There are plenty of ultra-mobile computers on the market, and most of them are beleaguered little gizmos: half the size of a laptop, but also half the speed, half the storage, half a keyboard, and in short, half-assed. In that light, it's nice to spend some time with a little machine that is full of real PC capability -- even if it comes at full PC price.
It's called the Model 02, and it's made by San Fransisco-based company called OQO. The company's mission: shrink a full-scale Windows PC down to pocket size, without sacraficing usability. I'll save you the suspense: they've done it right.
The Model 02 is a full-blown Vista Business Edition PC that comes in a variety of hardware configurations. My test model was the top of the line: a power-sipping 1.6GHz VIA processor, 64GB solid state hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a whole array of pretty terrific accessories. The best extra is definitely the discrete, black docking station, which has the potential to make the OQO a complete desktop replacement with its built-in DVD burner, HDMI and VGA interfaces, USB 2.0, ethernet and audio out. Models start at $1300, but the pricetag on my model rung in at almost $3200 without the $600 accessory pack. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The 1-pound device itself is housed in a sturdy magnesium frame and sports a 5-inch screen, a 3- or 6-hour battery, and a pretty extensive little backlit keyboard with one of those little pencil-eraser tracksticks for mouse navigation. That might sound old-fashioned, but the OQO trackstick is actually a wonder of precision; the pencil-eraser has come a long way since its ubiquity a decade ago. Precision is also a hallmark of the keyboard, which has a solid feel and well-spaced keys. And while I was nerdily overjoyed to find a number pad and nice, big "enter" and "delete" keys, some of the keys are overburdened with two or three different functions that are somewhat dizzyingly associated with the shift, function, and control keys. (Witness the poor question mark, which shares a key with the forward slash and the wireless dashboard shortcut, oddly displaced to left of the spacebar.) You can also use a Wacom tablet pen for touch-screen input, though I was content with the trackstick and keyboard for most applications.
You might have chortled a bit when I mentioned this thing runs Vista Business Edition -- I did too. But after speaking with Bob Rosin, SVP of Marketing at OQO, I can understand their rationale: Vista has much quicker wake-up time from its standby mode than does XP, and it has pretty advanced power management abilities to boot. With Aero and a lot of other superfluous junk turned off, it runs admirably on the Model 02 and rarely lags. Of course, OQO has baked in a lot of custom functionality to make Vista useful on such a particular device; the most salient example is their Wireless Dashboard, which allows you to quickly switch between WiFi, Bluetooth and integrated mobile broadband (which is an option, and works with Sprint or Verizon service plans). There are also zoom keys on the keyboard that allow you to, well, zoom in or out on whatever you're viewing on the OQO's screen, and a "rotate" function that turns the screen to display in vertical portrait mode. In such a high-end device, I would have expected a built-in accelerometer that could do this without neccessitating a button-press, but I was quickly placated by the touch-sensitive scrollers on the sides of the screen. They had a tendency to be jerky at times, but it was nice to be able to manipulate the screen even a little bit without rummaging for a stylus.
So, granted, it's a cool gizmo. But after the inital oohs and aahs subsided, the Model 02 didn't immediately find its niche on my desk. There it sat, between my desktop PC, my laptop, and my iPhone, its role unclear. I stared at it. Not as handy for email as a smartphone, and more frustrating for word processing than a laptop. Where did the little guy fit?
As it turns out, it's not worth trying to wedge the Model 02 between your existing suite of gadgets, because it really works better as a replacement for all of them. It took me a week to figure this out, detaching my monitor from its tower, putting the laptop away and using the docking station to make the OQO both my desktop and on-the-road PC. When on the road, the iPhone still handled quick internet excursions, but when it came time to book a hotel room on the train, or write a long-winded email to my sister in Europe, out came the Model 02. Back in its docking station, the Model 02 left little to be desired from my other PCs; only when it came time to do some work in Adobe CS did I retreat to my Core 2 Duo laptop.
