So we decided that we’d conduct a little experiment. I’d get an Android and my wife an iPhone. I got the Incredible 2, she got the iPhone 4. Then the fun began. I had my phone rooted and a custom ROM installed in less than 30 minutes. I have a Mac, but I use Google Music. All my music was instantly available to my phone via the cloud – playlists and all – sync’d with iTunes on my Mac. My wife paid the $25 for iTunes Match. It works pretty well, but seems to suffer from songs that are cut off, dropped playback and a few other issues (like songs that aren’t in iTunes – we have niche tastes in music). “Well,” I thought, “it’s a new service and sometimes Apple has a hard time with the rollout (anybody remember MobileMe?).” But Google Music just works. Then there’s Siri – the 4S claim to fame. We jailbroke my wife’s iPhone after a few weeks and installed Siri (after some doing). I admit, she’s pretty darn cool and puts pretty much all the “virtual assistants” on Android to shame – although I still use Vlingo quite a bit and it can launch apps, which is somthing Siri lacks. Word has it that Google is working on a virtual assistant called Majel to compete and the initial developments look pretty impressive.

So, now, it’s almost six months later and we still have our same phones. Hers is still jailbroken and mine is running a CyanogenMod version of Ice Cream Sandwich – i.e. Android OS 4 (why wait for the official release, right?). There are several things that the iPhone does better – pictures and games being at the fore. But, I have to say that I have zero iPhone envy. Except for Siri and better quality pictures, my “not-even-cutting-edge” Android phone does everything at least as well – often times – better than the iPhone. In the elegant simplicity of iOS, Apple has actually made some things difficult to find. My wife has, several times now, had to hunt for how to do something that’s as simple for me as hitting the menu button (and she’s no technology slouch).

I’m running a hacked version of Android that’s not even available for my phone yet and I love it. There are a couple things that don’t work as they should, but I’m so impressed with the polish, features and functionality of Ice Cream Sandwich that I don’t even care. Using it feels like an OS from the future. When I pick up my wife’s iPhone, I feel like I’ve stepped into kiddie land with a five-year-old OS that can’t keep up. The spin of Apple can keep iOS going as it is for a long time and Google still has hefty issues to deal with on the Android fragmentation front, but Google is innovating and improving at a rate that should give Apple pause. If Microsoft had been a few years earlier to this game, it probably could have gotten some hefty market share. When the iPhone was released originally, it was revolutionary. But that was a long time ago in the tech world – it’s time for Apple to pick up the pace. The release of iPhone 5 will be telling, but as I look at my Incredible 2 running ICS, I’m hardly on the edge of my seat.

First, let me just say that the whole iPhone vs. Android debate is really overdone.  When it boils down to it, both offer excellent choices and are really targeted at different users. Steve Jobs, long ago, decided that Apple would be about humanizing technology.  Simplicity and usability are the order of the day at Apple.  You have just a few screens with apps and almost zero clutter.  Android, on the other hand, is about choice. You have dozens of handsets, running various versions of the Android OS, which is itself, largely open to customization and hacking.  You can have lots of homescreens filled with apps, widgets, folders and shortcuts.

So which do I recommend?  Depends on who you are.  If you are a person who wants the very latest in technology, gets excited about being able to get inside the “guts” of something and loves to tweak and tinker, Android is your playground.  Also, if you’re on the hunt for a cheap smartphone, you can almost always find an Android phone for free or cheap.  If you value simplicity of design and an ease-of-use that your grandma can get a handle on, get an iPhone. Android’s big advantage is choice.  Choice often means power, but it also breeds complexity.

I think that the marketing campaigns for Apple and Android speak volumes.  With commercials for an Android device, you’re often greeted with a red “Hal-like” eye, a bionic voice and list of cool features.  With commercials for an iPhone, you’re met with a guy on his morning jog composing a text using Siri or taking, editing and tweeting pictures from the beach.  The message of each is clear: “Get an Android, rule the world,” “Get an iPhone, enrich your life.”

I have an Android and I love it, but I had to tinker with it (which I enjoyed) to get it to that point. My wife (not a tinkerer) loves her iPhone – right out of the box.

