3g

This morning, my colleague Jason Kincaid wrote a very good and very level-headed post about the new iPhone (and the new iOS 4 software) from the perspective of an Android user. I’m going to come at it from the other angle.

Recently, I’ve written my takes on both the Nexus One and the EVO 4G from the perspective of an iPhone lover. Obviously, I don’t have an iPhone 4 yet, and so this isn’t a full review, but after the keynote yesterday we did get some hands-on time with the new device. So I figured I’d write down my initial reaction after playing with the new hardware for about 20 minutes or so. Before I go any further, I’ll save you the suspense: it’s awesome.

The Build

The biggest thing that stands out in my mind one day later is that immediately after I put down the iPhone 4 and went back to my iPhone 3GS, the latter felt kind of like a toy in comparison. Now, I’ve always been a fan of the design of the first iPhone over the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS — that is, I liked the aluminum flat back of the first one more than the plastic backs of the second two. The iPhone 4 is a return to form — literally — but it’s even better now, as the aluminum has been replaced by glass (in either black or white).

As Jason noted, the device feels rock solid in your hand. It is without a doubt the most impressive piece of mobile hardware I’ve ever held. There’s nothing on the device that feels janky. Aside from the backside upgrade, all the external buttons on the device are now improved as well. The iPhone 4 is pretty much identical in weight to the iPhone 3GS, but it’s significantly thinner. This may be a bit hard to notice in your hand as the iPhone 3G/3Gs has the curved back (so you mostly handle the thinner edges), but I have no doubt it will be noticeable in your pocket.

The Screen

When the iPhone 3GS first launched, I wasn’t sure that the boost in speed would be enough to make an upgrade worth it. I was wrong. Once I had an iPhone 3GS and went back to using an iPhone 3G, the latter almost seemed unusable to me. Thanks to the screen on the iPhone 4, this seems likely to be the case as well.

As Steve Jobs joked in the keynote, “once you go Retina Display, you can’t go back.” After just 20 minutes of using it, I’m hooked. As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber noted yesterday, it’s not just that the iPhone 4 has four times the pixels of the earlier iPhones, it’s that much of the distance between the glass you touch and the pixels have been removed as well. It’s subtle things like this — things that most people will never even realize they’re noticing (but they are) — that make Apple, Apple.

With the iPhone 3GS (or any of the other iPhones), if you bring the device close enough to your face, you can see the pixels. With the iPhone 4, you can’t. It’s really not like looking at a computer screen at all. It’s like looking at a picture — or when something on the screen is moving, film.

The Speed

In terms of speed, it’s hard to know what is the new iOS 4 and what is the new hardware, but the device does seem to run a little bit smoother. It’s not noticeably faster in the way that the iPhone 3GS was noticeably faster than the iPhone 3G, but I would attribute this to the fact that there are already rarely any lags in the iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS 3. I suspect some new games that come out may push the new A4 chip though.

The Camera

As has already been noted, FaceTime is brilliant in that it requires absolutely no set-up to work. Yes, it sucks that it’s WiFi-only, but that will change with time. It also would have been brilliant for Apple to get this working with iChat on Macs (as others have also noted), but since it’s supposedly going to be published as an open protocol, that will probably come too.

I can see the new front-facing camera doing wonders for startups like DailyBooth — and yes, maybe even ChatRoutlette.

The key feature of the camera though has to be the ability to shoot HD (720p) video. There’s some debate out there as to whether this will or won’t kill the Flip cam. My reaction is that while the iPhone 4 alone may not, I can’t see how all of these new smartphones gaining this feature (the EVO 4G can do it as well) won’t.

The Android Question

I know that it’s shocking to some of you that I would love this device. Most interesting may be my thoughts on what this means or doesn’t mean for Google’s Android platform.

As you’ve undoubtedly read a lot in recent weeks, Google is making fast gains in terms of the Android software. I was beyond impressed at Google I/O with everything that was shown off. With Android 2.2 (which I have running on the Nexus One), most system speed issues seem to have been resolved. That said, in my view, there is still no Android device that is better than the iPhone 3GS. And so obviously, the iPhone 4 just widens the gap.

The fact of the matter is that while the software may be getting there from a practical perspective, it still lacks the polish of the iPhone OS (now iOS). A number of people (on both the iPhone and Android sides) I’ve spoken with recently agree, but point to Google’s recent hiring of Palm’s design guru Matias Duarte as a sign that this may change. I hope so.

Overall app quality on Android also still lags behind the iPhone. And the fact that you have to use third-party task killing applications to get devices like the EVO 4G to run the way it should, is completely unacceptable from a users’ perspective.

With the iPhone 4, Apple has refined the hell out of their winning combination of hardware plus software. It’s hard to imagine it getting much better in this form factor — and that’s why I think we may see some radically different things next year for iPhone 5 (well, aside from a Verizon version).

The Mac vs. PC debate has often found people using a car analogy to explain things. I keep coming back to that when thinking about iPhone vs. Android. For a long time, iPhone felt like a Lexus while Android was more like a Kia. With recent upgrades, Android has transformed into more of a Honda. But with iPhone 4, the iPhone is now an Aston Martin (it was James Bond, remember).

But the crazy thing is that the iPhone is an Aston Martin with a Honda-price. Meanwhile, Android remains a Honda at a Honda-price — it’s a good deal, but it’s not an iPhone-deal.

In fact, it’s such a good deal that I continue to say that the only thing really holding back the iPhone (in the U.S.) is its carrier, AT&T. Even if you have no problems with AT&T, you have to acknowledge that they’re becoming the big barrier to the iPhone’s potential growth. There are simply always going to be million of users not on AT&T. In fact, there will always been more users not on AT&T than are on it. So Apple needs to move beyond it to keep expanding.

And if they’re the Aston Martin being sold at Honda-prices, when they’re sold at other dealerships (other carriers), they’ll dominate, right? Well it’s not that simple.

The Honda-like price is only thanks to the sweet deal Apple gets from AT&T. Without the deal, Apple would undoubtedly sell the iPhone for more money (to keep up their margins), and it would be a less attractive purchase for people. It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t buy an Aston Martin (or a Lexus, to be more practical). Would some people still opt for the Honda if it was more customizable? Sure, some would. But most would opt for the nicer machine, all things being equal.

But all things aren’t equal because the iPhone is tied only to AT&T. And all things are unlikely to ever be equal because prices might have to go up if the sweet AT&T exclusive subsidy goes away. But seeing the success Apple has had being at the luxury end of the PC market, I’m not sure how much they’ll ultimately care. But the fact that they seem to now (as evidenced by pointing out their market share vs. Android in keynotes) is interesting.

As Jason noted in his piece (and I have in the past), the fact of the matter remains that a strong rivalry between iPhone and Android is a good thing for us all. Android continues to improve at a healthy pace and they have some features (like Google Voice integration) that it seems unlikely now that Apple will ever get. Meanwhile, Apple continues to improve their hardware/software combination at a rate that it’s not clear that Google (and their OEM partners) will be able to match.

It’s two different approaches. And that makes sense since the two have different motives. At the end of the day, Android exists so that Google can get more people searching — and keep them searching as mobile devices overtake computers. The iPhone exists to be one of the mobile devices that overtakes computers so that Apple can keep selling high-margin machines.

In my view, for most consumers, the iPhone remains the winning argument in the space right now. And the iPhone 4 just extends that.