It's worth mentioning that the more specialized the application, the more useful the Model 02 has the potential to be. For the average person, who travels only occasionally and does most of their work from a desk, it's hard to justify a device like the Model 02 -- especially considering its potentially astronomical cost. But for someone like, say, a journalist -- typing up notes from the field or examining digital photos to make sure you got the shot before you head home -- it can be invaluable. This isn't lost on OQO, which offers several accessory packs tailor-made for different professional applications. Logistics coordinators, technicians, field scientists and a littany of other workers will likely find the Model 02 a terrific little companion for their endeavors, especially considering its tablet interface and its ability to run any Vista-compatible software without caveats. Hopefully they'll work for organizations with deep pockets, because the OQO, in all its glory, ain't cheap. But when you compare it to other UMPCs that sport severely limited hardware and software functionality for only slightly less money, it's pretty clear that you get what you pay for.
Under-caffeinated readers of the Wall Street Journal might almost have been duped this morning by an interloper at newsstands nationwide. A parody of the monolothic paper, entitled My Wall Street Journal -- a pun on NewsCorp's other media property, MySpace -- took aim at the Journal's new ownership in an effort to undermine the paper's credibility and mock its (presumed) partisanship under Rupert Murdoch. (250,000 of the papers have been distributed nationwide, and are the product of an independent group of comedy writers who've done this same prank before, in 1982. Here is a photo of the front page, courtesy of the Times.)
Most of the jokes aren't much in the way of nuanced satire: the paper's lede news-analysis is a ho-hum "Bush Abolishes Death, Taxes / Move to Benefit McCain." But look closer, below the headline, and there are two small words that really turn NewsCorp on its ear: caveat emptor. Buyer beware.
But wait a second: the jokes are all goofy lay-ups, like the
Bush/McCain headline. Do we really need to be told caveat emptor?
Of course not. The maxim is more like a little punchline to the entire conceit, because it does something that seems anathema NewsCorp and the other media conglomerates: it demands your skepticism.
Everywhere we look, we see news sources referring themselves balanced and objective, with NewsCorp properties like Fox News leading the charge. I'm not insinuating that these networks and newspapers don't try to be such -- and perhaps that's why we're seeing a rise in sensationalism.
(After all, covering Britney's latest breakdown lets one eschew the politlcal minefield of, say, deeper reporting on the latest goings-on in the powder-keg Middle East.) Whether it's Fox, CNN, the WSJ or the Times, newspapers and networks are embarrisingly self-conscious of their
facade of objectivity, and they have almost an elephant-in-the-room denial of what everyone knows to be true: that any piece of reporting produced by a human being usually contains some kind of bias, intentional or not. You only have to read foreign newspapers to see that every reporter, no matter how ethical, just plain sees things differently.
In that light, caveat emptor is a punch line, sure, but it's also a surprisingly refreshing bit of candor from a newspaper -- even a jocular one. Somehow, our news sources have come to a point where their honesty and objectivity can be trumped by spoof newspaper that is simply, and valiantly, objective about itself. It knows it's a rag, and it wants to make sure you know, too.
In 1922, an author named Walter Lippman wrote a treatise on journalism called "Public Opinion." In it, he argued that traditional news sources were essentially useless tools for much of the country, who he deemed uneducated and uninterested in the nuance of world affairs. “As for example," he wrote, "in the matter of the success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people—that is to say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a matter of balanced evidence," traditional news reporting "causes no end of derangement,
misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.” My Wall Street Journal may be chock full of stupid "gimme" jokes and obvious buffonery, but its real indictment of the news media, and Murdoch and NewsCorp especially, is its insinuation that they have a Lippman-esque contempt for their readers and for real objectivity, and that they opt for spin or sensationalism cloaked as reportage. (A good example of this kind of behabior might be CNN's controversial April 7th airing, in which a polite question from an audience member at a McCain rally was reported as "heckling" by an on-air news personality.)
It's worth noting, of course, that My Wall Street Journal is operating on the same principle as Fox News when it makes entertainment out of a serious issue (media bias) to rustle up the attention of an audience. Cable news has proven that this formula can draw the widespread public interest, but this group of humorists is hoping it can also peak widespread public inquiry. That's a tricky bet, however, when the medium seems to skewer the readers of the Journal as much as its ownership -- the MySpace pun that replaces "The" with "My" can be taken as an oblique criticism of a self-centered, anti-intellectual culture that is more concerned with opinions and gut feelings than actual facts and analysis. (That issue is discussed in this recent book released in February.) Whether the public is inflamed, and for the reasons the group of humorists intended, remains to be seen.
