Rich Mintz  

Most of the buzz this year is all about the device (iPad, Galaxy Tab, Android, netbook, MacBook Air) and how it’s used (Facebook, Twitter, “liking,” “poking,” etc.). But I think the infrastructure story — the Cloud story — is more meaningful.

I’m not talking about the business story (how companies, including mine, are gradually moving their data storage and management offsite, and outsourcing their application provision). I’m talking about the individual story: how, for more and more people, access to the data they use in their personal and professional lives has become not only a platform-agnostic affair, but a device-independent one.

Consider:

• Almost all the information I need to use to conduct my life now lives “on the Internet.” That includes not just email, contacts, and appointments; I’m also talking about documents I produce and share professionally, reference material, entertainment content, etc.
• The few exceptions (e.g., the photos I took last week, which are sitting on the hard drive of my laptop) are, more often than not, a matter of me not taking advantage of existing channels to the Cloud, rather than such channels not existing.
• Google knows everybody. At some point about two years ago — and note that this is after I started my current job — I stopped keeping people’s contact information, because I realized that every new person I met who was 70 or younger could be found on the Internet if I remembered their name. Technically, if I meet them through work, I may not even remember their name, because most people I meet professionally can be found again online with a smart Google search using a few snippets of descriptive information (employer, job title, etc.)
• Google knows everything. By analogy to the preceding: I no longer keep factual or business information around because I “might need it later.” The nature of research has largely changed: now it’s a matter of asking the body of Internet de facto public record for what I need, rather than consulting a formal compilation (directory, etc.) and/or (re-)finding information that I (personally) squirreled away in the past.

I now live in a world in which I can potentially reach for almost any computing device that happens to be at hand (whether it belongs to me or not) and conduct almost any information transaction that I wish. In my daily life I use an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook largely interchangeably, choosing one over another based mostly on convenience in the moment and on form factor, rather than on suitability. Sure, at the margins, one device will be “better” than the others for certain transactions or in certain settings; but in the main, they all do most of the same things acceptably well.

And this is the beginning of the transformation, not its end state.

In the context of all this, it’s important to note that I didn’t really have to do anything special to make all this happen. I just lived my life, making choices (e.g., following or not following my employer’s recommendations, buying or not buying devices, signing up or not signing up for online services) as they were presented to me in the course of my ordinary affairs. Sure, I work for a technology company, and I’m an early-ish adopter; but I don’t live on the bleeding edge, and don’t have time to waste on unproven technologies or tactics. I don’t try something new until I’ve seen evidence, from others, that it works. And all this stuff works more or less as advertised.

So I invested in this iPad (original model, for now) about a year ago. It got a lot of use when it was a new toy, but then the iPhone 4 came out, and I upgraded, and with the speed improvement and fast app-switching, I now find the iPhone faster for a lot of the things I was doing on the iPad. Plus it’s right there in my pocket anyway. So I find myself reaching for the phone incrementally more, and for the pad incrementally less.

Besides, the iPad has some undeniable drawbacks. It’s a little too heavy; it’s awkward to hold at reading distance for long periods; the backlight eventually gives me a headache. And (surprisingly) for short bursts, anyway, it’s easier to type accurately on the phone.

But I’ve paid for this thing, and there are a lot of things it does well, even elegantly. And given that my alternative for heavy computing is a 17-inch MacBook (which I love, but it’s an awkward hunk of metal that I hate taking out at home), I’m trying to practice using the iPad more seriously as an intermediate computing tool rather than just as a consumption channel.

Much has been made of the decline in netbook sales over the past year, but (in contrast to some others) I don’t really think you can blame the iPad for that. If netbooks were better made, and faster, and easier to use, and less limited by what has to be left out of them to make them that small, more of them would sell. As things are, they have a nice chunk of the market, and it will grow as they get better — and as the gap between big, heavy, feature-rich smartphones and small, light, streamlined computers continues to narrow.

I like what I’ve seen of the new feather-light mini MacBooks, and perhaps I’ll experiment with one the next time I have a thousand bucks to blow. But first I’m going to try to get better value out of the iPad for a while.

I have one of those folding cases (the Macally) that turns into a triangular support for the iPad, so that you can put it in typing position or stand it up on a table. I’ve become fairly good as an accurate iPad typist — the problem is that I’m so fast on a real keyboard that extensive data entry on the iPad still feels too slow.

So except when I’m actually sitting on a train while trying to power-use the iPad — which, to be honest, is relatively rare — I’m experimenting with a solution that’s right at hand: the aluminum-cased Bluetooth Apple Wireless Keyboard. I already have one at home and one at work, so I just have to get in the habit of reaching for it, and also of throwing it in my briefcase (packed in a little jersey bag I happened to have around the house) when I go out of town.

