Dear Mr. Jobs:

I write to you on the occasion of your death to congratulate you on making a difference. As more of a technology visionary and businessman than a true geek (that was your erstwhile partner Steve Wozniak, or “Woz”), you may not recall that this was the concern of a dying James Tiberius Kirk at the end of the movie Star Trek: Generations. Granted, you never saved the planet by travelling in time to rescue whales or anything like that (at least, you left no public record of such feats), but, way back when, you knew a good thing when Woz showed it to you.

Some might say that you were the mercenary and Woz was the real techno-saint, but left to his own devices would Woz have formed a company to sell the Apple I back in 1976 or sought venture capital to expand and sell the Apple II in 1977? Or would he have been content to hand out his genius for free at the local computer club? If the latter, I might never have had an Apple IIe. That was a sweet little machine back in the day — thanks to the both of you Steves for that.

You also knew better than Xerox what they had when you visited their research facility in 1979 and saw what they were doing with graphical environments, and that curious pointing device, the mouse. You took these ideas, ran with them, and had Bill Gates playing catch up until 1995 (and yes, your devoted fans might say that Windows never caught up to the Mac).

When you were edged out of your own company in 1985, you simply went on to found another computer company, NeXT Inc. There you made the uber-elite NeXT computer — no compromises, including on price. Your target market was institutions that could afford it, including CERN in Switzerland where Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server and browser on one. Eventually an ailing Apple would buy your company and get an OS that would allow them to catch up to, and arguably pass, Windows, and also get you back as the CEO.

Once back, you didn’t stay in the PC comfort zone. No, you could see the future, and the future was in people’s pockets. Along came the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. You left Apple in such good shape that the day after the announcement of your death, Apple’s share price didn’t change much at all. Such was the confidence of the market.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Your personal stamp is all over Apple. It is so much the product of your vision. I don’t see how Apple can be Apple without you. And Apple has been without you. What happened is a matter of historical record.

But don’t let that worry you. Assuming that there is an afterlife, move on to your next project. Or better still, take a break for a lifetime or two. You packed enough into this one that you deserve it.

-Eric

Steve Jobs Timeline

Back in March, I criticized Apple for not including support for Adobe Flash in their iPad tablet. Their reasoning seemed to be, at least in part, that Flash was going away, to be replaced by HTML 5 with support from javascript and CSS, to which I responded that may very well be, but Flash wasn’t dead yet.

The writing is still on the wall today, but now in a large, animated font. This looming threat to Flash comes from Adobe themselves, with the preview release of their HTML 5/Javascript/CSS authoring tool, Edge.

What difference will this make to the average web surfer? Probably not much. Sites with annoying special effects and sound and other hoopla offered up by Flash will no doubt offer the same via HTML 5. But your back button will likely work, and you will be able to send links to interior pages, because the whole thing will be written with open standards designed for web browsers — it will be the same old web you’ve always known, just on steroids.

Indeed, Adobe isn’t doing much here that hasn’t been possible for years, at least with regard to the final product. But what a chore it was! Extremely time consuming, and even if you went to all the trouble to test your technical magnum opus in the top ten web browsers at the time to ensure it worked in all of them, one browser would go up a version, change its behaviour, and break your work. Just not worth it.

So even though Adobe doesn’t own the underlying technology as it does with Flash, if it can make the difficult easy, their new product will fill a huge niche. But couldn’t the competition do the same thing? Yes, but could they do it as well? Give the devil his due, Adobe is very good at what they do. Plus they will have a first-to-market advantage. They will establish Edge as the Photoshop (also an Adobe product) of HTML 5. And don’t look to the open source world for a free app that does all this and does it well — their track record when it comes to multimedia authoring is mostly dismal.

Who this will be a real boon for is the non-technical designer types who are drawn to Flash like moths to a flame. Easy to use Flash authoring tools mean that they don’t have to have a lot of technical knowledge in order to realize their glorious visions. Sadly for them, Flash has lots of problems, many to do with the fact that it’s mostly graphic, not text based. Search engines can’t read it, spider it, summarize it, and Flash sites usually don’t do well in rankings. And that’s only the half of it.

HTML 5 and associated technologies, on the other hand, are totally kosher open standards that use the web browser and all it has to offer, rather than simply using it as a frame. If Adobe can satisfy the Flash-addicted elves of the web design world (and they won’t be easy to satisfy, so good thing Adobe is planning more preview releases as features evolve), then there will be richly designed multimedia sites which sacrifice nothing of the power of textual information and the properties that made the World Wide Web the ubiquitous force it is today.

