An interesting trend is emerging: the downward percolation (can you say that?) of the stylus/touchscreen to mid-range devices. (I define mid-range as $75-$150.) While the consumer electronics business has always had a steady trickle-down of features from high-end to mid-range to low-end, touchscreen devices never made that migration. The assumption was that touchscreen features were too expensive / bulky / overwhelming to succeed in the basic / fashion-conscious / mass-consumer markets.

The frenzy over the iPhone has changed all that. (How much impact has the iPhone had on industry attitudes to touchscreen interfaces? I attended more than one meeting last Spring in which a participant started a sentence with, “Since January 8th…” — i.e., since the iPhone marketing launch. That was before the product was even released in June.)

Of course, Apple were not the first to realize the power of the touchscreen. They just executed so well that no one could afford to ignore direct input anymore. The market response with “iPhone killers” (many of which were planned for release well before the iPhone was announced, of course) is only the beginning.

Take a look at Palm’s Centro:

The higher Centro sales, though, are another case of good news/bad news. It’s great the the Centro is more popular than even Palm had expected, but its low cost (and thus low margin) must sting a little. [via Treo Central]

***

Over the past 18 months, almost every major cell phone manufacturer has come out with a product to address this market. RIM introduced the BlackBerry Pearl, a slimmer version of its BlackBerry device with an abbreviated QWERTY keyboard for typing. Motorola came out with the Q, and Samsung introduced the BlackJack.

But up to this point, price has been a major barrier to truly penetrating the consumer market. Most “consumer”-oriented smart phones have still been initially priced above $300. The iPhone retailed initially for $500 and $600. Prices are starting to come down, but experts say the hefty price tag of these devices has prevented them from reaching the mass market. [via ZDNet]

Mid-range device touchscreen input is not just a fluke, it’s the (overdue) future. I’ll go further, though: I’ve been predicting for over a year now that touchscreens will show up on low-end phones, too, in the next 3 years.

Never mind One Laptop Per Child… the one computer that is entering every single home in the developing world is the cell phone. The cell phone is where illiterate women and children will learn to read (a pet project / dream of mine). The cell phone is where contacts, photos, correspondence, business and banking will not only originate, but be archived. To me, the trickle-down of expanded interaction and handwriting input is blazingly obvious. (Of course, I expect to see those phones enabled by Power2B’s technology, but that’s another story!)

You heard it here first.

Sometimes you hear a story that just makes you want to cry.

A woman who lives not far from us has a hard life. She’s in her 30s, single, childless, and with severe health problems (physical and emotional) that prevent her from holding down a job. She lives on her welfare benefits.

She’s nervous, and although she hasn’t got much money, she calls taxis to get around — always from the Ramot Alon taxi company. The drivers got to know her over time, and decided together to give her a flat-rate price of 15 NIS anywhere in the city (typical in-city fares range from 15-40 NIS).

Last month, this woman went to get a haircut. As she left, she asked the receptionist to call her a cab. The woman responded, “Why order a cab and pay the extra fee, just catch one outside?” She did, and ended up unawares in an unregistered (=illegal) taxi. When she arrived and opened her purse to pay, the driver snatched the purse, pushed her out the door, and took off. She started screaming; a Ramot Alon cab was passing by, heard her, went after the first cab, caught him, and called the police.

The Ramot Alon drivers decided to give this woman free transportation for two months… The whole entire company. Each and every one of them. It’s what “little” they can do for her.

If you’ve think that Israeli taxi drivers are looking to rip you off… just think again.

Written on my Blackberry from the back seat of a Ramot Alon taxi. 

Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug. For decades, stimulants have been used to combat sleepiness, but they can be addictive and often have side effects, including raising blood pressure or causing mood swings. […]

The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired.

The study, published in the The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys’ cognitive abilities but made their brains look “awake” in PET scans. [via Wired]

There will be obvious and valuable uses for a drug like this: doctors, soldiers, pilots, intelligence agents and other key personnel who are occasionally called upon to perform under suboptimal rest conditions. There will also be lots of people who want to use this drug (if it comes to market) to avoid “wasting” time sleeping, or to cure jetlag, or to get a day’s work in after a night up with the baby.