Thoughts on the new iPhone and AT&T —

Shared by louisgray
TUAW says: "Even worse, as time goes by it's very clear that AT&T continues to hold the iPhone experience hostage. From killing FaceTime on 3G, to dropped calls, to spotty reception in big cities: AT&T just isn't ready for the iPhone"

Filed under: iPhone

iPhone 4 is a desirable and powerful update to the iPhone that we know and love, but as is always the case with Apple, there are some downers.

Off the top of my head, here's what I think is disappointing. I'm surprised 32GB is the top memory tier; I think a lot of us expected 64GB. You have been able to get that amount of memory in the iPod touch since September of 2009. Bummer.

FaceTime video chat is a great idea and everyone expected it was coming. Once again though, Apple is being held back by AT&T. To do video chat, you have to be WiFi to WiFi. How usable is that? Not very. Apple hinted that it will work over 3G, maybe next year, but we know how good AT&T is at meeting deadlines.

Read on for more...

TUAWThoughts on the new iPhone and AT&T originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you put your ear up to the screen, you can hear these two beasts snarling at one another. Hit up the gallery for more shots, along with some iPhone 3G for good measure. Let's see how they stack up on the big stats, shall we?


Not enough for you? We'll have a big comparison of all the "majors" for you shortly.

Now, there's a lot left to learn about Apple's FaceTime video chat service. For instance, they called it "open," but they also only mentioned a zero-configuration iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 calling setup. Meanwhile Qik can make calls between EVO 4Gs, but also stream video live to the web (while the iPhone needs to record and then upload to get "social" using its official apps). No mention was made of the FaceTime call resolution, but given the fact that the front camera is merely VGA, it's probably streaming at the same 640 x 480 that Qik is constrained to in the free service. However, a premium version of Qik for $5 a month lets you go beyond that resolution, using the EVO's higher resolution cameras. Perhaps the largest distinction is the fact that the EVO can stream video calls over 3G or 4G, while the iPhone 4 is constrained to WiFi for the time being. Naturally, we expect other video calling apps (Skype, please?) to crop up on both platforms and give these initial offerings a run for their money.

iPhone 4 vs. EVO 4G... fight! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Skype 3G iPhone: 5M Downloads — But What’s the Usage? —

Skype says that less than a week after it was made available, nearly 5 million people have downloaded the 3G version of its iPhone app, with the demand distributed across Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. I was among them, even though I don’t have a 3G connection, and I’m pretty sure many others without 3G connections did the same. But how many people are actively using the service? Now that’s an important question, and one Reuters forgot to ask.

The company recently told me that the Skype app had been downloaded a total of 12 million times by owners of the iPhone and iPod touch. And while it plans to charge for 3G calls between Skype users starting next year, “We’re not going to want to price ourselves out of the market,” Russ Shaw, Skype’s VP of mobile, told Reuters. “I can’t ignore the fact that consumers (currently) use us for free.”

I wonder if, between AT&T’s new data tariffs and Skype’s charges, there will really be a cost advantage to using Skype. Regardless, we can expect to see its usage climb starting next week, when Apple introduces the newest version of the iPhone with multitasking features. Many people are likely to leave Skype running in the background, especially for IM and Skype-to-Skype call purposes.

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Pandora may be the Web’s best-known personalized radio service, but it’s not the best one. That honor belongs to Slacker, which just upped its game by adding caching to its iPhone app. The new feature lets you download thousands of songs to your iPhone, listen to Slacker’s customized stations when you don’t have an Internet connection, or a reliable one, or you just want to conserve battery life. And as the Slacker folks are pointing out, it may prove especially appealing for folks who sign up for AT&T’s new, not-unlimited-anymore data plans–they can cache music over Wi-Fi, then listen without eating up any wireless data.

(When you tell Slacker to cache, it advises you to do so over 3G only if you’ve got an unlimited data plan–that alert will take on new meaning once there are iPhone users who don’t have unlimited data.)

Missing, at least for now, is the automated night-time caching feature that’s available on Slacker’s Android and BlackBerry versions. Maybe Slacker will add it once iPhone OS 4 is out and it can make the downloading happen in the background.

Dave Zatz liked this feature when he tried it a couple of weeks ago, and I do, too. It’s a point in favor of Slacker’s $4.99 a month Plus service; you can try it out for two weeks for free. After the jump, some screenshots.

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So much for it being a niche product! Apple says it has sold two million iPads in 60 days since the launch of the tablet device. It sold the first million iPads in 28 days. It is hard to find some of the 3G enabled iPads in their retail stores. The pace of iPad sales is way ahead of the early results for iPhone, which took 74 days to sell the first million. According to some estimates, iPad is outselling the Mac itself.

According to GigaOM Pro, our research service, “the web tablet app market will be a significant one in just a few short years, going from $183 million in revenue in 2010 to $8.2 billion by 2015″ and the “overall momentum for this market will be driven early on by the iPad and Apple’s app store.”

Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year. There are about 5,000 special apps for iPad.

Related GigaOM Pro Research Report (sub req’d): Forecast: Tablet App Sales to Hit $8B by 2015

Infographic by Column Five Media

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After New iPhone App Launch, Skype Ready With 2-Way Video Calls on Nokia N900 —

If you are one of the few thousand people who own a Nokia N900, then sometime later this week Skype is going to offer you a ability to make two-way video calls on that device. You would be able to call any Skype user (whether on desktop or laptop) and have a two-way video communication, Russ Shaw, Skype’s vice president of Skype Mobile told GigaOM. Eventually you will be able to call other mobile clients and also to Skype-on-TV.

Shaw said that it was part of their ongoing close relationship with Nokia. Nokia N900 has dual cameras — one in the front and one in the back. The calls would work on both 3G and WiFi networks, though I bet the performance is going to be far superior on WiFi. Some of the smaller VoIP players such as Fring have already launched video calling enabled apps.

“We are going to do video calling across all our platforms and are agnostic about the operating system and carriers,” Shaw said. In other words, if the new iPhone (version 4) features dual cameras, then Skype is going to make its software work with iPhone. In a recent poll conducted by the company, an overwhelming 43 percent of Skype users said that they wanted mobile video.

Ironically, on Friday afternoon when I spoke to Shaw, he was unclear when company would launch its Skype-over-3G app for the iPhone, arguing that the company didn’t want to release any product that disappointed customers. And 24-hours later the app was available from the Apple’s iTunes App store. (For now these calls are free but eventually Skype is going to be charging folks for calls over 3G, which tells me they are using a solution very similar to the one they cobbled together for Skype-over-Verizon. For an alternate explanation, check out Andy Abramson’s post who thinks the magic is Skype’s SILK codec and working intimately with Apple hardware.)

Shaw said that the company was focused on seamless switching between 3G and WiFi. Anyway that app seems to have met its goals, prompting even their harsh critics to give it a thumbs up. Skype data shows that the company has seen 12 million downloads from the owners of iPhone and iPod Touch.

Shaw also confirmed that the official Android Skype app will be available before the end of the year. Skype was focusing on iPhone, Symbian and Android OS devices, Shaw said. In other words, Windows Phone and WebOS don’t figure in the company’s plans for now. “We are not doing anything directly on Palm but if a carrier wanted to do that, we can work with them,” he said. It was part of company’s strategy to take a cue from carriers on operating systems with a smaller footprint compared to the big three.

What about RIM? Shaw said that a lot of people want an over-the-top application. Verizon subscribers can get Skype on their Blackberry devices, thanks to a special relationship between the two companies. In other words, for now, all Blackberry owners who want Skype are out of luck.

