Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Well it seems like the floodgates are opening. Another new announcement, this time from Microsoft and PalmOne, has the Treo community astir. Somehow PalmOne has convinced the company that has been competing with it for years (via its PocketPC platform), to provide its “ActivSynch” technology for use on non-PocketPC devices like the upcoming Treo 650. Basically what this will provide is the ability to synch the data contained on an exchange server, including email, appointments, tasks, etc., much like the Blackberry. Research In Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, recently said that their software would be available for the Treo “soon” so you can bet RIM’s alliance with PalmOne had at least some affect on motivating MS to provide a competing product ASAP.

The article I’m linking to (it’s no longer online) speculates that this agreement may presage a future where PalmOne actually moves away from PalmSource, the company that provides the operating system software for PalmOne’s hardware like the Treo. They used to be one and the same company at one time. I don’t see that happening any time soon, although Sony, which was making PalmOS devices (their Clie brand) recently decided to switch to pocketPC, so I suppose anything’s possible in this marketplace!

As I’ve mentioned, I currently already synch my email exchange-hosted email on my Treo 600 via a push/imap client called Chatter. It doesn’t synch Tasks or Appointments, though, and for now, for me, that’s ok. It’s a pretty inexpensive program and is available right now, but I’m sure I will be taking a look at the solutions from MS and RIM unless they are prohibitively priced!

It just amazes me that in one short year since the Treo 600 has come out, it’s been able to attract software support from two large competitors! With the Treo 650 about to come out, I can only see more companies jumping on the bandwagon and trying to provide services and software for what seems to be becoming (if it already hasn’t) the most popular smartphone/convergence device on the market today.

Update: A piece just posted on Gizmodo reveals a couple of new pieces of info about this. First, the Treo 650’s will ship with ActiveSync capabilty out of the box, sweet, and secondly, it doesn’t look like this will be made available to current Treo 600 users, bummer!

Ok, maybe this isn’t exactly a PMP, but it’s definitely worth a look. Sandisk has just announced a device they are calling “Photo Album” that will serve multiple purposes, such as being a standard memory card reader, an MP3 player (MP3 being the only audio format it supports), and a “photo album.” It also plays Mpeg-1 files, but no MPEG-4. It’s an interesting idea, but one that probably still needs a bit of work. For one, there is no internal memory, so in order to play anything, one has to save it onto a memory card first, then insert it into the device. Not a big deal if you have a digital camera and can just take the card you’ve been using in the camera and plug it in, but what if you want to listen to MP3’s too? In other words you are faced with the dilemma that in order to use the device for multiple purposes you really should buy multiple memory cards. Yes, it’s possible to store photos and MP3’s on the same card, but I’d rather keep things separate. Memory prices are going down, so you could buy a couple of 1GB cards for under $100 each and put 300 or more songs on one and a similar number of high-res images on another. Or, if you resize and compress your images a bit, you could fit 3,000 or more on the same card. The one problem with viewing pictures on it is that it doesn’t have a screen! That’s right! The idea is you plug it into any TV and watch the pictures on that. Due to the need for a TV (or computer) and the size being a little bit bulky (not huge but not really something you could easily fit in your pocket), I wouldn’t really call this a portable solution. The other downside when it comes to viewing pictures is that it only displays jpegs. That’s fine for most consumers, but for more serious amateurs or professionals, the ability to view raw format files is pretty important. Luckily, my current camera has the ability to produce a highly-compressed jpeg image in addition to the main raw format file, but then again my camera, like most digicams that have come out over the last 4 years (maybe all?), it has a video cable that will let you connect it to a TV, thus negating the need for a separate device for doing this. The nice thing about this device is that it is fairly inexpensive at $50, so one could think of it as simply as a card reader with some extra functionality tacked on that could be very useful. But unless I’m in the market for a new card reader and this is discounted to no more than $20 more than a plain card reader, I’m probably not going to even consider it…

Just a quick note to update folks on the impending partnership between Tivo and Netflix, since I wrote about it earlier. According to this article, the companies have always had close ties. I know Tivo already teams up with cable companies and satellite companies to provide units that have both the DVR and receiver in one unit, but it will be interesting to see how these various forms of content delivery and storage systems meld and overlap with one another to create a method that is optimally convenient. Then again, maybe what would be most useful would be to have different forms of content delivery and storage, giving people more choices. There are obvious pros and cons to one over another, so why not have them all available?

Most of the “convergence” devices out there involve the telephone and the computer, but not the TV, or at least not the broadcast part of TV – more just the element of TV as a monitor for playing pre-recorded video. But Sanyo, anyway, looks like they may introduce a phone with an honest-to-goodness TV tuner, and a digital one at that. The fact that it’s digital means that it could theoretically display high-definition content, although for a screen the size of matchbook, I hardly think you would be able to tell the difference.

Live broadcasts are something that’s so far been somewhat missing in such devices. Sure you can go up online and look at news on a website, or you can even have SMS messages sent to you with news headlines and brief stories. But the immediacy of live TV or even Radio just hasn’t made it. Since we’ve had portable TV’s for at least a couple of decades and portable radios for a lot longer, it’s a bit surprising to me. I mean portable radios have gotten so miniscule that adding them to a phone would mean little if any additional real estate.

What’s really needed for all of these devices is a screen that will make viewing a pleasure rather than a chore of squinting. The screen would have to use technology we currently don’t see in consumer devices but which has been developed and probably will be coming out some time in the next 5 or 10 years. The technology is called “liquid polymers” and it allows displays that are thin, flexible, and cheap. Theoretically these screens could be folded or rolled so that you could carry them inside of a small device or phone that could fit in your pocket or belt, but when you wanted to watch something for a longer period (not just a quick check to see who’s calling, etc.), then you’d just open the compartment, and unfold the screen and all of a sudden you have a monitor-sized screen but with the dimensions and weight of a piece of paper. Pretty damn cool!