Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I am no big fan of low carb food products that try to mimic high-carb foods like bread, candy, pancakes, and countless others. They tend to be highly processed with dubious claims based on the iffy status of sugar alcohols. Nevertheless, the recent decision by Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to outlaw any kinds of supplemental labeling that denotes the Atkins approval or even signaling that the product is low in carbs is, in my opinion, just unfair.

Has labeling signaling the lack of fat (even in nutritionally bereft foods like candy) been banned too? If not, then to be fair, it should be as well. As it stands, manufacturers will have to relabel lots of product and what’s on shelves now will become illegal to sell. Will manufacturers decide that it’s worth it to take the effort to relabel their product and then try to sell it when they can’t even advertise what is admittedly a major selling point for the millions of low-carb dieters out there?

Perhaps the end effect, even if it does strip Canadian consumers of options, is a double-edged sword. Low-carb dieters, especially those fairly new to it and who haven’t bothered to understand the mechanics behind a healthy low-carb plan, often tend to use these products as a crutch to continue to eat the way they feel accustomed to instead of truly adopting a new way of thinking about food and nutrition – a more holistic and natural way that involves few processed foods and mainly whole foods like veggies, fruits, meat, fish, poultry, nuts, etc. On the other hand, these products do have their place as an occasional treat instead of the full-carb alternative. The danger is that consumers see “low-carb” and decide this means they can eat as much as they want, just as consumers did with low-fat products.

What gets me is that these Canadian Agencies just used a U.S.-based entity, the Institute of Medicine (this was the first time I’d heard of them) to make this decision. Not only that but the recommendations from this institute that they are following came out a couple of years ago, before many studies supporting a controlled-carbohydrate regimen were published. So the science backing this not only is unoriginal, and only coming from one point of view, but in addition is old! Plus it almost seems like these agencies are renouncing responsibility for doing any work themselves by using someone else’s recommendation.

The regulations are said to take affect in December of 2005, by which time there will be even more studies out, and the recommendations that are the basis for these regulations will then be over three years old! It will be interesting if, as has happened over the last year or two, even more nutritional and medical experts start looking critically at the old assumptions of carbohydrate-centric diets as the model and decide that there may just be some benefits to controlling carb intake.

Update: Katherine Prouty at Low Carb Fredom also posted a piece about this (thanks for the link, Katherine!), with links to lots of scietific studies that support a reduction in carbs for health and weight loss.

Well, after driving me and countless other Sidekick users away due to their idiotic and anti-customer policy of not offering a product that had already been developed, T-Mobile has finally decided to offer Outlook Synch for this device. Unfortunately it is just too late for many of us, and really a slap in the face to those who fought so hard to get this capability only to be told that it wouldn’t happen.

For those few who are unfamiliar with this debacle, Danger, the company that designed the Sidekick, promised the capability for users to synchronize (or “synch”) their phone’s information (contacts, to-do’s, appointments, etc.) with popular personal information management software like Microsoft’s Outlook. Back in August of 2002, right before the first black and white Sidekick was released, Danger said that synch would be available “soon.” Rumors and unofficial responses from the company for the next year or so promised that synch was just around the corner. Finally, in the Spring of this year, it was learned that at least one mobile provider outside of the U.S. was already offering this capability. In other words, it had been developed and implemented elsewhere, but T-Mobile, for some reason, was refusing to offer it to their customers. Neither Danger nor T-Mobile would comment on when synch would come out or why it wasn’t currently being offered. I myself decided to make this issue a bit more public and so I initiated an online petition to get T-Mobile to offer Synch. This finally garnered the first official comment from T-Mobile: “Sidekick was chosen for its appeal to consumers who want one integrated, standalone communication solution at an unparalleled value. We are aware of the petition and continue to evaluate new Sidekick offerings, but at this time, do not have plans to launch PIM synch.”

Of course, this comment made it clear to many, including myself, that T-Mobile could not be relied on to EVER offer synch. Maybe they would, but there was no guarantee, and since it had been years since first promised and months since it had been offered through other carriers, the possibility seemed remote at best.

Because of this, when a friend offered me his Treo 600 (the Palm platform has offered synch since it’s first models from almost 10 years ago) for a much discounted price, I jumped at the chance. I wrote a review of how the Treo 600 compares to the Sidekick, and at least for me, the Treo won the battle.

Now the Sidekick II has been released, and with it this synch software. While this is finally a big step in the right direction, it does seem like a slap in the face to previously loyal Sidekick users who clamored for this functionality for years only to be told coldly that there were no plans to offer it despite it having already been developed and implemented on other carriers’ services. The Sidekick II promises to be a much better device than it’s predecessors even aside from the synch issue, but the Sidekick platform as offered by T-Mobile has some inherent problems that just aren’t seen with the Treo, or for that matter any Palm or PocketPC-based phones.

The main issue here is competition. Most phone manufacturers provide their devices to multiple carriers. Danger, on the other hand, was too small to go it alone and received heavy funding from one company - T-Mobile. Because of this T-Mobile is still the only Carrier to provide the phone in the U.S. (at least in markets that it competes in). T-Mobile has basically been able to hold the Sidekick hostage. It makes the decisions of what to offer when, and in too many cases this means deciding not to offer something for unknown or blatently selfish reasons. Other than synch, the example that comes to mind is the ability that was developed almost a year ago in an operating system update that would have allowed users to use any sound file as a “ringtone.” One could have recorded various people or oneself saying “John is calling,” send it as an email attachment, and then use it as a ringtone for when John called. But T-Mobile didn’t want this, they wanted to sell customers ringtones at $1-2 or more a pop, and giving users the ability to do this might have allowed them to actually record songs they owned and transfer them to their Sidekick, oh my! So the capability was hastily deleted before the update was released to the general customer base.

The other big problem around the Sidekick and T-Mobile’s domination of the device has been application development. The “catalog” was initiated almost a year ago. It was supposed to be a way for Danger to provide additional functionality to the device without going through what has become very long and drawn out process of updating the operating system. But despite setting up a big development site and many developers creating new applications for the Sidekick, the new applications came out in a pathetic trickle - perhaps one every couple of months. Many of them were games or ringtones that did not really enhance the capabilities of the device. If one signed up to be a developer, one could not only see but download some of the applications that T-Mobile was not offering, despite their obvious maturity and usefulness. Many developers ended up throwing countless hours of work away and leaving the effort because so many hoops had to be jumped through even to get consideration for their work to be considered. Compare this to the wide open development environment of the Treo (or any Palm or PocketPC device for that matter), and this situation becomes laughable, if it wasn’t so sad. The Treo 600 is not only my phone and internet device, but I also use it to run a GPS for my car, and listen to audio books, among many other things. The Sidekick may be more slick looking, but at this point in my life I would much rather choose function over form, especially when there is such an immense gulf in that area between the two devices.

That all being said, we are trying to get hold of a Sidekick II for my wife, who inherited my old Sidekick. I promised to eventually compare the Sidekick II and the next Treo (the Treo 650) when they were out. The Treo 650 isn’t out yet and I’m not sure if it will be in my budget for a while, but maybe I can find some way to get a loaner so that I can review it side-by-side with the Sidekick II, as I did with the last versions of these phones.