Apple Selling Million iPads a Month —

So much for it being a niche product! Apple says it has sold two million iPads in 60 days since the launch of the tablet device. It sold the first million iPads in 28 days. It is hard to find some of the 3G enabled iPads in their retail stores. The pace of iPad sales is way ahead of the early results for iPhone, which took 74 days to sell the first million. According to some estimates, iPad is outselling the Mac itself.

According to GigaOM Pro, our research service, “the web tablet app market will be a significant one in just a few short years, going from $183 million in revenue in 2010 to $8.2 billion by 2015″ and the “overall momentum for this market will be driven early on by the iPad and Apple’s app store.”

Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year. There are about 5,000 special apps for iPad.

Related GigaOM Pro Research Report (sub req’d): Forecast: Tablet App Sales to Hit $8B by 2015

Infographic by Column Five Media

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Shared by louisgray
MG's review doesn't match my take - but he will have some valid points here.

Back in January, I wrote a post entitled An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus One. At the time, the Nexus One was soon to be released as the latest and greatest Android phone, and a number of iPhone users were wondering whether it was worth it to switch for the benefits of Android (and perhaps more importantly, another network besides AT&T). My take: it was the Android phone yet, but it wasn’t better than the iPhone. Now I’m going to do the same type of review for the new HTC EVO 4G phone, which Sprint is launching next week.

At Google I/O, the search giant gave the phone away to every attendee complete with one month of service to try it out. Just as with the Nexus One, I’ve decided to use it as my primary phone for the past week or so to get a real sense of the pluses and minuses of the device. Just as with my Nexus One review, this isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing review or roundup (for that, see here or here or here). Instead, this is just my reaction to the device as an iPhone user.

So, I’ll start off with what you really want to know: is the EVO 4G an “iPhone Killer“? No way. Not even close. Does it have some advantages over the iPhone? Of course. But it has more disadvantages. And, in fact, this isn’t even the best Android phone I’ve tried. Both the Nexus One and the Droid Incredible are better. If you want details about some of that, read on.

4G

Let me lead with a big caveat: I haven’t been using this thing on an actual 4G network. Sadly, neither San Francisco or New York City (the two cities I’ve used the device in) have Spring 4G yet (both should get it later this year). That said, as just about every other reviewer has pointed out, the 4G is almost more of a detriment to the device because while it does offer faster download speeds, they’re not that much faster than 3G — and 4G usage destroys the battery life of the device worse than even 3G does. Also, I have used Sprint’s 4G network before, in Austin, Texas, and I can confirm that it is faster but not that much faster that I would consider it a killer feature at this point. Hopefully that will change as the network matures.

Battery

And let’s start with the battery. Simply put: it sucks. Again, I’m not using the 4G network (and yes, I have the 4G radio turned off), and it absolutely blows. My iPhone 3GS is about a year old now, so it’s battery isn’t at the peak condition that it once was. Still, it almost always lasts me for at least a full day doing what I would consider to be moderate usage of the web, texting, taking pictures, etc. The EVO? Good luck getting more than 4 hours of moderate usage out of this bad boy.

It’s almost unfathomable how bad the battery is in this thing. Why? Well you might assume it’s the massive 4.3 inch LCD screen. But according to the Battery usage area in the Setting menu on Android, the display is only eating up 5% of my battery on average. Instead, it’s “Cell standby” (again, I have 4G off), “Phone idle,” and “Android system” that eat up over 75% of the life. Am I doing anything odd that makes it drain faster than an average user would? I don’t think so, and talking with others who have the device, all report the same awful battery performance. I have no doubt that “regular” users are going to bitch about this as well.

I’m terrified to think what this thing would be like if I were using 4G. A mobile phone that lasts for 2-3 hours? Ugh.

Screen

Speaking of the massive screen, there’s no denying that it’s beautiful. Rather than using the same OLED screen that the Nexus One uses (which you can barely see in daylight), this uses a standard TFT display, so it’s easy to see at all times. The 480×800 resolution is great, and everything looks crisp. That said, this (and the HTC HD2 — the WinMo phone with the same size screen) proves that bigger isn’t always better.

The screen is too big. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that the screen makes the device too big. Mat Buchanan of Gizmodo has called this the “Escalade of smartphones,” and it’s a perfect moniker. For people with huge hands, and huge pockets, this thing will be great. For everyone else, I have little doubt they’ll find this too big. There’s a reason many smartphones tend to hover around the same 3.5 inch screen (iPhone, Nexus One, etc): it works.

Camera

The camera on the EVO is great. And there are actually two of them. The one in the back is 8 megapixels and destroys the iPhone’s 3 megapixel camera. The front one is a lower resolution (1.3 megapixels), but is convient for vanity pictures and video chatting if that’s your thing. The back camera also can take 720p HD video, which again destroys the iPhone (there’s some debate as to just how good the “HD” bit-rate quality is — to me, a novice, it looked very nice).

Of course, the new iPhone is expected to be unveiled in just about a week. And it too is likely to have two cameras (one front and one back). I doubt the back one will be 8 megapixels, but it should get a boost to 5 megapixels. And the front one will undoubtedly be fine-tuned for video chatting as well. And the rumor is that it will take HD quality video as well.

Meanwhile, the photo-taking software on Android continues to lag behind the iPhone’s. And I do mean lag — often times it would take up to a minute for the controls to show up onscreen. And oddly, they can only be oriented to take pictures in landscape mode. And it’s far too many clicks to switch between the front and rear cameras (this is buried in the camera settings area). But all of that is somewhat excusable – what’s not is that more than half the time while trying to take a picture, I would get the message “Unable to save file to SD card due to insufficient file permissions.” I have no idea what that means, nor did I care enough to figure it out. Nor will most users when they get the same message. It worked sometimes, and sometimes it didn’t. I’ve never had this problem with the iPhone — nor is it possible since there is no SD card slot.

The photo browsing element of the EVO, meanwhile, is better than other Android phones I’ve used. But it’s still not nearly as good as the iPhone.

The EVO has a pretty good flash — something the current iPhone doesn’t (but again, the next one likely will). But it’s pretty poor compared to a regular camera flash. Point is, if you’re buying this thing to get a good camera, you should probably just invest in a good camera.

Exterior

The exterior of the EVO is pretty nice. As I said, I prefer the size of the Nexus One (and iPhone), but the EVO feels just as solid (unlike many other Android phones). Taking off the back to access the battery is a bit wonky. The entire back faceplate is removable, but each time I did it, I was sure I was going to snap off one of the clips that holds it in place. I was also sure I was going to snap off my fingernail at one point (which they suggest you use to open it up — brilliant).

There’s also this rather odd kick-stand on the back of the EVO. Presumably, it’s to make watching media on the huge screen more appealing (so you don’t have to hold the big, heavy thing). It’s also probably good for video chatting. But it’s a gimmick at best. And my colleague Jason Kincaid actually almost broke it off when he thought that was the way you get to the battery.

Unlike the Nexus One, the EVO has no trackball. I think that’s a good thing. Some people seem to like it (I assume ex-BlackBerry users), but I never understood the point of having it on a touchscreen device. Good riddance.

My biggest gripe about the exterior though has to be the top on/off button. It lays way too flush against the actual top of the device itself, making it very hard to click. I endured much frustration when I would pull the thing out of my pocket and would try to turn it on quickly. Sometimes I was hitting the button, sometimes I was hitting nothing — and it was hard to tell.

Software

All the other problems aside, the software may be what really kills the device — for now, at least. The EVO out-of-the-box runs Android 2.1 with the HTC Sense UI. Android 2.1 is far too slow. Even running on these devices with 1 GHz chips, there’s noticible lag when doing things such as simply scrolling through your apps. It’s unacceptable.

