The HBM-770 is just like every other Bluetooth headset, as I’ve said before. It has a power button, a charging port, volume controls, and you can plug it in the charge. It sits on your ear using a large loop (See image left). which starts behind the microphone and causes it to gently rest on your ear. Its the in-ear piece which defines how it sits on the side of your head, which really seems to work for me.

The speaker horn (that’s what I’m calling it… deal) sticks out a ways and rests very lightly in your ear canal. Its so light overall that there are times when I forget I’m wearing it and put my hand to my head to check. To switch the side of your head you want to headset on, you just flip the ear hoop. You don’t have to pull it out or swap it with another one. Its also nice that this one doesn’t need to invade your ear canal in order to work. I don’t think it has significant noise cancellation, but a good, loud handset makes up for that. 

I’m actually rather amazed its so light. They actually crammed the standard LG handset charger port onto this thing, which is real overkill to me, and had they not, it could have been a few grams lighter. It might have even floated. That’s fantastic since I have managed to alienate every headset I’ve ever received. It hurts the back of my ear. It hurts the front of my ear. It has too many pieces. It goes in too far. It doesn’t go in far enough. Mostly, though, they’ve never been loud enough. 

This is loud and clear, which means I can actually hear conversations instead of guessing what someone is saying to me. Even the operational tones the headset makes are useful. I can easily identify each noise that its making without the need to consult a manual or query the phone. Its simple, clean, and without drama of any kind. I like it. Hell, it even turns on and off smartly. When its off, touch the power button for a second and it comes on. When its on, hold it for 3 seconds and it turns off. There are no incantations, certifications, or teams of professionals required to operate it. 

I can’t help it, but if you need a simple, plain Bluetooth headset, there is no other choice but the LG HBM-770. It beats the pants off of anything else out there for me. Even the Jawbone. Sure, the Jawbone looks fantastic and has that wicked noise cancellation technology which can delete lawnmowers from a conversation, but it doesn’t work for me. So, for US$80 list, I cannot and will not beat this thing with a stick of any kind. I’ve found my headset soul mate. Feel free to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

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Why am I saying these things? Recently, our amazingly cool, smart, educated, and well spoken President cancelled “Drug War” operations against medical marijuana stores. Los Angeles superstar Police Chief William Bratton who famously cleaned up New York City crime and was brought to LA to do the same, has stated that Obama’s actions are stupid. Bratton loudly proclaimed that Marijuana is a “gateway” drug. You, sir, are an ass.

I’ve never seen a single study or any statistical information indicating that everyone who smokes pot (ever, mind you) always does harder drugs. The concept is ludicrous. The idea that some dude who has never smoked pot before then takes a drag of a joint is instantly transformed into a hardcore drug addict, shooting heroine into his veins in some dank, rundown ghetto (back and to the left… back and to the left… back and to the left…) is simply mind boggling naive.

This is merely anecdotal information, but I know dozens of people who still smoke and have never touched anything aside from alcohol. A number of them won’t even smoke cigarettes! This isn’t an anomaly. This doesn’t represent a small segment of society. This is the reality of what marijuana is. To see pot as a so-called “gateway” drug is to say that every single person who uses marijuana for medical purposes is going to become a government sanctioned junkie. Feh.

The pot, also known in organic product circles as Hemp, is a hugely useful plant. It can be used to make clothing, ropes, and other fiber-based products and a huge range of other things which I don’t know about. My daughter, who can’t have any dairy of any kind drinks Hemp milk! Why are these things possible if pot is so bad? Hemp is extremely easy to grow, will grow in most climates and conditions, and can be sewn and reaped numerous times a year, making it a plentiful source of renewable goods.

Yet now, down in Mexico, we see the fruits of our drug war labors. Thousands of people have been murdered by drug cartels fighting with the Mexican army just over our border, with some of the ultra violence spilling over into US border communities. Many billions of dollars worth of drugs seized by drug war zealots every year is pot. Not heroine, cocaine, or any other hard core drug. DEA officials spend millions of our tax dollars every year to find and eradicate pot farms throughout the US.