AND you’ll be able to view them on your iPad.

With all the talk about Research in Motion’s financial and marketshare struggles, many people tend to overlook the fact that it is still a wireless behemoth, albeit one with intense and growing competition. It’s not just another Nortel.

Nevertheless, RIM needs to make some major moves to jump-start and revitalize its prospects. Here are some ideas:

1. It should hire a chief operating officer with strong marketing expertise, as well as a kick-ass chief marketing officer. While no one is going to match the coolness of Apple, RIM’s marketing efforts in the pro-sumer marketplace have not been inspiring, creative, or noteworthy. That said, there’s lots of potential to develop compelling campaigns that appeal to non-corporate users. Here’s a free one: the young’uns love the BlackBerry keyboard so they can pound out BBMs, text-messages, tweets, and Facebook updates. How about a fun, quirky ad campaign that worships the keyboard?

2. BlackBerry’s Web browser needs to rock the house. I’m not talking about good, I’m talking awesome. For years, RIM ignored the sad reality it’s Web browser was crap. Now, people are surfing the Web anywhere and any time so RIM must make browsing on the BlackBerry easy, efficient, and intutive. If need be, make a major acquisition to get it done.

3. It should make strategic acquisitions to enhance the BlackBerry features. The deals for Tungle, a scheduling service, and Scoreloop, a social and gaming application maker, were smart moves. RIM should make more small, but strategic, acquisitions so it can provide BlackBerry and PlayBook users with a strong suite of in-house applications.

4. Do whatever it takes to bring the developer community into the tent. With multiple devices and two operating systems – the upcoming BlackBerry OS 7 and the next-generation QNX – it is challenging for developers to play with RIM. While RIM will never have the same size developer ecosystem as Apple or Android, it has to have a big enough community to provide the BlackBerry and PlayBook with enough support. And, at the same time, RIM needs to bend over backward to keep its current developer partners.

5. Lose the hubris and arrogance. When I first started covering RIM more than 10 years ago, it was a friendly, accessible organization. As it grew, the company became more remote and impenetrable. At the same time, its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, seemed to become more cocky, which no longer goes over well when you’re no longer king of the hill.

6. Fix the PlayBook as quickly as possible. Without sugar-coating it, the PlayBook was launched as a half-baked product. Anyone who purchased one out of the gate was a fool. Sure, it has some nice features, including the ability to handle Flash, but there are also so many holes it’s nowhere ready for prime time. Yes, I can understand why RIM had to get the PlayBook out the door but it must bring out a ready-for-primetime PlayBook 2.0, along with an ad campaign that delights and entices.

7. Share the love with the blogging community. I’m only talking from personal experience but I find it strange to have almost no relationship with RIM even though I consider myself to be a modestly prominent member of the Canadian high-tech community. In the past five years, the only time I’ve been invited to a RIM event was a launch party for the Torch last year. Then again, nearly everyone was invited to that party, which was held at a nightclub in downtown Toronto, which also struck me as odd. Other than that, RIM and I are strangers, which means I’ve never had a chance to check out the PlayBook, for example.

Maybe it’s just me, but I suspect RIM has a similar approach to the overall community.

First published on markevanstech.com

So, it turns out that phones running the iOS 4 update of June, 2010 log date and location wherever their owners take them. The data sits there on the phone. It is not transmitted to Apple, so the charge cannot be made that Apple is actively spying on its customers. But do take extra care not to lose the phone or have it stolen.

Apparently this data is also transferred to your computer when a sync operation is performed, so even if this inspires you to destroy the phone (you’ll really want to pulverize it to nix the storage component), the data will remain on the computer.

Of course, in this time of people voluntarily surrendering large amounts of personal information through such things as Facebook and Twitter, perhaps this is a feature. It may be that some enterprising app maker has already created an app to post your whereabouts for the past year to your Facebook page with just the push of a virtual button! If not, be sure they’re working on it. (Code already exists if, for some reason, you want to privately track your movements). This would make things easier for private investigators and spooks – learning a person’s past whereabouts from their Facebook account would be a lot less grief than having to steal their phone.

