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HOSTS: James Kendrick (Houston), Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

Who said “smartbook?”
Lenovo buys back the Lenovo Mobile group they sold in 2003.
Amazon upgrades Kindles, some get better battery life but all get PDF support.
Black Friday deals — good enough to get us out the door?
Kevin explains why his Palm Pre is put on notice.

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Open Beats Closed in the App Economy

Two major growth areas in technology in 2009 are Facebook and iPhone — not just as consumer phenomena, but as developer ecosystems. Some have called this the “app economy.”

When Facebook launched two years ago, the applications were mostly trivial. But its unprecedented viral marketing power made it possible to capture millions of users almost overnight. Things really took off when Zynga and other free-to-play games added virtual currencies, and developers could monetize the attention they gathered. Facebook had 300 million users, viral adoption, and payments. In just two years, a $1 billion-plus economy was created.

Almost simultaneously, the iPhone App Store skyrocketed. Innovative and scrappy developers discovered how free apps could be monetized with paid upgrades and ads. The iPhone had 50 million users, viral adoption, and payments. The result: a $1 billion-plus economy.

However, an important distinction is that Facebook’s open approach gave it much greater scale, creating several companies with $10 million-plus revenue. Apple, on the other hand, has no such successes due to its focus on a closed, high-end phone.

So what could be the next big ecosystem to emerge? GetJar, possibly.

GetJar is the world’s largest open app store, with over 650 million downloads to date and three times annual growth. The key difference from Apple is that GetJar supports all phones, allowing viral adoption from friend to friend. So while Apple will reach a zenith in market share for its high-end phones, GetJar can reach all phones, including smartphones. GetJar already has the scale and viral growth that app developers need. The missing ingredient will come in early 2010: a payment system with global reach and high conversion.

The flu hit me last weekend, just after the MTM recount from last week. It was particularly aggravating as I had finally gotten the regular flu shot on Tuesday of that week. I suspect this bout with the flu was because of the shot, which I believe gives you a mild case so the body can learn to fight it off. My case was hard enough to fight, but not nearly as bad as the case some loved ones have contracted, so perhaps the shot worked.

Inking revisited

No new gadgets arrived at MTM this week, and nothing was sent back. I spent a lot of quality time with the gadgets that have been here a while, especially the ThinkPad x200 Tablet PC. I found myself sitting comfortably using the x200 in slate mode with the pen, and it was quite productive getting back to inking a lot.

The Tablet PC bits in Windows 7 are a great evolution from the Vista version, and I found the automatic switching between touch and pen to be seamless. I interacted with the slate with my fingertips mostly, pulling the pen out when I needed to enter more than just a few words of text. I found the need to pull the pen out to not happen that often. Tapping letters on the touch keyboard felt very natural, and I absolutely love the way the touch keyboard dims to a low transparency when input stops so I could see through it to the windows underneath.

Pulling the pen out and inking a lot into the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) proved to me once again how good the HWR is in Windows 7. The TIP was routinely uncanny in its deciphering of my chicken scratches, and I found it regularly figuring out contextually what I meant when I scrawled a word badly. It was as if there was a gremlin inside the Tablet PC, one in tune to what I was writing. It was almost spooky to tell the truth.

The heavy inking I did this week left me with a renewed respect for the Tablet PC, and proved to me without a doubt that if the fabled Apple tablet ever sees the light of day, it had better handle inking well. That’s never been Apple’s focus, so if they do produce a tablet it will be interesting to see how they approach HWR. They already have a basic HWR ability in OS X, but a tablet is going to require inking support a lot better than that. Typing on the screen is OK for small bits of text, but it’s just not a good method when entries need to be longer.

Speech revisited

The good folks at Nuance, the company behind Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS), saw my column from a couple of weeks ago where I rambled about the speech recognition in Windows 7. I have used DNS in the past, but had never seen the current version 10, and Nuance wanted me to take a look at it. They sent it over and I got it loaded up and have been testing it for a few days this week.

I installed DNS 10 on the MacBook in the Parallels Desktop environment running Windows 7. I installed it there for the simple reason that it has an internal optical drive, needed for the install. I really wanted to load it on the x200, but it lacks the optical drive and I didn’t want to go looking for my external drive. Hey, in my defense I was battling the flu.

The install of DNS in Windows 7 went largely without a hitch, although the system requirements for DNS does not list Win 7. I had a problem when I ran it the first time, as it gave me an error with an unclear message about not working in “elevated mode.” I had to Google the message to find what was blocking it from running. Elevated mode turns out to be running under a user account with administrator rights, something DNS will not do. The solution was to turn off the UAC for DNS, and once that was done the program duly launched. It was not an elegant beginning to using the program, and it would really confuse a novice.

DNS 10 comes with a headset by Andrea that is optimized for comfort and speech recognition. It plugs into the audio in and out jacks on the computer. One of the strengths of DNS 10 that allows it to have high recognition accuracy out of the box is accomplished by scanning the user’s emails and documents to get a feel for the writing style. I don’t use Outlook or Word so I had little for the program to scan, and I didn’t get any benefit from this scanning.