The good news is that Android 2.2 mostly fixes this. I have been using 2.2 running on the Nexus One, and it’s much, much better. The bad news is that it’s not yet clear when 2.2 will come to the EVO because HTC has to update Sense to work with it.

Speaking of Sense, some people love it. I do not. While I find Android’s standard UI to be a bit bland, Sense is almost too much of the opposite — it’s garish. It also takes up way too much screen real estate with things such as the default time/weather widget. Do I really need the time taking up half of the main screen? No. I want apps there. Luckily, it’s easy enough to delete those default widgets.

The EVO does come with some pretty nice ways to integrate your Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr accounts when you set it up. And then you can easily see friends’ activity from the nice Friend Stream widget they provide. Sadly, this widget loads way too slowly. I also like the Twitter widget they give you. It’s a very simple way to update your Twitter status without even launching a client.

HTC also has a brilliant pinch-to-zoom mechanism to access each of your 7 main Android screens. In fact, it’s exactly like the Expose feature in OS X. You pinch on the EVO (or if you’re on the main screen, hit the home button) and the screen you’re on zooms out to reveal thumbnails of all of the screen you have, and shows what’s on each of them. Apple should consider copying this for the iPhone because it’s much better than the current scroll from page to page method

The worst part of the software though is the keyboard. It’s laughably cluttered. The soft keyboard built into Android is bad enough — mainly because it lags (which again, Android 2.2 fixes). This Sense one is much, much worse. It’s set up in a way so that you can access things such as numbers on the top row of keys, but you have to hold them down to do so. And actually, numbers are also found if you hit the “12#” button at the bottom of the keyboard. It’s redundant and confusing.

And the cursor movement keys at the very button of the keyboard are one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. Again, this is a touchscreen device, why do I need touchscreen soft keys to move around whatever I’m writing? Just touch where you want to go.

WiFi Hotspots

Okay, I’ve been fairly hard on the device so far. But there is one thing that despite all it’s problems, would make me consider it: the WiFi hot spot feature. It’s hard to explain how awesome this is. But there are a few big catches.

I’ve tested out a Sprint Overdrive (mobile hotspot creator) before, and it’s great. But it’s also yet another device you have to carry around, and it’s somewhat of a pain to boot up, get connected to the service, etc. The EVO is like an Overdrive that you’re going to have on you at all times. And turning it on is one touch of a widget on the screen. This creates a new WiFi hotspot that up to 8 people can connect to. You can set the password right from the included software.

The other day, I was in a cafe in New York City but only had one hour of free Internet access. When I ran out, I turned on the EVO Hotspot and was up and running again in seconds. And it was fast (again, even without 4G).

Yes, the battery issue remains — this thing may work for a couple of hours as a hotspot, maybe less — but there is no disputing the ease-of-use.

Mobile hotspot creation is being built-in to Android 2.2, but it will be up to the carriers to decide how they use it (meaning, they decide whether or not to turn it on, and how much to charge for it, if so). This Sprint version is different (it’s not the built-in Android version) — and right, now entirely free. But that is expected to change following the actual launch. Reports indicate that Sprint will offer the Hotspot feature for free through July, but only to those on 4G networks. After that (and for other users) it will cost an extra $30 or so a month, apparently.

That’s a buzzkill.

Of course, next to the iPhone, which still doesn’t have any tethering option in the U.S. thanks to AT&T’s inability to maintain their network, this is still a great feature.

Overall

So, that a lot of words about what, as an iPhone user, I like and don’t like about the EVO 4G. Would I give up my iPhone for this? Not a chance. Hell, I wouldn’t give up a Nexus One or Droid Incredible for this, even with 4G. The battery life is simply too poor, and the whole device is too large.

The Android software continues to make steady improvements, but Sense, in my opinion, doesn’t help it at all. Instead, Android 2.2 is the thing to get, and that won’t be available on the EVO at launch.

The EVO has many of the strengths of the Nexus One — mainly, the way Google services interact with the phone (Google Voice, Gmail, Maps, etc), but it adds a bunch of weaknesses.

If you’re a fed-up iPhone user looking to switch to an Android device, there are better options. If you’re a happy iPhone user that is interested Android devices, you probably won’t like this one much at all.

And no matter what camp you’re in, if you do buy this thing now, you’ll probably be kicking yourself in a couple of months as better 4G devices hit. Or you’ll be kicking yourself in a couple of months when better Android devices hit. Or you’ll be kicking yourself in a few weeks when the new iPhone HD (or whatever it will be called) hits.

Forgive me, but: this is probably not the Android device you’re looking for.

Dear World.

I bet if I were to ask everyone who knows me – including my family and all my entrepreneurial friends – to guess why I’m having a sleepless night – that no one would be right.

Some of my friends might speculate that I’m having a “platform epiphany” like I did 3 years ago in May when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Platform and I couldn’t sleep until I blogged extensively about the Facebook opportunity for entrepreneurs. On that sleepless night, that blog post was my most successful of all time.  They may think I’m feeling that Google’s I/O announcements this week were keeping me up. But these friends would be wrong.

Some of my friends may know that my iPad 3G arrived this week, and that I couldn’t put it down until 1 am. I suppose I could have stayed up all night browsing the App Store and testing new iPad apps, but friends who think this sleepless night is gadget-induced would be wrong.

Some of my closest friends would know that FamilyLink has been going through our 2nd near-death experience in the past 2 years. (Read about our Dec 2008 near-death experience here.) The recent near-death experience was not caused by a bank loan being called as a recent of a global financial crisis (as the 1st one was), but rather by losing 85-90% of our advertising revenue over the past year as Facebook has changed its Platform, its policies, and taken away many of the most important viral marketing touch points and monetization opportunities that made so many developers happy to bet on the Facebook Platform in the first place. And then, on March 1st, they turned off our ability to communicate with 63 million of our 80 million users of our We’re Related/FamilyLink Facebook application. That was a body blow. We have literally lost $500k per month in revenue in advertising revenue, year over year. How does a startup possibly survive that kind of devastating loss? Well, fortunately we have 17 million registered user that we can still contact. And more fortunately, we had a side-business with 1.6 million family history records and a subscription model that has been growing since 2006. I have had a lot of sleepless nights during the last 3 months worrying about how to turn on subscription revenue, but tonight is not one of those. We are about 50% there in transforming FamilyLink into a freemium business model, offering billions of family history records to our 17 million users, and turning thousands of them into paying customers, and I think we’ll be 90% there in about 4-6 more weeks. In fact, this was our best week ever for FamilyLink subscriptions and the future looks very bright indeed. With our new VP of Marketing turning on a ton of paid marketing channels in the next couple of weeks (so far 100% of our subscribers have come from our house email list), we see a path to profitability (for the 2nd time) in the next few months. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be losing much sleep about FamilyLink anymore.

So what is causing this sleepless night?

It is a subject so complex that I can almost never bring it up in real conversation without attracting a glazed-over look and body language that says I better change the subject soon because the person’s political fanatic-o-meter is starting to go off.

It is a subject that I have become absolutely passionate about during the past 2 years, so much so, that I’ve considered retiring from my 20-year life as an entrepreneur, forgoing a possible 2nd career as a venture capitalist, and spending my life in some kind of public service in hopes of helping prevent the next global financial meltdown from occuring (an infinitely harder task than building another company with a near-billion dollar market cap.) This is less likely to involve a run for the US Senate than it is to mean taking to qualify for a seemingly boring post in the SEC or CTFC or the soon-to-be-created Systemic Risk oversight committee in an attempt to study and understand and bring true regulatory reform to the currently insane OTC derivatives market.

