MaSSSoftech

Gearing up for the Windows 7 launch, Toshiba on Wednesday has announced its new notebook and netbook lineup, including new touchscreen models.

Touchscreen capability comes on the new 13.3-in. Satellite U505 (pictured, above), which weighs 5 lbs., retails for $1,049 and will arrive on Nov. 1. Similiarly, the 14.4-in. Satellite M505 carries a price tag of $949 and a date of Oct. 22.

Both are loaded with the LifeSpace software package that includes Bulletin Board, an organizational tool, and ReelTime, a visual search aid.

Also announced were the following, with quick summaries and links:

* Satellite A500: 16-inch HD Edge-to-Edge display on select models, Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Turion II Ultra processor, discrete graphics options, optional Blu-ray, starts $589.99.
* Satellite L500: 14″ to 17.3″ displays, AMD Turion II and Athlon II processor, up to 500GB HDD, starting from $504.99 to $579.99.
* Satellite P500: 18.4-in. HD TruBrite display, Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Turion II processors, Blu-ray in some models, starts $799.99.
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* Qosmio X505: 18.4-in. display, optional 64GB SSD/320GB HDD dual-drive configuration, $1,899.99.
* mini NB205: 10.1-in. netbook, nine-hour battery life, up to 250GB HDD, five colors (brown, white, blue, pink, black), starts $399.99.

Finally, Toshiba also announced sleep-and-resume functionality for the recently announced Satellite T100 ultrathin laptop.

The kind folks at Motorola allowed me to spend the last week walking around New York City with their new Cliq smartphone, and having spent that time getting to know the device a bit better, I’m comfortable discussing what I like about it and what I don’t.

First, a refresh: The Motorola Cliq smartphone is Motorola’s first modern entry into the hot smartphone space and will land on T-Mobile on Nov. 2 for $199 with a two-year contract. The phone is a touchscreen messaging phone, and has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with D-Pad in addition to a 3.1-inch (320×480) display.
It runs on the Google Android platform, but has the company’s in-house layer of software and services, called Motoblur, integrated with it.
The phone is important in several ways. First, it is Motorola’s first major play in the smartphone space, a critical product for a company that has struggled for a hit since the runaway success of the Razr.

Second, it is the latest Android-based smartphone in a growing army of them from HTC, Samsung and others. While HTC’s G1 (Dream) and myTouch 3G (Magic) were the early birds in the Android game, the Cliq — along with the HTC Hero, the first Android phone on Sprint, and the Samsung Behold II — are the first models to incorporate proprietary software that layers on top of the vanilla Android installation.

Here’s a short video of the device, showing its dimensions, transitions and card-style widgets in action:

With that said, here are eight things I’ve come to like about the Motorola Cliq and seven things I don’t.

What I like:

