Always Innovating Touchbook – this thing comes with a variety of OS installations on it one can choose including Ubuntu and Android. You can order it with the netbook-ish keyboard part or just as a tablet PC. It has a nice set of core specifications but you will need to compare it against others. The variety of what OS to boot is very neat though. Ubuntu is so danged upgradeable and it ain’t your cousin’s legacy OS.

Notion Ink Adam Tablet – check this one carefully! The screen real estate is gorgeous and its propelled by android.

These two may not even be on the power curve but they offer a degree of flexibility and use which I think are compelling. The touchbook seems to offer a choice of OS’es which is growing while the Adam’s screen looks totally wowsers.

How does the recently announced iPad compare? Not sure; since I don’t intend on comparing it. I’m not a fanbois so the idea of no USB port, no flash, a “so big” ipad touch really does not do much for me. The new tablets will offer expandability, OS choices, ability to upgrade the core OS through multiple revisions and I can watch pron and load up a wifi finder as well. I also don’t need cousin Steve telling me what I can and cannot do on my device. I’m a big boy now. If I want to watch this or that and load it from an app store, I think I can make a reasonable choice. Even if I cannot; who is apple to tell me what I can or cannot do.

Is the iPad a “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price”? Doubtful. Evolution in cultures and technology happen in a few ways I believe. Cultures either adapt gradually to change or they bump quickly along in a punctuated equilibrium. What does this product produce for the evolution of our technology? Choose wisely and well. If you choose the iPad, well done folks. If not, look at the options and do your selective shopping best.

Big question… Can you jailbreak a iPad?

1. Its a tablet but it runs a phone OS.
2. You can run all the iPhone applications but you have to run them sequentially.
3. It will browse the web but you cannot watch flash on it.
4. You can read books on it but you cannot do anything else.
5. It will not do USB unless you buy expensive dongle-age.

Geez, then you gotta see what happens when Hitler heard about it. Thanks to Rich for this one,

Yeah Baby!

I’ll just run right out and get one now. What a sad waste of years of waiting. I’ll stick to my decidedly inferior netbook running Windows 7 which has a 250g hard disk drive in it that can do all the things that the iPad cannot. Even reading ebooks. This is an extremely sorry device and I cannot wait for the Linux community to root the thing and give it some meaning. If I were rich I would put a bounty on it and get a savvy Linux hacker a small fortune to put debian on it or something. Then it becomes useful.  It would mount file shares, run office applications, be a real convergence device or something. But hell no. It runs a phone OS. Back to one of the points above.

Edit 2.5

The so many thousand reasons why the iPad is so disappointing. Read them and weep. Some of the reasons may be BS. Others may be distorted or be a case like with me of pure and distinct Apple dislike fever; but other people may have purchased one until they heard about a few of my salient points above. Steve needs to gather the fanbois and do a state of the ipad presentation like Obama just did for the nation. He could tell us why:

1. Its okay for the iPad to run a phone OS.
2. That people really don’t want to load content directly
3. That iTunes itself is not evil and people should be glad to have the Outlook of digital media available
4. That iTunes is the only way now to sync data

That last few are really deal killers for me. I tried valiantly to get away from iTunes and it libmusicmangle.so approach.

I also went with Art to the Akihabara Electric Town in Tokyo. Imagine a place you can walk into a tiny stall and ask for something like “type 10035 dual home toggle switch with backlighting” and the guy knows what you want. The bigger thing is that Art knew what one was too. Art is the Gizmo Guy!

On Wednesday morning I board the financially bankrupt JAL but still possessed of some of the best in-flight service (bar Singapore Airlines and perhaps ANA) and head on back to the home frontier. A few things await me there like a Nexus One phone and three calls from AT&T offering an iPhone upgrade to my almost ended ATT account. I think you know my answer. Not interested. I’ll stick with the prepaid sim card thing I got going now.

After a week here, I fly out to Singapore next Friday for 5 days and then back home again. Not like my earlier trips where i stay gone for months at a time. Around mid-February, I will depart again for Singapore and India for engineering meetings, work and deliverables execution, and other stuff. I’ll be on the road it appears every 45 days for this year. That’s fine for me.

First night after flying 16 hours is kinda strange. I slept or rather fell unconscious for about 6 hours. I slept on the 6 hour plane ride from Narita to Hanoi. Luckily the flight to Hanoi was not too crowded so I had two seats to myself so I could stretch out.

This trip, I’m going with no real books. Instead, since I am an inveterate reader; I’m going with the world kindle. Folks tend to ask me all sorts of questions about it. Yes, its easier than lugging around 2 or 3 pounds of books. Battery life is decent. It links to my regular amazon account. Books are downloaded to it automatically. If you travel; its worth the savings in weight.

I also purchased a Lenmar 4 port international USB charger which lets me charge phone, iPod, kindle and even my PSP at the same time. Very handy. This is a great deal if you travel frequently. Just remember to carry the slightly different USB cables. Beats the heck out of carrying little travel chargers with plugs, etc.

Today, I find a cheapo Vietnam Simcard to use while here and also just rest a bit after the flight. Going to have breakfast here in a bit and take a look around the hotel boundaries. Maybe take some photo’s to add to my flickr stream.