Would you take this drug (or another like it — it’s not the first; there are others already in use for night shift workers, for example)? Would you worry about long-term (or even short-term) physical effects of tricking the body out of its physical needs? Do you love to be up, or love to get your shuteye?

What effect will drugs like this one have on cultural expectations of stamina? Of neediness? Of being “always on” in a 24/7 world?

The changes are already happening, although they are subtler: expectations generated by the ubiquity of laptop computers, cell phones, and Blackberry PDAs. Executives report setting their Blackberry alarms to wake them in the middle of the night just to shoot off an email to a colleague, in order to “prove” that they work around the clock. Still, saying “I got your email first thing this morning” is still an acceptable excuse for an eight-hour delay. Will that change?

Alternatively, will the backlash finally trigger a situation in which people start being more aggressive about drawing lines between their personal and working lives?

Stay tuned. Don’t fall asleep.

Jan asks:

Other ways that people tweak time? The relatively common practice of trying to ‘buy time’ by setting one’s watch or alarm clock a few minutes ahead of the actual time; inter-city drivers trying to talk up the time it takes to travel between two points to talk up an all inclusive fare; setting meeting’s ahead of time to account for late arriver’s.

In real life, our office tweaks time by just trying to keep it from jumping unpredictably.

When I travel (monthly), I do not adjust my computer or my cell phone clocks to the new time zone, nor do I allow my devices to automatically update their time settings from the network. If I do, all of my appointments will be out of whack.

When I enter an event into my calendar, I’m usually in Israel (GMT +2). The meeting is at 9.00am? I enter it for 9.00am on my calendar. When I get to Japan (GMT +9), my 9.00am meeting doesn’t show up until 6.00pm… hard to explain to the person you’ve come thousands of miles to meet. So the times stay set on Israeli time, and my friends and family are left to puzzle as best as they can at the oddball hours at which they are hearing from me. (Or not. In the midst of jet lag or work overload, my communication times appear to be perfectly normal when viewed from many timezones away.)

Why not set the appointment for the appropriate time zone in the first place? I’m sure many programs support that feature (as far as I can tell, iCal for Macintosh does not support timezone definitions for events on an event-by-event basis, although that’s hard to believe). But who has time to mess around and find out if the Macintosh solution matches my Nokia phone, or my Blackberry? If something in that loop doesn’t work, and the “synchronization” process ends up unsynchronizing my life… I’m in deep trouble.

Noted last night in real time on my Blackberry

Sitting inside the plate glass window of a cafe. Two men come in, one younger, maybe 25, and one older, about 45. They order coffee (”Latte?” “What do you mean latte? I want real coffee”) and take it to an outdoor table to drink.

20 minutes later

Two police officers, long guns slung over their shoulders, approach them. Subconsciously, I assume they know each other, this policeman and this older member of the coffee drinkers, and are having a chat.

Eventually, my eye is caught by the body language being projected through the storefront window beside which I sit. They are standing there too long, they are not smiling. The men at the table grow more serious. Another man is waved forward; he is accusing them of something. The police ask for an explanation. The two at the table are shaking their heads, making controlled little hand gestures; they are denying something. They are amused, then taken aback, then angry. The third man is drawn aside by the tall policeman. He is wearing a red hard hat, and lights up a cigarette. The younger man keeps talking to the policewoman, pointing at his cup of coffee emphatically. He seems to be saying that he has been here, drinking coffee, the whole time. He gets more agitated. The older man (his father? No — the relationship doesn’t fit. Maybe an uncle?) keeps trying to hold him back, calm him down. He gets up yelling. The policeman (and he is really big) starts to close in tighter. He’s in the young man’s personal space. He exudes menace. He’s got out handcuffs now. They walk the young man away, but he’s getting worked up again. He’s offended and angry. He’s wrestled to the ground, on his knees, his head pressed down low, handcuffed, hoisted back to his feet. The uncle (?) stands right next to them, looking helpless, and afraid to interfere any more.

Without hearing a word, I admit, I don’t think the police needed to be so aggressive. The young guy was so obviously upset, but also not about to jump on anyone. It was almost as if they were looking for him to get angry enough to justify physical restraint tactics. My sense is that if they had asked him to come with them for questioning, he would have.