1. Widgets. While Motoblur is part skin, part services and part software, the widget architecture is the most noticeably distinctive aspect of the Cliq. Whether you like it or not, our world revolves around communication, and any advances in simplifying this are welcome. Motoblur improves on the Android experience by offering widgets that can surface messages (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or headlines (RSS, etc.) The Cliq has a five-screen “desktop,” offering space for these units, which take up more room than traditional icons. They update on the fly, and offer a quick way to browse content without forcing you to dive all the way in.
2. Unifying identities. Palm was the first to unify identities with its webOS, but Motoblur keeps pace by doing the same thing with all of your services. While the Cliq doesn’t carry conversations across protocols in one spot like the Pre, it does combine things in sensible ways by allowing you to search for people based on knowledge known from other services. One simple example: when I receive a call from a contact, it displays their Facebook profile picture as well as their latest status update alongside their phone number and the “answer” button.
3. Simplified button schemes. As I mentioned previously, Motorola made the “answer” and “hang up” buttons virtual, leaving just three physical buttons (menu, home, back) on the main control area. Besides the fact that it’s a much nicer design experience, it also saves space.
4. T-Mobile. If you don’t have T-Mobile service in your area, this point is moot, but there’s something to be said for using an underdog carrier in a major metropolitan area. I rarely had issues with speed in terms of downloading web pages the way folks with iPhones on AT&T do here in New York.
5. Versatility. The Cliq offers a virtual keyboard as well as a competent physical one with wide keys. In a previous post, I said this was a power user’s dream. That turned out to be mostly true — sometimes I found myself typing short queries using the virtual keyboard, and sometimes it was easier to use the slide-out version, such as during extended instant messaging. Also: some early reviews questioned the use of a D-Pad, but after spending some time with the Cliq, I found that it was much easier to fix a typo or manipulate text with it than using your finger, like on the iPhone.
6. Development. Android is still in its application infancy compared to the iPhone, but considering the amount of handsets hitting the market, it won’t be long before all the essential apps (news, sports, finance, major social media services) are covered. I was able to find Last.fm (owned by this site’s parent company, CBS), Facebook and geosociolocation app Foursquare rather easily, and the widgets natively handle a number of other services (Twitter, MS Exchange, MySpace, Google, Picasa, Photobucket, Yahoo!).
7. Build quality. While the smooth matte finish on some of the plastics felt a little, well, plasticky, the expensive gunmetal finish on the phone’s metal body exuded quality. The sliding mechanism was a little less resistive than the one on the G1, but quite smooth, and I found all of the outside buttons to be placed in logical places (the tiny indicators for the buttons beneath the slider were a nice touch).
8. Business readiness. The Cliq comes preloaded with Quickoffice, meaning I can view Word, Excel and Powerpoint files on the device. Combine that with the QWERTY keyboard and D-Pad, and you’ve got a device that’s a BlackBerry-killer in terms of usability. (Security/BES, another story.)

What I didn’t like:

1. Sluggishness by hardware. This isn’t inherently the Cliq’s fault, but it’s exacerbated by the widget-heavy Motoblur layer. In my experience with Android phones, I’ve found that they’ve all been just a bit hesitant in terms of how quickly they react to my touch. (I’ve found the iPhone experience to be better overall.) This doesn’t happen all the time; rather, it happens intermittently, which can be frustrating. The reason? Hardware. Anand Shimpi explained in detail yesterday why the 528MHz Qualcomm processor in all of the most recent Android phones is the weak link. The user can help the situation by turning off more services and widgets and things, but then why use a smartphone if you’ve disabled its intelligence?
2. Currency. The widgets were indeed nice, but sometimes they didn’t update frequently enough to be useful. Examples: Twitter, RSS. I found that my e-mail and other essentials updated instantaneously, but on occasion I found that the widgets didn’t surface recent blog posts. Several times, the widgets reflected content that was hours old — years in Twitter time, and an impossibility, given how many people I follow on Twitter alone — and, to my knowledge, there was no way to manually refresh the widget. Side note: when you boot the phone, all the apps try to update at once, and there’s no way of halting this train. It’s unnerving.
3. Upgradeability: That extra layer of services presents a problem for Motorola, who in addition to providing cloud services and resources for the effort are also the gatekeepers to progress on Android development. For example, even though Android 1.6 Donut rolled out to existing Android handsets on the market (G1, mytouch), the Cliq will hit shelves with 1.5 Cupcake. Why? Because the Motoblur architecture is hooked into the Android platform, so Motorola can’t update to 1.6 without also updating its Motoblur software. For sure, some Motoblur features may become standard Android features over time. But that puts the onus of development on Motorola — particularly the pressure to both keep pace with open source Android development as well as its own, and not branch off.
4. Choice. I mentioned versatility as something I liked about the Cliq, and that’s true. But people have preferences — personally, I prefer a lighter, slimmer, full touchscreen phone with no physical keyboard at all (like the HTC Hero, but that’s on Sprint). So there needs to be more choice among form factors for Motoblur. Motorola told me it was preparing another Android phone for launch before 2010, but one without Motoblur. It seems to me that it’s a no-brainer to provide a touchscreen-only Motoblur phone as a foil to the Cliq.
5. Screen size. It seemed a little silly to me that the one surface with the screen on it actually had the least amount of area compared to any other flat surface on the device. Why is this? The Cliq device itself is much smaller (width and height) than the established iPhone (screen: 3.5 in.). The Cliq’s smaller screen means I have less room for those big widgets on my home screen.
6. Media player. Motorola says it didn’t Motoblur-ify the default, underwhelming Google Android media player. That’s a shame, because if we’re really moving toward converged devices, I shouldn’t have to carry around my iPod touch, too, just to get a complete multimedia experience.
7. Android market. My main beefs with Android market are that it’s very hard to surface apps and you can’t tell which apps are legitimate. For example, there’s a New York Times app in the market’s Top 10 apps, but it’s not developed by the New York Times Company. The Android market is still a burgeoning movement, and it was a little ironic that some of the apps for the services promoted on the Cliq’s box weren’t preloaded (Facebook, Last.fm, etc.).

