Back in 1999, when the president of Nokia came to say hello to the Network Alchemy crew after Nokia had purchased us, I stood up at the Q & A with my Palm VII in one hand and the neat new Nokia phone they had passed out to everyone in the other. I said "I want this [the organizer] in that. [the phone]" Alas, Nokia was committed to Symbian, a different OS, and they would never ship a Palm phone. But the Qualcomm phone that did have Palm OS was reportedly a dog. I don't know why that should have been the case. It may have been due to PalmOS not being ready for cell phone management. Or maybe the integration of the two functions was done badly.
But this Treo, it's.. sweet. The integration of phone and organizer is well thought out. PalmOS 5 is a lot more powerful than older versions. Finally, the hardware is much more capable than the pokey old moto chips that ran the original Palm devices. For me, the combination of these factors means that the device is a spectacular success. For the first time in my geek life I have all my contacts and all my appointments synced up everywhere. This has always been possible, but I could never get in the habit of carrying an organizer everywhere I went. Now, I'm carrying a phone everywhere I go, which I'm used to doing. The organizer comes along for the ride.
The Treo 600 is a compromise, of course. It's bigger than a cell phone and smaller than an organizer. That means the keybord is tiny and fairly hard to use, So the Treo is designed not to need the keyboard, much. The device is bulky to hold up to your ear and to carry. But the speakerphone function works well, and I'm getting used to using hands-free for all other times. I carry the Treo in a holster on my belt. The phone is well designed for this purpose. It's stubby antenna serves as a key that fits a slot in the holster. Popping the button flap and pivoting the phone out of the holster can be done in one smooth movement. The reverse manouever is just as easy. So I can live with the design. But what makes me love the device are the games and the audio books.
Palm OS isn't nearly as cool as embedded Linux. I know because I own a Sharp Zaurus SL5500 on which I run Open Zaurus. It is very cool. Only, I never use it. Palm OS has been around for many years. That means that there are tons of software applications written for it. The ones that get me excited are the games, and Audible.
audible.com has a mind bogglingly huge collection of audio books for sale on the Internet. They are pricey, compared to paper books, but they are digital. That means I can listen to them nearly anywhere I am. Specifically, I can load them onto my Treo's 256MB SD card and listen to them while commuting, or driving across Kansas.
So I was pretty sanguine about the Great Plains when I set out on this trip. What had seemed like a big, bison blanketed barrier to my ancestors would appear to me as no more than a corn colored conglomerate, as I sped through listening to the Canterbury Tales or something. That plan seemed in good shape, as I ate up the miles from San Mateo to Winnamucca listening to "Xenocide" by Orson Scott Card.
I find that audio books are a great way to fill time while traveling. It turns out, I don't need to use much of my brain to appreciate scenery. I do need brain power to think about the scenery I'm passing through. But it turns out that my desire to do that is limited to particularly startling scenery. "Oh, the Bonneville Salt Flats. Salty. Flat. Very well named" is about as far as the normal run of my thinking goes. But "Hmm, mirage of birds sitting on salt flats appearing 30 feet in the air. How interesting" takes a good deal more of my attention. I just pause the audio at points like that.
Before I went to bed in the overpriced hotel room in Winnamucca that evening however, disaster struck. I'm not sure why, but the copy of the Audible Palm application on my laptop got hosed. When I synced my organizer, it screwed up my organizer's copy. Since the overpriced hotel room had broadband (which got about 160Kbit down) I was able to reload
But it got me thinking about technology. I'm a geek through and through. I have dedicated my life to technology. To me, technology is fun more often than it is frustrating. But in the middle of trying to rescue my Audible player, I remembered that technology is seriously not fun when you need it to work to get something done, and it isn't cooperating. This fact is what keeps me in demand in high-tech, of course. I am able, more often than not, to get broken software to work as intended. (The fact that this often involves changing what people do, as well as the software seems amusing to me.) But this always involves someone else's problems. For myself, I have a less demanding standard for the technology I use. Or, maybe I just design it better when trying to get it to fit my life instead of someone else's. I actually think it's a little of both. I have lower, and more realistic, expectations of technology. I also try to build software systems for myself that have well defined failure modes, each of which I can have a well defined response to. In the case of the Audible player on my Treo, I had allowed my expectations to exceed the reliability of the software system. I really like my audio books, and I was really counting on them to get me through the Great Plains. And I had no backup plan in case the Treo failed to play my Audible content. I could play it on my laptop in the car, but without power, the laptop would hibernate frequently, thereby shutting off the audio. And the laptop battery would give out quickly in any event.
I now realize that my Treo is a massive "single point of failure." If it stopped working on this trip, I'd be out of touch with work and my family. I'd also be a good deal less entertained and organized. This dependency on a single device is the natural consequence of my desire to have an integrated phone and organizer. I got my wish, now I have to live with it. But the audio books are worth it. I haven't had much time for recreational or self-educational (outside computers) reading in years. Audible has brought this back into my life.
Posted by hbo at June 27, 2004 06:08 PM