The expectation of an emerging dominant platform for smart phones comes from general experience with the PC industry, where there has been virtually a single platform for decades. However, the cell phone business is very different from the PC business: while market forces pushed the latter towards platform consolidation, there are several factors keeping mobile platforms distinct. Factor in Google’s self-stated motivation for entering this market in the first place and it becomes clear that the current fragmentation of smart phone platforms isn’t going to go away any time soon.

1: Cell Carriers Discourage Platform Consolidation

Partially by design and partially by nature, it’s plain impossible for a single platform to become dominant today. Cellular companies make exclusive deals with handset manufacturers, keeping phones out of the hands of consumers who would otherwise purchase them in a heartbeat. The exclusive AT&T and Apple deal comes to mind, but cell companies have been in this practice long before there was an iPhone. Hip devices draw new customers, and the manufacturer receives generous financial kickbacks to keep things exclusive. Additionally, some carriers use different radio technologies, which means that device manufacturer must develop different hardware to support all the different radio technologies around the world, adding expense and slowing hardware rollouts. This isn’t a factor which will go away soon.

2: The Market Has Legs

In 2009 a smart phone sales exploded. According to Gartner, there were sales of 172 million smart phones in 2009, a 24% increase from 2008, and that growth is expected to continue. This means that every company in the market can sell more units than the previous year without competing directly for customers. As long as this continues to be the case there is plenty of room in the market for multiple platforms. For some context, the ceiling for this growth is high. If all cell phones sold were smart phones (not an unreasonable long-term perspective) there would be 1.2 billion every year, so there’s quite a bit of room to grow.

3: Consumers Aren’t Sticky

In stark contrast to the PC market, smart phones are relatively simple to operate. Since the learning curve is lower, consumers are less likely to be afraid of switching to a different platform. Other factors gain relative importance. For example, consumers don’t put a high value on the shape and color of their desktop PC or laptop (beyond the basic form factor), but industrial design plays a more important role with smart phones. In part this is because OS tie-in is less important.

Consumers are also likely to switch between cell carriers every year or two, and when they do they are more likely to purchase the most cost-effective smart phone available with the new carrier. Statistically, this depends mostly on the promotions running at the time, if the same platform is even available. Apple’s exclusive AT&T contract, and Microsoft’s major revision to Windows Mobile are cases where users may not even be able to stick with the same platform if they wanted to.

4. Google Isn’t in the Mobile Phone Business

Surprise. Here’s a quick recap from Eric Schmidt from when Android was first announced:

The fundamental problem with most phones today is they don’t have full-power browsers. We’ve been taking our mobile services and use specialized engineering to get them on other devices. No longer … Imagine not just one Gphone, but a thousand Gphones as a result of the partnerships … I’m a very happy iPhone user. It’s important to say that there will be many, many mobile experiences, and Android will be used on many other kinds of devices…

Remember that when Android first came out, there was really no viable mobile web browser aside from Safari on the iPhone. Google makes their money on web search. Lots of people had phones, but couldn’t realistically use them to search, and Google therefore couldn’t make money from them. Google solved the problem by giving away a smart phone OS to any device manufacturer who wanted it.

So, while Google does have a bottomless wallet, there’s no reason for them to spend significantly more on cell phone development. Android simply has to be “good enough” to motivate smart phone competitors to improve the browsers on their phone. Google makes the money whether a user searches via an Android phone, an iPhone, a Symbian phone, or potentially even a Windows Mobile phone (should mobile IE ever become a reasonable browser). That’s why the pace of Android development has slowed as its uptake has accelerated. Google doesn’t need to dominate the market, because they don’t care which phone or browser you use, as long as you use one. To put it another way, Android is a stick they can use to herd the cell phone market in the direction Google wants.

Conclusions

The public likes competition, and the Internet will never stop pitting different platforms against each other. At first glance, Android and iPhone OS look like they compete against each other. However, the motivations behind their development are very different: Apple wants to sell hardware, while Google wants to spur users to browse the web from their phones. These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, which is why Eric Schmidt sat on the Apple board of directors until well after Android was released. Because of their respective philosophies, Google and Apple will never compete in the mobile phone space — Apple will never license their OS to other device manufacturers, and Google will never shift their revenue base to hardware sales (The Nexus One is another stick to hit device manufacturers with, not an attempt to make a profit for Google).