Another system that I have employed this week is Google Cloud Print. Two years ago, doing things in or with “the cloud” was a bit tenuous and it still has its moments, but The Cloud is increasingly moving us towards technological utopia…or oblivion, I can’t remember which. Regardless, being able to take advantage of the Internet to host applications or provide services to mobile users is where it’s at nowadays and Google Cloud Print is a great example. The service allows you to print to your home or office printer from anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection. When my wife goes on trips, she writes out notes for our kids ahead of time that they can read while she’s gone – it’s like a little connection while she’s away an it’s a beautiful thing. This week while I’ve been away, I’ve done something similar, but with a hi-tech twist (of course). Each day I’ve written a little note to our kids and printed them off on our home printer from my location hundreds of miles away. I click “print” and 400 miles away, my son picks up his note off the printer. It’s allowed me to share with my kids things about my day and pictures of where I am while giving them the personal touch of a note written just to them.

These are a couple of prime examples of technology enriching our lives and help us connect in ways that our parents never would have dreamed. It’s 21st Century tech at its finest.

Scenario 1: Mary makes an appointment with Dr. A on Tuesday at 10am. She also needs to see Dr. B, so she makes that appointment on Tuesday at 11am. Mary gets two phone calls Monday morning from two different receptionists regarding her two appointments. She writes these reminders on a scrap of paper and puts it on the fridge. Tuesday morning comes by and Mary is on her way to the medical plaza. She has left the paper on the fridge. She goes to Dr. B’s office, thinking (incorrectly) that she has an appointment with him first. After signing a piece of paper attached to a clipboard, she sits and waits. Thirty minutes later, the receptionist calls her name and tells her that her appointment is not for another thirty minutes. Mary hurriedly runs down to the other office, only to find out that she’s too late and they’ve moved on with the other patients on the schedule. The receptionist asks if she’d like to reschedule, but Mary’s calendar is at home, right next to the scrap of paper on the fridge, so she’ll have to call in once she gets home and can see her schedule. Frustrated, Mary goes back up to Dr. B’s office, just in time for her 11am appointment. Once she gets back home, she checks her schedule, calls Dr. A’s office and schedules a new appointment, which she writes on another scrap of paper and puts it next to her calendar on the fridge.

Scenario 2: Mary makes an appointment with Dr. A on Tuesday at 10am and Dr. B on Tuesday at 11am. All the offices in the medical plaza use a shared patient database that allows them to coordinate patient and practitioner schedules. This database uses an automated phone system to place a single call to Mary informing her of her two appointments. This system also sends out an email later that evening as a reminder. When Mary clicks on a link in the email, the appointment is added to her calendar on the computer, which is in turn seamlessly synchronized to her smartphone. In the morning, this same system sends a text message to Mary’s phone letting her know about her two appointments. Mary is on her way, but gets caught up in a phone call with her sister and goes to the wrong office. She pulls out her patient card and holds it up to an electronic tablet on the wall near the reception desk. The tablet, being connected to the central schedule database lets Mary know she’s in the wrong office for her 10am appointment, displays a small map of how to get to Dr. A’s office and offers to check her in with Dr. A. Mary realizes her error, clicks the “check in” button and heads to Dr. A’s office, where she is right on time for her 10am appointment. When she leaves Dr. A, she needs to make an appointment for next month. The tablet on the wall allows her to pull up a list of available times for Dr. A. Mary selects her desired appointment date and time and the scheduling system sends out an email with a link to add that appointment to her calendar.

This is the kind of technology that I can get fired up about – it makes a real difference in someone’s life. I don’t know if there’s a doctor’s office like this yet, but the technology to make it happen is real. Got some other great ideas for today’s tech? Throw ‘em in the comments below.

When you go to purchase your next (or perhaps your first) smartphone, look beyond the list of processing power and megapixels and instead look at the quality and ability of the ecosystem that surrounds that phone.  The question to ask is, “How well does the phone leverage applications, features and “the cloud” to keep my information and files in sync across all my devices?” If you create an appointment on your phone, will it show up on your computer? How about on your spouse’s phone? If I’m killing time in an airport, can I pull up a document I was working on at the office and make some changes? If I buy a new song on my computer, will it automatically be on my phone, too? If I take a picture with my phone, how easy is it to share with my spouse, friends or grandparents?

Those are just a few examples of questions you can ask. One of the greatest things about today’s technology – and the technology of tomorrow – is the promise of connectedness. If you buy a smartphone just based on the features of the phone, you’re doing yourself a disservice and potentially wasting money on a device that may not work as seamlessly with the rest of your technology. For example, the Palm Pre was a very good device, innovative and extremely capable. Its ecosystem, however, was very limited. The number of apps was minuscule compared to Android or iOS and the devices it seamlessly connected with were very few.