Final thoughts: Motoblur’s a great platform, but the hardware is visibly taxed by it. For T-Mobile users, this is the phone to get. Period. It’s much better than a G1 and a myTouch 3G. For others, it’s a harder sell, and depends on your local carrier situation.

The device is a toss-up with the HTC Hero on Sprint — if you prefer physical keyboards, this is your device. It all depends on your hardware preferences.

That’s not all there is to say about the Cliq, but that gets to the heart of the experience.

Motorola Cliq: deal or no deal?

The Linux desktop experience is now closer to the Windows environment than before, but the gap in mainstream adoption for the open source OS will not close anytime soon, says an industry analyst.

Laurent Lachal, U.K.-based senior analyst at IT advisory firm Ovum, said inconsistencies across Linux distributions still stand in the way of wider user uptake.

"For one, Linux has two main GUIs (graphical user interfaces), KDE and Gnome. Some see that as choice, but overall it confuses the market," Lachal told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview. He added that each GUI is further tweaked for different distributions, further compounding the disparity.

Different distributions also have different ways of allowing users to perform tasks, such as terminal commands.
Some distributions also try to mimic Windows as closely as possible in order to entice Windows users to migrate, but has often resulted in only "good enough" experience for "basic" enterprise tasks.

Lachal said: "Usability is not a problem with Linux, but the issue lies with application support."

John Brand, Hydrasight's research director, said in an e-mail interview such support issues have plagued Linux, and still do. "The majority of organizations still find application incompatibility and lifecycle management an issue for Linux-based desktops," he said.

Linux can be suitable for "light use" by some members of a company, but this mix-and-match approach where both Windows and Linux platforms are deployed is not typically considered cost-effective, Brand explained.

And while Linux desktop projects may rate well with users during pilot deployments, the "complexities of having a mixed environment generally dilutes any benefits Linux may otherwise provide", he added.

He highlighted Microsoft's integration with its other office products that increases the reliance on the Windows OS. The most significant example of this has been Microsoft SharePoint, he said.

"We see that [SharePoint] adoption has become widespread and often entrenched as a core part of the enterprise IT infrastructure," Brand said. Competing software such as open source document management product Alfresco, has not yet managed to appeal to users to a similar degree, he noted.

Furthermore, device support is still an issue, he said. "Without the commercial drivers for open source, market momentum is variable at best," he added.

However, Laurent disagreed. He said lack of driver support "is still an issue, but overall it has been solved".

Greg Kroah-Hartman, Novell programmer and Linux Driver Project lead, noted in an earlier interview with ZDNet Asia, that the "problem" of device makers resisting the Linux community is not an issue. He said the coders at the Linux Driver Project were getting requests to make Linux-compatible drivers for hardware "all the time", suggesting growing adoption of Linux OSes among enterprises.