As someone who writes about technology, I'd like to think that I'm technically literate; I'm conversant in a few programming languages, I can ramble about future microprocessor features (like IBM's incredible optical switches), and I secretly hate Facebook. That makes me part of the technorati, right? Well, I've got a secret. I can't build a Wiki.
Or, more accurately: I won't build a Wiki. If you haven't tried starting one, I'll save you the trouble. It's a colossal pain in the ass. First you have to find the right Wiki engine for your purposes and your server technology. Then you have to decide whether you want to pay for licensing it, or find a version that does what you need for free (here's an explanation of some different types of Wikis, appropriately on Wikipedia; here's a full list of Wiki engines you can choose from.) Then you actually have to build it. By that point you're wondering: isn't there an easier way to do this in a Web 2.Whatever world?
Well, of course there is. But it just came out this week, so I feel like less of an idiot for having not found it sooner. It's called Nuospace, and it's a fully web-based, no-coding-required Wiki platform that aims to be a one-stop home base for documents and content that require group collaboration and editing. It's not project management software or a CMS, but it borrows some features from those genres; all changes are trackable, and there are several social-network features that make collaboration a little easier. Right now it handles Office documents and comments, but according to the founders, with whom I spoke last week, Nuospace should be able to handle all kinds of editable content before too long.
While Nuospace calls itself a web-based Wiki, it's really more of a replacement for unwieldy corporate shared drives and intranets. Because it's brainlessly easy to setup, it's conceivable that a group of employees could fire up a Nuospace Wiki for any given project with minimal approval from above -- there's a free version, or a higher-storage version for only $50 a month.
Granted, this isn't going to be a fully-integrated or branded solution -- your Wiki will live at an address ____.nuospace.com, for example -- but for quick projects, it could be a considerable time saver. You can try it out at demo.nuospace.com, but if you're on a Mac, avoid using Firefox; so far, only Safari is supported.
The growing success of a little web startup called Radar.net begs an interesting question: are we getting tired of lifecasting?
Think about how many blogs are started every hour, and how many are soon after abandoned. Blogs -- like Twitter and MySpace -- fulfill a fundamental need for expression and sharing, but can also be tremendously unrewarding. By nature, all three are declarative, not conversational; even with comments and wall posts, whatever communication is had is disjointed, public and brief. It's a little like talking into the wind; you know your words are traveling, but you're largely clueless about who's hearing them.
Here's what Radar does: once you sign up for free, you can use your mobile phone to capture pictures of your daily life, and upload them to the site. Only your group of friends can see the pictures, and they serve as prompts for communication between you and your pals, not as free-standing photos that beg for commentary (as on Flickr). It's sort of like instant messaging with a group of friends, except there are little pictures involved that help prompt a new string of conversation or inject a spark into an existing one.
Last week I sat down with the CEO of Radar.net, a sharp, unassuming guy named John Poisson. While Radar.net is based in San Francisco, it sounds as if much of his philosophy about communication -- and it's extensive -- was shaped by his experience working for Sony's mobile phone division in Japan (that's right, Japan: the real deal.)
Online life, Poisson theorizes, isn't about plastering up a static facade ala Facebook or talking to everyone (and no one) on Twitter. Instead, he prefers to think as the web as a tool for chronicling the smaller moments in life, and doing so within a forum of your friends. The natural medium for doing this, he believes, is photographs -- especially since the tool you're using to do your chronicling, your cell phone, isn't great for long-form writing. Meals, tickets, traffic; photos of almost anything can serve as useful, heartfelt and unique prompts for conversation. That's what Radar's banking on.
According to Poisson, most people end up with a group of friends between 60-80, far less than the several hundreds you see users racking up on Facebook or MySpace. If Poisson is right, that's because it's only really valuable to have ongoing online relationships with very close friends, and few people rack up 364 best buds. But that doesn't mean that every picture you post on Radar has to be seen by every friend. Instead, users have groups of friends (i.e., "College Friends," "Work Friends") to whom they can post pertinent pictures. Within each of those groups, there is even more privacy; if you'd like to make a picture available to only a few people, you can. Or, if you'd like to make a private comment on one of the photos, you can do that too. "We don't go head to head with Facebook; they're about face-making," Poisson says. "The world is getting over the notion of everything being public. Things like Twitter have a limited lifespan. We're enabling people to converse."
People getting over Twitter? Those sound like fightin' words.
