User Devices

We are following Bug Labs with interest.....the idea of modular component based hardware is (we reckon) potentially quite disruptive....its the antithesis to both the "you need different devices to do each thing" and the "one device fits all" schools. Anyway, here is the first little bugger out the labs.



Silicon Alley Insider is less polite, The Henry Blodgett noting that:

It is a SERIOUSLY geek toy--similar to a build-your-own-radio kit. Can't imagine he's going to sell many to end users. Is there a market in OEM-land?

I don't know...for a generation growing up with Heathkits and Meccano, what could be better

Sed the Grauniad*:

Apple’s much-hyped iPhone is prompting a rush to stores when it finally launches in the UK.

Carphone Warehouse, O2 and Apple are braced for huge queues and a surge of customers when the must-have gadget goes on sale.

and more......

Die-hard fans started queuing outside Apple’s flagship store on London’s Regent Street on Thursday morning.

Friends Graham Gilbert and Nik Fletcher huddled under umbrellas equipped with sleeping bags, food and chairs as they began their wait...

Silly boys...they could have trundled into town after a warm nights sleep, had a good coffee and panini at Pret or Costas or Starbucks, and just wandered in to buy one. Because all this hoo ha, dear reader, was pre-canned PR soup.

Yes, the UK has been completely and utterly overwhelmed by a wave of indifference towards the iPhone, as The Register points out here (and the Grauniad tries to pull back some street cred here).

Why is this....the sheer amount spent on PR, per head of population likely to buy a phone, was probably enough to buy the entire first wave a free phone each.

The reason is this - its still a cr*p deal.

Its £270 odd for the phone before "extras"** (in a country where we are used to having phones heavily subsidised), you can only use it on O2 (which has c 20% market share), and it won't do things we really want like run on 3G, make Skype calls, or hook into any WiFi network around. And as it was such a long time coming post US launch, people like 3 UK and Blyk have been able to launch "good enough" services to chip away at some of the reasons to change.

It will sell, but we predict it will sell as people come off their contracts from the other operators over the next 12 months or so, as there is just no compelling reason to switch operator to buy one yet, at that price and with that level of lock in. And as everyone knows, if you wait 6 months after launch with hyped stuff like this there will be better deals, and like DVDs, the unofficial hacks will be in place....

The Guardian article I quoted above also makes a bigger point, however (as does the New York Times here):

Until now, phones have been relatively primitive devices, so the corrupt absurdity of the closed systems operated by networks has not been obvious to most. The arrival of the iPhone lays it bare. Having an iPhone locked to a network which doesn’t provide 3G connectivity, and is unable to make VoIP calls despite having good wireless networking built in, is like buying a Ferrari and finding that the only thing you can do with it is power your lawnmower. It’s nuts - and our regulators have allowed it to happen.

I agree re the UK Regulators - Ofcom have come down on the fixed line services like a ton of bricks over the last 10 years, while at the same time allowing the mobile operators to run an effective oligopoly, and its only really the EU regulators that have fought the good fight for roaming price reduction, and even that has been painfully slow. Once again i am impressed by French law, which rules this sort of anti-competitive behaviour illegal.

* But no...they claim they did not in fact say this, merely published the news from AP under their own brand header. Tsk tsk...next time any MSM accuses the blogosphere of running with half truths ....

** £7.50 per month for theft insurance....according to O2, if you lose your iPhone and then buy another one (bear in mind there is no subsidy) you have to take out another network contract (£35+ pm) as well as keep paying on the first one. The £7.50 prevents this terrible occurrence and allows cancellation of the first contract. Says we - is that legal under UK contract law, as in theory they bear no loss on the first contract after loss of phone ?

We've been tracking the potential of the PS3 as a Superecomputer since it came out, this is a very interesting additional story

A project that harnesses the spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) to help understand the cause of diseases has entered the record books.

Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The network has more than one petaflop of computing power - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Watch this space, I don't think we've seen that last of this machine's potential. Previous posts of ours on this beastie are here and here.

Engadget has some blurb and pix of Bug Lab's first demo mockups...Bug Labs is one of the companies in the emerging area of modular (and potentially open) electronics device building, an area we have been following with some interest as the (theoretical) economics are very disruptive, especially if you add m2m capability.

This is a DiY camera kit in the picture, but you can imagine the day when you carry around your tiles and assemble them into what you need right there and then.

Time Magazine has already voted the iPhone as product of the year (with 2 months to go!), but to my mind this is potentially more revolutionary.

SanDisk has invented a Flash-using black box that allows you to save PC videos and play them on TV. It costs $150.

