Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Originally posted on the BIF Speak blog.

Walt Mossberg continued his conversations on day 2 of BIF-3, bringing storyteller Clayton Christensen up on stage. It was refreshing to see Christensen say that the cell phone is poised to disrupt the personal computer because I’m a firm believer in that, too. What was really fun for me was the conversation about Nokia vs. Apple. If you’ve gotten a coffee or a beer in me, you’ve probably heard me rant on and on about this, but never as articulate as Christensen and Mossberg. Now you’re all in trouble, because I think I can speak more lucidly and loudly about this.

Christensen said his money is on Nokia to build a platform that disrupts the personal computer. Mossberg replied that Nokia has made several tries to do this, and they all sucked. I completely agree with Christensen, and even with Mossberg (who, for the record, made it clear he wasn’t placing bets). I have two phones in my pocket at all times: a Nokia 6290 and an Apple iPhone. When geeks ask me which cell phone they should buy, I give them a rundown on the issues and a little demo. The first thing I tell them is that if they are a geek and love tinkering with things and hacking them to do stuff that they won’t do out of the box, get a Nokia phone (but don’t get the 6290; I got it because it was the cheapest phone I could find running the latest version of the webkit browser). Then I tell them that both platforms use the same wonderful web browser, WebKit, which is the engine that powers both Safari and the S60 Browser.

There’s no question that the iPhone is a powerful product, and it’s going to get better. But my money’s on Nokia, too, for pretty much the same reasons Christensen has. Christensen said that the iPhone is a sustaining innovation: it keeps the iTunes Music Store platform alive in the face of more and more cellular companies competing with Apple on music downloads. But if you pick up a high end Nokia phone today and spend time tinkering with it… I mean really spend the time: download some of the 3rd-party software for it, mess around with Nokia’s Python interpreter, tweak every setting, and maybe even look at the free SDK and write a Hello, World. What I think you’ll see is a simmering cauldron of disruptive innovation, with a not-so-pretty user interface.

If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, let me jog your memory. What is Mac OS X? It’s a simmering cauldron of not-so-pretty disruptive innovation: FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, the GNU Compiler Collection, the Apache web server, and much more. What Apple did was take a beautiful user interface (NEXTSTEP), make it even better, and put it on top of that mess. What happens when Nokia takes that crucial step?

update: I spoke with Walt Mossberg during the break, and he made an important point. It’s wrong to look at Mac OS X as just a pretty face on top of a mess of random bits, and what I wrote above frames it that way. The NEXTSTEP-derived bits that make Mac OS X so wonderful are a really thick part of the whole stack. And likewise, it would be wrong to look at Nokia’s Series 60 as just a mess of disjoint components; it has many usable bits, particular the S60 web browser, high on up the stack. Nokia still has a lot of work ahead of it. If I were them, I’d stop with the feature set they have now, and spend all my resources on making a user interface as good or better than the iPhone. This doesn’t mean changing their icons or rearranging the layout of controls. They need to refactor things in such a way that usability permeates the Series 60 operating system.

At first, it seemed incredible that a bug like this could find its way into a shipping product, and it becomes even more annoying when you realize you probably won’t see a fix for it until you buy another phone. But there’s probably a simple explanation for it, and the fact is, everything works fine for a lot of people (but I’m going to stop just short of apologizing for Microsoft, because it’s annoying the hell out of me).

The problem is this: when you delete items from certain IMAP servers, they don’t stay deleted. My guess is that this is common on IMAP servers like the one I use, where everything is organized under one top-level folder (INBOX, in my case). When the Smartphone’s Pocket Inbox goes to create Deleted Items (or whatever folder it wants) in the root of my IMAP space, it fails and so does the delete.

So, there’s a simple workaround: use the move option (right menu, 5) to move it to your trash folder (in my case, INBOX.Trash), and then do a sync (right menu, 9). I have a feeling this problem would go away if I could tell Pocket Inbox to use INBOX as the top-level IMAP folder, though.