Why do we do this? There’s the far left answer which says that the Religious Right coerced the Republicans, through Mrs. Reagan (remember Just Say No?) to push a complete, unfiltered war on drugs on her husband in order to satisfy a faith-driven agenda. The far right leaning answer is likely that drugs erode the moral fabric of our society, driving us ever closer to the brink of the hellish abyss from whence satan spat his bile which morphed into drugs, but I don’t know for sure since I’m a Democrat.

Regardless of the reasons, we blow billions of tax payer dollars every year on this ridculous war on drugs to mostly combat a weed which makes people silly and get the munchies. Now, come to think of it, that would be a fantastic stimulus package. Just allow everyone to go to a medical marijuana facility and purchase up to 12 oz. of pot. Once they smoke some of it, they’ll get the munchies which will cause them to go out and seek food, thereby stimulating the economy by spending!

So, my personal challenge to you, Bill Bratton, is to prove to me with real data that pot is a gateway drug and that people can’t help but seek out hard drugs once they’ve tasted the pots. Deal?

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The reason this is cool is because it allows you to use Google’s most used features without being online, but what it affords Google is far more comprehensive. Gears technology allows Google to pre-define and work out the kinks on keeping its mess of services synched up correctly with local applications. Sure, for now that’s web browsers and web pages, but there’s no limitation anywhere which states that the sync target isn’t an application instead of a browser. This suggests that its the synching which is more important to Google than the offline usage aspect, though that’s a feature which should not be discounted. It will be some time before everyone is always online, so offline access is critical to Google’s success.

Google’s also got another trick up its sleeve which it hasn’t seen fit to shine a spotlight on. You thought that the Google Phone, T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone, was cool. Wait until you see Grand Central. Grand Central is an access provider which Google bought last year and has not yet publicized significantly. In fact, its still in private beta and there are no signs that it will be coming out of the closet any time soon. What does Grand Central do? Its a single point of contact system which focuses around a phone number. The service gives you a number and you can add any number of phones to that service. Once added, you can control when and how people reach you and when and how the phones connected react. 

Its not clear what Google plans for Grand Central and how it might fit into the grand scheme of things, but it is a compelling additional notch in Google’s already battle-tested belt. Grand Central could very well be a component of an everything or nothing play which leaves all other contenders on the field. Take Picasa, Google Gears, a desktop application compatible with Mac and Windows, Google Sync, and Grand Central and you have an all-in-one data powerhouse which can handle your internet access, search, email, contacts, agenda, images, feeds, voice mail, phone calls, and back it all up while offering you ubiquitous access. Its not hard, then, to imagine a cheap netbook with 3G network access or tethered to a Google/Android phone (more are coming, I assure you) and a Google-specific Linux distro designed to take advantage of all of these features. 

If prices of netbooks aren’t compelling now, wait until you get a deal which includes unlimited wireless internet. My guess is that the sweet spot will be US$99-250 for MIDs to 10-11″ netbooks. Does this mean that Google’s taking over the world as we know it? Yes and no, depending on who you talk to. If you ask the nuts, sure. Google’s been trying to wrest freedom from our already tenuous grasp since day one. If you ask me (and you are reading this), then the answer is no… with concessions. Google is very clever. It will pretty much own the internet in 10 years, but not alone. It will be owned by a largely loosely compiled group of open source advocates who have been eyeing this prize since Steve Ballmer started gloating about Microsoft’s position years ago. 

More specifically, with the way that Google has positioned how it uses and leverages technology, there will be a number of sources for Google’s almost assured dominance, and this is clever because it almost completely bypasses Anti-Trust. Android is Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) so, technically, Google doesn’t own it. Email is ubiquitous, and Google makes no claims that its Gmail or nothing. In fact, Google has been opening Gmail up further and further since it started, making it pretty damned compelling. Docs: There’s no real competition, but Google’s not exactly vying to stop it, either. The same goes for Calendar, Sync, and Picasa. When you buy a WinMo phone, it won’t work with anything but Outlook on Windows. Hmm. Everything from Google works everywhere. If you were Anti-Trust, who’d you look at first?