The iPad-plus-keyboard combination works great on a table; to get the angle correct on my lap, I need to set a big heavy book on my knees and lean the keyboard against it. Here you see this tactic demonstrated with a copy of Egypt: Gods, Myths and Religion which happened to be at hand.

I’m going to test out using the iPad-plus-keyboard combination in various ways over the next few weeks — as a high-volume Gmail processor, as a simple document production machine, as a blogging platform — and I’ll keep you posted.

A few things I already wish this combination had:

• The keyboard support on the iPad is fairly good (this WordPress application fully supports the arrow keys in edit mode, for instance), but I wish the keyboard had an equivalent to the iPad Home button! I know Apple sells an iPad keyboard dock, but I already own this one.
• I wish the iPad would support a Bluetooth mouse (without jailbreaking, I mean). That’s so obvious a need that I imagine it’s on its way.

More to come as the experiment plays itself out.

… consists of 3 iPhones, 1 iPad, 1 copy of the official Scrabble iPad app ($9.99), and 3 copies of the official “Scrabble Tile Rack” iPhone app (free). Actual retail value approximately $2,400, not counting 3 iPhone data service plans. If you’re really cheap, just buy 3 iPod Touches instead (bringing the total cost down to about $1,000).

Or just buy a Scrabble set at your local drugstore ($14.99). But what fun is that? There’s nothing to click or push or slide, it doesn’t beep, and you have to rotate the board yourself.

Below are a couple of photos demonstrating that, yes, this complicated Bluetooth-enabled setup does in fact work. The game even keeps track of where you’re sitting, and rotates the board to face you when it’s your turn. (The first few times, this is really creepy.) Photos are reversed, because they were already uploaded that way and I’m lazy.

OK, I’ve done it: I’ve subscribed to Sirius XM satellite radio. This despite owning hundreds of CDs and gigabytes of ripped and downloaded music, having streaming music available at my command bundled with Time Warner and Roku products and services I’ve already paid for, having a Pandora account that I basically like, and, you know, having access to the Internet, which contains for free (for those willing to dig) every single musical note ever played in the history of man, multiplied a zillion times over.

So here’s the deal. In the course of my one-week free trial, I discovered that despite all that music I already had access to, I actually listen to a lot more music via this Sirius XM/iPhone/docking station three-way marriage than I’ve listened to since I gave up my XM subscription. A lot more, like five times as much. And that music involves a broader variety of genres, and a broader variety of songs, including both songs that awaken my nostalgia and songs I’ve never heard of before. And about half of the background music I’m adding to my media diet is directly crowding out background episodes of reality TV. Good stuff, right?

One of the business facts I’m reminded by all this is that people don’t just pay a premium for innovation in product, they pay a premium for innovation in delivery experience, too, and in packaging of that experience, and especially in the consistency and reliability thereof. It’s worth money just not to have to think — to be able to take for granted that something will just work. Netflix figured that out with DVDs-by-mail, and then figured it out again with streaming, and Apple of course figured it out ages ago and has put it into practice half a dozen times, in a range of sectors that are gradually converging. FedEx figured it out, by taking something (overnight delivery via USPS) that was perceived, rightfully or not, as a dicey proposition and making it 100% trustworthy.

So now, wherever I plop myself down, I dock my phone, I hit the Sirius XM button, I fiddle with the display for just a moment, and within 10 seconds I’m listening to an interesting stream of music. I don’t even think; I just do it. Now that’s the kind of reliability I’d happily pay $12 a month for.

John Scalzi’s post last week about living in the future (not to mention Scott Adams’ reminder last December that we’re all cyborgs now, now that we’re carrying our exobrains around in our pockets) has got me thinking about the same thing. I joke about wanting the Internet in my head, but if you get a drink or two in me, I’ll confess that I’m pretty damn impressed with the stuff we’ve got already.

The latest entry in the “hey, when did all this stuff happen?” sweepstakes is Voice Control on the iPhone 4. Press and hold the home button for a minute, and your personal digital assistant waits for your command. “Play artist Alison Krauss,” you can command. Or, “What song is this?” Or, “Call Martha Jones.” And it actually works!

Yes, I got an iPhone 4 this week (somehow all the queues and secret lists and 24-hour windows are now yesterday’s news; I walked into the Upper West Side Apple Store and had one in 15 minutes). And yes, I’m amazed — FaceTime and the super-sharp screen and the two cameras and all that stuff, it really is remarkable. Video, with editing right on the device! Multitasking! I can listen to Sirius XM radio while converting between ounces and grams! (And it comes with a free iPod Touch, in the form of my defunct iPhone 3G, which still works perfectly well via wireless and continues to do everything it ever did, except make phone calls — which I don’t do much of anymore anyway, and neither do you, but I digress.)

