The Apple iPad: So close, yet so far

Introduction

The iPad is both the best and worst kept secret to come from the computing powerhouse / genius of Apple. Like many, prior to its launch, I’ve been reading the various rumour sites imagining what it might be like, what I need from it and trying to discern fact from fiction. Now that it’s here, I’ve done a quick synopsis of what I think are its strengths and weaknesses based on the available Apple information.

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Lina: Promising write once – run everywhere

Developing applications for multiple platforms

The guys at Lina are promising write once – run everywhere, using the native look-and-feel of the host operating system. This was also the promise of Java, which also uses a virtual machine to run the binary code.

It certainly looks interesting, but the FAQ on the site says there will be a 2x performance hit (i.e. applications will run at half the speed of a native version). Other solutions, like using a VMWare, VirtualPC and Parallels for the Macintosh provide alternative approaches to running applications from one platform on another. These tools work best when the host operating system is running on an x86 processor, meaning that virtualisation speed is around 80% of the host processor – which is a very good level of performance. This occurs because the virtualised processor is the same as the processor and there is limited need to translate the instructions.

However, their disadvantage is that you need to buy the host operating system (e.g. running Parallels on the Macintosh requires that you buy MS Windows to run a windows application inside the virtual machine). This can be an unecessary overhead and cost on the end user.

There are also alternative to Lina, such as Wine, which allows a lot of compiled / binary Windows applications (including Office 2000) to run on Linux. If you’re writing your application in .Net, then you can also use Mono, which works essentially in the same way as Wine but is restricted to running .Net applications. Mono is a cross platform simulation of the .Net framework.

What next?

There are many different solutions available to creating an application and running it on multiple platforms – until there is a unified platform for computing where developers can write once and run everywhere – with the same version, no emulation and no virtualisation.

This is as close or as far away as the major players choose to make it, or until some truly disruptive technology platform comes along and reshapes the playing field. I have some ideas about this that are well into development…

Fujitsu P1610 ultra mobile tablet PC – A mobile winner

I finally got sick of lugging around my old laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600). Don’t get me wrong, it still is a great machine. The reason I bought it was for the massive 15.4 inch screen packing 1920×1200 pixels. I have very good eyesight and I could have three documents open side by side (e.g. two word docs and a visio or powerpoint file). But after a while, I got sick of its 3.5kg weight. My computer bag regularly weighed 7 – 9kgs after a few notepads, powerpack, mouse, iPod, etc.

I’d been doing some shopping around for a new sub notebook / UMPC. I seriously considered the new Samsung Q1Ultra, but finally settled on the Fujitsu P1610. If you’re in the market for a sub-notebook / TabletPC, I strongly recommend taking one for a test drive. Read on for the strengths and weaknesses.

(Images borrowed from http://www.fujitsu.com/sg/services/computing/pc/products/notebook/p1610/gallery.html)

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The continued folly of wired broadband

The continued political battles between Liberal, Labor, Telstra and the ACCC over wired broadband is not helping anyone. Various press articles (here and here) portray a pointless point scoring game where the winner is nobody and the loser is the consumer.

I’ve covered it before, but the only real solution is wireless broadband. There is no point to spending $4 – $5 billion on a new wired network when wireless networks like Telstra’s Next-G exist.

The Government, Telstra and G9 should instead invest in a single wireless broadband network. Next-G is based on UMTS and consumers can receive data at up to 3.6Mbps (enough to stream DVD quality video using Mpeg4) with near-future improvements up to 14.4Mbps. 4G UMTS will provide 100Mbps down and 50Mbps up.

With a strong propensity for people to use mobile phones as their primary communication device over fixed land lines, the need to have a wired phone line reduces. Quite a few people have active land lines only for their ADSL connection and not for general phone usage.

Wireless broadband is the only solution for a relatively mobile population – people change address or move around for work. Why should consumers have to pay for fixed line internet and wireless internet, let alone the connect / disconnect fees and related time delays in re-activating services?

Wireless broadband, like Next-G also serves the needs of rural and regional populations – an important issue for Australia.

Why doesn’t the Government insist on saving $4B and instead remove the Next-G inrastructure from Telstra’s direct control and seek investment from the G9 consortium? A single network improves the quality of service and experience for consumers. There is greater choice as manufacturers need to build for only one technology variation, and costs are down because consumers do not need to pay for 2 or more networks in their access fees.

The wireless account and access can be shared across consumers’ desktops, laptops and mobile phones, increasing its appeal and revenue opportunities for service providers and people use more online services in more environments.

Merging projects in open source land – building on strengths and stopping unhealthy competition

Slashdot, one of my favourite websites, features a story on the Compiz and Beryl Projects merging. Why is this important? If you look through the major open source software repositories (like freshmeat, sourceforge), you’ll find tens of thousands of projects. More than a few of them are attempting to do the same thing, albeit from different angles.

I’ve always thought there is healthy and unhealthy competition. Healthy competition occurs when players compete against each other with their products and services with the view to improve quality, commoditise products and services and reduce prices, all in the effort to provide greater value for customers (i.e. users).