So, as Sherlock Holmes used to say (despite the fact that he is a fictional character), “The game is afoot.” Google isn’t playing, either. They’re in this to win. They’re already one of the world’s largest companies in what is most assuredly a record breaking time. I can assure you with every fiber of my being that there’s no way in hell (or Los Angeles, if you like) that Google’s going to willingly give up that growth and power position, recession be damned. Mark my words, though. In the next year or so we’ll start hearing about desktop applications, and then you’ll know that I saw the future as clear as day… or at least that I guessed well

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Of course, it turns out the be a check cashing scam and my wife and I can see it coming a mile away, plenty of time to avoid the scam. Of course, not everyone will be able to sniff out the rat. If people had gotten wind of how it works then the scammers around the world, including the notorious Nigerian gangs, wouldn’t still be at it. In case you don’t quite get it yet, this is organized crime, dear readers. Here’s the ad itself:

tutor/teacher

Reply to: xxxxxxxxxxxxx@rocketmail.com ^[?]
Date: 2008-12-12, 1:20PM PST

I posted it here since it will likely be removed sometime very soon. Sadly, removal isn’t enough. There are so many scammers and so many scams that it may be impossible to ever stop it. Of course, there is one way to stop it. Tell your friends and family. Don’t be cordial or kind. Lay it on heavy. If you know someone who is unwilling to educate themselves about who to protect themselves from such scams or are susceptible to coersion, inform them of the level of idiot they are. Bluntly.

If this looks innocent to you, take a look at the reply which my wife received:

Hello,
Thanks for replying back to my online job posting, requiring your tutorial service for my Daughter, I would like to make a tutoring arrangement between you and my Daughter for the month of January 2009, I would like you to tutor him within a period of 1 month, on a schedule basis of 1 hr Daily, 3 times weekly, totaling 12 times in a month. I am willing to pay $50/hr. I would like to use these medium to inform you that my Daughter don’t live in the US, she would be flying from the Philippine to the US, I want you to teach her during her 8 month stay in the US, if there is need to extend your services, an amendment would be made to your salary. she would be dropped off/picked up by his nanny during the hours of teaching at any location you want the Tutoring to take place in your area.
You would be receiving a check drawn from a Bank in the US, from my business associates in the US, since i am from Philippine and right now am in Cuba for a business trip the  payments wont be honored in any bank there in Philippine or here in Cuba , These check would be made out for the cost of the tutorial services you are rendering, and also for the living expense, nanny fees of my Daughter . Regarding this- I hope i can trust you with these payments, as the payment would be made out in excess, so all you have to do is Deposit and cash the payment  at your bank, deduct your tutorial service fee, which should be $50 per hour X 12 Times a Month = $600 i would include an additional $100 for run around fee and any additional text book you might be needing- so $700 is what you deduct from the check you receive , whatever the remaining balance is after deduction of the $700 go ahead and deduct Money Gram or Western union  transfer sending charges for sending out the remainder to the Nanny who would be contacting you with further arrangements and instructions regarding pickup/drop off of my Daughter to the library where you would always teach her. So i hope i can trust you that you will teach my Daughter good academics and some moral respects so that they can be good to their self in the future, i hope i can count on you for the tutorial and the money to be sent to the Nanny. I look forward to read a detailed message from you containing the following information, if you are OK with my arrangements.
Full Name.
Mailing Address including Zip Codes ( no PO Box pls ).
Cell No ( If Available ).
Home No.
Gender.
Best Time to Call.
Email.
N.B  My Daughter  Name is Christine Miller, She is actually coming to the US for sight seeing, but while she is here i want her to study at the same time, she understand English, can write and read fluently i just need her French and English Upgraded.
Thanks for your Understanding.
Collins

Note how there was no mention of the daughter travelling internationally. Miraculously the offer has risen from $45 to $50 and it will be provided in the form of advance payment in check form. Oh! And if there’s extra left over you can have that, too. Just deposit the check and wire the remainder of the money to the “Nanny”. If there’s something inside you which says this could be plausible, you need help. There are so many holes in this story its not even vaguely funny.

This, then, is why Craig’s List is now completely and officially useless. It can’t stop these scams and the system is designed to count on the smarts of strangers to report pages which are questionable. This is what people traded in for local print paper ads?

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If you see one of these under your tree this Christmas, don’t bother unwrapping it. Take it back to where it was bought from and buy yourself a Sony PSP. The new Mystic Silver PSP-3000 model which comes with a new Ratchet & Clank game and a movie sells for the same price and offers infinitely more functionality and fun. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

I won’t even bother going into the specifications or any real details about the device. I will, however, state that it is not what it says it is. The Sony mylo 2 is not a smaller version of a laptop, as Sony would like you to believe. That would suggest that its a MID, and it is most certainly a MID, just not a very good one. The reasons for why it is not good are simple and clear, and I will outline them for you here.

