Why mobile phones need to change!

An interesting experiment tonight drove home the point that Steve Jobs made with the introduction of the iPhone which was that the existing manufacturers of mobile phones need to wake up and improve their products.

I decided that I wanted to transfer a couple of files off my Blackberry Curve 8310 to my MacbookPro. Unfortunately, Macs and Blackberry's have never played terribly well together if you looks at the discussion forums at Crackberry.com you'll see numerous posts to this effect. To RIM's credit they have struck a deal with PocketMac to enable users to get a free copy of their software for synching Blackberry's with Mac's. Unfortunately this leaves Mac users behind in the software upgrade cycle since RIM's own desktop applications only run on Windows machines (obviously now with Bootcamp, Parrallels and VMWare we at least have the option of running the app. on an Intel Mac with a Windows install). However, personally I prefer to stick to OSX and would like to see RIM stepup to the plate and more aggressively support the Mac platform.

Regardless I opted to utilize the Bluetooth connectivity on my Curve to transfer files from my Mac. I was able to get the devices to pair and recognize each other. However the one thing that wasn't intuitively clear was how the Blackberry was to receive the file once I initiated the transfer on my Mac. To Steve Jobs' point most of the mobile handset operating systems out in the wild today aren't particularly user friendly or intuitive. Eventually, I was successful and must say that the file transfer was easy once you knew that you have to set the Curve to receive or send via Bluetooth. Maybe there was another option to enable it to automatically accept connections and files from my Mac but it wasn't exactly evident.

In comparing my use of the iPod Touch things operate very much the way you'd expect on a Mac and a user with a little exploring can easily maximize their use of the device. The iPhone has ushered in a new era along with the Touch not only in terms of a touch driven interface but in terms of a highly usable operating system. As we saw by the scrambling this year at the mobile industry tradeshow 3GSM the mobile handset vendors are in catch-up mode. It's interesting that in a 1.0 device Apple has been able to put all of these vendors on the defensive and forced them to face up to the fact that most of the user experiences on mobile devices pre-iPhone were plain awful. Let's hope that this intensified competition will kick-start vendors into actually spending on getting improved user experience for mobile users.

"The Little Kingdom" by Michael Moritz

I just finished reading one of the earliest biographies of Apple and its founders. Former Fortune reporter Michael Moritz was granted access to Apple's inner circle leading up to the 1984 launch of the Macintosh by Steve Jobs. After having read a number of books that cover Apple's history if you're a fan or even interested in the background to Apple's launch this book offers a good perspective. More so than Apple Confidential 2.0 and various biographies on Steve Jobs (e.g., iCon)
The Little Kingdom puts into perspective the role of Apple in the early development of the personal computer industry.
As you work your way through this book, Moritz outlines an interesting portrayal of how the computer industry operated in its infancy. He offers up a more detailed description of Steve Wozniack's background and experiences and how they influenced the design of the Apple I and Apple II. Additionally, he offers perspective from Woz's peers as to his gradual withdrawl from the business in the early 80's. If you're an Apple fan I'd pickup a copy of The Little Kingdom for a quick read to gain some interesting insights into the background. Don't expect a tonne of exciting insights into the workings of Apple relative to other discussions.

Time Capsule - Home Storage & Backup

We've come a long way from the days of the Classic Mac and Fat Mac to where we are today in terms of processor speed, OS reliability, and most of all disk space. Going back to the early 80s I can remember the time when storage was treated as a precious commodity and while I'm glad I don't have to watch every megabyte I use up - I fear that we're heading for trouble. In previous posts I described the rapid pace at which I've been burning through storage space on my MacBookPro.

The good news I see some positive benefits on the horizon:

• TimeMachine - with the release of Leopard OS X now contains a built-in easy to use and configure back-up system. To-date I've been running Leopard and using a TimeMachine back-up with a Western Digital MyBook connected via Firewire 400. At this point I've partitioned the back-up drive in two segments: i) for TimeMachine and ii) for backing up some Audio files. I will say that Time Machine is a bit of a disk hog so depending upon how much data you want to back-up a bigger drive is better.
• TimeCapsule - one of the more interesting announcements from this years MacWorld is the launch of TimeCapsule - essentially a combination wireless router (Airport Extreme) and a built-in harddrive (in either 500GB or 1TB sizes) that enable over the air back-up of any Macs in your home. After checking the prices of 1TB drives at Costco on the weekend it would seem that Apple has the pricing right on this device avoiding the typical "Apple Tax" that Apple fans are forced to pay. The only area of uncertainty on the web at the moment is whether the TimeCapsule drive must be dedicated to TimeMachine back-ups or whether it can be used as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. The consensus at the moment appears to be that its for TimeMachine alone.
  
• Other NAS drives for home use - A number of NAS drives exist targeted at the home market with a number of new devices being launched earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. My thought here is that given the growth in the amount of digital content that we're all generating and wanting to keep at home the idea of a NAS that is a central file store within the house is a great idea. I see both NAS options such as the Drobo or Apple's TimeCapsule as solving the biggest headache for most users which is the need to have an external hard drive plugged into your laptop and the hassle of accessing external drives across multiple machines. It seems clear that wireless connectivity to your back-up drive is definitely the way to go.
  

At this point I still have storage space and time left to pick an appropriate option but the next move upwards in drive size will see me heading the way of a home based NAS.