So, to answer my friend’s question, “who will win the mobile phone wars: Apple or Google?” I don’t think either will win, because there isn’t really a war – at least not between those two. Palm, Microsoft, Nokia, and Research in Motion are different stories altogether. Until the market hits the ceiling though, none of them are going to achieve market dominance anytime soon. It has become a game of staying power, and the only platform in any real danger is Palm.

http://www.sdtimes.com/ORACLE_TO_BUY_SUN_PENDING_APPROVAL/About_ORACLE_and_SUN/33425

The site is written at an introductory level, and will focus on simple instructions to get encryption working in your favorite applications. There will also be articles on how encryption is seen from the popular media and Movies and TV, as well as some of the basic theory.

Recommend it to your friends!

Most people know to encrypt their Wi-Fi router, for example. That’s because there’s been lots of press about it, and many people like to tell stories about how they bum internet service from their neighbors.

A few people know the difference between a regular website and an SSL-encrypted web site. That little lock icon in your browser means that communication between you and the site is relatively secure. However, few people know what it actually means. I won’t go down the road (in this post, anyway) of the value of SSL certificates and whether they actually do the job they are supposed to.

And that’s about it. SSL and WiFi is the limit of what most people deal with encryption. I’m talking about personal use here, not business. Of course the average IT worker uses a terminal session called SSH which is quite secure, and most businesses have secure VPN’s in to their private networks, which are generally also secure. Like WiFi encryption, the what I find interesting there is that the businesses use this mainly for protection of their own internal networks. Their outside communications are generally via email or IM, just like most people’s private ones.

And yet there are plenty of free, and not terribly difficult ways you can encrypt your emails and IM’s, and even phone calls so that only you and the receiver can communicate. Yet, hardly anyone uses them. In fact, so few people were interested that PGP, one of the best methods for sending emails securely, completely failed as a commercial product even before they started charging for it. Luckily, there is a free GPL replacement, so that the solution is still generally available for anyone who wants to use it (I do).

What am I talking about here? Well, any message you send over the Internet can be read by just about anybody. Any Email. Any IM. Any Skype call. Any message board posting. Now, I’m not paranoid. I agree that statistically speaking, no one really cares about the chain letter of jokes I forwarded to my cousin last week. Right?

Well, maybe not. But what if I sent a bank account number to my wife, so she could check it? You can bet there are bad people on the internet who are on the lookout for such information. What if my friend asks me for my phone number and address so he can send me a party invitation. How do I know it was really him, and that I’m not sending my information to an impostor? What about the government? I mean, you don’t have to be paranoid to be worried when the FBI calls their email surveillance system CARNIVORE. For Cripe’s sake! They couldn’t call it “PEACE” or “LOVE” or something? CARNIVORE?! And before you think that we don’t need to worry about this sort of thing anymore, CARNIVORE was initiated by the Clinton administration, not Bush.

So, I’m thinking about creating a blog for encryption-related stuff. Encryption for the lay-person, as it were. I’m not saying everyone is out to get you, but people buy car insurance even though they don’t plan on ramming anything.

Would anyone out there find something like that useful? Like easy how-to’s to set up encryption in different mail and IM clients, layman-level articles about how encryption works, and why you’d want to use it? It’s a bit of work to set up a new web site (and write for it), so I’ll only do it if people want it. Leave comments here! (http://2robots.com/2009/01/23/encryptonomicon)

I immediately realized my mistake, and rushed to dry it off. If you search the Internet, you’ll find that the beat thing to do next is stick your iPhone (or other soggy electronics) into a bag of white rice. Rice absorbs water better than almost anything else. It will quick the moisture right out of your phone.

After 24 hours, I took the iphone a out of the rice and guess what? It worked perfectly! Well, almost perfectly. The screen was a little psychadellic, but that cleared up after a few more days as the cu al bits of water dried up, and then it was good as new.

Or so I thought. While I had survived the immediate risk of frying my phone, the moisture ha done some long term damage to the circuit board inside: it had allowed rust to start to set in.

Fast forward to today. 6 months later, my phone started acting funny. It claimed I had an incompatible device plugged in. All of a sudden, the battery only lasted a few hours. The circuit board had rusted and begin to short out.

Unfortunately, the water indicator was still bright orange, so apple wouldn’t fix it for me (rightly so). There’s nothing for it now; my iPhone is in the twilight of it’s life, ends early with electronic alzhimer’s.