If they are, they're rational ones. Poisson believes that Web 2.0 is growing up, and I'm inclined to agree. Once fascinated by the power of the internet for self-expression over thousands of miles and billions of eyes, users are becoming less intoxicated with quantity and more interested in quality. If I write a blog, who cares if some random guy in India reads it? I'd much rather know my friends are reading. Using Radar, I would know that -- and they'd have a chance to talk back.
Of course, there are problems with this model. Social network fatigue is the most salient; most of my friends would be loath to sign up for yet another account at yet another website. That said, if these are my real friends -- which they would need to be, for Radar to be fun -- they'll do it if I ask nicely. And maybe buy them beer.
As far as the mobile usage goes, Poisson claims that Radar's software will work easily on pretty much any modern phone, and in my limited testing, it does. Not everyone has the multimedia messaging service required to send pictures to Radar (the option is an extra on most carriers' plans), but mobile users can also email their photo to a special address at Radar that will also do the trick. As an iPhone user, I took this tack, but there is an iPhone application in the works as well.
Though it's easy to use and easy to install on almost any phone, I initially had trouble deciding what Radar's role in my daily routine would be. Would I do most of my commenting on my phone or PC? Most of my photo uploading from home or the road? How quick is too quick to respond to a photo? (I'm thinking of the requisite lag time considered to be polite when responding to Facebook messages.)
In the end, I fell into a routine that became damn fun, and not a little addictive. Not since my early Facebooking days have I been so enthralled with the minutiae of my friends' lives and thoughts. The difference is that comments and photos on Radar aren't premeditated or crafted the way profiles are, so you get to see more of your friends' quiddities. And that's cool.
Undoubtedly, some of you -- Blackberry users -- are screaming that this already exists. And it almost does, in the form of Blackberry Messenger, a kind of BB-only photo-capable IM software baked into all new Blackberrys. The difference here is that the conversation is quite usefully expanded by online use, and it's also archived so you can go back and see what kind of silliness was going on between you and your friends a few months ago. Can't do that with BB Messenger.
I'm not entirely convinced that the world will tire of lifecasting soon -- or in my opinion, soon enough. But when they do, Radar will be ready and waiting.
The Web, though I love it so, abounds with services I never knew I
needed -- and probably don't. For that reason, it's refreshing when a
site comes along that does something that actually makes daily life
easier. It may not be glorious, it may not be groundbreaking, but
YouSendIt.com actually made my job more efficient today.
The site offers a solution to that woeful problem: how do I send a
large file to someone? Even if they sit two desks down from me, am I
going to waste a CD? Give them my flashdrive and risk not getting it
back? Plow through the company network and find their dropbox? None of
those sounds fun. I would gladly, however, upload it to a third-party
site and let them download it from there without having to set up my
own FTP server.
That's essentially what YouSendIt does; you upload a file, it emails
the recipient a link, and they download the file. You can send things
up to 2GB, and if the recipient's download gets interrupted, they can
resume it just like any old peer-to-peer download. Individuals can do
this for free, but the company's bread and butter is enterprise
usage:for $30 a month, your business can get branded services with
delivery confirmation, sending receipts and other fancy-pants features
that make YouSendIt feel like a virtual FedEx.
They're not the only company to do this -- there are competitors
such as SendThisFile.com and Pownce.com -- but they definitely do it
with the most professional cachet and have more capabilities at every
level of service. That's evidenced by the handful of big companies that
have jumped aboard: Levi's, Ritz Camera, Novelis, and Kelly Moore
Paints, to name a few.
Like Pownce, which aims to bring big-file-sending services to
personal users, YouSendIt has developed a handy, light desktop app that
allows users to browse their hard drive, select their file and ship it
off without touching their browser. Ideally, that kind of functionality
could be shoved into Apple Mail or MS Entourage, so that my brain
wouldn't have to take the extra step in determining if every attachment
is best suited for email or YouSendIt. But hey -- the world of sending
big stuff digitally may not be perfect yet, but YouSendIt definitely
makes it more pleasant than it's ever been.
After watching the Oscars last night, I had a thought: what would these stars' cell phone address books look like? Imagine having names like Nicholson or Spielberg or Streep in your phone, and having your number in theirs. But then I realized: there must be other numbers in those phones -- normal peoples' numbers. Hair stylists. Agents. Casting staff. Assistants. Many of them probably have your number, too. That seems risky when you're a celebrity; how can you control who ends up with your number? As it turns out, I am not the first person to think of this problem, which perhaps is why I am not a successful entrepreneur instead of a lowly FC blogger.
