estate; and they have to be able to tell when the tablet is docked, so they can take advantage of the keyboard and touchpad. And I need good remote-desktop software so I can access my dev machine at home, especially in laptop mode (since it won’t be running a full Linux, only Android).
This should give me a good phone, with decent battery life for a phone; a decent tablet, with good battery life for a tablet, and not too heavy (I’m looking at you, ipad!), and a usable laptop, with decent battery life for a laptop. Of course, it will cost a lot, but it had better cost less than a laptop + tablet + phone (by quite a bit). And, all my data and apps can be in one location, and look and feel the same, no matter where I am.
So, Google: you want to own the world? This is what I want. I suspect I’m not alone. Take the wind out of Apple’s sails.
Device Convergence
The iPad has made me think a bit about device convergence. Conceptually, I have 8 main devices in my life:
- A phone. Receives calls (and occasionally makes them). Has to last a full day of battery at least, preferably a full weekend.
- A development box. Big keyboard, big screen, fair amount of computing power. Let’s me code.
- A home gaming machine. Big screen, good controller, good sound, lots of horsepower. Let’s me play full on modern games.
- A mobile gaming machine. Portable, good screen (for a portable), decent sound, decent input, decent horsepower. Lets me play games on the go. Battery life is not hugely important, as long as it can last a couple of hours.
- An ebook reader. High-rez screen, portable, good battery life, good sunlight visibility. Let’s me read books comfortably for long periods of time an on the go.
- A home diversion device. Decent screen, decent keyboard, decent horsepower, internet connection. This is used “at home” to browse the internet, read email, watch video, play small games, write blog posts, IM, and so on. It must be accessible where I spend most of my downtime.
- A mobile diversion device. Highly portable, good battery, always connected to the internet, reasonable screen, touchscreen, not impotent, preferably some kind of keyboard. This is used for the same kinds of things as the home diversion device, except for when I’m on the go.
- A music player. Stores and plays lots of music. Prefereably all my music. Preferably portable with really good battery life.
I pretty much use all 8 of these conceptual devices every day. Now, obviously, I don’t really want 8 different devices for this, so I make some compromises to reduce number and cost of these devices. This is not always possible; device 3 (home gaming device) is, in fact, a dedicated device. It’s my PS3. Full-on modern gaming, such as Fallout 3 (my current game) is demanding. It takes a lot of fairly specialized and expensive hardware to get that kind of game to play properly. You can game with a computer; and lots of people do. But the price of a decent gaming computer is 3 times the price of a console, for approximately the same experience. Unfortunately, consoles are pretty bad at most anything except gaming, so I end up with a dedicated gaming device. So, that’s one down. (Well, really more than one, because we have a Wii, a PS2, a PSOne, a dreamcast, a NES, and so on… but I don’t use them hardly at all, so I’m not counting them here.)
I have another dedicated device, my ebook reader. There’s a good reason for that: e-ink. Anyone who has tried to do any significant amount of pure reading on an LCD has discovered that they make horrible reading devices. I stare at a screens all day at work, and they’re about as good as screens get, but I still have to look away all the time to rest my eyes. Not so with e-ink. I can literally read for hours without looking up and be fine, just like paper. It’s awesome. Nothing else currently available comes close. However, for anything except reading books, e-ink is currenlty useless. It’s refresh rate is just fast enough to turn pages, but not fast enough for anything else. So, my ebook reader (a Sony PRS-600) is my other dedicated device.
Now the compromises start. First, my development machine. As much as I love my hoss workstation at work (quad-core, 4G, dual 24″ LCDs), it’s very big, very non-portable, takes up lots of desk space, and is very expensive. I spend most of my down-time at home in the living room sitting in a chair with my feet up. This means that getting access to a hoss dev box (which would presumably be on my desk in the computer room) would be difficult. I would need to either give up my living room time with my family or my dev box time. So, I use a laptop for personal development. This allows me to spend time in the living room with my family.
Once I have a laptop, I can compress a number of other pieces of functionality into it as well. My home diversion box, used primarly in the same downtime as I do my development, is also my laptop. It has all my music on it, so it ends up being my primary music player (I use it at work to listen to music). I even use it for some gaming, although admittedly not much. It’s not very powerful.
For portable gaming, I have a DS, but I don’t ever use it. I basically take it on flights, and that’s it. Why? Because my G1 is a decent mobile gaming device. There’s lots of games that are quite fun, and lots of them are games that don’t seem to end up on dedicated mobile gaming platforms, like sudoku and freecell. In addition, it has always-on internet, so it can use that to enhance the gaming.
This leaves a phone and a mobile diversion device. Now historically, I had two devices for this: A moto flip phone and my 770/n810. However, for the last year and a half, I’ve had a G1. Initially, I carried my n810 as well (since I used it at the time as my ebook reader), but my G1 quickly usurped all the features of my n810, and it became my main portable device, with one exception: reading. It’s a poor ebook reader. Too small, too short battery life, and that everpresent LCD. In addition, I used to carry an actual mp3 player with me for portable music. However, my G1 has usurped that role as well. It doesn’t have enough storage to hold all my music, but it holds a good subset. It also docs in my car, so I can use it in there for music.
Now, there’s one device that I left out of the list: GPS. It’s a common dedicated device, and I do use Google Navigator (and before my G1 I used my n810) for GPS fairly often; however, I don’t use it anywhere near as often as the 8 use cases above, so I kinda left it off the list. In addition, I’ve never had a dedicated GPS device; I’ve always used another device as a GPS. All the entries on that list have, at one point or another in my life, been represented by a dedicated device. So, GPS is important to me, but not enough that I’ve ever actually bought a GPS unit.
