My memory of Steve is tainted by my feeble attempts in telephone negotiations with him in 1992. NeXT was developing NeXTSTEP 486 for the Dell 450 DE/2 DGX, and both companies wanted a more formal relationship. Steve wanted large sales volume commitments, $2.5M worth if memory serves, and I knew that we at Dell didn’t want to make any volume commitment. In trying to keep the conversation going, I was making excuses, and Steve accurately but unkindly challenged my excuses. There are other positive personal memories, of Steve demoing NeXTSTEP 486 on stage on a DGX, and of face to face meetings regarding some large sales opportunities, but memories of him mocking my words still linger.

Since his death, I’ve seen hardly any positive discussion of NeXT, yet what Steve did with that company was so important, with regard to Apple products, but also with the beginnings of the World Wide Web. (The only significant post-mortem NeXT-oriented report I’ve seen is Jonathan Schwartz’ Realigning the Stars.)

It is perhaps exaggeration, but not wild exaggeration to say that Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP adapted to have the Mac OS 9 look and feel. iOS internals, in turn, are derived from OS X. At least from a software perspective, all of the prominent Apple products, current Macs, the iPhone and the iPad, trace back to Steve and his team at NeXT.

It is no secret that the first Web server was built by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT machine at CERN. And that the first Web browser was also built on that machine. [See 20 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published, Welcome to info.cern.ch, and World Wide Web.]

What if there had been no NeXT, no NeXTcube and no NeXTSTEP? Would there have been a World Wide Web? It is easy to say that Berners-Lee might have used a SPARCstation and SunOS instead, and the Web would still have thrived. But in 1991, there were Gopher, USENET, and other alternatives to the Web. Who knows what would have happened? Without Steve Jobs, the Web as we know it might have never come to be. So give him some credit for the Web while you’re thinking of him, an exceptional person who gave us so much.

At
http://shop.sprint.com/en/shop/why_sprint/4g/4g_plan_details.html,
“Everything” doesn’t really mean “Everything”. That page used to say “Because we’ve boosted your data experience with this phone’s amazing services and features, you’ll need our $10/mo. Premium Data add-on” [emphasis by Sprint]. Initially, this seemed tied to Sprint’s 4G WIMAX network. However, the $10/month premium was applied even when 4G didn’t work reliably, as in my experience in Austin, and even when 4G was not available at all. I readily accepted the $10/month when the Evo was new and I had been convinced that 4G would work well in Austin. 3 months ago, I was considering buying a second 4G capable phone, a Samsung Epic for my wife, and appealed to Sprint that they should not charge another $10/month for the Epic.

I spent several days trying, as a “Sprint Premier Gold” customer, to get Sprint to make an exception, even escalating to CEO Dan Hesse’s office, but to no avail. Everyone I spoke with repeated the assertion that the 4G capable phones put extra traffic on the 3G network when 4G was not available. But they would never provide a plausible technical explanation for the assertion. When my wife said she wanted an LG Optimus anyway, I accepted defeat. [When I first signed up with Sprint, it seemed like they would do almost anything to make customers happy. Even 5 years ago, when I would escalate some problem, Sprint was surprisingly, perhaps excessively, accommodating. Perhaps the less accommodating position is viable, since Sprint seems to actually be regaining customers again.]

In January, in the third paragraph of the press release Smartphones Drive Wireless Data Explosion, Sprint overcame the seemingly indefensible $10/month premium for 4G capable phones by “applying a $10 per month Premium Data add-on charge to activations of smartphones beginning Jan. 30.” — the premium now applies to 3G only phones such as the LG Optimus.

But the plan naming didn’t change. Sprint still touts the “Everything Data” plan that really isn’t everything, since typical data capable phones have a $10/month premium.

Though http://shop.sprint.com/en/shop/why_sprint/4g/4g_plan_details.html now simply says “Plans for this phone require our $10/mo. Premium Data add-on charge in addition to one of the plans below.”, that page lists 6 “Everything” plans with “unlimited” data.

As Ed Vizard once wrote “Words are only words and they have no regard for what they say.”

Update March 13: See, also, Sprint’s Dan Hesse differentiates between unlimited and ‘unlimited’ in latest TV spot and Sprint increasing 3G data plan pricing by $10/mo, calling it ‘premium data’.

In 1996 I, when I was last active in IMTC, I participated in board meetings in Munich and London and the annual meeting in Boston. This time I participated in the IMTC annual meeting mostly from my home office, but also while driving, running errands.