From September 2008, when I realized a global financial meltdown was occuring (it felt like I was living through something on the scale of the Oct. 1929 market crash) till now, I’ve had dozens of sleepless nights doing research about over-the-counter derivatives. Taken individually (unless the packagers of them were selling them fraudulently by mis-representing why the CDOs or CLOs were being created), each individual derivative makes a lot of sense as a hedge or a speculation. Someone believes something about the future and wants to place a bet on an outcome. It makes sense to the buyer and seller to offset each others bets, and it makes sense most of all to the banks, who act as the bookies on these bets, and make tens of billions of dollars of profit annually selling OTC derivatives.

But taken as a whole, these unregulated derivatives add up to hundreds of trillions of dollars in notional value, and introduce systemic risk into the entire global financial system that is without precedent in world history. Too large of a concentration of derivatives bets gone bad (mainly because there was so much leverage and not enough capital reserve requirements) have led to several previous financial fiascos, including:

• Barings Bank
• Long Term Capital Management
• Enron
• AIG
• Bear Sterns
• Lehman Brothers

Taken individually, most derivative instruments make rational sense to the buyer and seller. They are often viewed as an insurance policy. They are often sold as a way to hedge risk. Like an earthquake insurance policy on your home, it might actually make sense for a company or government treasurer to use a derivative instrument to protect against a future interest rate change, or credit default by a large supplier, or the future price of a certain commodity – like jet fuel.

But would you buy an insurance policy on earthquake insurance for your home from the same company – without regard to their balance sheet – that sold earthquake insurance to all 100,000 other home-owners in the same fault-zone as you?

That would be utter stupidity. And yet that is what we have allowed to happen time after time after time after time after time after time. Since trillions of dollars of OTC derivatives (insurance policies on anything) are NOT exchange traded, don’t have adequate capital requirements, and have such concentrated counterparty risk they become as irresponsible as paying a premium for earthquake insurance on your home to a company that in the event of an actual earthquake of any sizeable magnitude, would have ZERO ability to pay off the policyholders.

AIG FP – one of about 17 or 18 units within a profitable traditional insurance company – was such an “insurer”. And without the AIG rescue by the US Government the failure of this one so-called insurer would have created a domino effect of such magnitude that the worldwide financial system may have freezed up, leading to a horrible worldwide depression.

But AIG wasn’t the only company using OTC derivatives to mint money while the getting was good. When Henry Paulson was CEO of Goldman, that firm was minting money – along with many other huge global banks – by creating all kinds of derivatives products. When these “assets” turned “toxic” – Secretary Paulson had to do something, and so he scared the living daylights out of our representatives in Washington, and against the will of the people, they passed the $700 billion TARP bailout package. Later, the $1.8 trillion purchase of “toxic assets” by the Federal Reserve (which didn’t even need Congressional approval) was viewed by the central bankers as necessary to prevent the whole house of cards from collapsing. Both of these moves may have been necessary – I really don’t know. But it’s the environment that led to the bailouts that I’m most worried about.

Through these bailouts, the US taxpayer became the “re-insurance” company that backed up the small number of insurers who had sold all the earthquake policies to all the home owners in the same fault-zones for years.

And we still have a financial house of cards. No regulatory reform has yet taken place. But the Senate has passed a bill this week, and the House previously passed a bill, and the bills are about to go into reconciliation.

And that is why I am having this particular sleepless night.

I know quite a few things that disturb me:

• I know that a few banks have tens of billions of dollars in annual profits to lose if they are prevented from using leverage and federal-backing to trade in OTC derivatives, whether they are exchange traded or not.
• I know that the banking lobby is the biggest and most effective lobby in US history.
• I know that the biggest donors to congressional campaigns are the financial services companies. Utah’s own Senator Bennett, who serves on the Senate Banking Committee, is (I think) the 4th largest recipient of donations from banks of anyone serving in the US Senate.
• I know that 18 months ago – based on a private 90-minute meeting in his office on election day 2008, that global systemic risk and OTC derivatives regulation was absolutely NOT a priority for Senator Bennett, and I also know from reading hundreds of pages of the Congressional Record and watching hours of CSPAN hearings that most of his Republican and Democratic colleagues have been clueless until very recently about what derivatives even are. (I must say I have been impressed in the last few months in the rise of financial literacy by the members of several congressional committees.)
• I know that Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who has been one of fewer than a dozen members of Congress who have been consistently on the right side of the derivatives regulation debate since the early 1990s is retiring from the US Senate this fall.  (If you want to read a very prescient article written by Dorgan in 1994, click here.)
• I know that the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, pushed hard by Senator Phil Gramm (whose wife Wendy was on the board of Enron), led to the complete deregulation of derivatives trading at the federal level and invalidated all the state anti-bucket laws (which were passed in the post 1907-crisis era) which could have prevented the 2008 crisis from occuring.
• I know that Mark Brickell, the former head of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, was friends with the Gramms, and led a very effective effort in 1994 to defeat any attempt to regulate derivatives using the exact same lies lines that we are hearing today from all the banking lobbyists, such as:

“if we don’t allow our banks to trade in exotic derivatives, we’ll lose all this business to Europe or Asia, and it will negatively affect the US economy”

“we need lots of exceptions to the exchange-traded requirement so large corporations who need custom derivatives will not be hurt”

“we have risk management standards in place, and we have the biggest motivation to self-regulate because if things go south, we are the ones hurt the most” (This lie line which worked extremely well for Mark in the 1990s but doesn’t work as well today, because we all know better now who has the most to lose.)

Last year I flew to Washington to watch an AEI debate on derivatives that featured Mark Brickell, the previously-mentioned former chairman of the ISDA, because I had to meet him in person after reading about his amazing one-man lobby. Frank Partnoy, a former derivatives traded turned law professor, whom I consider one of the fore-most authorities on derivatives, described in his excellent 2003 book “Infectious Greed,” how Mark Brickell almost single-handedly defeated congressional efforts to regulate derivatives back in 1994-1995.

I’ve gotten to know a bit about how legislation is written (largely by the lobbyists themselves), and how blind almost everyone in Washington and on Wall Street is to systemic risk (it’s nearly invisible). I’ve learned how few investors are both brilliant and honest enough to call for a ban on certain types of derivaties. One of those is Warren Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger. He said in May 2009 we should ban credit default swaps entirely. He said recently that no way should JPMorgan Chase be able to trade in OTC derivatives. He knows how corrupt the accounting industry has become in enabling all these shenanigans to continue. George Soros has also called for a ban on credit default swaps.

So here’s why I’m sleepless tonight.

I’m afraid of what is going to happen to the financial reform bill in reconciliation.

I’m afraid we’re going to miss this once-in-a-generation chance to properly reform our financial system to prevent the next global financial meltdown from happening.

I’m afraid that the several things that I have hoped might happen may not happen at all, and that the worldwide banking/betting industry will be free to create and sell exotic derivatives to their hearts content – making billions in profits – while continuing to introduce massive system risk into the global economy.

I am not a scholar and I don’t claim to have a prescription to solve this incredibly complex problem, but I have hoped that a few things would happen in financial regulatory reform.

• I have hoped that all OTC derivatives would be forced to go onto exchanges – with no loopholes and exceptions
• I have hoped that leverage would be dramatically reduced and capital reserve requirements increased tremendously for derivatives participants
• I have hoped that as Charlie Munger and George Soros have both said, credit default swaps should be banned entirely
• I have hoped that the spirit of the Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act of 1933) could be returned, so that we could avoid “too big to fail.” I think Blanche Lincoln’s attempt to prevent bank holding companies from trading in derivatives is a courageous and bold attempt to bring back the spirit of Glass-Steagall.