To be entirely frank, I don’t have many issues with the hardware itself. If I had to be picky, I’d complain about the poor range of the Wi-Fi module and the lack of Bluetooth. The slider snaps open with an annoyingly loud sound, and the unit us twice as thick as Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet, a product its supposed to compete directly with. Sadly, where the Nokia N810 shines, the Mylo 2 falls very, very flat. One of the biggest failings the device has is the complete lack of any additional software in any way, shape, or form.

Yes. That’s right. There’s no software you can add. There’s not even a decent Mylo 2 site or, from what I’ve been able to tell, a development site for the version of Linux which the Mylo 2 uses. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that utilizing any related open source code requires that you make that source available. This means that Sony should have a developers site for the version of Linux the Mylo 2 uses. Nokia (I’m sorry I keep dragging them out, but they’re an excellent example) has a complete project for the Maemo project and almost all of the software is available in source form.

Apparently Sony has found a way around this by using Linux as the core, but designing every single bit of UI software in-house and using entirely private and proprietary code. Its possible to do this as long as they don’t use any open source code at all. What this boils down to is that Sony doesn’t have to give out the code, offer any SDK for developers, or really do anything at all. And that’s just what Sony has done… nothing.

The interface is annoying. There’s no software. There are no 3rd party developers. There are no games. There are no tools to convert media. You’re forced to use Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick for storage. There’s really nothing at all that the Mylo 2 can offer. So, either get the aforementioned PSP or go pick up an Acer Aspire One from Costco for a measley US$349. I’m serious. For once, I’m actually telling people to stay away what appears to be a very cool gadget. Please trust me.

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First, however, the good news. If you thought that the original Jawbone was a revelation in Bluetooth headsets, you’d be right. However, after I was consistenly unable to make it work for me and remained relegated to the bench while watching my wife enjoy every minute of it, I had to consider the possibility that my head and/or ears are mishapen. To my great relief it turned out that others had similar problems. The Jawbone was designed for a particular kind of head, and mine wasn’t one of them.

Instead of railing at the poor, defenseless Bluetooth headset, I opted to not review it and wait, instead, for the Jawbone 2. It turned out that it was only a few months away (my review Jawbone came very late) and just a couple of weeks ago I received my Jawbone 2. I again marvelled at the superior industrial design, how it was so much smaller than the original, at the quality and sveltness of the new, more compact ear hoops, and that super-neato box it all comes in. I was immediately smitten.

The eye can lie, though. I opened it all up and followed the instructions. I bound it to my Palm Centro. I tried various ear bits and hoops in different combinations and on each ear. Again, however, I was foiled. It wasn’t fitting my head and, because of that, I couldn’t hear anything and people couldn’t understand a word I was saying. I thought that, at last, I knew that I was not destined to use Bluetooth. Then, one day, I spoke to a fellow nerd and he said that some people wore them without the ear hoops.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but the next day as I was trying to get onto the 10 West-bound I recalled the thought and pulled off the offending dealy and promptly shoved the Jawbone into my ear canal. Suddenly, everything was clear and it worked and it stopped noise from going in and out and, even with my windows down and the radio up, I could hold conversations. Finally, the dream which had been promised in the promotional video was available to me!

It was then, however, that I realized a few things about the price one must pay for such perfection. First and foremost, I lost the ability to hear anything from the ear into which the Jawbone 2 was inserted. I hear reasonably well, but I have a processing defect which makes it hard for me to discerne two or more sources of sound when they are competing with each other. Most people, it seems, are able to focus on one sound and push away the others. I cannot. With the Jawbone 2 blocking my ear canal, my other ear (the right) needed to hear everything else.

This did not go over well with me. I’m a music person. I prefer to have music with me all the time, especially when I’m driving. Now, this little, black communications device was taking away my music. In order to be on the phone or to have it available I would need to wittingly reduce my hearing range to less than half. Hearing works in much the same way that opening your eyes under water in a swimming pool. If you go under and look, you can see okay, but not great. If you wear goggles, you see perfect, but when you take them off, your vision is now worse than the first time.