The primary venue for the meeting was RADVISION’s SCOPIA Desktop, which also allows for participation by H.323 video calling and PSTN calling. The participation probably peaked at 30+ distinct callers, mostly calling by SCOPIA clients, a few calling by telephone, and at least one conference room calling, presumably using an H.323 system. Though there were glitches of various kinds at various times, the overall experience was surprisingly good.

Compared to flying to Boston or across the Atlantic for a three hour meeting, it was definitely better than physically being there. About two-thirds of the way through the meeting, I was interrupted and needed to leave my office and the SCOPIA client. But I had had a chance to browse materials in anticipation of the rest of the meeting, and listen in from my phone while I ran my errands. (Android doesn’t seem to be a client option yet, but perhaps it will be.)

On the other hand, there were no direct chances to get to know the participants outside of the Internet meeting. The 90s IMTC meetings were typically multiple day events, with hundreds of attendees and opportunities. None of today’s participants were people I knew from back then, so some informal contact would have been useful. And there was no opportunity to sample the attractions of Boston, London or Munich.

In the 90s, one of the major activities of IMTC was fostering the now irrelevant T.120, but IMTC was also at the forefront of fostering conferencing on packet switched networks, particularly the Internet. (Today there was a bit of nostalgic disparagement of T.120…) Now IMTC is fostering a much broader range of options, with many activity groups pursing topics across the spectrum from hand-held mobile devices to immersive “telepresence”.

There was much lamenting lack of interoperability, not that different from When will they ever learn?, but with commitment and plans to try to improve interoperability. There should be a recording of the meeting and copies of the presentation materials available soon at IMTC.org.

Though the song is about more substantive issues than interoperability of video calling solutions, that refrain comes to mind when thinking about all of the isolated islands of video calling solutions that seem to be proliferating instead of reconciling.

It’s hard to keep up with them, all the instances this year: Cisco umi Home Telepresence that won’t call other Cisco systems, the Logitech TV Cam that seems to only call other Logitech Vid instances, not Logitech’s LifeSize sytems, FaceTime that only calls other iPhone 4′s and iPod Touch, Qik that only calls between Evo and Epic, …

In July, I had hopes for fring, and that Skype would soon leverage the video capable hardware of Evo and iPhone 4. I actually succeeded with a fring to Skype video call just before fring stumbled out of sync with Skype when iPhone 4 launched.

For a while I was dismayed that Skype had not become available on Evo, with the Android Skype only available for Verizon phones. Skype lifted the Verizon-only limitation a few weeks ago, but so far Skype isn’t doing video on phones. Skype is moving in lots of directions, so patience may be necessary.

Impatient for something useful/usable, I started trying to setup a SIP environment that would allow me to use one of the SIP apps for Android. I’m still pursuing that, but it is much slower going than I hoped. That’s another story for another writing or two.

Tango seems plausible for phone to phone video calling, but there are no indications of interoperability beyond phones.

FaceTime may well become available for other Apple platforms, but will it ever call non-Apple systems?

For now, I’ll hope that Skype and Tango may become more useful on my Evo, and try to get things going with SIP, and wonder “When will they ever learn?”

The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

Let’s get the two most talked about items, battery life & 4G via WiMAX, out of the way first.

Battery Life

The first data on battery life I saw was positive (“We know what you’re thinking, though: what about battery life? Amazingly, …”) in the May 19 Engadget review. However, the same day, Walt Mossberg was reporting Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags. That day, still a couple of weeks from my own hands on experience, I accepted those as different experiences due to different usage and expectations.

Nothing since has made me think much differently. I was concerned about battery life, so I ordered a cheap second battery. While waiting for the off-brand battery, I tried to see how long the battery would go with minimal usage, just my normal phone usage. I was able to get three days out of a single charge. That’s not much worse than I was used to with my pocket phone (LG Muziq), so I started thinking that I would be OK with battery life.

After the extra battery came, I fully charged the original battery, set it aside to be my spare, and have used the off-brand battery ever since. With my normal usage habits, including powering down the phone when I’m sleeping, I usally go two days between charges. Only once, after a long day of heavy phone usage, camera usage and my grand-daughter’s game playing, has the phone asked to be recharged, after 13 hours use that day.

The most comprehensive review I’ve seen are the 13 pages from AnandTech on June 28. The page discussing battery life leads off “There’s no other way to put it: the EVO 4G has terrible battery life.” The data there doesn’t contradict my experience. But that reviewer wants perfection — the last sentence says “While I’d be willing to carry something the size of the EVO, I’d need it to be perfect in order to make that tradeoff.”  I’m not expecting perfection. With hardware in general, and certainly “phones” like these, one can always wait for something cheaper/faster/better. I don’t see anything currently available that would be better for me than the Evo. Droid X, though a littler newer, doesn’t seem any better. I ponder about the iPhone 4, but only ponder.