Of course, this sort of tracking can be done with an Android phone as well, but you will have to go through a lot of bother figuring out the feature and activating it, and you won’t have data from before the time you did. Apple thoughtfully keeps all this data for you right from the start. And the user has agreed to it. They gave Apple the right to collect such data at the end of a long licence agreement, every word of which I’m sure they read and considered carefully.

From the time of Apple’s first Mac they have been marketing to the clueless, removing from them the burden of having to know stuff. Heck, you have to jailbreak their appliances just to get administrative access. Trust Mother Steve, she’ll take care of you. But don’t even think about lying to mom about where you were last night.

A couple of posts ago I wrote of the Motorola Xoom tablet, extolling its virtues while trying to convince myself that I don’t need one. And truly, I don’t. My little netbook is all the portable computing I really need. What I might want, and might actually get (if it was in the budget), is another question.

This question has recently been complicated by the announcement of Apple’s iPad 2. Uh oh, Motorola, has your leapfrogging the leader been leapfrogged? The short answer appears to be: No.

The most telling comparison I was able to find was over at The Mac Observer. Though one understands they might have a bias, given the name of their site, here’s what they manage to come up with: “The iPad 2 is clearly the best when it comes to size, weight, price, and battery life.” I suppose that’s one way to sell the smaller, lower resolution screen as a good thing.

Of the Xoom’s virtues, they write:

The Xoom is the clear favorite in four categories, starting with its display resolution (1280 x 800 compared to 1024 x 768 for iPad and iPad 2). Some users who fancy holding a tablet up as a camera may fancy the Xoom’s back-camera flash, as well. The Xoom also features stereo speakers, a feature Apple doesn’t offer, and the device includes a full GB of RAM. The iPad featured 256MB, and it appears as if iPad 2 has double that, at 512MB.

What they don’t note, and isn’t clear from the accompanying chart, is the megapixel rating of the iPad 2′s cameras. And don’t go looking for that information on the Apple site, because you won’t find it. That suggests it’s not worth boasting about, so if you’re one of those strange people who, as macobserver puts it, “fancy holding a tablet up as a camera” and care about the resolution of the pictures you take, the choice is clear.

Also missing from their comparison is consideration of support for USB and SD. Again, that may be because the iPad 2 doesn’t support either. The Xoom does both.

Also no mention of support for Flash (though it does come up in the comments). Apple has developed an allergy to Flash, believing that HTML 5, CSS, and javascript are better alternatives. Consequently, iPad 2 offers no support for the junky legacy product. I’m not unsympathetic, having predicted the demise of Flash myself a few columns ago. But here’s the thing — it’s not dead yet.

With regard to price, a not maxed-out version of the iPad 2 will save you a few bucks over the Xoom, but as Wolfgang Gruener concludes in his article 5 Reasons Why You Should Not Buy The iPad 2, you could save even more “if you . . . consider the original iPad, which we hear is seeing dropping prices. The crappy camera, the software update and the dual-core processor may not be worth the extra expense.” Now may be the best time to buy the original iPad at clear-them-out prices.

One gotcha about the Xoom: While it’s intended to support Flash and SD, it may or may not, depending on the version of the OS. Ask before you buy. If it’s from an earlier batch, you may have some geeking to do to bring it up to scratch.

Nevertheless, it appears as though Apple has gone from first-to-market leader, to having to play catch up. Stay tuned to see if the iPad 3 finally delivers on the promise of the form. Perhaps by that time Flash really will be dead. Hopefully Steve Jobs won’t be.

Okay, I’m starting to want a tablet. No, not the iPad for which I expressed my underwhelmedness back in February of 2010, but the Motorola Xoom to be released this quarter, perhaps even as soon as next month.

What’s so great about the Xoom? Well, if you’re one of those who have been waiting for Apple to add all the features they omitted, like camera, usb support, multitasking, SD card support, and so on, your wait may soon be over, at least if you’re prepared to venture outside the Apple fold. The Motorola Xoom will be everything the iPad ought to have been at its inception.

Check out this vid, and note when the Motorola spokesperson refers to it as a tablet PC.

 
If one had to summarize the difference between the iPad and this, one could simply say that the iPad is an internet appliance whereas the Xoom is a tablet PC. This may change as Apple is forced to compete on features. A mockup of the iPad 2 was displayed by a CES exhibitor for a time until it garnered too much attention and Apple quashed it. While a mockup can’t be regarded as final or definitive, it suggests that it will sport a camera as well.

