GracefulFlavor

The new Motorola Droid, probably the most anticipated Android handset to hit the broader market, has a 512 MB ROM embedded onto its motherboard.  Of that, only 256 MB is available for application storage. From AndroidandMe's Taylor Wimberly:

The Motorola Droid will be the most powerful Android phone to date when it launches on November 6, 2009. However, the device still features the same shortcomings of all other Android phones. The Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM which contains only 256 MB available for app storage.

Google does not support installing apps to the SD card (and likely never will), so developers are limited in what they can create.

This makes no sense to me, and frankly, I'm surprised this handset came to market with this limitation.  No doubt it's a measure to prevent app piracy -- a problem installing apps onto an SD card would surely create -- but this decsion shows a distinct misunderstanding about how an application-rich smartphone could be used.  My old BlackBerry had the same thing, and the onboard memory to run apps got crowded -- fast.

On my iPhone 3GS, I have just over a gig used for 57 apps.  I have a few games that weigh in at over 50 MB each, with one approaching 100 MB.  For a single game.  In light of this, 256 MB for app storage on the Droid seems ludicrous.  Did anyone look at iPhone user/app stats before making a decision not to include more onboard memory, even if it meant the demise of SD support?

The confusing thing is that Motorola gave the Droid a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU -- a strong piece of kit capable of cranking out some impressive graphics.  Did they expect users to have one or two games, and that's it?  Because any graphics-rich game that takes advantage of that chipset is going to weigh in at a fairly hefty size.

The solution is a tough one.  Either allow SD card support for app storage and runtime, or rev the hardware to include more onboard storage.  The former is unlikely to happen because it's a policy-side Pandora's box, and the latter because it's otherworldly expensive.

The more I learn about the Droid, the more I see a rev A effort that shows a ton of promise, but has a long way to go before it can match the iPhone's user experience and platform polish.  Give the iPhone a real network (say, Verizon, sometime, oh, around 3Q next year), and it will own the smartphone market the way Windows owns the desktop.

I've been having some recent email correspondence with Kit, an old grade-school friend with whom I've recently reconnected.  He's is, and always has been, a phenomenal artist.  Stumbling across him some 20+ years later through the magic of the Googletubes, I'm happy and thrilled to see his talent has afforded him a full-on art career.  But let me tell you a story about contrasts, embedded in which is all the proof you'll ever need that I'm a horrible artist.  Not that you asked or anything, but it's Friday, so just go along for the ride, bokay?

Four million years ago when I was in my early teens, I was envious that Kit could draw anything you wanted on command.  I’m not talking a simple line drawing, or some lame demonstration of perspective ("Look how these lines converge on the horizon!").  Oh no.  Kit could whip up something nearly photographic in under two minutes that would take me a solid month to try to match.  I’d say, “Hey Kit, draw a stapler,” and Kit would grab a pencil, looking utterly bored, and perfectly whip up a perfectly-shaded sketch of a perfect stapler that would fit into a design catalog.  To this day, people with this talent rank only slightly below ninjas to me.

I decided, upon seeing this a few times, that I wanted to be able to draw like that too.

Through sheer force of will and being what's known as an 'unrelenting pain in the ass,' I harangued my parents into art lessons, which were (a) expensive and (b) an utter waste of my and the instructor’s time.  I simply wasn’t good.  Turns out that in the business, what I had was called 'very little talent' mixed with 'the inability to realize it.'  My short art career – which led me to create some horrible colored pencil-on-textureboard drawing of a wolf’s head and some variety of retarded panther prowling on some sort of mesa or something – lasted about six weeks and cost my parents roughly $500.

I tell you this story because a few months ago, during a relatively boring meeting, I decided to try and draw a picture of a dog or wolf or hyena or something I had approximated in my mind.  The result was was so horribly bad – so laughably fucked – that it actually became funny in its horribleness.  It wasn’t something someone looks at and goes, “Wow, that’s a pretty bad mess, whatever that is,” but instead looks at, nearly chokes on coffee, and starts to laugh audibly.

Here:

What IS that?  It has three front paws, an optical-illusion grade pig snout, a one-dimensional mouth and eyes that are set in some sort of trench on the right side of its face.  Not to mention it looks like it’s been in Vegas for the weekend.

And so there you have it.  All the proof in the world that I am a horrible artist, wrapped nicely in one blog post.

Spot-on performance by Stewart.

Lots of hay being made about the native Exchange functionality in Verizon's upcoming Motorola Droid, but John Gruber points out the not-so-tidy underbellly: it will cost users an extra $15/month to enable this feature.  As Gruber says, so starts the Verizon nickel-and-diming.

It's nuances like this, little business plan caveats, I'm convinced were the roadblocks to the iPhone debuting on Verizon instead of AT&T.  Verizon isn't a carrier who is willing to let a device vendor call the shots of the larger revenue model.  Apple, naturally, isn't even remotely willing to let a wireless carrier dictate its market vision, either.  So Apple took its ball to AT&T, and we know how important the iPhone has become to AT&T as a service provider.

Verizon may be getting religion about the revenue power of a cutting-edge handset on its network (with handset being increasingly defined as "portable computer"), but as any Verizon user knows, the death-by-a-thousand cuts fee structure really muddies the entire experience.  And that's what Apple is all about: experience.

I think the Droid looks very promising, but it's the steampunk, uber-nerd version of the iPhone.  Very powerful, some nice technical juju under the covers, but overall an open platform waiting for user customization to make the phone what it really can be.  The iPhone, for better or worse, is the exact opposite: polished to the nines right from the factory, but comparatively closed and controlled from an ecosystem perspective.  But the user experience?  Unsurpassed.

Finally, with respect to the growing din that the Droid is an iPhone killer, I say two things:

1. We've all heard about the iPhone killers that are now being offered for free after rebates, and
2. The company that's trying to really unseat the iPhone 3GS from the alpha seat is this little company called Apple.  Have you heard of them?
   

I'm fully aware this is way old news by now, but I just got caught up in Google Reader on Matt Taibbi's excellent column, and his analysis of the Nobel Committee's strange decision is too good to miss.  Some key excerpts are below, but really, you should read the whole thing.

How do we do things? We keep the troops in those faraway places like Afghanistan and Iraq, sure, but while we do that we make sure to extol things like tolerance and dialogue and the spirit of diplomacy. We make sure that the same people who were not involved in the decision-making process during the previous bombing runs under Bush are in the loop again, now and hopefully forever. We smile a lot and say nice things about the Geneva convention and the impropriety of torture and secret detention, the importance of the rule of international law. We make everybody feel better about how things are going to go from now on.

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies. You see the difference? The Nobel committee sure did!

The unifying thread for all these prizewinners is that they were all important political figures who at one time or another embraced violence as a just and appropriate policy, and got the peace crown once the political weather changed and it was time to put the tanks back in the garage. Even Gore, during the Kosovo war, boned up on his war cred before he got a prize for losing an election, growing a beard, and making a freaking movie. And hey, maybe in the real world, you can’t punish politicians for embracing force — maybe there’s just no way around the use of violence, when you’re running a country the size of the U.S. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been President or Vice President of anything