I am afraid that the financial lobby is working around the clock to water down any of the really good provisions of the financial reform bill, and in particular, that they will pull out all the stops to eliminate or prevent Senator Lincoln’s prohibition.

I am worried there is little that any of us can do to influence our representatives, most of whom know very little about how the worldwide financial banking system works, to get things right.

I am afraid that global systemic risk will continue to be the major problem of our generation, and the most likely cause of future economic devastation and the potential collapse of life as we know it.

It is clear that our financial system is fragile. The situation in Greece is illustrative of how interconnected everything is.

It is also clear that we rarely learn lessons from history.

The more I learn about the history of financial crises in the past few decades, the more I realize that we are more prone that ever before to have future crises on an unprecedented scale. I’m not happy that China is now getting into derivatives trading in a big way. (They don’t want to be left behind.) I’m alarmed that a huge percentage of “profits” from S&P 500 companies are coming from the financial sector – not from the real economy – and that we are all living a fiction when we focus on how the economy is improving, because the system risk that underlies everything else – the chance of an 8.0 or 9.0 magnitude financial earthquake – is as high or higher than ever before.

Yeah, so I’m kind of having a sleepless night, worrying about the reform bill, and all that hinges on it, and wondering if there is anything I can do to nudge this in the right direction.

I’ve been trying for 18 months, in my spare time, to get informed, and then to do some nudging.

Frank Partnoy was kind enough to send me about 30 copies of his book Infectious Greed, and with the help of a friend, I’ve been able to get this book in the hands of a couple dozen legislators in the past several months, hoping to contribute to their financial literacy.

For months I spent a lot of hours trying to document the roots of the 2008 financial crisis on a site called Crashopedia.com, but for the past six months, since Facebook hasn’t been so nice to me and my company, I’ve had almost no spare time to update this site. (At the end of this post, I’ll include a dozen or so of my Crashopedia entries listing what happened from 1993 to 1997 that helped contribute to the 2008 crash.)

Ok, so I think I’m finished.

I can go back to bed. And see if I can go back to sleep.

I haven’t accomplished anything except probably annoy all my readers who occasionally visit my blog for my usual posts about entrepreneurship, internet marketing, or less frequently on the genealogy industry.

But I have probably done enough to be able to fall back to sleep, knowing that I at least tried to share something that might be read by someone somewhere, and encourage them to take some time to study and try to understand OTC derivatives and what ought to be done someday, somewhere, by some informed legislators, to prevent a future worldwide economic collapse triggered by whatever is going to trigger it next time.

If you want to spend an interesting hour, just do a Google search on something like

financial crises ltcm barings enron aig

and then check out some of the more scholarly online articles and blogs posts such as:

http://www.finreg21.com/lombard-street/how-deregulating-derivatives-led-disaster-and-why-re-regulating-them-can-prevent-anot

and then ask yourself, is our Senate and our House going to actually pass a reconciled bill that will regulate derivatives adequately, and prevent the next global financial meltdown from affecting billions of people worldwide.

and if the answer to that question is “yes,” go back to sleep.

Goodnight. And sweet dreams.

- Paul

(Okay, as promised, here are some excerpts from Crashopedia.com)

November 1999, DerivativesStrategy.com: “Somebody Turn on the Lights,” By Martin Mayer. Regulators are hindering transparent markets.

Nov 12, 1999 Congress passes Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act which repealed part of the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933 and allowed banks to offer investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act

Oct 15, 1998. Brooksley Born (CTFC Chairperson) gives speech on lessons from LTCM collapse, and need for OTC derivatives regulation

July 30, 1998 Brooksley Born, Chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) testifies before U.S. Senate Committee of Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. She says derivatives (including futures) have been regulated for three quarters of a century by the CFTC, and she wants to commission a study on derivatives, since they had changed significantly in the previous five years since the last CFTC study.

“Chairman Greenspan testified just last week before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Financial Services, “I have no doubt derivatives losses will mushroom at the next significant [economic] downturn as will losses on holdings of other risk assets, both on and off exchange.”

Washington Post article covers 1998 meeting of Brooksley Born (CTFC) with Treasury and Fed when she argued for regulation of OTC derivatives. They resist. Mark Brickell shows up here in 98, 99 opposing government regulation. There are transcripts to these meetings.

July 17, 1998 Mark Brickell, JP Morgan Securities, sends letter to Congress opposing derivatives regulations

May 7, 1998 Greenspan: “the major expansion of the over-the-counter derivatives market has occurred in [a] period of unparalleled prosperity. . . [in] which losses generally, in the financial system, have been remarkably small . . . And as a consequence of that, I don’t think that one will fully understand or know how vulnerable that whole structure is until we have it really tested. And eventually that’s going to happen.” (Cite Source)

1997 GAO Report “The 1997 GAO Report, entitled OTC Derivatives: Additional Oversight Could Reduce Costly Sales Practice Disputes, chronicles 360 end-user losses, of which 58% reportedly involved sales practice concerns.” (Brooksley Born, 1998 senate hearing)

1995: Senate votes on Balanced Budget Amendment. Sen Paul Simon on Charlie Rose: http://tinyurl.com/3sbv8k. American public “overwhelmingly support balanced budget amendment.” Wirthlin poll 76%.

1995: Charlie Rose interviews Mark Brickell after Baring Bank failure

October 1994 cover story in Washington Monthly, “Very Risky Business” by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, warns of future financial disasters if derivatives are not regulated. Dorgan wanted to prevent federally insured banks and financial institutions from speculating in these exotic instruments.

July 1994 Article in CPA Journal, “Derivative financial instruments: time for better disclosure.” http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/old/15611641.htm

June 1994: SEC asked to study derivatives by Markey

May 1994 GAO releases 190 page report entitled “Financial Derivatives: Actions Needed to Protect the Financial System”

April 12, 1994: Rep. Henry Gonzales introduces legislation (HR4170) “Derivatives Safety and Soundness Act of 1994” which would require “insured depository institutions to include information on derivative financial instruments” in reports

April 7, 1994: OTC derivatives study called for by Edward Markey (D-MA)

1994 Derivatives regulation legislation introduced by Edward Markey (D-MA):

1994: Credit default swaps invented by JP Morgan bankers on a Florida off-site retreat (Newsweek article).

“I’ve known people who worked on the Manhattan Project,” says Mark Brickell, who at the time was a 40-year-old managing director at JPMorgan. “And for those of us on that trip, there was the same kind of feeling of being present at the creation of something incredibly important.”

“Like Robert Oppenheimer and his team of nuclear physicists in the 1940s, Brickell and his JPMorgan colleagues didn’t realize they were creating a monster. Today, the economy is teetering and Wall Street is in ruins, thanks in no small part to the beast they unleashed 14 years ago.”

1994: Jim Leach introduces legislation to regulate derivatives. A lobby led by Mark Brickell defeats the attempt. (Source: “Infectious Greed,” by Frank Partnoy.)