All very good stuff, but if people just bought TVs with VGA input this would be unnecessary - I have a very good Philips flatscreen here that does this straight from the laptop or PC.

From the, like, Hey thats cool Dept.

A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple's iPhone to AT&T's wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.

The New Jersey teen collaborated online with four other people to develop the unlocking process.

George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from San Antonio-based AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology.

While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.

And here I am in the UK with a SimCard in my hand

Respect!

He worked with 4 other people, 2 in Russia. The shape of things to come......

Read all about how to do it here.

Usually in our world, when we talk about a great rack its something to put lots of blade servers in. So, the opportunity to talk about it in the context of women's boobs* should be grasped with both hands (as it were....



Pinny Grylls, who we met at the BBC Innovation Lab thingy, is doing a series of short films for Channel 4 on....the Bra. She's asked us to pass on the good news...here's her blurb piece:

After much sweat and tears Pinny Grylls has finally finished directing her series of 4 x 3 minute films for Channel 4.

The series is entitled BRAVO! and is about THE BRA - we need the best audience figures achieved by 3 Minute Wonders EVER - so get tuning in every night of the week beginning the 13th of August to see some serious titty action...

TIGERLILY FILMS PRESENTS
BRAVO! 4 x 3 MINUTE WONDER FILMS ABOUT THE BRA ON CHANNEL 4
Dir. PINNY GRYLLS, UK, 2007, 4 x 3 MINS

In the week commencing 13TH August, Tigerlily Films present a series of films that celebrate the centenary of the invention of a woman’s most essential undergarment - The Bra. Of all garments invented by man or woman to improve their appearance only the bra truly defies nature itself, struggling against the force of gravity. This series sees us riffling through the knicker draw of brassiere history to shine some light on what makes an everyday object truly remarkable.

Film 1: The Bra Lady – 13th August 2007
It's an often-quoted fact that 80% of women are wearing the wrong size bra. Sadie 'the bra lady' Ayton has fitted over 50,000 women in her 37 year career – transforming their lives as well as their busts.

Film 2: Me, My Bra and I – 14th August 2007
Stop frame animation of real women wearing the same bra in progressing sizes together with a few home truths from women about their relationship with their bra.

Film 3: The Liberators – 15th August 2007
Did women really burn their bras? Two feminists re-visit the toe-curling wonderbra adverts of the 1970s to explore why the bra became the ‘bete noire’ of the women’s movement.

Film 4: Happy Birthday Bra – 16th August 2007
A Whistlestop tour through one hundred years of the bra! This film takes a look the changing silhouette of the bust from the invention of the bra in 1907 to the present day – from flattened flappers through to cone shaped ‘Sweater Girls’ - from Jane Russell to Eva Herzigova – for 3 minutes the bra’s ‘supporting’ role in history takes centre stage.

This series of films attempts to look sideways at the history and cultural legacy of this not-so-ordinary undergarment, exposing the secrets we tell ourselves (and others) and revealing something about humanity’s ability to shape our history – despite the constraints of reality.

Web Address:
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/B/bravo/index.html

On consideration we have filed this under "User Devices", though "Quad Play" was tempting.

* Or tits, breasts, hooters - yup, we are unashamedly going for the Porn 2.0 traffic here

We are doing a piece of work right now where the evolution of RFID and M2M (machine to machine) services is a part of it. While working on the mobile aspects of this, it occurred to us that most people conceive of the m2m device / agent / whatever as quite dumb - a pallet, a piece of inventory, a truck etc etc, and its main role is to tell something more intelligent about itself.

But what happens if the device itself is (semi) intelligent, and is using the m2m comms as much for its own purposes as much as anything else. One of the interesting insights from work on Artificial Life is that often the combinations of fairly simple rules allow very complex behaviour, and quite a high level of self organisation.

One fairly common example is where the common or garden house vacuum cleaner robot may use m2m comms to tie up with other devices to define when and where it cleans. But as Moore's law progresses these devices can all have more intelligence, and this can allow them to exhibit fairly complex capabilities even for simple devices.

For a start, they could use evolutionary algorithms to learn new tasks - like learning to fly for example:

Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error - but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.

Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.

To begin with, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated - simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut.

After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favour of a more effective flapping technique, where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down.

"This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion," says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. But while the robot had worked out how best to produce lift, it was not about to take off.

"There's only so much that evolution can do," Bentley says. "This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it," he says.

.

(report from New Scientist)

That was 2002...today, there are robots that can fly like insects - these tiny robot flies (see pic below) for example. Imagine swarms of these operating using self organising behaviour routines (flocking, direction finding etc), each built with a different type of very simple sensor.



