Louie discusses the Motorola Droid 4 and HP hanging onto WebOS

Is there even a tablet market in the first place?

Plugging the TouchPad into a computer and attempting to sync

Got my hands on an HP TouchPad. This is initial reactions.

You want to make changes to Android all willy nilly? Google says NO!

MIX10 is Microsoft’s 3-day conference going on in Las Vegas right now. It began yesterday and will end tomorrow. The title is “The Next Web Now” and will cover all the ways in which Microsoft can help you enter or stay in the web space appropriately. Some such examples are “Designing Corporate Web Sites using SharePoint 2010” or “Rapid WordPress design and Prototyping with Expression Web 3.” this is a very proprietary turn for Microsoft.

For all of its history, Microsoft went out of their way to avoid being labeled proprietary like Apple, Sony, or Adobe. Sony puts Memory Stick and only Memory Stick into all of their products. Microsoft built in support to read any media type. Apple controls the hardware and the software of all their machines. You cannot install Mac OS X on anything but a Mac computer (exceptions apply after hacking/tweaking). Windows will install on just about anything. Adobe created Flash (the animations and cartoons you see running around all over the web). Then they didn’t update it or make it efficient. Microsoft has embraced the HTML5 movement.

The reason for Microsoft’s apparent need to play nice with everything is driven by its real mission of total ubiquity. Bill Gates’ edict was “…a computer on every desk and in every home…” They have always, admittedly, been interested in quantity. They were also the only real player. In 2010, Mac OS X, the forthcoming Google Chromium, and any one of a variety of flavors of Linux are all contenders.

Microsoft needs to step up its game and it seems to be doing exactly that. The biggest change is coming from their approach to mobile computing and smart phone technology. This is a space in which Microsoft has not been real successful in the past. Windows based mobile devices or smartphones have been around since the dawn of that market competing with Palm handhelds when they were just the Pilot1000 owned by the now defunct US Robotics and when we still had something called a Newton.

Palm took the lead early on and, despite their best efforts, Microsoft could never seem to keep up. Part of the problem was that Windows Mobile (affectionately called WinMo) was the OS but the device could have been any number of models by any number of manufacturers, including Palm at one point. Every device was made to manufacturers’ specifications. Hardware ranged so greatly that there was no baseline standard and the performance of WinMo fluctuated to the point that it was nearly unusable on some hardware platforms without serious hacking by the experienced power user.

This biggest news at MIX10 is Windows Phone 7 (WinPho?). Their mobile platform is back with a new name and new rules. And the rules are better than the name, by a longshot. There are parts of the phone that leave a little something to be desired but by the time it gets released, that may all be fixed. In the meantime, what is Microsoft doing to ensure success - or at least help it along this time? Manufacturing of phones to run Windows Phone 7 is totally open, but the standards are not.

Everyone phone running this operating system must meet strict guidelines on the form factor (certain size, 3 buttons - start, back, bing), memory, processing power and almost most importantly - screen resolution.

They keynote 1 yesterday at MIX focused on this and development. More than anything it seemed to showcase the talents of Windows Phone 7 and how easy it is to develop for it (as long as you play by the guidelines). Microsoft pulled a page from Apple’s playbook and showed the Software Development Kit and the partners who have seen it early and then announced that the availability of it for home developers to start their own apps would be… immediately. Joe Belfiore wasn’t as charismatic as Mr. Jobs in his delivery but the lack of high-water jeans and black turtle neck was better.

Does this mean that Windows Phone 7 will be superior and knock everyone else off their pedestal? Probably not, but it will be a major player in a space that Microsoft has traditionally gone limp. Blackberry, iPhone and Android are already established, with Palm’s new WebOS in the back chugging along. 47% of Blackberry users said they would trade for an iPhone and an additional 32% said they would trade for an Android recently. Microsoft has a long road ahead.

Personal prediction: Windows Phone 7 puts surpasses Palm in less than a year leaving them floundering again. Android’s open source, non-advertising, tech for the masses mentality staves its commercial/consumer growth making Windows Phone 7 the owner of the 32% of Blackberry users that said they wanted an Android last week. iPhone stays dominant in the market. The remainder is split between Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry users. If we had to break it down, let’s say 40% to iPhone, 20% each to Blackberry and Microsoft. 10% to Android and the remaining 10% spread out across anyone else such as Palm’s WebOS and Samsung’s forthcoming entry into the smartphone market, etc. 

Kudos to Microsoft for identifying their issues and making an effort to fix them. The result in the eyes of the consumers remains to be seen.

We have been hearing about this for years through all the grapevines but nothing has ever come out of it. Multi-tasking on the iPhone. That rumor is swirling around yet again. The iPad drops tomorrow. What is the next big thing on Apple’s plate? A new iPhone this summer and a new OS 4.0 to go with it.

Let’s set the record straight, the phone is totally capable of it - just ask anyone who has jailbroken theirs. That means that if multi-tasking is not done, that’s on purpose. Apple has its reasons for doing this and they all make sense but they it is still a hindrance and there is some hypocrisy involved. I’ll explain what I mean.

What are the detractors for enabling multi-tasking?

Battery life in a phone with existing substandard battery performance

Memory management - the iPhone’s greatest feature is that it never crashes which can be forgotten about with multi-tasking. Palm OS users want to chime in here?

App switching/closing - this is not a detractor as much as it’s something just needs to be addressed. You have an app open. How do you open another without closing the first? What if you want to close the first? This needs to be built which takes away from the simplicity of the home button.

Why is it a hindrance to not have it?

I can’t listen to music on Pandora and check an email while keeping the music going.

I can’t play a game and stop to respond to an SMS and come back to where I left off.

Think of anything you do on your iPhone for an extended period of time (let’s say 10 minutes straight) and then think about all the ways that can be interrupted (text, email, phone calls, push notifications) and realize how much productivity would be gained if you could pick up where you left off.

Hypocrisy?

Have you ever been listening to music in iTunes and moved applications elsewhere and the music kept playing? I suppose that means Apple will partially allow it with their native apps but 3rd party apps don’t count. Checking email and listening to music with the iPod function still causes battery drain, right?

I know there are push notifications now and that helps a little. So you can log into Yahoo messenger and leave the app and a push notification will alert you when a message comes in. Even with that, when you enter the app it is opening as if from scratch which causes a delay that you wouldn’t have if you were opening a minimized application.

So what does this mean? Will they include it. Several places are reporting this but there is no date for 4.0 out there yet. There is no justification for this except one major business idea. Competitors have offered multi-tasking all along but not enough of everything else to be an issue. With WebOS and Android picking up steam and Blackberry in the background with its own market share, it’s time Apple started addressing the concerns of their customers. I think everyone agrees that an overhaul of the OS to bring in some killer features like multi-tasking and something nobody really sees coming is needed. Bringing us a  new revision number on small hardware changes and no “wow features” this summer will narrow the gap and Apple will no longer have the lead they have now. They even run the risk of falling behind.