Nov 3, 1993 SEC Commissioner J. Carter Beese speaks at the International Swaps and Derivatives Association Conference in Washington, DC. “A Roadmap to SEC Regulation of Derivatives Activities.” He said, “I do not believe that derivatives will be the next S&L crisis.” He explained the 4 general themes to SEC regulatory oversight of derivatives activies: 1) risk assessment–the SEC required “securities firms to report on a quarterly basis the size of their derivatives exposure in terms of both notional amount and replacement cost value;” 2) the SEC was seeking public comment relating to the “appropriate capital treatment of derivative products under the Commission’s net capital rule;” 3) since “settlement values under derivatives contracts are largely contingent . . . current accounting rules do not require settlement values to be reflected in firms’ balance sheets,” so he encouraged international efforts to harmonize off-balance sheet accounting, and he mentioned recent FASB rules and also SEC requirements for public companies with “material exposures from derivatives to discuss the commitments and uncertainties” in their reports, under Regulation S-K, Item 303; and 4) coordination between regulators and market participants. He said the CTFC had recently issued a study on derivatives and recommended the formation of an “interagency council” to fulfill this coordination function.

Similarly, in an extreme market stress environment, the liquidity of the nation’s equity markets could be strained by the sell-off of stocks and futures by derivatives dealers trying to adjust their hedges to accommodate rapidly changing market risks. . . . I do think it is safe to say these would be low probability high impact events.

1993: Group of 30, with help from Mark Brickell, prepares recommendations for internal risk management, including daily mark to market. The derivatives lobby used this “best-practices” document for years to avoid regulation by claiming that self-regulation was sufficient and preferrable to government regulation. http://www.riskglossary.com/link/group_of_30_report.htm

Sept 8, 1993 According to EIR, John Hoefle testifies before House Banking Committee, discusses bailout of Citicorp in 1990, and Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez responds by railing on the speculatives derivatives industry and accuses the participants of creating a mega-Las Vegas. (Find actual transcript of the Committee hearings.)

Everyone is talking about location now. But back in 2007, basically no one was talking about it. But Tom Coates was. That’s the year that Fire Eagle, an early location platform spearheaded by Coates first peeked its head out of Yahoo’s now-defunct Brickhouse. Yes, Yahoo had the pieces in place to be perhaps the key location platform 3 years ago. Obviously, that never happened. And now Coates is leaving Yahoo.

In a post tonight on his personal blog, Coates details some of his favorite memories at Yahoo over the past four years. In it, he singles out Yahoo Hack Day, Brickhouse, and Fire Eagle (as well as a dozen or so former colleagues). Coates came to the U.S. to head product for Brickhouse, which Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake started for Yahoo in 2007. A number of products launched out of there, but Coates is clearly most proud of his work on Fire Eagle. As he notes:

When I first joined Yahoo! in 2005, Simon Willison and I wrote a list of some areas we thought could be really fascinating to work on, and which could be a really huge deal over the coming years. We’d become really interested in location and had come to the conclusion that every website on the planet could be enhanced in some way if you could add some element of location.

That dream is of course coming into existence only now. Coates acknowledges that his dream was perhaps a bit ahead of its time.

In 2008, Fire Eagle launched the the public. I was at the launch event and recall it being one of the first location-based ideas that fueled my excitement about the topic. Location had just started to come on my radar with the launch of iPhone 3G and its GPS chip (and the App Store), and I was particularly interested in how services such as this would deal with privacy issues (a problem which is still an issue today). Fire Eagle actually had a very smart approach, and Coates knows it, writing today:

We spent an incredible amount of time thinking about the privacy implications of users sharing their locations. Many other services see privacy as a problem and attempt to gloss over it for their users. We thought of it as an opportunity and made the privacy features the core part of the project. Users could choose where to share, how much to share, hide themselves and change or retract their permissions at any time. I think we progressed the state of the art in that area.

But the money quote in Coates’ post has to be, “Someone once referred to Fire Eagle as the Pixies of the latest batch of Location Services, and if that’s at all true, it may be the biggest compliment I’ve ever received.” In many ways, Fire Eagle was the precursor to some of what we’re seeing now. It’s too bad, that for whatever reason, it never really took flight.

Coates notes that over the past year at Yahoo he had been working on taking some of the ideas behind Fire Eagle and applying them across Yahoo’s other location services. We’ll be seeing the results of what he’s been working on in the months (and years) ahead, he says. Let’s hope that’s true, but I’m not too confident in Yahoo’s commitment to the future of location, considering that the Director of Geo Engineering just left a few days before Coates did.

Yahoo had been making a run at the hot location network Foursquare, but the latest word is that that is now off the table too.

Coates won’t say what he’s up to next beyond taking a break. He does note that he’s been talking to a few people about interesting projects though. Hopefully he’ll be able to contribute to the exploding location field now that he’s outside of Yahoo.

[photo: flickr/patrick h. lauke]

And the good Froyo news just keep flowing in. TechCrunch have flexed their exclusive muscle this morning in revealing their discovery that Android 2.2 will come with built-in tethering and WiFi hotspot support. That means you'll be able to use your phone's 3G internet connection to hook your laptop up to the worldwide webosphere, with a choice of wired or wireless methods. Of course, this dreamy scenario will be subject to the big bad network operators permitting -- or at least not forbidding -- you to do such awesome things with your hardware, but at least we know the goods are being baked into this forthcoming release from Google. Frozen yogurt for all!

Android 2.2 'Froyo' to include USB tethering, WiFi hotspot functionality originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 05:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Everyone's favorite WiMAX-powered Android device finally has a date and a price, and you don't have terribly long to wait: June 4 is the date that you'll want to be lining up outside your local Sprint store for an EVO 4G, $199 in hand (assuming you're signing up for a new contract, of course). We still don't have details on plan pricing, but Sprint has specifically called out that you'll be able to video chat (remember, the EVO 4G has a front-facing cam) over both 3G and 4G, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of software they include for making that happen. More as this develops!

Sprint selling HTC EVO 4G on June 4 for $199 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 May 2010 18:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ustream Viewer Beta for Android —

Ustream Viewer Beta for Android is a post from Chris Pirillo

Not long ago, we announced the iPad app for our live stream. Steve (Granit in our chat room) developed this app that will allow you to see the video AND the chat room right on your iPad screen – without having to click between them. You’ll be able to private message other users if you choose, and have moderation options available if you’re a channel operator. Additionally, if you click on a link within the IRC channel, it will open a browser window right inside of the app.

AndroidAdvocate is apparently disappointed to see there is not yet an alternative for those of you who are rocking with Android on your cell phone. His solution is to use the Ustream Viewer Beta, which is found on the Marketplace.

According to the Ustream blog, this is their second application for this platform. Their Broadcaster app was released last year. It enables users to stream live from their phones on 3G or Wi-Fi. The Android Viewer provides chat functionality, and when combined with the Broadcaster application… “it allows the first mobile-to-mobile functionality available on the Market.”

When the Viewer was released in November, it was done so in conjunction with a live KISS concert that was aired over Ustream. Viewer may only allow you to watch live video feeds, but it does so flawlessly. Use it to watch anyone’s live feed – from red carpet productions to puppies to my humble little show – while you’re on the go.

Ustream launched the iPhone version of the viewing app last January, when it was downloaded a whopping 113,000 times in 24 hours. It’s worth pointing out that the iPhone doesn’t have a Broadcaster app, because Apple won’t approve them. Could this give Android a small – yet important – leg up over the iPhone os?

• The Chris Pirillo Live iPad App
• Go Shopping With Google
• Why I Think Apple’s iAd Sounds Amazing
• iPad Stylus
• Twitter for Android
• How to Get a Camera on the iPad
• Soundrop is Addictive for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch
• Jailbroken iPad Already
• How to Create Art on the iPad
• Turn Your iPad Into a Harp

Why you must bet the farm on mobile and social media

Mitch Joel’s keynote at MarketingProfs (which is a neat evolution of a talk I saw him give at PodCamp Toronto years ago) sparked an idea in my head about how we’re communicating with customers and what it means for your business. In his talk, he mentions the internal conversation, the one to one conversation, and the one to many conversation – how marketers can interact with their audiences.