The folks behind Vumber.com have already created a surprisingly flexible telephony tool that can allow users to create a 2-way disposable phone number for about $5 a month. Of course, other services like GrandCentral and Gizmo already create virtual phone numbers, but Vumber does a few tricks that make it particularly useful for business folks, movie stars, and even chat room users (Vumber has recently partnered with Paltalk, an online chat site.)
Like other telephony services, it gives you web access to voicemail and allows you to chose how incoming calls are handled if you don't answer them: some can be sent straight to voicemail, others can be given a "number disconnected" message (ouch!), and still others can be given a special recording that you set. Lo, how many ways to avoid people!
But Vumber's distinctive feature is this: the site is quite clear that it allows you -- perhaps even expects you -- to change your Vumber an unlimited number of times, as if Vumber-changing were a metric for celebrity (and it likely could be.) This is representative of a patently different idea about virtual phone numbers than espoused by, say, GrandCentral, which aims to centralize calling between several phones and/or reinvent voicemail. The "disposable" nature of Vumbers mean that you can give them out with relative impunity, whether it's to an online store or a other sketchy character you might otherwise think twice about. (Some other software, like Gizmo, requires users to buy numbers.) You can also call out using your Vumber, though it's a chore (you have to punch in your own Vumber, then the number to dial), thereby maintaining the illusion. Presumably this would allow a salesperson, for example, to give out his Vumber freely at trade conferences without having to have a dedicated "work" cell phone to protect his privacy.
There's no doubt in my mind that there are more perfectly-suited uses for Vumber than my non-celebrity brain can generate as examples. However, what's most interesting about Vumber isn't even the freedom it provides its users, or the multifarious ways it could be used, but in the anonymity that it endows telephones for the first time since Bell's invention. It's likely that part of the explosion in the utility of email has to do with its inherent anonymity and ease of control, and Vumber poses the question: what if phone numbers could be used similarly? Were these features -- the ability to pre-screen calls, jump numbers and set privacy restrictions -- popularized, would some of the communication that has now been relegated to email move back into the realm of the telephone? I, personally, hope it does; my fears of carpal tunnel grow at every 1,000 word email I draft.
If you had to guess what type of site could grow its visitor base by 349% in 2007, what would it be? Some fashionable social network? Some free Web 2.0 app? I would have guessed ICanHasCheezburger.com, but then, I only know my own browsing habits.
Of course, we'd all be wrong. The fastest growing web property, according to comScore, is EverydayHealth.com: a health-oriented community site moderated by a group of 20 physicians. The company that operates it, Waterfront Media, is no stranger to runaway hits; it was the progenitor of the South Beach Diet, the Sonoma Diet, and a handful of other health and wellness franchises. But EverydayHealth is different: it serves as a kind of experiment, seeking to socialize the the old support system -- friends, family, doctors -- in the online space. It doesn't mean to replace these people; when posts or discussions indicate that a user needs real medical attention, the site has ways of flagging them for trained healthcare moderators to respond. But it's a supplement to the old support system, and as such, it's an interesting phenomenon.
The site's approach eschews the role of health encyclopedia -- a role amply filled by WebMD, Drugs.com, Yahoo Health and others -- and concentrates on various kinds of interpersonal support. Ben Wolin, the co-founder and CEO of Waterfront Media, told me that EverydayHealth "is not a space that users visit to simply look up information... but an organic and active place for users to proactively manage their conditions and find ways to live better, healthier lives." Of course, "managing" your health isn't quite like managing your portfolio, so what does this mean?
That depends on whether you're looking for hard facts or just a forum to voice your concerns. The site does have a dossier on the symptoms, treatments and prognoses of a host of common and not-so-common ailments, but its unique contribution to the online health realm is the team of doctors that write for the site. They're concise and informative without being digressive or preachy, and while they can't respond to every question the millions of users pose, they do address the most common ones and digest new information on a litany of diseases and conditions.