On to the iPad, which brought this whole thing up. The iPad, as it stands, cannot fit into my life. It tries to be an ebook reader, but it has an LCD, so it fails. It isn’t a phone, so it can’t replace my phone. It would make a decent mobile diversion device, but it’s not enough better than my G1 (or, say, a Nexus One or an iPhone) that it’s worth carrying in addition to my G1, and I have to have my G1 because the iPad isn’t a phone. It is supposed to be a decent mobile gaming device, but again, not significantly better than N1/iPhone, which I have to carry anyway, so… It could be a decent home deversion device for most of those uses; however, it’s lack of a keyboard and lack of a real OS make it completley useless as a dev box, so I have to have my laptop anyway, which is much better in every home diversion category, so it won’t fill that niche either. It’s not powerful enough to be a home gaming box. It’s not any better as a music player than G1/N1/iPhone (and arguably worse because of it’s size). That leaves nothing. I need a laptop, I need a phone, and that covers everything that the iPad can do, and generally better.
So what would it take to get a tablet like the iPad to slot into my life? Well, first off, it has to be able to replace my phone for 95% of my uses. I’m willing to keep my old phone around on the charger so I can put my SIM in it for going to football games. And, don’t tell me a tablet would be a horrible phone. I know it. But lets face it: making actual phone calls is the least common thing I do with my G1. I actually make less than one call a day on average. So a crappy phone is fine, as long as it can work as a phone. I wear a headset for long calls anyway, so that’s not a problem. But, without being a phone, the tablet just cannot fit into my life; I won’t carry it.
The next thing it needs to be able to do is replace my ebook reader. This means it needs an extremely high DPI screen that is directly sunlight visible, and one that won’t hurt my eyes after hours of use. Currently, this is e-ink, which fails for other uses; but there’s some hybrid screens coming out that operate like e-ink or like an LCD. Hopefully something like that would be good enough for reading.
It would have to have great battery life. Like 12 operational hours, at least. I need to be able to actually use it all day without it going dead in the evening. This is actually my main gripe with my G1: it has horrible battery life. If I actually use it much, it fails in the evening. I actually keep it plugged in all day at work, just in case.
It would have to have an always-on internet connection (like my G1), and a decent app store (like my G1) or run a full OS like Linux (which, of course, has tons of apps).
It would have to be the right size. For me, that’s ~6-7″ diagonal. Much bigger than that and it becomes too big to carry or to use as GPS in the car. Much smaller than that, and it’s too small to be a decent ebook reader.
If I had such a device, then I could remove one of the two dedicated devices from my life: my ebook reader. I could consolidate down to a single device that I carry with me all the time. Would I actually do it? I’m not sure. I can think of situations when I’d rather have my current phone (like the afore metioned football game). But, at least there would be a chance. The iPad, as it currently stands, is completely useless.
Writer’s Community and Store
My friend the reporter (who still has a job this week…) was visiting today, and we were talking about the newspaper industry, and how reporters everywhere are getting laid off. In fact, my “home town” newspaper (the Ann Arbor News) recently folded, fired their reporters, and became some kind of online monstrosity (named after my city with “dot com” on the end; I won’t give them Google Juice by listing the name) that does nothing interesting with news, and dumps printed ads (not news or content, mind you, just ads) on my lawn all the time. They’re basically paper spammers… Anyway, we were talking, and it occurred to me that there is probably a fairly large set of out-of-work writers at the moment. People with lots of skill, and love of writing. What we need is a business model to take advantage of that to make everyone involved a bit of money. What model should this be, I wonder?Here’s my idea: iTunes for ebooks, but done right.
See, ebook readers are becoming good right about now, and Kindle has shown that they can even become popular. And people are buying iPhone and Android apps for a buck or two right and left. What if we could come up with a way to get these writers to be able to write good content, and get that content to consumers, all at low enough overhead that you could charge a buck? What I want is two things: A community and a ratings system. It works like this.
There’s a community for writers, where they can collaborate on, edit, comment on, rate, and so on each other’s work. The community provides appropriate licenses (in collaboration with Creative Commons, probably), and hosting, and forums, and mailing lists, and all the snazzy web 2.0 things that fan-fic sites have. The community also provides, and here’s the important part, a store.
The store would support Kindle, Sony’s reader, Plastic Logic’s reader, at least one decent iPhone app, at least one decent Android app, at least one decent Pre app, and at least one decent blackberry app. Probably a Windows Mobile app too, but that’s a pain. Buyers would be able to rate things, tag things, and link things. Each book would link to the authors community page, so that people could follow and interact with their favorite authors. Authors, subjects, tags, and so on, should have feeds that you can follow: blog-like, twitter like, and so on. Integration with other services (such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and so on) would be a plus.Prices should be low; $.50 – $1.
The idea is to encourage people to buy. Overhead should be low: 5-10%, maybe. Some works could (and probably would) be given away, as teasers or other incentives. There should be no DRM; it wouldn’t help, and isn’t really necessary.The point of the store/community should be convenience: get things for your device easily and cheaply, support people providing your content, and get good content our the deal.
The point of this whole thing is to make an opportunity out of the failure of the newspaper industry: we have a surplus of talented, professional, skilled writers, who need money. We also have the beginnings of devices that make reading ebooks a good experience. Let’s put them together, and allow the fans to help pay for the works of the writers.