Google and Apple are currently slugging it out on OS and cloud fronts to outdo each other on the quality and extent of their ecosystem – the specifications of the device almost become irrelevant. It is the ecosystem that enables people to spend less time connecting the dots and more time connecting with each other. So when you go to buy that smartphone, ask yourself if you’re buying into an ecosystem that will require you to connect the dots or free you up to connect with life.

A similar event occurred with Palm OS back around 2002.  Palm had pioneered the PDA industry, handily dominating the market for most of the ’90s.  It licensed the Palm OS to Sony in 2000 and Sony began to make Palm’s hardware look like last century’s devices. Sony began including music players, cameras, virtual Graffiti areas, illuminated keyboards, memory card slots and faster processors. They were innovating and it was great.  A few years later, Palm was still playing catch-up, but seemed more concerned about corporate divisions, re-mergers and acquisitions than in actually developing hardware – let alone the Palm OS.  They did not keep pace, let alone innovate. Palm OS 6 was announced in 2004 with significant upgrades, including a built-in phone dialer – it never made it to market.

Five years later, Palm finally gets around to innovating – they introduced webOS. But while Palm lay in bed dreaming up webOS, Apple and Google were rolling out new operating systems and new devices to capture the market. In many ways, webOS was superior to iOS, Android and Blackberry, but it arrived nearly DOA. Devices running webOS, sold like sand to bedouins. Even HP with its deep pockets and marketing power could not effectively save Palm’s legacy. WebOS now sits languishing in a closet somewhere at HP.

Blackberry is staring at the same fate in a couple of years if they don’t turn things around.  They’ve had a series of unfortunate missteps not keeping up with a rapidly changing market, producing a lackluster tablet and – most recently – serious outages in their service. Blackberry CEO Mike Lazaridis had a chance to really put some momentum behind Blackberry at this week’s Blackberry DevCon. He didn’t. He announced an all new Blackberry OS, but pulled out no devices running this OS – not even a picture of one, not even a picture of one they’re thinking about. At least we got screenshots of Palm OS 6 when it was announced. The good news is that, in a rapidly changing market, a few key decisions can really accelerate your business. RIM really needs a homerun device running BBX just to keep pace with the market because right now they look more like Research in Reverse.

1. Calendar, Mail, Contacts – Unless you’ve got a Microsoft Exchange server somewhere, your best bet for synchronizing your calendar, contacts and mail across multiple devices is Google. With their Google Apps service for organizations and businesses.
2. Documents – Google Docs comes with Google Apps (above) and has been one of the best collaboration services for sharing and working on documents.  Microsoft Office 365, fresh out of beta, offers much of the familiarity of Microsoft Office on your computer, but has some catching up to do in order to really beat Google. If you’re just looking to sync your docs across multiple platforms, without all the collaboration bells and whistles, Dropbox is tough to beat.
3. Books – If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already familiar with the chief alternative to Apple’s iBookstore: Kindle. Amazon has spent years building the world’s largest online library. They’ve made those titles available not only on Kindle devices, but also on the Kindle app that runs on Android and iOS. The Kindle app keeps your book reading in sync across multiple devices and has a store built-in to purchase additional content.
4. Photos – There really is not an alternative that will automatically push pictures that you take to all your devices (computer, tablet, phone, etc.) like Apple’s Photostream. However, there are really stand-up photo sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that do an excellent job of allowing you to share your photos with the rest of the world.
5. Music –  Google and Amazon offer music services that allow you to listen to your music on multiple devices (though Google’s only appears to work on Android devices). Google offers a 20,000 song limit for free while Amazon gives you 5GB for free and then incorporates a tiered pricing structure.  For a limited time, Amazon is offering unlimited storage space for all of their paid plans (click here for offer).

StumbleUpon is like leafing through our modern day encyclopedia: the Internet.  Only it has the benefit of tailoring your “stumbles” to stuff you might actually be interested in.  Like any good social media service, StumbleUpon is free.  It is during the sign up process that you get to select from a pretty diverse array of interests.  It’s not completely comprehensive, of course, but it does allow you to nail down a general swath of categories that interest you.