If you have questions or you're looking for someone to commiserate with, the message boards are the place. They're very active -- several million people are registered users of the site -- and supplemented by a start-your-own-blog feature. Most people seem to opt for the message boards over the blogs, since it's the feedback that is helpful, and blogs are, by nature, somewhat declarative and lonely. Reading the message boards is alternately inspiring and heartbreaking. One thread in the "Emotional Health" category began with a user who was curious if anyone else was suffering both depression and major anxiety, and how they were dealing with the treatments. The first response was heartening, and began: "I have been going through both for several years, although a bit different than your story." But the second post was moribund: "I have been battling depression and anxiety for my whole life... I just don't know what to do anymore. I just want to be able to work and not feel so exhausted and doomed all the time." Does writing that on anonymous message board help?
Many health concerns are, for many Americans, still taboo and tough to discuss. For that very reason, the anonymity and camaraderie of online message boards may be a strangely ideal match for the average health-site user. The user that wrote that sad reply about depression also mentions in her post that "my husband and I don't have a good marriage." Maybe she feels like her problems burden him, or maybe she's embarrassed. What's more important is that she felt compelled to tell her story on a message board, and that doing so obviously provided her some comfort that she can't get from the prescription drugs she mentions, or the people in her life. Viewed in that light, it's no surprise that EverydayHealth has been growing in leaps and bounds; it's a poultice for the social soreness -- maybe loneliness, maybe embarrassment, maybe confusion -- that often surrounds sickness. Obviously, many users are there just out of curiosity, or concern for their general health. But it's heartening to think that the internet might be a tool not only for entertainment, or information, but also some kind of authentic human interaction. As an online culture, we may be heading for collectivism -- but that doesn't have to mean the Web has to be impersonal.
iPhones aren't the only Internet-surfing phones that have gaping security weaknesses waiting to be exploited. In fact, all smartphones -- that includes Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry devices -- can be easily commandeered by malevolent nerds with a little bit of code and a dose of trickery. In the interest of fairness, we've gotten some security folks from Bluefire Security Technologies to show us what kind of mischief can be made on a regular Windows smartphone, just as we did with the iPhone in November. Or is mischief the wrong word? Perhaps "data and identify theft" are more accurate terms.
Check out the video below:
First things first: who are these guys?
Bluefire provides the tech behind Symantec's mobile security software, and also works with carriers and phone manufacturers to bake in better security to off-the-shelf phones. Of course, this means that they know more about the mobile OS than the average Russian teenager who writes viruses, but it's worth mentioning that the malware they've written for demonstration in the video is actually an exceedingly simple piece of software: only a few lines of code that require a paltry 1K of memory. That's why it's so easily injected into the phone; all it takes is one vague e-mail attachment or malicious website to spread the contagion to your beloved device, and it can embed itself in milliseconds. That's what I call Kelly Clarkson-level contagious -- all it takes is a second of exposure, a few notes of "Since You've Been Gone," and you're hooked.
Unlike Kelly Clarkson, however, this simple piece of code can take control of your mobile phone for whatever ends its designers like. (Kelly, by contrast, can merely take control of your heart. But I digress.) The first trick seems harmless enough: changing your preferred homepage. But as Mark Komisky, Bluefire's CEO, notes in the video, forcing your browser to hit a certain malicious site has tremendous potential, especially for hackers intending to impersonate your carrier and ask you for personal information. Same goes for the error message he has the virus generate on the sample phone -- another opportunity for carrier impersonation.
While it's not comforting to think about your vitals being purloined -- account numbers, addresses, phone and internet contact information -- it's perhaps even more unnerving that this bit of malware (and code like it) can spy on your communications, manipulate them, and steal your documents. I'll avoid summarizing every hacking movie ever made, and choose not to enumerate the perverse amount of control this can surrender to a malicious coder. You know and I know: it would be bad. Really bad.
So what is a smartphone owner to do? I have an iPhone and a Blackberry; is someone going to commandeer them both, steal my bank information, dump my girlfriend via text message, and steal my top secret files? Probably not; a comparative few of all cell phones are smart ones, meaning that it's not yet worth most hackers' time to target them. However, it's probably smart to set definitive rules for your phone usage, and delineate what needs to be done via mobile device and what can (and should) be left to the computer. Online banking is one of those tasks; rarely should you find yourself in a position where you must login via phone, when you can just as easily call.
As with all things bad, it's easiest to avoid them if you know how they work, and can identify when you might be getting bamboozled. Keep your vital information close to the vest, monitor your cell statements for unusual data or voice activity, and watch our video again. You'll be glad you did.