I take the Jawbone 2 out of my ear, and now the music sounds weird, even when I turn it up loud. Is this the fault of Aliph? Probably not. I can’t imagine their engineers were laughing one day about how they would be the ruination of music. I’m sure there was an earnest effort to make something which had always been sucky, better. I believe they did do that, but sadly at the cost of my ability to enjoy music on the road. This likely means that I won’t be using it and it will go to my wife, who has been eyeing it with hunger.

If I had any other issues with the Jawbone 2, it would be the buttons. Now they are too easy to click and I’m confused by how they work. I’m also a little surprised that, despite the general loathing of power and status LEDs of Bluetooth headsets, that Aliph designed in a way to turn it off. How, then, would you know whether it was on or not? I thought that the white LED instead of Obnoxious Blue™ was a huge step in the right direction. Really, though, I just prefer to use my handset as the remote control. It works for me.

All in all, though, the Jawbone 2 is a fine, quality product which does exactly what it says it will, as long as you’re willing to put up with the loss of hearing. I’m quite sure that there are lots of people out there who are willing to do so, and I’ve seen it in the number of Jawbone 2 devices I see on Angelinos. The headset is available now for US$129.99. If it works for you, it will be one of the best buys you ever make.

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Some people just move the cable to the printer from one machine to the other. Others delve into the periodically annoying and frusterating world of network-based device sharing. Others who care not to engage in such tomfoolery just duplicate some things. This is where the new Kensington ShareCentral line of device management products comes in. Kensington shipped me a ShareCentral 5 the other day, and I’ve been putting it throught the paces to see what its made of.

RIght off, I’d say its made of some pretty nifty technology. When I first received it I made the almost immediate discovery that what amounts to a 5-port USB hub is first and foremost an ingenious USB device aggregator. Here’s how it works. On the back, as you can see in the illustration, there are two USB Type-B sockets, one for each computer. There are then 5 USB ports and a power socket for the powersupply. Install tiny little drivers on the two Macintosh or Windows systems (or mix of the two) and plug them in.

My assumption would be that the driver sets up a number of virtual device ports on the host computer so that they can all talk at the same time. This is fantastic because then all you need to do is plug in a single USB cable to access all of your devices, something which could possibly allow for cleaner cable management. Of course, its a little too expensive to just use as a device aggregator, but as a device sharing tool, it strikes a fair bargain.

To test the ShareCentral 5, I set it up on my desk where I have an HP 7800 Small Form Factor PC running Windows XP SP3 and an older PowerPC-based Mac Mini running Leopard. I removed the keyboard and mouse from the Mac and installed the drivers for both Mac OS X and Windows. I was a little disappointed at the poor quality of the CD-ROM supplied. It seemed rather poorly created, but it worked well. I would have preferred a dual format CD for users who may not be as well equipped to work with technical issues as I am.

I then plugged in each of the supplied USB to Computer cables (one is shorter than the other for what I would assume to be an effort to reduce entanglement) into each of the machines and connected the wireless dongle for the Logitech LX710 keyboard and mouse combo. It popped up in Windows first. I then clicked the button with the keyboard and mouse icon on it, it flashed a few times, and jumped to the other side. Now the Mac was using it. It was seamless, though it took a few seconds.

I tested a printer and a USB hard drive formatted in FAT32 and each worked flawlessly. I even tested switching with a hard drive from the Mac to Windows without first ejecting the drive and it apparently doesn’t complain, which means that the driver must add that functionality. I can’t confirm that just yet because I haven’t tested it to my satisfaction, though, so don’t take my word for it. Otherwise, everything works as advertised.

The box comes with everything you’ll need inside, including a little rubber gromet thing which can attach to either side and act as a cable guide in case you want to plug in a laptop in front of the device. Another nice touch are the four buttons which are magnetic. If you mount the device on a wall, you can rotate the images. If you want to put on custom buttons, it comes with three numbered blanks. Very well thought out, aside from the CD, of course.

Its solid, well built, and very functional. I appreciate the Mac OS X support, as well as the seamless operation between systems. It would be nice if Kensington got really platform happy and developed a set of Linux drivers, but we can’t get everything we wish for, do we. It is now available for US$79.99 direct from Kensington and, I would presume, from their retail partners.