I will be continuing the testing of DNS 10 but so far it is bare bones compared to the speech tools in Windows 7. Win 7 speech makes it possible to control the PC via speech, which DNS 10 doesn’t do. I found it necessary to manually switch DNS in and out of dictation mode as a result. The accuracy of DNS 10 out of the box was about the same as that of Win 7 speech. That surprised me as I did a brief training session in DNS to improve the accuracy, something I did not do with Win 7. I also thought using a proper headset would help DNS, but it seemed as accurate as the Win 7 speech tools using no headset.

Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke sales records when it was recently released, and I grabbed it as soon as a computer arrived in Mobile Tech Manor that was powerful enough to run it properly. I couldn’t wait as Call of Duty 4 was one of my favorite games ever.

It took only a few hours to get through the single player missions, and while I won’t give any spoilers I have to say I was sadly unsatisfied when the game was over. The missions felt disjointed, with no logical connection from one to the next. The mission objectives were often unclear to me as I went through them, and it was hard to feel like I was really in the game. That’s an area that COD4 excelled in, and a big disappointment for me in MW2.

Don’t get me wrong, the graphics and technical aspect of MW2 are superb. The game is simply stunning visually, and it’s a big improvement over COD4. But gameplay was not as good for me personally, and I was disappointed when the game was over. I particularly disliked the end-game. I’m sure there will be many who disagree with my assessment, but that’s the way I felt when it was all said and done. Hopefully, multi-player mode will be more fun, but I hear it has problems that need to be addressed (latency issues).

e-Book of the week

This week I picked up one of Jeffrey Deaver’s older novels, The Blue Nowhere. It is a story about a serial killer who is a master hacker, and the book takes us into the underground hacker scene. It was a good story, although Deaver felt it necessary to explain hacker lingo and concepts all through the book which got a little old.

Wrap-up

That’s the week as it went down in Mobile Tech Manor. I hope you enjoyed sharing it with me, and if you are in the U. S. I hope your long holiday weekend is a good one. Safe travels, if you are visiting others, and until next week — take care.

So is this the best handheld camcorder out there? Of course not, but at this price, I simply couldn’t pass it up. As you can see by the photo gallery, the HDC-SD10 has roughly the same footprint as my iPhone 3GS, so it’s pretty small. And it doesn’t weigh all that much either — the body only weighs 85 grams more than my iPhone and the battery doesn’t add much more heft. I can easily see myself throwing this in a gear bag — OK, maybe not throwing — for use at CES and on the run.

The HDC-SD10 supports recording in full 1920 x 1080 at up to 60 interlaced frames per second or 24 fps progressive and sports a 16x optical zoom. The device records to an SD card in AVCHD format and can also take 2.1 megapixel stills. Other features include:

• Optical image stabilization
• 2.7″ LCD with touchscreen for camera controls and settings
• 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x mini HDMI, 1 x component out
• iAuto function for auto-focus, auto-exposure subject tracking
• Integrated microphone for Dolby Digital stereo recording
• 725 mAh battery

Again, there are plenty of better high-definition cameras on the market today — just not at $299.99!

Pre owners in the U.S. got webOS version 1.3.1 a while back, but those outside the U.S. had been left high and dry. That’s over now, with the latest version getting pushed out to phones that have not received the update prior. Version 1.3.1 was largely a maintenance release, with a new version of the Facebook app included.

Techmeme is a great way to keep up with the latest and greatest news in the tech world and they recently released a new mobile version of the site. The new version presents the content in a better format for phones, and is automatically invoked when it detects a supported mobile browser. The new format supports the Pre and Pixi browsers, offering a nicely formatted web page when surfing with those phones.

They took smartbook creator Qualcomm to task to make them stop using the term in Germany. Now it seems they are going international and are warning bloggers to stop using the term in any fashion. Now, last I checked they can’t really do that. But it seems to me the term is not a very good one for those little 3G-connected devices like Qualcomm is promoting, anway.

The best way to fight off these Smartbook folks is to make the term irrelevant, and we can coin a better term at the same time. So what should we call smartbooks? Something catchy, descriptive and better fitting. What do you think? Here’s some suggestions to kick off the conversation:

• ThinkBook
• Communicator
• PocketPal
• WebBook
• WebPad
• Webster

I’m still futzing with the latest Android x86 build on my UMPC, so maybe this Android MID from Inbrics is the way to go. Actually, there’s not much information to go on other than the video and some specs that jkkmobile has from a translated press release.

The handheld uses a current Cortex-A8 ARM platform running at 800 MHz, has an AMOLED touch display, integrated Wi-Fi, GPS and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Inbrics should be sharing more at the Consumer Electronics Show this coming January, and I plan to swing by to get some hands-on time if they allow it. The form factor actually reminds me a bit of the Motorola Droid, which I like — I’m partial to slide-out keyboards in landscape mode, due to the larger keys.