First, there are currently two types of external hard drives in the market today. The first kind use laptop hard drives, which offer less storage and slower performance, but are physically small, light, and silent. The second type, which the V1 belongs to, use desktop hard drives. These offer much larger capacity and much higher performance than the first kind, but the tradeoff is that they are physically larger, usually more noisy, and require an external power plug in addition to a USB connection. The VOX V1 however bucks this generality. It is smaller than other external desktop drives (you can see a comparison picture in the photos), and also runs nearly silent. This is partially because the VOX V1 is a sealed case. There is no fan for airflow, and heat is dissipated through the walls of the enclosure. While I wouldn’t recommend putting the V1 in a desk drawer, this does mean that you generally don’t need to worry about available airflow where you place it as much as you would have to with a different brand.

The external hard drive market is very crowded, and vendors have to try to differentiate themselves from the competition. While the V1 supports all the standard things you would expect from a modern external enclosure, including an SATA connector, VOX also supplies a Windows-only backup software package. This software installs on Windows XP or Vista and allows you to push the (only) button on the V1 to initiate a system backup. This is a nice feature, and one really shouldn’t mind that this software is Windows-only as OS X has Time Machine, which is just about the best backup software for home computers in existence. Linux users are unfortunately left to find their own software solution for backups, although there are several solutions available for free.

As mentioned earlier, the VOX V1 includes both USB and E-SATA connectors. It’s nice to see the E-SATA connector as USB2 can’t supply data as fast as the drive can. Unfortunately, E-SATA was a standard that never really took off. It would have been better to include a newer SATA2 connector. Having said that, for whatever reason most modern laptops and desktops do not include external E-SATA or SATA2 ports, so either way you either need to purcahase an adapter card, or simply wait for the standard to catch on. What would have been really exciting was if the V1 included a Firewire 800 port, as those are much more common (especially on laptops) that any sort of SATA port. Regardless, this isn’t a problem just with the VOX V1, but with most external hard drives today. The takeaway here is that it is probably worth the investment for you to purchase an external SATA card rather than rely on the USB connection.

One additional comment is that, while the drive does come with a complete set of E-SATA, USB, and power cables, the included cables are on the short side. Even the power cable, which is typically the logest of the bunch, was under 6 feet long, including the power brick. This makes it a little annoying when using the V1 with a laptop, as you may not be that close to a socket (if the cord is 6 feet you need to be within 4 feet or less of the socket).

Another small note is that the manual said it was supposed to come with a screw driver and screw set, which mine didn’t. However, as there’s no reason to open the case, I don’t see why you would need one anyway. The only reason I mention it is because the manual said it should. Probably, they should just change the manual to not say that.

The above are relatively minor complaints however, and overall the V1 is a pleasure to work with. It is by far the quietest of the 7 other external drives I use, and 750GB of capacity provides a lot of space to use. The fact that it is more compact than my other drives is good (although it is a little bit taller), and the E-SATA port means that the drive will probably last me until my next computer. In fact, in several years or whenever it has reached the end of its lifetime, I’ll probably be able to upgrade the disk inside of it and re-use the case, which is a good thing.

Overall, the VOX External Hard Drive V1 USB 2.0 & SATA has a silly (but descriptive) name. More importantly, it does exactly what it says it does by providing a compact, quiet, and high performing external hard drive. The build quality is excellent, and I look forward to using the V1 for a long time to come.

It implements a simple terminal emulator, and can be used to connect to any standard telnet server including Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, Cisco, or even Windows as long as telnet services are enabled.

You can choose which host and even which port to connect to, which makes this useful for debugging web and mail servers.

Works over WI-FI or your Carrier Network.

You can play a free demo online. The online version has simpler graphics and gameplay than the full version. It works both on a PC web browser and from the iPhone.

You can get the full version through the iTunes Store. It has much better graphics, sound effects, and more!

That was a while ago. Now I have a job. And I don’t pirate any more. Partially, this is because I’ve been a software developer, and I see things more “from the other side.” But mostly, its because I can. I have $50 to my name so that I can go out and buy that game I wanted, or the box set dvd’s, or whatever (not to say I don’t think they are overpriced).

That’s why I’ve always thought that the piracy numbers given out by the movie (MPAA), music (RIAA), and software (BSA) industry groups have been complete garbage. I mean, Billions of dollars? Common, that’s rediculous. Just because someone has pirated your software/song/movie doesn’t mean they are willing to pay for it. That’s always been my assertion, but of course I could never prove it.

Luckily, Russel Carrol, Director of Marketing at Reflexive (a PC game company) has done it for me. In an article posted at Gamasutra, he lays out a very data-driven and scientific analysis of the company’s piracy rates both before and after taking steps which reduced piracy. Read the article. Really.

His conclusion: Only 1 in 1,000 pirates are actually willing to purchase the product.

Does it still seem worth suing college kids, guys?