4G via WiMAX

Click on the top map above and you’ll see the coverage at my home, light green to indicate some WiMAX signal, but not the dark green to indicate strong signal, with big patches of white (no signal) nearby.  The other map is a broader picture of our part of town, mostly dark green, but noticeable patches of white and light green.

Though I can use and appreciate the WiMAX in some places, it is mostly artificial, in that I mostly would either not use my pocket computer in those places, or would choose WiFi over WiMAX in the places where I would use the Evo. Most of the places where I’ve really wanted to use WiMAX, the signal just hasn’t been strong enough.

Sometimes it seems the Evo is trying to use WiMAX when it should accept that the WiMAX signal is too weak and revert to 3G. To avoid that apparent phenomenon, I usually leave the WiMAX turned off, turning it on every few days when it seems like it might really be useful. Then I wonder why Sprint is charging me the extra $10/month for 4G, but rather than protest I hope for the day when the coverage here is comprehensive.

All the “little” things

To me some of these are a much bigger deal than battery and WiMAX concerns. They make Evo a good pocket computer for me.

Display

Both the size, 4.3″ diagonal and resolution, 217 pixels/inch, are a delight to me. I can’t imagine anything physically larger that would still be a pocket computer, until flexible displays become practical, if they do. I’m typing this report on a screen with 99 pixels/inch. Looking at photos and videos is so much more pleasant with the Evo’s higher resolution. The difference is dramatic enough to make me curious about the iPhone 4 “Retina” display, at 326 pixels/inch, but not curious enough to go looking for one.

“Keyboard”

I didn’t know what to think before I tried the on-screen keyboard. I didn’t think I’d miss having tiny physical keys and knew that a pocket computer couldn’t have big enough keyboard for touch typing. I’d gotten used to the on-screen keyboard of my i300 easily enough, without learning Graffiti, so I thought I’d be OK but clumsy without a stylus. Learning to use the keyboard, with just my fingers, has been faster than I expected, though I’ll usually rotate the Evo for landscape keyboard unless what I’m entering is very short.

Google integration, Android, HTC Sense

With Evo’s Android, I expect good fit with Google, and that has been true as far as I’ve explored. Besides search, I mostly use Google for Reader, and Reader works OK in mobile mode for skimming tens of headlines (actually groups of 15) at a time. I don’t use Gmail much, but will probably use Gmail a little more as time goes on and I become more dependent on the Evo. Having Google Maps in my pocket has been useful a few times. But I really haven’t explored Android or HTC Sense very much so far. That is an endorsement from my perspective — as an end user I haven’t had the need to explore the software much. Eventually I will, but because I want to, not because I need to.

Camera(s)

“Faster/better/cheaper” applies to cameras, in particular, cameras built-in to computers and phones. The Evo’s built-in cameras suffice for almost all my purposes. The still photos are about as good as the pocket camera I bought last year, with lack of optical zoom being the main limitation. For video, the Evo is definitely preferable to my “marvelous toy” (AIPTEK MPVR+) of three years ago. Optical zoom and 1080p are the main reasons I think of separate cameras now.

YouTube (Flash)

Browsing Android phones at a Sprint store earlier this year, I was dismayed about the absence/clumsiness of YouTube support. So I was expecting to have to deal with that when I got my Evo. But YouTube HQ was already in place, and works just fine. Other Flash video doesn’t work, but I don’t have much need for other Flash video, and will probably just wait for the Evo to have Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1.

Apps

My daughter was dismayed that I’d had the Evo for more than 24 hours and still hadn’t downloaded any apps. I don’t think she was impressed that I responded by getting ConnectBot (SSH client) and AndroidVNC (a.k.a. Android VNC Viewer). I hadn’t tried SSH or VNC on a phone since the i300. They both seem to work just fine. I’ve even tried using vi after logging in to a Fedora machine with ConnectBot, knowing that the on-screen keyboard would make it very hard to use vi normally. That I was able to use vi at all seemed worth celebrating. ConnectBot is mostly for SSH tunneling, at least in my current thinking, and handles that well to the extent I’ve tried it with VNC, IMAP and SMTP.

I’m still behind the curve in downloading apps. Since I haven’t explored many of the factory installed apps, and what I’ve explored has met my needs, I’m not likely to be much of an app consumer. I did download “Barbie in a Mermaid tale” for our grand-daughter — she and our daughter like to play that.