You can have more than one BackPack on your monitor, although at $30 you might stick with just one.

The company also has a very cool MacBook stand that is the most elegant product of its type I have ever seen. I can’t see dishing out $50 for it, though.

That’s it. Of course, the landscape keyboard is vastly different than the portrait model so you’ll have to get the right 4iThumbs to fit the way you work. I guess you could just get one of each but at $19.95 for the pair you may just want to go with one. That will only save you $3 or $4, though.

I’m not sure now many different X-Slim notebooks that MSI can keep track of, but add another one to the list today. The X430 is the latest thin-and-light from MSI weighing in at 3.3 pounds — not bad for a notebook with a 14″ display. At that size, I think it could stand a higher resolution than 1366 x 768, but all the cool kids seem to be running that res nowadays. Unlike many other notebooks in this space, MSI opted for AMD’s second generation Neo platform that uses up to 18W of juice in lieu of the Intel CULV package. The dual core AMD Athlon Neo X2 is paired with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3200 graphics chip which shares memory from the included 2 GB RAM module.

Other goodies include:

• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
• 1.3 megapixel webcam
• Stereo speakers
• Ethernet port, Bluetooth (optional), 802.11 b/g/n
• 320 GB or 500 GB hard drive
• 1 x HDMI, 2 x USB, 2-in-1 card reader
• 4 or 8 cell battery

No word on price or availability just yet, but I’d hazard a guess of around $700 street price when it becomes available.

The USB Wireless Handheld Keyboard and Touchpad is exactly that, a portable keyboard that works with Windows systems that need a thumb keyboard solution. What sets this gadget apart from others that have appeared in the past is the inclusion of a touchpad with two mouse buttons. It uses a USB dongle on the UMPC side to provide a wireless connection to the keyboard. It might be useful to those slate users who run programs that have a lot of key commands. The keyboard features backlit keys and comes with a charging cradle. $60.

(via Red Ferret)

An all-Google phone coming soon? (Times Online) — Rumors of a phone designed by Google surfaced last week — the device would obviously use Android, but also bypass traditional cellular voice with deep Google Voice integration. News today alleges that HTC will make the phone for Google while Qualcomm will power it. Google always said that they wouldn’t build a phone, presumably so they don’t compete with their partners. If HTC builds it for them, they’re still keeping their word, right? As a big fan and user of Google Voice, I wouldn’t mind seeing this rumor come true — and sooner rather than later. Such a device could disrupt the cellular space.

Backup your Palm Pre data with a free utility (PreCentral) —  Backing up phone data is a hot topic these days and some folks have had problems with Palm’s Profile and backup services of late. With a free utility you can manage your own data backup for a little more peace of mind.

1Password for iPhone free (Agile) — 1Password is one of my favorite Mac OS X programs — I use it to manage all of my passwords. Why then, would I be mentioning it in a phone post? Good question. Version 3 of 1Password — which I beta tested — is now available, and to celebrate, the iPhone companion app is a steal. Literally. 1Password and 1Password Pro are free until December 1. Run, don’t walk, to get either of these apps because the prices return to $4.99 and $7.99 respectively in just less than a week.

While the interface is new and refreshing, it looks like it would take some time to get used to. Actions are performed by swiping both down the screen with the thumb and left across the screen. It seems utilitarian in appearance, and a bit laggy at times.

Interestingly, the First Else is based on the Access Linux Platform (ALP), a mobile OS that seemed to have died a while back. That’s the platform started by Palm way back when and then sold to Access in Japan.

Take a look at the videos that Engadget shot of the First Else, it’s totally new.

Fighting the flu last weekend has really hit me hard. I’m feeling better today but my stamina is shot.

I am working in the easy chair at home, and using the Tablet PC makes it more comfortable.

Actually, my test really won’t be affected because the increased power management benefits only applies when the Kindle’s wireless radio is active. I don’t ever leave my radio on — I simply turn it on as needed and then immediately turn it off. See mobile mantra number four to understand why. For those that don’t want to be bothered with my approach, you’ll see battery life extended to seven days from four with your wireless radio powered on – provided you have the Global Wireless Kindle, another reason I won’t benefit. The specifics of firmware v2.3 mention that only Kindles with the HSPA radio will see the power boost. No such luck for the early EVDO models.

Regardless of the 3G radio inside your Kindle, the devices do gain native PDF support:

“[t]he 6-inch Kindle now has a built-in native PDF reader that enables Kindle customers to read professional and personal documents in their original PDF format without conversion. To read their personal or professional documents, Kindle customers simply email PDFs to their Kindle email address or move them over using a USB connection. Customers that prefer to have their PDF documents converted to the Kindle format simply type “Convert” in the subject of the e-mail when sending documents to their “@kindle.com” address.”

While these features now come standard on new Kindle devices going forward, Amazon will be making them available through a firmware upgrade over Whispersync. Also included in the firmware is a method to manually rotate the display when viewing web pages or PDF files. Maybe I’d better leave that wireless radio for the next few days, after all.