But the innovations are turning up fast and furious these days. Take Dragon Dictation, which is available for iPhone and iPod Touch and iPad and BlackBerry, and soon for your toaster and electric toothbrush. I like the idea of voice-to-text, but I type fast and accurately, even on small devices, so the value hasn’t been evident. But Dragon’s accuracy is now so good that, for certain situations in certain circumstances, I could imagine choosing to use it. Look at these two passages I dictated last night (in the first, I was just riffing, in the second I was reading from this story on The Awl about freelancing, which you should read anyway):

Once upon a time there was an angry dragon. The dragon was very, very angry.
One day, the dragon was walking down the street, and he came upon the lion. Lyon, he said, what say you?
John, said the lion, I am very happy to see you.
And thus ends the lesson.
***
But the sword of Damocles isn’t what’s most toxic to the freelance experience. What’s worse is that, in order to be a freelancer for very long, you have to think of yourself in certain ways. You know what they say about beautiful people? That every pretty girl or gorgeous man is someone’s ask, was too much hassle for someone.

This is raw and unedited. Everything came through as I intended. The punctuation. The paragraph breaks. It got “thus.” It got “freelancer.” It got “Damocles”! The only problems were “Lyon” for “Lion” in the first passage, and “ask” for “ex” in the second. That is a level of accuracy I can live with.

Or try SoundHound. Nevermind holding it up to the radio speakers to identify a song; that’s kid stuff. It identified Nessun dorma from my humming. And I’m no Pavarotti. This isn’t beyond incredible?

(And we’re nowhere near the bleeding edge. Have you heard of Google Goggles?)

Think of the last cellphone you had. Not the first one — just the last one. (Or, if you were an early iPhone adopter, the one before that.) The one I had was a Nokia e62, running Symbian — which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I detested every moment my fingers were on it. It did hardly anything except make phone calls, download my email, and make me wait while it swapped data in and out of RAM. Put it next to the iPhone 4, and it’s like setting down a lawnmower next to an Audi TT Coupe. If not for the fact that both of them make phone calls (something which fewer and fewer of us bother to do), they might as well be the products of parallel UI evolution on distant planets. And I carried that thing around in my pocket all day, every day, in 2007! I think I have mayonnaise that’s older than that.

So, if on some day in the distant future, when you are an old, old man, a little child asks you when the past ended and the future began, you can tell them with confidence that it was yesterday, August 2, 2010, when Rich Mintz got his iPhone 4. Or something like that.

I think I’m readdicted to satellite radio (that didn’t take long, did it?). It’s a whole new ballgame now that my iPhone, combined with the docking speakers that are already strategically placed around my life, can play satellite radio anytime I feel like it.* Sure is easier than hauling that boom box around in the car, like I did in 2002!

In honor of my new addictions, here’s a musical gem turned up for me by the inspired programmers at Sirius XM: “Indiana Wants Me” (1970), a Canadian #1 and American #5 hit, by R. Dean Taylor.

*Some of my docking speakers aren’t compatible with iPhone 4. Fortunately, they’re the crappy ones I already hated…

Here comes FarmVille for iPhone.

Could you beat a Muppet in a staring contest? I doubt it.

Daniel Kroop launches Los Angeles and First, a blog about Los Angeles politics — specifically the City Council — that promises to be a good read, if the first week is any indication.

Am I really the only person in America who finds the “gay panic” subtext in this Pretzel M&Ms ad a little bothersome?

Aerolineas, the Argentinian airline, updates its brand identity.

I’m trying to decide whether to bother with the iOS 4 iPhone upgrade, given that I’m certain to be buying a new phone within a few months. I’ll only get a few of the new features, and there are lots of reports of slowdowns associated with the upgrade.

Relatedly: I did set out to do the upgrade last week, only to find myself stalled during the backup phase like this guy. I’d already concluded that a wipe-and-restore — or, more gently, a “delete all apps, upgrade OS, then restore apps one by one,” assuming it works — would be my next step.

For all you crazy people lined up for 5 hours in 95-degree heat to get your hands on an iPhone 4, because the iPhone 3GS you bought six months ago is now virtually a doorstop in your eyes, consider this: within my adult lifetime, portable phones weighed 17 pounds and came in a briefcase. (And, like, I’m not even that old.) And the only thing you could do with them was talk on the phone.

Nevermind that — the first cellphone I actually owned, which was very similar to the one changing the lives of the people in the video below, cost me 99 cents a minute to use — and everyone thought that was normal!

More retro phone porn here.