What its final configuration will be is uncertain, but it does seem likely that Apple will have to add features, a camera being only one of them, if it wants to remain competitive in this space.

The Motorola Xoom runs the Android Honeycomb operating system, which is the latest version of Google’s Android OS originally designed for phones, but retooled by Google specifically for tablets. Boasting an Nvidia Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor with a gigabyte of RAM and 32 GB of storage (expandable with SD), it packs enough punch in a well-designed package running a skookum OS that it won CNET’s best of the CES show this year. They note “We believe the Xoom is the most potentially disruptive technology among the nominees; it’s a true competitor for the iPad and will be one of the first 4G-compatible tablets to hit the market.”

I don’t need a tablet. I’m typing this on my faithful Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s fine, really it is, all I need in a light, portable computer. I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet. I have a feeling I will be repeating this a lot. Just because the Xoom looks cool, sleek, sexy, and doesn’t allow its form to interfere much with its function as a PC (I could always get a Motorola bluetooth keyboard), that doesn’t mean that I need it.

I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet.

Last year at this time I predicted that a small revolution in web apps would occur in 2010, thanks to the introduction of Google Chrome OS, and may have implied that this would have a negative effect on the iPhone. I also expressed the opinion that, if all went well with the Google branded Nexus phone, Microsoft would follow with one of their own.

This year I will have to revise and amend somewhat, since Google did not introduce Chrome OS mid-year as planned, so the fallout from that will have to wait until the first half of 2011. Daniel Eran Dilger has written a piece on this over at appleinsider.com. Perhaps not surprising given the source, it has a bit of a pro-Apple bias. Dilger notes, for example that “Unlike the Chrome OS, these machines [Apple laptops and desktops] can run native Mac apps, can host X11 Linux apps, and can even run Windows apps in a virtualization environment.” This suggests that he doesn’t get it, in spite of having extensively quoted Google’s intention earlier in the article:

”Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems,” the company blogged last summer.

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up,” the company explained.

“They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.”

It is Google’s intention to out-iPad the iPad by offering a world where you don’t have to worry about apps or backups or where your data is, a world in which everything “just works.” A paranoid geek like myself won’t allow Chrome OS anywhere near any of my devices, because I care about where my data is and who has access to it and things like administrative access. It’s bad enough that they have my email, I’m not handing over everything to the buggers, even if they are my favourite corporation.

But that’s just curmudgeonly old me. If they can deliver on this vision of drop dead easy computing, Steve Jobs will find himself in the position of having to play catch up, and Microsoft will then play catch up to Jobs. Technologically it won’t be difficult for either of them. The killer will be that while they sell their stuff, Google gives it away free. That could be a very difficult dime for them to turn on.

In other 2011 news: I’m not going to predict the demise of the iPhone. That’s one area that I think is fairly secure for Apple. Though with Nokia’s introduction of the N8, I wonder if the iPhone won’t become just a normal smartphone, ceding the high end to others.

You may have seen articles like this one over at pocketgamer.biz, suggesting that Nokia isn’t doing so well against Apple since the iPhone is outselling the N8 by six to one even in Nokia’s home territory of Europe. (Pro-Nokia site noknok.tv offers a rebuttal.)

This is a little like comparing sales of Rolls Royce to BMW, and, if Apple doesn’t up the ante soon, maybe Lexus. The techno-elite have already turned in their iPhones, and now it is just for little girls. (I’m only partially kidding — Sara Yin over at pcmag.com reports that when considering the purchase of a smartphone, men prefer Android, women the iPhone.)

Microsoft did not release their own branded smartphone this year, instead simply releasing a new OS for phones, Windows Phone 7. I’m not going to predict a Microsoft branded phone for 2011. I think Google’s motivation for the Nexus was sluggish uptake of Android by third parties, and if Microsoft finds themselves in a similar situation, perhaps they will adopt a similar strategy. But if they haven’t copied Google by now, I don’t think they’re going to, especially if it is strongly adopted, or even moderately well adopted.

So if I can’t predict the death of the iPhone, whose demise can I predict? Ah, yes, the overused and much abused Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. And who will kill it? A new specification for web pages, HTML5. This specification provides for much greater support of multimedia content. When those Chrome OS web apps come rolling out, they won’t use Flash. Look for them to be written in HTML5 with other supported specifications (for example, the latest in cascading style sheets [CSS]), and associated technologies. Flash will be a thing of the past.