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This new model is, like the others in the SlimBlade series, designed to perform more than one task. In most cases, there is a presentation element involved, which is the case with this model. It is designed to work as both a mouse and a presentation control module. You just switch between modes by pressing the Mode button twice in short succession, it flashes, and off you go. It supports both Back and Forward as well as a couple of other presentation behaviors. At the same time it disables the laser and stops acting like a mouse. Just double-tap the Mode button and you’re into Mouse Mode again. Easy as pie. The Trackball Mouse worked like a little thumbball mouse, which is cool for media use while sitting on your couch and manipulating your compy on your bigscreen TV.

The new SlimBlade Bluetooth Presenter Mouse (Hey Kensington, you really, REALLY need to figure out a more compact naming convention!) is designed to work in the same way, except with presentations, but its far superior to the SBTM and its probably because Kensington figured out a few things. I’ll be glad to tell you what those things are, as well. First, they figured out that the detector array under the mouse doesn’t need to be some ridiculously engineered portal with sophisticated industrial design. Now its just a hole. That works just fine.

Second, you don’t need lights everywhere to prove that its an optical mouse. Some of the early optical mice threw off so much light polution you’d lose most of your night vision capabilities! While the Presenter has its share of lights, they aren’t blinking or lighting up unless you tell it to do something or, and this is expected, when it runs out of battery juice. I do find it somewhat annoying that the presenter mode lights flash 10 times to indicate going into or out of the mode. Five would have been more than enough.

Third, you don’t need to design a mouse to be shaped like and nearly weigh as much as a Curling puck to make it comfortable to the hand. The Trackball Mouse was very heavy (two “AA” batteries didn’t help much) and is much larger, with the bottom edges curved in, presumably to make it more comfortable. This new Presenter is much slimmer, like its namesake, and just gets out of your way. Its also significantly lighter than the Trackball, making it almost disappear when using it, and I’m really liking that.

Despite this shrinking in size and reduction in weight, it still feels very well built and sturdy. There’s a strip of plastic which runs around the sides and front, and when you pull it forward is slides out to reveal the Bluetooth pairing button. This is nice, but then anyone who didn’t buy it or know about this would never, ever, ever find the pairing button and would therefore not be able to use it.  Of course, I don’t really foresee that kind of thing happening very often. Do you?

The new Kensington SlimBlade Bluetooth Presenter Mouse is a really solid product that is well built, has no real flaws, does the jobs it is designed to perform very well, and is priced right. I personally love it and can’t see moving to another mouse for some time, especially since I’m on the road all the time. This mouse is available now and goes for US$49.99. It works with both Mac and Windows systems. Pairing with Mac OS X 10.5 was seamless and fast. The unit takes two “AAA” batteries and Kensington claims it will work for three months before needing new ones.

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For more Carlin on YouTube, go here.

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What is a MID? A MID is a Mobile Internet Device, a term coined by someone else whom I don’t care to lookup. It could have been Intel. It was Intel, in fact, which coined the term UMPC, or Ultra Mobile PC, which Microsoft later called its Origami Project. Much like the Tablet PC before it, people did not flock in sizable droves to purchase UMPCs with wild abandon. This is mostly because people don’t like them or find them useful. They are large, heavy, and cannot be closed to protect their screens. The market, indeed, is telling Microsoft what it wants. They do this by calling the large number of new micro-lappies UMPCs.

That is, after, what they are. It all started in earnest with ASUS’ Eee PC, a tiny sliver of a lappy, able to do just about anything as long as it didn’t require significant processor resources or touchtyping at over 100 WPM. Since the Eee PC shipped, there are now at least eight other competitors on the market, including products from HP and Dell, all of which are sub-US$800 systems, with most of them selling for under US$400. This brings us to the MID. The MID is what falls into the space being created for the pocketable PC. That idea which came to then Apple CEO John Sculley for a personal assistant which could go everywhere with you has come around again for another shot at the big time.

This time, however, Apple has already made their successful version and now others are trying to catch up. Its not just about the iPhone, though. Its about a range of different product technologies which are all coming together and finding that the technologies have improved enough to make certain technologies viable. In this case, its the MID; a convergence of the PDA, the mobile phone, the iPod, and a desktop computer. Yes, a desktop computer. Why? Because MIDs are capable of running Windows XP, various Linux distributions, and, in one case so far, even Windows Vista, though its not recommended. I would assume that by the time MIDs hit the market, someone will have hacked one to run Mac OS X, as well.

