Thursday, September 05, 2002

Want to go wireless? Here's some ideas... Going wireless with your laptop or Pocket PC is a difficult choice. Geographic areas, providers and technologies (not to mention the actual service plans!) are all different and difficult for a non-specialist (or heck, even a specialist) to understand. A friend of mine, Mr. Phillip Torrone of flashenabled.com and pocketpcmagic.com, has put together a very nice wireless provider overview here. Be sure to check it out! 10:09:36 PM

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

The day ended with a bang... Interesting light program day at the PPC Summit. Ended with kind of a bang when there was a bit of a public disagreement between the last presenter, analyst Todd Kort of Gartner Dataquest and one of the conference organizers. I should say, that one of the conference organizers was not happy with the way the information was being presented (he thought it was presented as bashing Microsoft) and basically told the presenter so in front of the whole audience. Now, I obviously have a lot of affection for the Pocket PC, and have chosen it over Palm, but it doesn't stop me from recommending Palm where it makes sense but still championing Pocket PC. I think balanced knowledge is important to ensure that you can present a credible perspective to people. However, all of the people attending the Summit are big people and able to understand what the presenter was trying to do, and indeed, what he thought he was supposed to do: present the state of the handheld industry as he saw it. This was not necessarily how the presentation was billed (it was supposed to be "The Anatomy of the Pocket PC Industry," but in Mr. Kort's view, that was a much broader subject) and people (and the conference organizer) were a bit thrown off by the change. I say "as he saw it" because he appeared to be badly misinformed about a number of Pocket PC features and capabilities and seemed to be a bit biased toward Palm (or blind toward PPC features). As an occasional consumer of Gartner research output in my technical analysis work (and knowing how much it costs!) it is a source of deep consternation to me when it becomes evident to me that one of their analysts does not appear to have all his ducks in a row. My axe to grind with him was when he presented the 'street price' of the Palm m515 as $325 and used that in a comparision with Pocket PC prices. My favorite example of where the consumer market for Palm and Pocket PC meet is in the m515 and Toshiba e310 comparison. In the real world (and I do expect Palm to lower this price fairly soon) both devices sell for $399; e.g. you walk into an Office Depot or CompUSA, the price of both devices is $399. Mr. Kort's suggestion of a $325 street price for the m515 was supported by only one online retailer, called something like BuyDig.com. Certainly some other sites showed prices below $399, but all large retailers were in the range of $399 down to $375 or so. $325 is the single lowest available price, and not necessarily from a retailer that will make most people comfortable. I hope Mr. Kort reevaluates his information and delves deeper into the other platforms. Still, no reason for him to have been interrupted in the middle of his presentation. Any disagreements should have waited until the end. 8:22:18 PM     Hello from the Pocket PC Summit! Had a great day yesterday exploring the Independence Mall area of Philadelphia. The conference begins at 1pm today for kind of a light day. 7:35:26 AM

Sunday, May 26, 2002

Now in Chicago, waiting for the plane to Philadelphia. Nice weather here! Though O'Hare's certainly more crowded than Seattle, the volumes are nothing like a normal day. 5:24:43 PM     Waiting to fly... It's amazing how quiet the airport is when you fly on the Sunday of a three-day holiday weekend. Even through security, it was maybe 10 minutes from garage to gate. (Okay, maybe 15 minutes.) Sea-Tac is slowly becoming a very nice airport as the facilities are upgraded and the decor is generally improved. I suppose in a few years it will look kind of dated. Flying to Chicago and then connecting to Philadelphia; looking forward to seeing Philadelphia for the first time. For some reason, I resist using the term 'Philly.' It's like I don't want to be too familiar before we're introduced or something! 8:26:40 AM

Saturday, May 25, 2002

Pocket PC Summit - May 28-31 - Philadelphia (http://www.pocketpcsummit.com) Headed to Philadelphia in the morning to attend the Pocket PC Summit. There are a couple of Pocket PC-specific shows now (the Summit and there was one called Pocket PC NY) - this is the second PPC Summit; the first was held October 2001 in LA. From what I heard, the PPC NY one was rather sparsely attended but the first PPC Summit was very well attended, especially when you consider what happened a month earlier. As I'm pretty well attached (not well-known, but well-attached) to the Pocket PC universe, I will see a bunch of friends there and get to attend a couple of days of conferences. I'll help out at the Microsoft booth during the trade show portion (which runs concurrently with the last two days of the conference) and cover my friend Dale Coffing (http://www.pocketpcpassion.com) while he's out doing panels and stuff like that. I believe the exhibit hall passes are free if obtained from the Summit website, so if you're in the area, hop over on Thursday or Friday to the Loews Philadelphia Hotel to see what's new! 6:40:42 PM     Trying a mail-to-weblog tool on Radio 8.0. Using hotpop.com for POP3 email since Radio deletes (!) all email from the account; wouldn't want to use my regular one! Radio uses a "secret subject" to enable posting to the account. Any email to the target account containing the secret subject is posted. With this tool, it's easy to post using SMS or mail from PDAs, as well as webmail access from public computers. 10:06:47 AM     Okay, well, here it is. What everyone else is doing; a weblog. I don't know if I really have anything interesting or different to say, but what the heck, someone might want to read it. My personal technology interests are pretty much anything small or wireless (even better if small AND wireless) and I've been very fortunate to be able to play with devices like this and write about the technology (for a private consulting firm). I hope you will find some of this information (I promise, soon to come!) useful. 9:14:34 AM

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