The revolution has not been cancelled. Merely postponed. Until then, best wishes for the holidays and the new year.

After a lot of hype and venture capital, Blekko launched today. For those of you not familiar with Blekko, it’s a new search engine that, like most of the search start-ups in recent years, has been billed as a new threat to Google.

While I haven’t had much of a chance to put Blekko through its paces, here’s hoping it is able to survive its debut to live another day. In other words, it would be good to see Blekko be given the benefit of the doubt rather than be hit with the criticism that cut off search start-ups such as Cuil and Wolfram at the knees.

Even before Google emerged as the industry Goliath, search has been a competitive and nasty business. Pre-Google, being king of search was a short-lived experienced. One day it was Lycos, the next day it’s Excite.

And since Google, the biggest challenge facing search start-ups is that the acid-test has been benchmarking its performance against Google. Wolfram, for example, which set itself up as a research tool, was savaged by critics because it paled in comparison with Google.

Another problem has been that many search start-ups have suffered from a bad case of hubris and over-hype. Cuil boasted about the billions of pageviews it had indexed, while Wolfram did little to dismiss the buzz it was the next Google. This is the kind of material that critics love to chew on because it provides a story with drama.

My first impressions of Blekko are that it provides good search results, although its real value may be the ability to make vertical searches from an original search query. I haven’t had time to fully explore this feature but it appears to be a smart way to differentiate itself from Google.

I was also impressed by how Blekko quickly responded to a comment that I made on Twitter this morning after I read a New York Times story about its debut. If you are a new search engine looking to win over consumers and technology watchers, being engaged on Twitter is a very smart idea.

Like many people, I did a query for my name. At first, I was surprised to see I ranked second, while Google ranks me first. According to Blekko, Mark Evans Art is the king of “Mark Evans” because it was recently bought by Boing Boing, which is sending a lot of traffic its way.

For more thoughts on Blekko, check out the following

- Danny Sullivan: “Blekko the “Slashtag” Search Engine Goes Live.

- Rafe Needleman: “Blekko Launches the Biased Search Engine”

Originally published on markevanstech.com.

Q: How difficult would it be for the copyright holder of a film to get the IP addresses of people sharing that film over bittorrent?

A: Easy as pie. Here’s a portion of a screen capture from my bittorrent client, ktorrent, showing the ip addresses of people sharing a popular file on my computer right now.

I’ve blurred the ip addresses in the image in order to protect the innocent until proven guilty.

The relationship between the IP address on your computer and packets of information sent on the internet is similar to the address of your residence and letters sent by post — both letters and packets must know where they’re going if they’re ever to get there. If you want to access or share data on the internet, you can’t be without one, which is why it is difficult to be absolutely anonymous. Really, the best you can do is use someone else’s IP address — either by connecting through a proxy which, while it sees your IP address, displays its own to everyone else, or by connecting via someone else’s IP address, such as that of the wireless service provided by a local cafe or neighbour who has left their wireless unprotected by a password.

So why then haven’t studios gone after people using bittorrent? Surely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents the big studios, would have an interest. Perhaps they don’t want the negative image that the RIAA and its member labels (Sony, Universal, EMI, Warner, etc.) have acquired by going after the people who are often their own customers. Or perhaps, since they’re experiencing record profits, they don’t really feel a need.

But a smaller studio, Voltage, has filed a copyright complaint against the currently unknown holders of 5,000 IP addresses who used bittorrent to snag a copy of their movie The Hurt Locker. Lawsuits for 10 other small films have been filed by a company called the U.S. Copyright Group.

The message they want to send is probably that you shouldn’t take free copies of movies via bittorrent. But in practical terms the message may be more specific, namely avoid the movies of litigious studios like Voltage and those represented by the US Copyright Group, including Cinepro Pictures International (The Steam Experiment), Far Cry Productions (Far Cry), G2 Productions (Uncross the Stars), Animationwerks (Gray Man) and Braeburn Entertainment (Call of the Wild in 3D). It shouldn’t be too hard, since none of these movies is exactly rated highly.

I just hope this doesn’t represent a new business model — create a crappy movie, then recoup your losses by suing file sharers en masse. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will ISP’s cooperate in associating names with IP addresses? Will those targetted simply settle, rather than go to court? If they don’t settle, will the courts react negatively to being used as part of a business model intended to generate revenue through litigation? Or will they award the sort of over-the-top damages that they have in music sharing cases? Stay tuned.