Let’s take this a step further. Before we do, let’s look at a few changes in computing and communications.

The 1990s were the decade of email and email marketing. Computers were leashed to the wall for nearly every task. Even my ultra-awesome at the time Powerbook 1400cs (cs stood for color screen, imagine that!) needed to be tied to the wall for any form of communications. Most people were still computing using machines the size of aircraft carriers, and while the Web had just gotten popular amongst the high-tech crowd, by no means was it mainstream. Email was it, partly because email was something that people could grasp onto and understand immediately – form of electronic communications that worked very much like the real world’s analog equivalents. There were letters, addresses, inboxes, etc. – a good entry point for many.

2000-2009 was the decade of the Web, unquestionably. Computers got smaller and much, much cheaper. The decade started out with the Pentium III line of processors barely topping 1 GHz, and ended with computers shipping with four-core CPUs. People figured out the Web, they figured out what was possible beyond making a brochure of their company. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter arrived. Wireless Internet access via Wi-Fi finally got hot and achieved some level of market penetration.

Here we are in 2010. Computers are shipping now with as much processing power in a handheld as in a desktop, and Wi-Fi + 3G are the standard rather than the exception. The latest computer is fully mobile – the iPad – needing only to stop to recharge its internal battery and not much else. All this and we’re barely into the mobile revolution. This corresponds with the latest change of mind – social media.

While social media got its start in the era of the Web, it’s rapidly evolving to take advantage of the devices now afforded to it in ways the regular web simply cannot. There’s nothing more social than hanging out with friends and passing a mobile device for someone to have a quick laugh at a text, a mobile pic, or a Tweet. There’s nothing more social than sitting with colleagues and just handing someone an iPad to say, “look at this…”

As devices get smaller and easier to use, they become more social. Clay Shirky said it best – when something becomes technologically boring, it becomes socially interesting. In the case of the iPhone and iPad, the interface becomes so intuitive so quickly that it fades away to nothingness, leaving only you and what you aim to accomplish.

So let’s tie all this together. Email was and is, for functional purposes, the one to one conversation. Yes, you can broadcast email, yes you can reply to all in a manner that’s as convenient as it is painful, but fundamentally email is a one to one conversation.

The Web was the one to many conversation. Put up your site and as long as your server can handle the traffic, you can do one to many conversations better than at any point in human history. You can get noticed, become popular, and do business at greater velocity than ever before.

Social – and the mobile devices that will increasingly power it – is the next logical extension of Mitch’s framework. Social is the many to many conversation, where you as a marketer are an active participant, but you’re not in control, not in charge, not even directing the conversation. You are among your peers, interacting, collaborating, and creating.

Just as the rules for email are different than the rules for the Web, so are the rules for social different than what preceded it. Chris Brogan and Greg Cangialosi often like to quip that the strategy of choice is “be there before the sale” but that’s not enough. You have to be relevant before the sale. You have to be credible before the sale. You have to earn a seat at the table not only before but at the time the decision is being made, which means you have to have persistent presence of mind in the business cycle of your prospective customers.

In this framework, that also means that everything you do has to have at least an idea of how it will appear in a mobile computing landscape. If all you do is broadcast useless updates on Facebook and Twitter, you won’t be shared or talked about. You’ll stop appearing in people’s streams – and when the majority of communication is done on smaller form factor mobile devices, what little slice of screen real estate attention you have left will vanish.

If someone were to pass around your web site on a mobile device at an executive roundtable, what would they see?

• How easy is it to find a call to action?
• How easy is it to find a call to share?
• How easy is it to pass around by word of mouth?

The future based on trend growth is clear: mobile devices will power the way your prospective customers communicate, and social media will be the many to many conversation medium in which you will do business. Bear in mind, there will still be one to one and one to many – but there will also be many to many, and you need to be there.

Are you ready?

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The ongoing legal wars between Nokia and Apple are heating up. Nokia is slapping Apple with another lawsuit, this time alleging that Apple’s iPhone and iPad 3G products infringe five Nokia patents. The complaint was filed in the Federal District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin.

Nokia is alleging that Apple is infringing patents that “relate to technologies for enhanced speech and data transmission, using positioning data in applications and innovations in antenna configurations that improve performance and save space, allowing smaller and more compact devices.”

In October of 2009, Nokia took Apple to court over alleged patent infringement for technology related to its GSM, UMTS, and WiFi “standards”. You can read a detailed report here. Apple then countersued Nokia, alleging a patent holdup.

It’s unclear how much grounding this lawsuit has but it’s sure to annoy Apple, who is embroiled in a patent lawsuit against HTC.

Shared by Jesse Stay
But why? ;-)

You'll recall, studious little gremlins that you are, that we recently saw the venerable first-gen iPhone prancing about with an unusual little green droid providing it with operational commands. Well, the coder behind that project, David Wang, has now stepped his game up to the iPhone 3G, which has been outfitted with an almost complete implementation of Android. Audio support is the last missing piece of the puzzle, but the groundwork has been laid and it too should be ready for some unholy Apple plus Google action within the next few days. Downloadable binaries are currently being prepared, so we thought we'd help you fill the time with a video demo of the port, which may be found just past the break.

[Thanks, Andrew]

Continue reading iPhone 3G gets an Android port to call its own (video)

iPhone 3G gets an Android port to call its own (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 May 2010 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Should You Wait to Buy an iPad? —

Should You Wait to Buy an iPad? is a post from Chris Pirillo

Here’s another impossible question to answer:

I am from Romania, I’ll be in the US for the whole month of September and I have the following question: should I get an iPad, considering it will be midway through its cycle by then or should I wait for the iPad 2G?

Before you answer that, I’ll tell you a little about myself: I love Apple products, I have a February 2008 15″ MacBook Pro (the generation right after the one you’ve just replaced), I have an iPhone 3G and I’m planning to replace it with the one coming in the summer – and I’ll be a college student in the UK starting in October.

I am not planning to ditch the MacBook, obviously, as I’ll be getting a computing degree. Nor am I going to get a new MacBook Pro because I plan on replacing the HDD in this one to a SSD so I’ll have a good notebook for about another 18 months.

So, is an iPad worth it (for me)? I am considering the 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G version, as I don’t want to be dependent upon Wi-Fi hotspots. I would like to have an iPad in order to read the school books on it, rather than purchasing or borrowing traditional books from the university’s library. Another reason would be the pure fact that I wouldn’t need to take my laptop with me to class and I could take notes on the iPad.

There’s never a great time to buy any product.

True, the iPad will have been out for a few month’s time by the time September rolls around, but I’m not sure that Apple will announce anything new that close to the Holiday season. It probably won’t be until early 2011 when we’d hear about the next iPad – and there’s no telling if it’ll be absolutely better than the model(s) available today. At least, “better” for you.

If you’re going to spend the money, get the 3G version. You aren’t forced into a subscription plan, and you’ll have Assisted GPS to boot. You can always sell what you buy at some point – and most Apple hardware has great resell value.

Even people who thought they could wait… couldn’t.

• Apple and Adobe: Where is the Common Ground?
• iPad Fingerprints
• Still Think the iPad Sucks?
• Why Do Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod not Use Adobe Flash?
• Backwards Compatibility Isn’t Viable with Hardware
• iPhone OS 4.0 Beta Video
• Why You Don’t Want an iPad
• How Does iTunes Work on the iPad?
• The Future of Apple
• Why Isn’t Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPod, iPad?