Mail

Ever since I’ve been handling mail servers for myself and others, I’ve been a fan of IMAP for mail servers. I’ve been less of a fan of most mail clients’ handling of IMAP. The only two clients I’ve ever really liked with IMAP, particularly with regard to handling of folders, are Netscape Mail and the Outlook Express lineage of Microsoft options, including the current form, Windows Live Mail. I’m pleasantly surprised by the handling of IMAP folders by the Evo mail client.

Multitouch

Reading about the lack of multi-touch in Android had been one source of trepidation, unnecessary trepidation in my Evo experience. Multi-touch may not be present in all of the apps, or as fully featured as in other environments, but seems OK in the browser and the PDF viewer. AndroidVNC doesn’t seem to have adopted multi-touch yet, presumably because the APIs are relatively new to Android, but does have discrete zoom buttons.

More to come

Froyo

Before I got the Evo, I thought I’d be impatiently waiting for HTC to update from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo), if for no other reason than to have Flash support. Since the Evo YouTube HQ support seems just fine, I’m simply curious about 2.2, not impatient. Now is probably a good time to start taking a closer look at how Android and HTC/Sprint software all fit together on the Evo.

Travel

I’ve not gone on any trips with Evo yet. I’m expecting that having a pocket computer will make me much less likely to bring out a laptop in airports, etc. On the other hand, the Evo’s (extra $30/month, so far not purchased by me) portable Hotspot capability may be attractive in terms of both convenience and avoiding airport and hotel WiFi charges.

Videoconferencing

I haven’t tried Qik video chat — I don’t know anyone to call with Qik! I’d really like to try Skype on Evo, but my impression is that Skype won’t be offering video calling on Android/Evo any time soom. I keep seeing intriquing reports about fring, and it appears that a production release of fring for Android is available, so I’ll have to give fring a try.

Development

I’m assuming I’ll have to build an app of my own for Android/Evo, if for no other reason than to say “Hello World!”, but it will probably be a while before I do so.

But right now, I need to respond to all the text messages that are making my Evo beep at me…

The 450MHz Pentium II mail/web/name server had been seeming more sluggish, and the load average was often in the low single digits, not cause for alarm, but not the totally loafing I was used to seeing less than a year ago.

Every time I would investigate, thinking that web traffic might be the problem, especially MySQL for WordPress, I’d find multiple instances of spamd consuming the most processor and memory.

This was anything but rigorous analysis, but surprising/disappointing. After considering moving both mail and web to the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 sitting next to the 450MHz PII, instead I moved only the web service to the 3.0GHz P4, leaving the 450MHz machine to just handle mail. The web traffic, including MySQL, seems to place minimal load on the 3.0GHz processor, but the load average on the 450MHz processor still creeps up, as it fends off spam.

A few days ago I was passing by the neighborhood RadioShack and thought “Maybe I could get an Evo from RadioShack faster than directly from Sprint?”.  I walked in, asked a few questions, and a few minutes later I was pre-ordering an Evo, only my second “smartphone”, my first being a Samsung SPH-i300 purchased in late 2001.

I think the i300 was the 2^nd Palm OS (3.5.2) phone on the market (soon after a monochrome phone from Kyocera). I loaded it up with SSH, VNC, a PDF reader, Java ME, Java apps of my own devising and probably some less used apps I’ve forgotten. Using the i300 changed my thinking about email, about web browsing, and application development. But ultimately, the hardware and network weren’t up to what I wanted — I wanted much more screen area in both pixels and physical size, faster processing, and faster transfers.

By some time in 2006 I’d gotten to the point where the i300 sat in the charging cradle most of the time. Late last year I stopped using it entirely — I think it is in my office closet somewhere, along with a spare that a friend gave me. My current phone (an LG Muziq) will nominally browse the web, handle email (even IMAP), and play all the MP3s I put on a MicroSD card, but I rarely use it for more than voice calls, an occasional text message, and an occasional photo.

I couldn’t believe the iPhone, its predecessors and successors, could be all that fundamentally better than the i300. All the pre-3G and post-3G iPhone networking complaints, including the 2009 SXSW reports, didn’t help entice me. I didn’t even touch an iPhone for the longest time. I kept hoping for a larger scale device, bigger than a phone and smaller than a netbook, that I would find satisfying. My XO has not been that. The alluring iPad is too big and, so far, missing too much to convince me.

Since the HTC Evo was announced, it has seemed the closet fit I’m going to find anytime soon. Lots more pixels than the i300, modern processor, and, potentially satisfying networking. (WiMAX seems to cover our neighborhood and my most frequent travel spots.)