I’ve been taking violin lessons for over a year now. Back at the 12 month anniversary, I thought it would be cool to create a vid of my playing to look back at on the second anniversary, to measure my progress.

My first attempt was with my Acer Aspire One netbook. I’ll spare you the gory details, but sufficeth to say, the Aspire One SUCKS at video (though the blur effect on the bow was kind of cool; man I must be able to play fast!).

For awhile I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to get a digital camcorder, but, as I don’t have loads of disposable income, they would have to come down significantly in price. But frustrated by the netbook and feeling the pressure of passing time, “significantly” suddenly took on a lower value. When I saw the Samsung U10 for sale at ncix.com for $200, I got one.

Mounted on a tripod with the handy tripod mount attachment, it did a good job of documenting for myself, and no one else in the world ever, ever, ever, the current state of my violin playing. Some vids are not for YouTube.

The subject of my first attempt was actually my cat. I wanted to see what sort of quality this little beasty could crank out, so I made sure it was set to max HD. Interestingly, it turns out that my computer can’t play full HD video. It tried valiantly, but there were lots of dropped frames, and, in places, it was just a slide show. If quality at a low price is your objective, this little unit may suffice, but unless you’ve got a recent computer with a graphics subsystem that can handle it, you may not be able to play it back.

Of course, you could always play it back through your TV, since it comes with cables for that. What it doesn’t come with, surprisingly, is even a small SD card. Since it records to SD, you would think that they’d at least include a little 4 GB one, good for a little more than a half hour of HD vid. But no, and until you get one you’re out of business. Also missing is any sort of cover or sleeve — again, a cheap little extra they could have included.

And don’t look for a printed manual. That would have been very nice, since the interface sucks so badly I actually had to refer to the one provided in pdf format on a CD that was included. I would guess that Samsung did not do extensive prototype testing with actual human beings, refining the design with their feedback. If they had, it wouldn’t have this interface.

Here’s a glaring example. What does this button do?

Wrong! That’s not a play button, that’s the “mode” button. It switches you between record standby mode and file management mode. If you want to play a vid or view a still, you switch to file management mode, use the dicky pressure pad buttons to select the file and then, if you’re like me, you press the play button and get switched back to record standby mode.

I got my first cassette recorder when I was a child and have had numerous recording devices and programs since. That symbol is burned into my brain as the play button. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that, and that it really does qualify as a universal symbol. To play the selected file, you’re actually supposed to hit the “ok” button on the dicky pressure pad.

“Dicky pressure pad” is not Samsung’s term. If I had a handy printed manual, I’d look up whatever they’re calling it, but I don’t and am too lazy to find the CD and look it up in the pdf. But “dicky pressure pad” describes it well.

Because the dicky pressure pad is flat with no raised buttons to inform your fingers of where they are, you have to pay careful attention to what you’re doing to use it. It seems to have been designed for the fingers of a geisha, and is not well suited for meaty man fingers.

Miskeying is a common experience. Reliability is also an issue. Sometimes I’ll get a double keying, other times no effect at all. This, plus the way the software works, makes selecting and deleting some files, but not others, a royal pain. Even if you finally get marked all the files you want to delete, and manage to get to the menu option to delete, you have the opportunity to screw the whole operation up by miskeying the confirm dialogue. For cleaning out files it is definitely better to use the provided USB cable to connect it to a computer and use the operating system’s file manager to do the job.

Because of the interface, I would only recommend this sweet little horror if you need something small and cheap which produces high quality vids right now. For only a hundred bucks more you can easily get something a little more conventional (although I marvel at how small even the conventional camcorder is becoming) with a more mature, less flawed interface. Or if you like the idea of a high def camcorder you can slip in your shirt pocket, I doubt it will be very long before the competition comes out with something better, perhaps even by the time you read this. So shop around.

I’ll close now with a clip originally shot in HD. It’s about a minute and three quarters. It was around five, but I used the built in split feature of the U10 to divide the video in two. Sadly, as unpleasant as the experience was, it was easier than trying to edit video on my otherwise redoubtable Linux operating system. The video split feature is another reason not to lose the CD with the manual, or if you’re blessed with an OS and software that edit video easily, do it there.

Without further ado, I present my cat, the inimitable BB Rose in her online video debut.