Outgoing

Nexus One woes

I thought the Nexus One from Google sounded pretty good and I'm passed my two years on my T-Mobile Shadow (also an HTC phone), so I tried to buy one from Google.

All the problems you might think could occur when one organization is selling you a phone another organization is going supply phone services to (and yet another handles 'hardware' problems) do seem happen.

Google's site wouldn't give me the T-Mobile discount, evidently because I am already in a family plan with T-Mobile.  After researching this a bit I talk to a T-Mobile representative (who are fairly easy to get a hold of, uniformly helpful, and mostly knowledgeable) who suggests that they switch me to two individual accounts, I order the phone from Google, and then after it ships they will switch me back to the family plan, upgraded with the new data plan required.

Fine.  So I do that, and Google says the phone will now cost $379 ($150 discount) because I am not a 'new' T-Mobile customer.  T-Mobile says I'm eligible for the full discount to the advertised $179 price.  They helpfully gave me a number at Google to call.  Turns out the number is for HTC.  She was helpful, but said that's the way things work and showed where on Google's site you can submit a question.I did that and the (rather quick) response was that the full discount is only for new T-Mobile customers.

I'd buy an unlocked version for the full $529, but the T-Mobile reps don't seem to know about any rumored T-Mobile monthly discounts for such a phone.  I suppose I could become a 'new' T-Mobile customer, then cancel my old phone and possibly get back into the family plan, but I'm afraid I'll end up with a double bill for at least a month. Or I could buy a full price phone and stick my SIM card into it and see what happens.

This is all taking way too much time.

--Th

Update:  Friday 2010 January 15: The Google phone site is now offering existing T-Mobile customers like me a $250 discount.  That's enough!  I ordered it.

Quantity & quality

Joseph Stalin is often credited with the aphorism that 'quantity has a quality all its own'.  Presumably he was talking about tanks or steel at the time, but network effects are similar, as is coverage.  My 2010 prediction is that we will see this effect in the photo services (probably Google's first).  As more photographs are made public and more metadata about the pictures is available, these services have the possibility of doing very interesting things with the data.  In 2007 Microsoft demonstrated what they could do with Flickr photographs of Notre Dame in Photosynth, automatically making a montage of the overlapping photos that you can view from any perspective.

I'd say that we are rapidly approaching the point where much of the earth has been photographed in detail.  As more of the photographs are made public and tagged with position metadata automatically applied by cameras with GPS receivers, it will become ever easier to patch them together into a seamless (or at least well-seamed) view of the world.  More than that, it should be possible to start to recognize the relative age of the photographs so that you can move back through time to see historical views, use the people tags that Picasa encourages you to add to photos to identify even more people, and do many more things by processing the metadata and images.

As I sit here contemplating buying a Nexus One phone from Google I can't say I'm enthusiastic about entrusting my whole life to one company, but I expect they are trying to do this sort of thing right now.

In libraries we are seeing similar effects as more of our materials are digitized.  One of my long term predictions has always been that everything in libraries would eventually be digitized, although I had no idea that a company like Google would be doing so much of it.  Digitization will probably really take off when it can be done without opening bound volumes at all, by doing high resolution CT-scans and parsing them into pages.

The graphic is from the current (January 2009) VIAF record for Joseph Stalin. We are linking together 13 different authority files that have an entry for him, plus finding a link into Wikipedia.  This level of coverage (we have VIAF records representing nearly 10 million people from 20 different authority files) has implications on the sort of matching and services that can be done on names.  Probably not as showy as stitching the world in photographs together, but important nonetheless.

--Th

Those of you who follow Stu Weibel's blog may remember this post.  I claim that the first time I heard the phrase about quantity and quality was from Stu, not the other way around.

Cell phones and netbooks

Although I have been on vacation the last two weeks, I did take the time to view VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai's  hour-long video about Google's Chrome OS November 19th 2009 announcing it as an open-source project.  Since I recently bought a laptop (really a high-end netbook) and am in the market for a new cell phone I was interested to see this slide:

 

My new laptop has GPS and broadband in addition to Wi-Fi, making it feel a bit like a phone (and of course you need a phone number to access the broadband).  I'm not too excited about paying $30-$50/month for a broadband connection for every portable device I have, though.

Before watching the video I was a bit confused about the relationship between Google's Android operating system on phones and the Chrome OS. Chrome OS (the name is really Chromium OS when you get to the developer site) is an attempt to create an OS whose sole purpose is to support the Chrome browser.  The idea is that everything you do through a Chrome OS machine happens in the cloud though a browser window.  Any local memory is just there as a cache.  It's probably a little ahead of its time, but there are a lot of advantages to working this way.  With its extra battery pack my laptop is good for 10+ hours (and still well under three pounds), so the hardware to do what they want is certainly getting here, and I find myself working in 'the cloud' more and more.

Right now there is little or no relationship between Chrome OS and Android, although you can see them merging in the future.  Android is a fairly conventional approach to managing a phone, while Chrome OS is trying to do something quite different, and Google is in a good position to make something like this work.

I still don't know what phone to pick, though.

--Th