Having ordered the phone, now I can’t wait. Every new report or review, even Mossberg’s ambivalence (Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags), raises anticipation. In less than two weeks I should be immersed in Evo.

I spent Friday morning with the managers of the seven Red Arco Iris project regions (“networks”) and other Nicaraguan staff, working towards la red de redes (the network of networks). I believe, and I think the staff believes, that improved use of email, use of Internet shared storage (SkyDrive) and Skype calling will facilitate better communication and more efficient use of time and other resources.

One of the surprises of that session was eagerness to try Linux. I’m encouraging exploration using Ubuntu “live” CDs.

a.k.a. ”This looks great! But how do I use it?” (silence)

Back in the 90s, Larry Ellison and others were positing the feasibility of the “Internet Computer” a.k.a. “Network Computer”, based on “thin client” hardware and ubiquitous network access to servers and services. Though impractical then, computing along those lines is (becoming) practical today.

For those with sufficient  motivation, Google Documents (a.k.a. “Docs”) and (Microsoft) SkyDrive provide enticing capabilities.

One motivation is sharing files almost as if the people sharing the files are in the same location, using a conventional file server, even though the people are actually separated by significant distances. I’ve been exploring two scenarios, one city-wide and the other international.

Both Docs and SkyDrive operate along those lines but necessarily attempt to integrate with local “desktop” computing (quite possibly on a portable notebook or netbook) via a web browser. Both succeed and fail,  in different ways, with some of the failures likely by design intent.

For example, SkyDrive doesn’t reasonably permit in-place editing of a document, but rather expects documents to be uploaded/downloaded. Likely Microsoft is trying to protect sales of Office, but likely also waiting until support for in-place editing has been sufficiently well developed.

Less explicably, Docs limits file formats to three application surrogates for the Office core, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus non-editable PDFs. The in-place editing capabilities are likely more than enough for many users, but not seriously competitive with the full capabilities of the Office (or OpenOffice, etc.) applications.

Docs (though in seemingly perpetual “beta”, like GMail) has been around longer and seems easier to learn, mostly because it requires relatively little interaction with the traditional desktop environment, compared to SkyDrive. So in choosing whether to try to use Docs or SkyDrive one of the first questions is whether or not the limited file formats of Docs are sufficient. Also, though Docs may be easier to learn than SkyDrive, switching one’s thinking from desktop computing to Docs does require effort, and I’ve struggled to get others to expend that effort.

If those four Docs formats are not sufficient, then SkyDrive seems the best available option. The usage model is different from what most people are used to, and requires substantial interaction with the existing desktop environment, so SkyDrive is not easy to learn. But compared to the problems of carrying USB sticks from computer to computer and/or sending USB sticks in postal mail, there is much to motivate the learning.

Sometime this year, Google may provide another option, GDrive. For now, I’m encouraging people to give SkyDrive a try.

Some more related reading:

Watch out Google Docs – Microsoft SkyDrive is Coming

SkyDrive, Google Docs, Office Live Workspaces – Compared (suspense music…)

From SkyDrive to Google Docs

Yahoo drops its Briefcase

Cloud Storage’s Killer App… Geographic Collaboration

Much of my time is focused on helping the poorest of the poor in rural Nicaragua, where families subsist on US $1/day income. Red Arco Iris, as it is known in Nicaragua, a.k.a. Rainbow Network in the U.S., provides feeding centers, micro-loans, housing assistance, schools and educational assistance, and physicians and dentists at community clinics.

Of course, computer technology, Internet communication, cell phones, fax machines and other standard office accoutrements enable and facilitate Red Arco Iris staff in the seven regional offices. The staff enablement may be felt indirectly in the communities, but we can be much more ambitious.

Our ”feet on the ground” efforts have little to do with modern technology: food at the feeding centers is prepared on open fires, micro-loan committees depend on hand-written communication, the houses we help build are concrete/cinder-block/tin-roof construction, classes may be held under a shade tree, doctors practice in makeshift clinics, and so forth.

However, modern technology “inevitably” finds its way into direct import in these rural communities, whether it be a television hooked up to hazardous power or a cell phone passed amongst the people. Portable computers are beginning to be present. Internet connections are plausible. 20-year-olds who ten years ago couldn’t attend school are now graduating from high school and going on to college, where the technology needs and wants are not hard to imagine.

Assuming technology incursions are inevitable, are on the cusp of meaningfulness in rural Nicaragua, the questions become “How can technology be positive in these communities?” (money going to the cell phone providers is positive!?) and “How can we facilitate positive technology infusion?”.

Lots of small steps are being made. In days to come, there will be more to say about those steps.