This week I became the roughly one billionth person to buy one of those diminutive, happy little things called Asus Eee PCs. Mine is the low-end $299 version, and it came in a color I've taken to calling Confident Man Green.
Naturally my first inclination was to hop on the Intertubes and figure out how I could hack and update this thing with quick-and-easy mods, so it might be ever so much more than I'd hoped. Here's what I found.
Basically: that I can't. The low-end $299 2G Surf model, which ships with 512MB of RAM, an underclocked 900MHz Celeron processor and a 2GB flash hard drive, is cursed with soldered memory and little recourse for the upgrade-hungry. It does, however, have an SD slot, so its 2GB hard drive (1.7GB of which is consumed by the custom Xandros Linux OS) isn't as claustrophobic as it sounds.
If you were prescient enough to buy one of the other models (the 4G Surf, 4G or 8G), replacing the RAM is relatively easy, using the RAM access port built into the bottom of the machine. You can see how to upgrade the RAM on one of these bad boys here.
So what else can you do to an Eee PC, if you have the time and guts? A lot, as it turns out.
With some minimal tech know-how, you can install Mac OS X Leopard on it (although, be forewarned, you may lose functionality like WiFi if you don't tinker with the drivers correctly). You can also put XP on there, which is more kosher, according to Asus. Ubuntu is also an option for Linux fans who aren't keen on the Eee's moronically simple interface.
Hardware-wise, there's even more you can do, though much of it defies reason and frugality. For example, if you're unimpressed by the Celeron chip, which is underclocked from 900MHz to an effective 600MHz to save battery and keep heat down, you can perform soft overclocks like this one by upping the frontside bus. This is something that will probably tempt a great many Eee users (after they've already upped their RAM), because the notion of unused speed trapped inside a computer is a compelling and frustrating one for any bona fide computer enthusiast.
More cool stuff: upgrading the flash hard drive from 2, 4 or 8GB to a whopping 32GB using a simple USB power modification and a stock 32GB flash drive. Or, adding an internal 3G mobile internet card. You can also add a touchscreen with this rather in-depth installation tutorial:
All in all, most of these hacks involve spending money or time that could otherwise have been invested in a more expensive and capable UMPC. But if you're buying the Eee as a project computer, you could end up with a pretty tricked-out little machine for under $800. I, for one, like my Confident Man Green Eee just the way it is -- even if the keyboard can feel infuriating, the OS lags like crazy, and it forgets my WiFi network every time I turn it off. It's still the happiest little machine $300 can buy, and it edits Word documents and gets GMail. That's enough for me.
McDonald's has nearly 14,000 stores nationwide, all of which will be equipped with full-fledged coffee bars and baristas by year's end. Having already begun adding plush seating, gentler lighting and subtler colors to their franchises, the big M is looking to steamroll the limping Starbucks on its own turf. Starbucks, however, isn't going anywhere; rather, it's McDonald's that will be maimed most by its own campaign to destroy the Seattle super-brand.
Admittedly, McDonald's is one of those monolithic brands that will likely have a longer half-life than radium -- but that hardly makes it invulnerable. By adding the "theatre" of a coffee bar (as one McDonald's VP has phrased it), the company has gained little more than the potential to alienate customers, confuse its menu and open up a black hole for capital.
If you haven't gotten the scoop on McDonald's big move, here's a useful summary from the Wall Street Journal:
Before I go on to detail the three ineluctable barriers to McDonald's success with coffee, let's first agree on a few things about the average coffee-buying American.
- When they go out for a coffee, they are going out simply to buy coffee. It's only recently that Starbucks has decided to upgrade its (over-priced and under-flavored) food menu, because frankly, they haven't had to. [Edit: Indeed, some people buy coffee with their breakfasts at McDonald's. But most coffee drinkers are not also McMuffin eaters. McDonald's new attempt is to capture the coffee-only customer, not its captive audience of breakfast customers.]
- Customers expect buying coffee to happen even more quickly than buying fast food, because, hey, it's a beverage and not a meal.
- Most aren't fiercely loyal to one brand of coffee or another. Some think Starbucks is too strong, and some think McDonald's is too watery, but most just want a caffeine fix that's brown and hot.
These principles given, here are the factors that will make McCoffee bomb.