This is a compelling idea, yes? How could it not be compelling to be able to carry a full-sized desktop OS in your pocket and use it whenever you need, you say. That’s going to be a problem, though. Desktop OS are designed to be used with a mouse and a keyboard. We already know from the Tablet PC experiement that its actually more complicated to use a desktop interface with a pen and no keyboard, especially when entering data. That’s when using an interface designed for pen interaction becomes useful, but from years of experience with Palm and Windows CE based OS, I know that there’s a very limited amount of interaction you can have with a PDA OS.

It all comes down to data entry. If its going to be hard to enter data, then it won’t be used to enter data, and the MIDs will not fulfill their promise of a more powerful, portable computing platform. It will be another larger, faster PDA which uses more battery power and isn’t as convenient. Then again, I could be entirely wrong, and heaven knows I’ve been wrong before. The MID could be that bridge device which carries us into the next decade eyeing Star Trek’s science fiction concepts with confidence and swagger. Imagine a future where we get up in the morning, check out our news and answer our spam-free email, then grab our MID (which was acting as our desktop system in a cradle) and head out for the day.

We check movie times, verify our appointments with clients, set up a date with a GF or BF, plan a trip to Vegas with our pals, and all the while feel confident that we are computing in one place, with every iota of it being backed up constantly. That one place might just be our MID, a small, pocketable module which uses an Ultra Low Voltage CPU which still runs fast enough to run all major internet and office applications and is made even more powerful when connected to the home dock which adds a CPU, an optical drive, an additional hard drive for archiving and third-stage backup, and a video card to run an HD display. This rig will also allow you to make a receive video calls either at home on your big screen or while you’re out and about enjoying the fast and freeing WiMAX network.

Sadly, this is more a PR firms descriptive text than a possible reality. This IS, after all, what we want. This is not what we get, though. Competition prevents that from coming to fruition. To make such a device reality we would need to see technology sharing pacts between Intel, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, ASUS, Vonage, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Sun, EMC, Linux, and possibly the Pope. They’d all need to get together and say, “hey! Regardless of the fact that our individual survivial and success means that we must grind 2/3rds of you into the dirt within the next 20 years, we’d like to work with you to make this global computing environment a possibility within the next two years. Sound good?”

Yeah, right.

Among all of the other issues, I could see the entire Republican party having a simultaneous coronary and the FTC’s Antitrust department having some serious issues about all of this. Most of the companies in my incomplete list simply aren’t creative and forward-thinking enough to even be engaged in a part of such a conglomeration, much less spearhead it. So, in the end, the MIDs will just be another market niche. They will likely even sell well, though I predict they will sell more and offer more variants and models in Asian countries than here in the States. Ultra portables have long sold well in Japan and personal media players (the video kind) are very popular in Malaysia and South Korea.

In the meantime, Microsoft is busy making Vista the standard in the world and Windows 7 will just be larger and require more resources than Vista, completely the opposite of what a MID market needs. The best desktop OSes for MIDs are Windows XP, Mac OS X, and the king of the hill in embedded performance, Linux. Microsoft wants to kill XP dead, though, despite the fact that the market is making it plain and clear that it doens’t want to lose XP. Microsoft is making it equally clear that they don’t care what the consumer wants. Apple listened and produced the iPhone. If they ever make a larger, tablet-like one, then their MID will be perfect and complete. Linux already works perfectly well on a range of embedded systems.

So, again we are confronted with the truth that Microsoft isn’t interested in playing the game by the rules everyone else is cotent to play by. Not only will they not take their ball home so nobody can play, but they will replicate the ball and forcefully install it into every home in the neighborhood until people accept it as theirs. The telecoms are the same. Sprint has no interest in playing with Verizon or AT&T, and the latter two could care less about the others. It is their aim to win and not taking over the entire market is losing, so you see where we’re going there.

The reality is that no, MIDs will not be the tricorder, they won’t work like KITT, they won’t be an R2D2 to our Luke, and they won’t know how to make dinner reservations for us. They will be just another dumb tool which looks nice, costs a lot of money, and takes up space. Might as well get an iPhone and be done with it.

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