Headworx

I wrote about Snapdragons way back in 2006. That is 5 years ago. There was the vision. Today it is the reality. Last week I became a proud of the Snapdragon Mobile Development Platform by Qualcomm . It is a mobile phone, or rather a demonstration of power, of what a mobile phone can be today. Sparing some deep technical details, the features that have impressed me most are: Dual standard radio, meaning it works on all GSM network variants: GSM, UMTS, HSPA, CDMA, EvDO Dual SIM capability (not many high end smartphone have that). A feature very welcome by frequent roamers - one SIM card for your main voice number, the other for local (prepaid) Internet access, to avoid absurd data charges abroad . It effortlessly plays Flash video embedded into Web pages. Something Steve Jobs said could not be done. The main camera is 12Megapixels. Point and shots are dead. HDMI out. This is my first phone I can connect directly to a HDTV and play HD video. The cable is bigger than the phone itself. The ...

The Plantronics Discovery 975 has been my gadget catch from the trip to the Consumer Electronics Show. I had been in and out of Bluetooth headsets a number of times before. I tried variety of models and designs and none really fit me well. But strolling along a lazy mall after the show the Discovery attracted my attention. It had a nice leather case. Cases are essential for gadget geeks. But this one is a gadget itself. It has an integrated rechargeable battery. You charge the case and then store the tiny headset in it and the headset is charged. This way the headset itself can be very light, having a very small battery that gets recharged every time the headset is stored. Plus there is a nice LCD display on the case, showing separately the level of juice in the headset and in the case itself. Super - cool, and I have to admit, the selling point in my case (pun intended). Thinking about cases, quite often they do make a difference. Examples? The iPad without a case and the iPad with ...

My trip to the 2011 CES last week was both fruitful and fun, despite the fact it started with some complications "due to the operational reasons". The quoted sentence is from Lufthansa, the airline I fly very often, because they offer potentially very good connections, especially across the Atlantic. I say potentially, because my statistics of spending hours and sometimes even nights at airports "due to the operational reasons" are alarmingly high. Lufthansa is quite efficient with their mobile strategy. They have been sending alert SMS messages for years and most of their standard processes (including a check-in) can be done from a mobile phone, using a web browser. But unfortunately when something goes wrong, it turns out a mobile phone does not help much. On Thursday, January 6th, I started getting messages like "we are sorry but your flight from Krakow to Munich id delayed". Fine, thank you for keeping me updated. But unfortunately I had no idea, whet...

On October 15th, 2010 I delivered a talk at TEDxKrakow , sharing my vision of the future of mobile communications. The recorded video is available on YouTube , or here with subtitles, thanks to perfect work of volunteers supporting the TED conferences. And if some of you are interested in the slides too, you can go to the Slideshare page for the full content. Looking back at what I said, from a perspective of three months, I am convinced more than ever glasses will be the universal form factor of a communications device of the future. Why glasses? There are multiple reasons for that. Today, when using mobile Internet devices (and by mobile I mean smartphones and teleputers, not laptops with wireless usb modems!), we are constrained by input and output. Screens are too small and so are keyboards. There are two opposed needs. One is to make the device as small as possible to carry it everywhere. And this can be done pretty easily, as we continue to follow the Moore's Law of shrinki...

A week ago I was contemplating whether the shutdown of the Internet would mean the shutdown of the human civilization. And even if not today, we are rapidly approaching the point of no return. Our assets, achievements, wealth, power, love, joy, entertainment - you name it - come in a form of bits, not atoms. A bit is a state of information. It does not exist in a physical world. It has no mass, no energy, no dimensions. It only carries and represents information. We have come to the era where the value of information (bits) is exceeding the combined value of all other physical items (atoms). To me the milestone we have passed in 2010 was the discovery of the Stuxnet virus. The discovery, as the Stuxnet was created much earlier, probably in 2009 or even 2008. The Stuxnet is a weapon. It is the first weapon in the history of mankind that does not have a physical form. The Stuxnet is just an organized group of bits, a piece of information. With immense power to destroy the targets it was...

I am reading the Brian Clegg's Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction . In chapter seven the author envisions information meltdown as one of possible reasons of mass destruction of human race. At first this idea seems stretched a little too far for me. Is bringing down the Internet really going to wipe our civilization? I have been contemplating a long lasting failure of electric supply grid as a very serious threat. Theoretically there is such danger. A severe solar eruption can induce enough energy in power transmission lines (acting as huge antennas) to burn many transformers simultaneously. Recovery from such accident world wide may last several months. In the meantime nothing would work. It would not be just dark. Everything would stop. Factories. Agriculture. Transport. Communication systems. The loss of power can be devastating. But the Internet? Most of us are on the Internet for fun. At least partially. We could certainly survive without the Facebook. At least...

I am tempted to buy the new MacBook Air. And install Windows 7 on it (of course). But there are two issues that keep me from finalizing the transaction. First - there is no built-in WAN 3G option. Before owning the Nokia Booklet 3G , I had considered the 3G WAN not necessary. But later I started appreciating having the 3G modem built into the computer and being able to connect anytime and anywhere, without the need to plug any external "dongles" or booting up a personal WiFi cloud . It is just so difficult to understand the rationale behind the decision of not including the 3G option in the Air. The iPhone has it. The iPad has it. The Air does not. But in the end I decided I could live with it, returning to regular use of the Huawei 3G/WiFi router. Second - the more important issue - is the lack of any hardware - based security. In the PC/Windows world the TPM or Trusted Platform Module has been available for years, tightening the platform security. I have been using TPM-base...