Once you’ve selected your interests, you can “stumble” through the Internet and the service will bring you to content (articles, images, videos, PDFs, etc.) that it thinks will interest you.  You can then “like” or “dislike” the things it gives you and it will refine future results.  StumbleUpon brings up things that you would probably not search for intentionally, but thinks you would enjoy nonetheless.  In my experience, it does a pretty good job of churning out content that is engaging to me.  Check the video below for a little tutorial and then sign up.  It only takes a minute and I think you’ll enjoy it – one more way to kill hours in front of your computer.

1. Mozilla Firefox – For a number of years, Firefox was my number one choice for browsing and what I recommended to all my clients.  It is fast, has a world of plug-ins to extend its functionality and used to be more secure than Internet Explorer.  The security issue is no longer really an advantage, especially with the advent of IE9, but its speed and plug-in factors are still big selling points.  Firefox is struggling to keep up with Chrome these days and I’ve yet to see any appreciable improvement in day-to-day use since Firefox 5.  I still have Firefox installed, but my daily browser is:
2. Google Chrome – Making its debut in 2008, Chrome began gaining ground quickly.  Chrome is fast, stable and versatile.  I began using it in 2009 and early this year it became my main browser, replacing Firefox for the following reasons:
1. Stability – Chrome is almost uncrashable, it seems.  When a tab becomes unruly, it doesn’t take down the whole browser.  Boy, is that nice!
2. Speed – Firefox continues to be a resource hog, despite adjustments in recent versions.  Chrome is fast, sometimes very fast.
3. Web apps & extensions – Installation is a snap for both of these categories and extend the functionality of Chrome well beyond anything that Firefox could dream of at this point.
3. Safari – I use Safari mainly for testing compatibility with web sites I design.  I use it for little more than that because it simply doesn’t offer anything compelling for me to switch.

Like many people, the first computer I ever used was an Apple – an Apple IIe, to be exact.  I remember lots of time in front of the green screen, playing Oregon Trail or Tetris.  I had no idea then that the products that came from the mind of Steve Jobs would so profoundly impact my life.  Now, almost thirty years later, I am typing this on my MacBook Pro, which is very nearly my constant companion in work and play.

In 2007, I was working for a Verizon Wireless retailer in their IT department.  That was the year Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone.  When the iPhone hit the market, I was in awe – both at how revolutionary the device was and how Verizon scrambled to produce something, anything that could compete.  They couldn’t even come close.  I remember watching Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone to thunderous cheers with the tagline: Apple reinvents the phone.  They not only reinvented the phone, they revolutionized an industry that was firmly entrenched in the status quo.  Apple has never adhered to the status quo – in fact, Jobs abhorred it.  His relentless (and sometimes ruthless) control has given rise to products that capture more attention than any other in the technology industry.

There are people out there who monitor everything from patent filings to cargo container shipment to predict the future of what Steve Jobs and company could cook up.  No one monitors Dell, HP, Toshiba, Samsung or any other technology manufacturer so closely.  For months people have been predicting a myriad of possibilities for the new iPhone.  There were fake silicon cases and even an aluminum unibody mockup created to predict what the shape of this new iPhone would be.  Whoa.  I don’t see anyone trying to predict what the next Motorola, Samsung or HTC phone will look like.  Why?  Because Apple creates “magical” products.  They are magical because they really do “just work” and in a world of technology that constantly needs to be tweaked, fiddled with and babysat, when something just works, it really is like magic.

When I first started my own business, I went around fixing peoples’ computers.  I would walk in with my Mac and they would invariably ask, “Why do use a Mac?”  I almost always thought to myself, “Because it’s not a source of frustration like your computer.”  Every Mac I have ever had was a joy to use.  Both PCs and Macs will get you from Point A to Point B (usually), but in a Mac, you’ll enjoy the ride.  My wife and I joke about how we have an actual relationship with our computers (she has a white MacBook) and they really are like friends.  Most of the clients I visit see their PC as an enemy to be conquered and subdued.  Not so with a Mac.  Macs somehow become your partner in creativity and productivity.  I’ve always believed that technology should allow us to do things better and faster.  I’ve only ever seen Apple products consistently deliver that kind of technology.

So, thank you, Steve Jobs, for creating revolutionary, “magical” products that are a joy to use and that really do make our lives better.  Thank you for showing us the power of one man with a vision.  Apple may continue to carry your vision, but your panache and passion will be missed.

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