Finally, don’t travel with the wrong OS on that computer folks. Leave Windows at home and use Ubuntu. Easier to manage, update, deal with strange networks. I’ve found Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 to be a very handy and capable OS. If you cannot do this; how about using a live CD instead? No real tracks of what you did, banking, etc. Give it some thought. Do you really need all that fluff and stuff on Windows 7? Probly not

I’m sitting at SFO in the International Terminal patiently waiting for my JAL flight to Narita and then on to Hanoi. Its pretty exciting since I have never been there. After a week or so in Hanoi, I fly over to Singapore for some days for work. Perhaps meet Art there for drinks at Raffles Long Bar.

Happy New Years folks. Hope you all have a happy and profitable year in 2010. If you went to Vegas in 2009, don’t worry. Its all forgotten and in the past…

Let the man go.

The ETC…

I always add one. I got my Moto Milestone and I’m stuck in a loving mood with it. Its a great device, has this kinda strange and quirky good looks. It does the phone thing well; but is that the only reason we truly get Android devices? I think we want them because we are discriminating and we don’t want stupid Apple phones that only come in one flavor, one hardware type, with no flashing of ROMs. There is no root on this phone (yet) but we saw the same thing happen when I bought my HTC Magic from Airtel in India. Inside of a month, the phone was rooted and we had great customized ROMs on it. It all takes time.

You may be tempted to think that its the same as the Verizon Droid; but it ain’t. Its unlocked which is the only kinda phone I’ll buy any more. It did have the battery cover issue which I fixed today thanks to this video:

It Works!! Thanks Droidsters!

• Stage 1. You need authority and links. You want to surf that wave and become the next great technorati author. Recognized, listed, linked to and from.
• Stage 2. Non bloggers discuss your blogposts in forum posts. Wow! Basically someone has taken the time to find your valuable meanderings and include something that you wrote. I published this one post once on using Mutt with gmail’s imap support and got a few emails back from non-bloggers about it. Very cool and it felt quite right.
• Stage 3. Everyone knows you and you reach the zenith and people just quote your words. When you reach this level, you don’t even have to really blog anymore. People know what you are gonna say before you even blog it. Omnipotent powers; but be careful. Don’t be like the guy on Friends and think I just said “impotent”.
• Stage 4 to 98. Variations on above…
• Stage 99. Well, you’ve reached the climactic and final stages of blogging nirvana. Now it occurs to you that none of those other stages really mattered. Links and authority, everyone knowing your name, non-bloggers knowing you. What you are writing is for the pure joy of writing because you want to and can. There is no ultimate reward of the blogosphere. No big circus tent or award show for the best and brightest. No emmy’s or oscar’s. Just the honest feeling you get and that each thing you write does not have to mean a damned thing.

Its my birthday so I can write on the wall of my apache server any damned thing I want. I don’t want honesty. I am not terribly honest at times and I lack other things too. The things which if I had I would not be human. I am not terribly social and I’ve known it for a long time. I’m what a rather famous archeologist called me once: “a somewhat private person; shy; with some brightness”. Thanks Phil!

Always seems like there is something new with the Android OS devices which is cool to figure out, hack on, make it work. Ubuntu Karmic has turned out to be a very nice operating system on my laptops and desktops. No real problems on my x64 desktops and my thinkpad T60 laptops. This whole ubuntu thing is getting really good. Windows on the other hand; is only marginal. I don’t think that Windows 7 is that much better than anything else that MS has ever done. Its just another in the long line of consumer OS’es built for a large market share of less than demanding users. I think the problem really is that everyone using Windows are consumers of Windows and not really users. With Ubuntu Karmic its too easy to boot Windows in VirtualBox, run Outlook 2007 when I need to; but leave it all when I travel and just have a much more robust and stable system running Linux. Linux is just better and always will be.

Finally, all the travel still leaves me a bit jet-lagged. I get tired earlier and wake up at strange hours. Hopefully that ends soon. I’ll be leaving for Singapore and Chennai again in February for 2 weeks. Maybe do a r&r trip to Thailand this time. Have to wait and see. Was also thinking of going to Kyoto for a few days. I love Japan.

• Allow non market applications on your phone.
• Download and place flashrec on the SD Card.
• Download recovery image for Hero like Amon Ra’s from XDA and place on SD Card.
• Install the Linda File Manager from the market (not sure what to do with no market like some HTC’s. Perhaps find on slideme.org).
• Boot the phone and run Linda. Select the flashrec apk package and install.
• Now select the Recovery Image and install from flashrec. You have to manually enter the name of the name of the recovery image and then flash it to the phone.
• Now take the update.zip for the ROM image and put it on the sd card (rename the file downloaded from Modaco and rename)
• Flash the update.img

Done, bingo, voila. Does this sound complex? Well, it took me 15 minutes to get this done and have a rooted Hero ROM. Why have a rooted ROM? Well, if you travel and need the Android Market Enabler; she will not work for you without root. If you want to use an application which needs to “su to root”, no way. So its worth it having a rooted ROM on the phone. Much easier than the Goldcard method and not really needed anyways.

Thanks to all the guys at XDA, Paul at Modaco, and the folks that made flashrec. Some day HTC will close this little back door for root happiness. But for now; installing a rooted ROM and not worrying about the rest is pretty easy and takes all of 15 minutes.