If you’re going out to the Maker Faire, be sure to drop by the Hacks booth and say howdy. I’ll be bringing some goodies related to a few of our hacks books, and there will be plenty of toys you can mess around with.

My favorite Palm app these days is ChatterEmail. It’s a top-notch email client for PalmOS. What I love most about it is that it plays incredibly well with IMAP. It works well with my IMAP store, which has a couple of dozen folders and probably takes up well over a GB of disk space. And it keeps getting better: the developer of ChatterEmail, Marc Blank, has just started a blog to let his users keep up with development.

I’m getting ready to upgrade to a 15″ PowerBook, so I’ll be leaving the ranks
of 12″ users pretty soon. To ease the burden on my wallet, I’m selling a few
things. Here are some things I’ve put up on eBay:

• Pocket PC with
  GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi adapters

• Compaq
  Internet Appliance with Linux and Wi-Fi; this is hard to describe, so see
  my post
  from the other day for links.

Here’s some stuff that’s going up on eBay soon, unless someone makes an offer
before then (send mail to stuff <at> jepstone <dot> net):

• Palm m125 with Bluetooth adapter
• Texas Instruments TI-92
  Plus calculator

• D-Link
  DI-713P 802.11b Access Point, 3-port hub, and print server

• Some miscellaneous PC100 SO-DIMMs

The Compaq IA-1 is a neat little machine, and I have one of these
gathering dust in my basement. I’m thinking of putting it up on eBay,
but I figured I’d load it up with an interesting operating system before
I do that. So, here’s what a quick Google search turned up for me:

• TechTV
  | Compaq iPAQ Home Internet Appliance IA-1

• I-Appliance
  BBS

• IA1Hacking.com
• The Guardian’s [How
  Not To Use The] Compaq IA1 links…

The
Merlin G100 I recently picked up on eBay works great on Mac OS X
10.3. I
plugged it into a 400MHz PowerBook G3, and it instantly recognized it as
a pccard-serial port. I used Macron software’s
GPRS Script Generator to bang out a quick script, and it worked
perfectly. The speed is pretty nice (about 40kbps) and the modem feels
less flaky on my Mac than it does on my ThinkPad (I need to remove and
reinsert it on the ThinkPad in between connections).

Something I just came across on eBay; quite a
few sellers have the T-Mobile/VoiceStream
Merlin G100 GPRS card for around $50. I believe most, if not all of
these, are locked to the T-Mobile network and I don’t know if there’s a
way to unlock them. Here’s
the auction I picked one up from for $49. This is a lot cheaper
than the $249 that T-Mobile asks for the Sierra
Wireless AirCard 750, although the AirCard has more features than the
G100. Still, $50 vs. $250–not bad if you’re looking
for a cheap card to use once in a while. I’ll let you all know how it
works after I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Update: the card works great. Linux sees it as /dev/ttyS2. It
didn’t respond to my AT+CGDCONT command at first (well, it responded,
but with an error), so I removed and reinserted the card. I’m typing
this over a GPRS connection using the card right now. This was $50
well spent (and the fastest-shipping eBay purchase I’ve ever had; won on
Friday, the seller sent it out on Saturday, and I got it Monday).

I bought a Nokia 6200 a while back so I could play around with EDGE, but I
really hate the Nokia DKU-5 data cable. The only computer I could get it to
work with was a Windows PC, and the Mac absolutely hated it. So, I dropped
about $70 on SmithMicro’s
QuickLink Mobile Mac, and I have no regrets. The cable’s USB->Serial
converter identifies itself as a Prolific PL2303, which works great under
Mac OS X using the driver that SmithMicro supplies. Another pleasant
surprise was that Linux is happy to talk to it if you have the pl2303 module
compiled into your kernel.

Where else, but in a weblog named 3650
and a 12-inch, would you expect to find some insight into that error
(”App. closed AppArcServerThread”) message that pops up on some users’
Nokia 3650s (including mine) during iSync?