The Carefully Proven McMenu
McDonald's has spent decades refining its menu and its accompanying drink selection. When you go to McDonald's, you step in the door knowing that the company's ubiquity was built on its reputation for hamburgers and fries. With hamburgers and fries, you drink cold soda. So it is written, and so it will stay.
Remember McPizza? Me neither. I've read it was neither better nor worse than Pizza Hut or Domino's Pizza, but it was a miserable failure. Why? Because when you go into a McDonald's, you're going to be bullied out of your pizza-eating mood (assuming you entered with one in the first place) by the sweet stink of the flagship fare. The place reeks of fries and beef. McDonald's has spent millions of dollars developing chemical aromas for its fries, burgers and chicken, and they are every bit as intoxicating as they were meant to be. You know that frustration you experience when you try to hum one song while another is playing on the radio? That very dissonance was the demise of the McPizza, and will claim McCoffee next.
When you step into a Starbucks, however, you probably begin to anticipate your coffee even more than you did on your way over. The place smells of beans, frothing milk, and pastries. That visceral impression will stay with you the next time you want coffee, but the visuo-olfactory confusion of getting coffee in a McDonald's probably won't initiate the same kind of conditioning in your coffee-loving brain.
The Drive-Thru Factor
Both Starbucks and McDonald's make their bread-and-butter on drive-thru and to-go sales -- Aha! The workaround for the last argument, right? Wrong. Even if customers step into McDonald's and don't experience the sensory dissonance I discuss above, they will be subject to another mental quiddity that will be bad news for McCoffee.
When you're opting for a drive-thru, you're opting to "save time." We all know, rational as we are, that human beings will go to incredibly illogical lengths to shave even 5 seconds off a trip or task; run a red light, apply lipstick on the highway, and so on.
That very compulsion to be as efficient as possible, the very one that brought you to use the drive-thru in the first place, will tell you that a popular place that serves food will have a slower drive-thru than one that serves only coffee. I don't have any statistical evidence to back that up, but then again, statistical evidence is impotent in the face of what consumers perceive to be their common sense. More people use McDonald's drive-thru's than Starbucks, and the products coming out of the window take more time to prepare. The savvy driver will almost always opt for the specialty store when time is of the essence, particularly if they're in search of a single product.
Think of an analogous situation in retail: Home Depot vs. Sherwin Williams. You know you need two cans of paint, and you know you can get them at either place. Home Depot will definitely be cheaper than the specialty Sherwin Williams paint store. However, you also know that parking at Home Depot is a nightmare, the store is large and time-consuming to navigate, and the lines are often interminably long. Maybe if you have all day, you'll opt to save money and go to the Home Depot. But if time is the least bit of a concern, most consumers will go to the specialty store every time -- even if they know they'll pay a couple dollars more. Likewise with Starbucks, where the drinks will inevitably cost more than those at Mickey D's; actual price matters little when the customer perceives that they'll get their desired product with less time spent and less stress suffered.
The Dunkin Factor
For some reason, the media coverage of the new McDonald's strategy (which McDonald's is calling, redundantly, the "Strategy to Win") has largely overlooked Dunkin Donuts as a competitor in the Coffee Wars. While they lack the branding sex appeal of SBUX and the sheer might of MCD, Dunkin Donuts is not to be overlooked, because it is likely to be the Perot to McDonald's George H.W. Bush.
Here's the problem, if you're a certain red-shoed clown: Dunkin Donuts is entirely too much like your franchise. Both stores are low on quality and nutrition as well as being low on cost. Both have serviceable, sometimes downright lackluster eating areas. They're the same class of competitor, even if their niches and products are slightly different. The worst part: they already have a terrific reputation for good, inexpensive coffee. Dunkin also benefits from a bit of the specialty-store image that Starbucks does, and offers about as much food as a coffee customer probably wants (donuts, bagels, muffins and breakfast sandwiches.)
Where McDonald's sees its market isn't entirely clear to me, especially with two good players already in the fold. That said, McDonald's does have a fighting chance at selling coffee if it can persuade existing customers -- ones who wouldn't normally buy coffee while at Mickey D's -- to replace cheaper sodas for more expensive coffees as their meal-side beverage. Considering the scale of the McDonald's experiment, that could have a broader effect on the way Americans think about the harmony of food and drink. I'll wait and see -- Venti Macchiato in hand.