But thats just for starters...how about this one - unmanned Aircraft with Solar cells that can in theory cruise the stratosphere in large numbers, using self organising software to keep their coverage going at high levels of reliability - who needs satellites for TV signals, mobile signals, ground surveillance with swarms of these.....the economics vs satellite (or even mobile base station networks) might be pretty interesting.

(The pic below takes it even further - using these to explore Mars)



Now...mash some ideas together - RoboFly RFIDs, Glider Grids....bears thinking about, doesn't it?

Yes, it is "way out there", but it is (theoretically) doable, and it is Friday afternoon after all.

Rumour of the day....is tomorrow Orange's turn?

Apparently no longer 3G initially....erm...whats the point then - its a tad pricey to be just a phone....?

Postscripts:

Speaking of pricey, it would seem Vodafone baulked at the price Apple were asking....

Also, seems like - as we suggested they should last week - Nokia has taken this kick in the pants to get a bit more radical...except they had even started earlier than the iPhone's release a whole few days - from their website on June 20th 2007:

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced that it will introduce a new company structure from January 1, 2008. The move, driven by Nokia's strategy, is aimed at creating an organization aligned with the opportunities Nokia sees for future growth, and to increase efficient ways of working across the company.

"The convergence of the mobile communications and internet industries is opening up new growth opportunities for us, both in the devices business as well as in consumer internet services and enterprise solutions. Growing consumer demand for rich, mobile experiences creates an opportunity for change....."

Could've told them that in June 2005 though........

Following on from our blog on the strategic implications of the iPhone, a San Fran based friend has emailed over this review he did earlier......sitting in the UK one can only envy hugely

Overall assessment..."this thing is seriously COOL"

Its worth transcribing his post in full, if only to wallow in the delight of my own misery of not having one

For background, I'm a classic gadget freak. I've had many Macs and PCs, Treos, Palms, Blackberrys - including the Pearl, and many different mobiles over the years. I've been eagerly awaiting the iPhone as my Pearl replacement. I was primarily interested in carrying my phone, Music, podcasts, DVD Rips, iCal, and Gmail with me during the day. Here are my initial thoughts:

- Fantastic, beautiful, elegant design. Very responsive UI in all apps.
- Perhaps I was lucky; moving my AT&T BB contract took ~5 mins
- Had an "invalid SIM" error 30 minutes after activation!? Powered down and reseated SIM to fix. No misbehavior since...
- Typing is initially awkward, but I'm learning quickly. 2 Thumbs will work!
- Email really needs "mark all as read" and "delete marked" commands
- Has a 2 MP camera, but only emails 640x480 resized images.
- Video camera would be great (version 2 I guess)
- Camera image quality (after fetching via iPhoto) is on par with others
- No Vibrate first, then ring. Vibrates and rings simultaneously.
- Silent/Ring switch is very useful.
- No "message waiting" LED (like blackberries have)
- Seamless, excellent WiFi
- Phone is slightly worse than Pearl at holding weak signals. My Pearl is always solid at the house even with our weak signal; the iPhone seems to oscillate from 1 to 4 bars, and drops some calls. The difference is pretty small, however. Might be due to WiFi, bluetooth, etc all running. Will test.
- Audio and Video performance is outstanding, as is the UI!
- 320x DVD rips look great (and save space). I wouldn't bother with 640x...
- Earbuds, mic, and integrated "spongy switch" work great.
- Should have (at least) included a slip case!
- Safari is the best smartphone browsing experience by a wide margin.
- Where is text iChat?!!!!
- SMS interface is a very nice iChat imitation.
- No ability to add "name, address, home phone" to welcome screen. If an honest person finds your iPhone, it's not easy to identify the owner (I put a label on the back, which really detracts...)
- Can't modify sounds used for events other than phone ringer (e.g. - mail), but can turn them off at least.
- Map app is outstanding!!! Useful as yellow pages (like Calamari ad), Used it twice today to locate a store and restaurant.
- Live traffic is cool!
- Widgets are great! We need more...
- Needs a file manager/"disk mode" (I've heard it's coming...)
- Bluetooth in my Lexus 400h worked fine, incoming and outgoing

My overall rating is a 9.5/10. The newness will wear off, but objectively, I really believe this device is a tremendous leap forward! It's the first unified device I've used that really feels truly integrated, and I suspect it will only get better with future software/firmware releases. It is really, really, well thought out, and in case you missed it before, it looks like a piece of art! Apple's competitors better crank up their R&D in a hurry...

The only conciliation is that when (if?) we get ours they allegedly will have 3G, not 2G