Category: Technology

Utterly elite. Amazon is now offering the Sidekick for fifty bucks after rebate. And, come to think of it, if you use Share the Love I bet you get the full 10% of $250, which would make it an additional twenty-five bucks off, assuming one of your friends takes advantage of the deal. Um. That would mean you’re getting a Sidekick for twenty-five bucks.

Twenty-five bucks. It’s a cell phone, an email station, a web browser, an AIM client, and a crappy camera. Plus all the essential organizer functions. But hell, even if you can’t share the love, it’s still just fifty bucks.

I cannot believe that this thing became commodity hardware so quickly.

I’m at the Apple Store watching the Macworld Expo keynote broadcast. Lots of audience shots onscreen right now, so I got into the spirit of the thing and snapped two pics, visible at Hiptop Nation. I’ll update this if Jobs says anything interesting.

My, this is an excited crowd locally. Steve can’t hear you clapping, you know.

OK, an iPod jacket with controls on the sleeve is cool.

More integration between the iApps is pretty cool. Updates for all of ‘em, it sounds like… ah, except iTunes, which had hiden features in 3.0. iPhoto 2, with integration plus really slick retouch. Wow, very solid integration.

iMovie has chapters, heh. Better audio editing, good. New UI! About time. Integration with iTunes is slick. I wonder if that service is available to other apps? Pans over still photos, with iPhoto integration as a photo source.

iDVD 3, again with integration. Direct export from iMovie into iDVD. Chapters! 24 new themes. Hugely slick menu building.

The whole schmear is now named iLife, available 1/25, free with new Macs. All still free exceot iDVD, which comes as a bundle with everything else in the suite for $49.

New browser! Safari. Very fast, and yeah, they benchmarked it vs. Chimera. Integrated Google. Ew, brushed metal UI. He likes his bookmark implementation but it doesn’t seem so innovative. Still, it’s very fast and looks like a solid entry-level browser. Supports XHTML. It’s KHTML-based. Yeah, he’s putting all the improvements back into the community. Free beta download as of now.

Keynote — new presentation app. Steve’s been using it to do keynotes for a year. I guess we’re well into the screw Microsoft portion of the keynote. Yep, cause it imports Powerpoint. And exports. Nice. Cost is $99, available today.

New portable? Sort of, 17” Powerbook. Sexy! Thinner than the old model, too. 1440×900 display. Look up the specs on apple.com; it’s worth it. 802.11g! And a new Airport! Yeah! $199 for the new Airport. Insane.

One more thing… a new 12” Powerbook, which is the amallest notebook in the world. Cute.

I’m standing at a bus stop in Harvard Square, realizing that I’m better off posting via Web than by email. Whoops; maybe not, since I can’t set categories this way. Oooops. Ah well.

The first day review of the Hiptop: pretty good, it’ got a very thoughtful design. For example, the @ sign is unshifted, which makes a ton of sense since it’s used so much. There’s decent autocapitalization. The keylock automatically tturns off if you flip the screen open, cause you’ll never do that unless you want to use it.

The core interface is good enough for now. There are some warts; you can’t do an address book lookup while writing an email message, for example, which is dumb since you can store email addresses in the address book. On the other hand, you can launch email from within the address book. The only really annoying quirk is that the email client loses track of attachments if you save a draft message. oh, and it sorely needs cut and paste, or at least a way to delete text from an email message so you don’t wind up quoting the whole damn message each time.

The unit is nicely integrated with the T-Mobile web site. You can import Outlook or Palm address lists via the Web. Nice stuff there.

The physical unit is barely big enough for me to type on, but not big enough to be clumsy on my belt. The case that comes with it kind of sucks; I’m on the lookout for a better one.

Let’s see. Oh, yeah, the camera. Check out Hiptop Nation for an idea of the quality. It’s bad, but the concept is exciting. Realtime pcitures from the mass event of your choice, good or bad? Heady stuff.

Overall I rather like it so far. And everyone in my office wanted to play with it, which has to say something.

[Edit: interesting lack of line breaks. My fault (I set up my bookmark wrong), not the hiptop’s.]

I’ve been peering at this Scripting News post about cell phones all day, trying to figure out what struck me as weird about it. I finally figured it out. Check this quote:

“So why not make them just a teensy bit bigger and put a real qwerty keyboard on the darn thing and let me type into it like a human being.”

That seemed totally reasonable to me the first zillion times I read it. I just went out and got a Sidekick, cause I wanted a keyboard on my cell phone. But wait — “like a human being.” He wants a keyboard-based interface, cause he wants to use the cell phone for more than just the classic telephonic voice based interface. “Like a human being.”

Humans aren’t stuck with just talking. To be human is to have access to a keyboard!

So it’s weird, but he’s also right. We are the tool using ape. Keyboards are a very nice symbol that says “digital tool here.”