Who were these people? The accuser in the red hard hat, still quietly smoking his cigarette? The slight policewoman, ducking behind her partner? The religious and supportive but impotent uncle? The open-looking young man with contradictory clothing? The intimidating officer?

What are their stories? What chapter are they writing at this moment?

30 minutes later

Sequel: The “uncle” just came back… to pay for the two cups of coffee. Mi keAmcha Yisrael. His honesty inspires. Perhaps they are at the police station just two blocks away?

Was he trying to help out his young friend without realizing what he was up to? Was he in the dark completely — maybe the young man was in a hit-and-run on his way over? Was the whole thing a mistake? I’ll never know.

I watch him walk away in the rain.

The picture? Their table, as they left it. Never did get a chance to finish the coffee. 

I recently mapped the left-side softkey of my Blackberry 8700 to the keypad lock function, and I’m experiencing a startlingly big improvement on a daily basis. I had previously had that key mapped to the profile selector, so that I could quickly shut off the ringer when going into meetings, without fumbling through the desktop, down to the profile icon, etc. It took me this long to realize that since the Blackberry is not actually my primary phone (except in the U.S.), I wasn’t using that feature much. I do use the Blackberry daily for data (mostly email) all over the world. It’s a pity that I never realized this before!

Making the switch has revealed an odd quirk: If I press a key while the phone keypad is locked, I get a message saying: “Keypad is locked. Press * ‘enter’ to unlock.” Not very different from my older S40 Nokias’ unlock messages. This is a pain, however, since finding the asterisk and enter keys requires more attention on a Blackberry than on an ordinary 16-key phone.

Oddly (but more usefully), if I scroll the scrollwheel up from a locked screen, I get a different message: “Keypad is locked” followed by three clickable button options: Unlock, Emergency Call, Cancel. The default is on Unlock, which can be selected by clicking the scrollwheel.

It turns out that a quick scroll-up followed by a click is far simpler than a tap and two specific key presses. I learned quickly to unlock via the scrollwheel.

But why on earth are there two different messages in the first place?

Everyone talks about Blackberry Thumb. I get Blackberry Shoulder, holding it up so I can write in bed…

On the meaning of small messages, oft repeated:

Apple’s Mail, Blackberry OS and surely most other enterprise applications always put the “work” number preferentially at the top of the stack if you have multiple phone numbers for a contact. “Home” gets pushed down towards the bottom. The (reasonable) assumption is that if you have a work number for somebody, you probably do business with them, and are most likely seek the work number.

The subliminal message? Work matters more than home.

Goebbels (and Hitler) are both quoted as saying that you can get people to believe anything if you repeat it often enough. What is the impact of the constant reinforcement of the Work Over Home message? How does it affect our relationships at work and at home?

I’m going to drop a bucket of Blackberry posts in a heap here. I suspect that I won’t be making any friends at RIM anytime soon, if they read these.

First noticed when bedridden with the flu: Keeping your Blackberry 8700 too close to your 30GB 5G iPod may be harmful to your hearing. The electro-magnetic radiation bursts emitted by the BB will trigger and randomly mess with the iPod’s volume control, meaning that you may suddenly find that you are on full volume. Quite a shock, let me tell you.

Is this indicative of a lack of shielding of the Blackberry? I have noticed that while all cell phones trigger speaker activity, the Blackberry does so more than most. Or is it a lack of EMI shielding of the iPod?

Whatever the case may be, let me encourage you to allow your iPod and your Blackberry some personal space; don’t drop them both into your pocket or purse (or pillowcase) if you’re going to have earbuds in.

Just like my cell phone camera lets me catch snapshots of the visual images I see around me — not as clear as a good digital camera, but it’s there with me — the BB lets me capture snapshots of thoughts I have when I’m not sitting at the computer. I’m not talking about quick email fire-offs, but blog thoughts like this one: in the taxi, in a waiting room, while nursing the baby. There’s a stress-reduction in not worrying that I’m going to “lose the thought” before getting it down. That’s my primary use of the Blackberry, as it turns out.

The secondary use is to ensure that I don’t miss important emails while on the road.