The netbook example
The biggest gap Linux needs to close is the maturity of its channel, said Ovum's Laurent, adding that the platform lacks vendor support and market visibility.

Although Linux had the headstart in the netbook game--with Asus supporting the open source platform--Microsoft eventually overtook the lead because "the market was not ready".

Laurent said: "Sales people were not trained and did not understand [Linux] because the sales channels were not experienced. Thus, they could not sell [Linux-based] netbooks properly and customers were unhappy."

Furthermore, Microsoft's decision to extend Windows XP's lifespan for the netbook market was sufficient to sway users back into the familiar Windows camp, indicating that consumers tend to prefer what they are most familiar with, he said.

"The netbook example displays the level of inertia that Linux has to fight," he noted, adding that because of this inertia, Linux will remain a "minority" OS for another five years.

"It will be used more extensively in the enterprise but will not dramatically challenge Microsoft or Apple in the consumer space," he said.

Cloud computing, a term used by many Washington information-technology companies these days, may seem simple enough to those of us who use Yahoo e-mail accounts, store pictures on Flickr and upload videos to YouTube.

The basic premise: store your information, photos, documents — pretty much anything — on some company’s remote servers — or in the “cloud” — instead of directly on your computer’s hard drive. That company stores and maintains it for you, and you can retrieve it from any computer as long as you have an Internet connection.
It definitely holds promise. Federal technologists, including Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra in the White House, hope it will save money for agencies and be a more efficient way for employees to share information and work remotely. And if employees’ information is no longer stored on physical hard drives, they won’t lose data even if they lose their laptops.

The White House recently launched apps.gov, a site that lets chief information officers all over the government shop for pre-approved software programs that make use of “the cloud.” Officials can download software from the site, upload their organization’s information, and they’re off and running.

The selection of applications on the site is still relatively limited as the government vets new ones.

But what is still hazy is how that information is stored and kept safe from security and privacy breaches, how to ensure information can be deleted from remote servers without leaving traces of sensitive information and who is going to provide the services. Firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce have been clamoring to develop cloud-computing products that are robust enough for government use. And firms that have traditionally provided IT services to the government — IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton and CSC, for example — are trying to defend their turf by building their own expertise in the area.

And the government hasn’t even figured out how to define “cloud computing.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which advises agencies on technology use, last week released its 15th version of a working definition. It’s two pages long and begins with a caveat: “Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors.”

If you’ve been reading the Hillicon Valley blog, you’re aware that the private sector has already stumbled on this front. Last week, T-Mobile informed some of its customers that a Microsoft subsidiary called Danger lost e-mails, photos and contact lists after its servers crashed. If similar episodes continue to occur, the government will probably be less likely to entrust classified, sensitive information to third-party servers until security and reliability improvements are made.


California Congress members cheer on young homebuilders

In the Solar Decathlon going on right now on the National Mall, the team from Silicon Valley, Team California, is in the lead.
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) met with the team Wednesday morning at the Capitol to encourage its members in the remainder of the competition, which ends Friday morning.

“We understand, more or less, how important your project is,” he told the team, made up of students from Santa Clara University and California College of the Arts. “A lot of times I wish I had one of those homes. For a single guy living alone, that’s all I need for entertaining.”

The team’s project — Refract House — won first place in the architecture, hot water and communications categories. The house, which uses green materials and energy-saving technologies, will next be judged on its net power production, although the team from Germany is expected to have a leg up in that round. The U.S. Department of Energy puts on the annual competition.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who attended Santa Clara University’s law school, stepped in to say a few words to the 20 or so students on the team.

“We know we cannot continue our dependence on foreign oil,” she said. “Climate change is real and what you’re doing is part of the solution.”

Ken Reidy, a staffer for Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.), is also an alumnus of Santa Clara University and swung by the short event to show his support. Carnahan co-chairs the High Performance Buildings Caucus and has taken an interest in sustainable, eco-friendly homes.