In contrast, unhealthy competition, is where players are so focussed on beating each other, that they cut prices, engage in predatory practices and sacrifice quality in the effort to ‘buy’ business. Their focus is not on the customer, but on how they can beat their competitor.

Open source software, I think, has a significant advantage over commercial operations in that the values of the people involved are the primary motivator, rather than profit at all costs. What are these values? They are about delivering projects focussing on the end users, doing things better than others have done and a focus on quality.

So why is the merger between Compiz and Beryl interesting? The source article from Linux Tech Daily suggests that the rivarly between the two projects had denigrated into a slanging match. I’ll bet that there is probably no truth to any of the accusations that people were making.

These two projects, and others like it (such as Looking Glass) have the potential to spawn a revolution in the user’s desktop. For all the advances of Microsoft Vista and Apple OS X, these two OSs are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Meanwhile, other more revolutionary projects are making significant impressions, like Jeff Tan (Jeff’s personal site can be found here).

What we need is more collaboration, not competition, in this space. There are so many smart people with smart ideas. We do not need them to start infighting and losing focus on what they’re trying to do. It’s so easy to get caught up in a slanging match and all that happens is a rapid spiral into a death vortex.

Provided the surrounding value system is right, and people on the projects are thinking more about the end goals than themselves, then healthy collaboration amongst traditional competitors is possible. There’s more than enough kudos to go around – and if the project turns commercial to recoup the costs of development and fund the next project, then there’s usually more than enough of that to go around, too.

We’re seeing around us many social networking site being built in the ‘back shed’, later being sold for hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of these projects – provided sensible things happen with the funds -like paying people fair and reasonable salaries and funding the next revolutionary projects.

Even though I run a for-profit commercial organisation, I spend around 10% of gross margin on R&D and innovation, when in Australia, the national spend is around 2% of GDP. Why? The plans I have to shake the foundation of IT drive me to channel profit into activities that will have a far greater positive impact on people than me driving down the road in some silly sports car. (Mind you, if it all works out, maybe I’ll treat myself to a little one )

Convert your laptop into a Tablet PC

Here is a neat bit of technology – and pitched at around $USD 130. It converts your laptop into a Tablet PC. You can see it in the picture below (taken from the Navisis website).

One laptop per child – worth watching

The One Laptop Per Child initiative by Nicholas Negroponte will have an incredible effect on people and technology, not just the recipients of the laptops.

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Spending future generations’ money, wireless broadband and standard infrastructure

Kevin Rudd has identified Australia’s Future Fund as the way to pay for a $4.7 billion election promise to deliver broadband to Australian people.

I’ve recently been using Telstra’s Next-G network (850MHz HSDPA) and it works brilliantly. I’m regularly in regional Australia near Grafton and getting 200kbps is way better than the 21kbps available via a standard modem. In the city areas, the network can deliver peak speads of 3.6Mbps, with upgrades during this year and next year to ramp it up even further.

Besides the fallacy of spending future generations’ money, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in wireless broadband than Mr Rudd’s vision of a wired broadband to homes? Large proportions of our population move home, meaning regular disconnect / connect cycles. Having a laptop card or a small wireless modem is a much more feasible option.

Also, 3.6Mbps is is plenty to receive a streaming DVD quality video. Right now, how much more do we need? Something like Next-G is, to me, a much more sensible strategy. But Telstra has work to do on delivering more reasonable pricing – Next-G is super convenient, but very expensive.

The one aspect of his vision is a neutral network where all players get equal access. One of the things that has always annoyed me about Australia’s telecommunications infrastruture is that for a population of just over 20 million on a vast continent, we have to have 3 of everything. remember when Foxtel dug up your road for its cable, then Optus came along a month later. do you see all those mobile towers everywhere? I wonder how much sharing between the carriers actually goes on?

What if we only had one CATV network and one mobile network and all the carriers bought time? How much faster would it have been to reach large tracts of the population? How much easier would it be to upgrade the network if you only do it once? Imagine how much cheaper it could be since you only need to pay for one installation of the infrastructure.

We’re seeing some aggregation with Telstra and Hutchison sharing, as is Optus and Vodafone. But still…the Austalian Government should have installed the infrastructure and leased time to the carriers. Carriers would then focus on services and content.

Mr Rudd’s vision is down this path, but with wireless broadband working very well, let’s skip the old generation and get on with the new. What we should be doing is encouraging all the carriers to agree on a single wireless broadband standard and just build the right infrastructure once.

Vista, memory usage, perceptions and explanations

Recently, I upgraded my laptop to Vista from XP. I have 1GB of memory in the notebook and one of the things I noticed in XP was that there were usually a few hundred megabytes of free memory. My understanding (and expectation) of that free memory is that it is available for a new application if I started one.

Interestingly, when I upgraded to Vista there was no free memory, at all!! The first thing I did, knowing that Vista is memory hungry, is buy more memory and the notebook now has 1.5GB, while I wait for the other 1GB stick to arrive at the store (for 2GB total).

When I checked the memory usage, Vista had immediately used up this new memory, too!! But what I later learned completely changed my thinking – you might think it’s a trivial thing, but it showed me just how much our past experiences are a filter for future experiences and how it’s so easy to misinterpret things if you don’t have the right knowledge.

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