Headworx

Not that long ago I decided to cut down on the number of information threads I used to follow. This has proven to be the right decision. I stopped chasing my inbox, have more time to concentrate and think and do some productive stuff. And I do not feel uninformed at all (although I may be...). The information vortex is a trap I think I have escaped. At least for the time being. Enjoying the reclaimed moments of life I have noticed my attitude to Facebook has been changing too. I had considered it fun before. But yes, this was back in 2007. While fun, it has been somehow shallow. The network of my connections has been quite weak. Sure I have followed many friends but I noticed it has never really been close to real meetings, even a phone call. On Facebook, you really do not pay too much attention to what others are doing. You pretend to. Oh how nice it is to get many likes when you say something silly or controversial. But what do the likes really mean? People who like your posts, do t...

This week a number of comments on the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet have popped up. The authors agree the PlayBook comes to market as a product only half - finished. Hardware - complete and software - work in progress. Hard to disagree. RIM is rushing the product out, promising the updated software for the Summer. I wander if they could wait. True, after the Motorola Xoom / Android Honeycomb fiasco, Apple is building another year of advantage, selling the hardly upgraded iPad 2 to the crowds. But the Xoom story should teach RIM something. Do not rush. Complete your product. Customers today are demanding. And you do not need a bad press to start with. But let us look more closely what the reviewers point to as missing on the PlayBook. One thing is the lack of on-board 3G modem. It is disputable, some want it some do not, especially as I know this is considered a plus by many. Today almost any high end mobile phone can act as a hotspot and the PlayBook can connect over Bluetooth to...

A couple of months ago I commented on WebKit , the technology behind most of the modern Web browsers today. The comments were from the end user's perspective. Today a few words from the developer side of me. For many months I have been involved in a new secret startup of mine, which by the way is becoming less and less secret as I write this. We will be going live with the product in a matter of weeks and I promise the product is cool. And contrary to what I had been doing before, this time it is mostly hardware. But, you know, hardware today still consists of at least 60% of software. This is what BMW claims - 60% of non recurring costs of bringing a new model of a high end car to the market is software. You have probably never considered cars being a software... But coming back to the WebKit. We needed touch control panels for our product. We could have had designed our own hardware panels, but considering how many devices today are "touch panels" the better way was to ...

I have written on Snapdragons many times here . But today we have another reason to celebrate. The 8660, Qualcomm's new mobile processor is coming to the wave of mobile devices right now. ARM - based, dual core, clocked up to 1.5GHz with powerful Ardeno 220 GPU on board, it will be available in two incarnations. One, I should say, traditional, with advanced 3G radios on board. Its sibling will be a WiFi only chip. The first 8660 device on the market will be the HTC Pyramid phone. And then the avalanche will follow, with such notable design like HP's PalmOS -based tablets. In February, at the Mobile World Congress I played with the 8660-based MDP (Mobile Development Platform), a form-factor reference design made by Qualcomm to demonstrate the virtues of the new chip. Basically there are three: Power. Or I should say performance, as power is misleading. It simply looks like the 8660 is the most powerful mobile processor available today. AnandTech has put it through various tests,...

Ever since Apple has become the largest IT company, people tend to compare it to Google. This tendency has intensified even more as Google, with the Android OS invaded Apple's turf of smartphones and Internet tablets. But really, these companies should not be compared. Because they are different. They do different things, have different strengths and fundamentally, they do not compete. Google is the company that has indexed the Internet, representing today the majority of information and knowledge of our civilization. They did this, in principle, by creating a computer system different to any other system ever created. Every computer system on Earth works worse, as it grows and handles more information. Google is different. The bigger it is and the more data it processes, it works better. Faster and more accurately. Google has tried many ways to monetize what they have been doing, and so far the most successful for them way to make money has been selling ads as sponsored links. Goo...

Recently I have noticed I spend more and more time reading various news flowing down from around thew world over the Internet. Too much time. I have about 30 RSS feeds I have been reading regularly. This is a lot, but bearable, as long as you sit at the computer all day. But when the daily amount of messages started exceeding 200 and I was on the road, trying to catch up in the evening, I decided to do something about this. The decision what to cut is always tough. But after considering all pros and cons, I cut the most busy feeds. The ones generating more than ten messages a day. I feel much better now and I do not have a sense I miss something. Todany the information sources, especially the popular ones, are redundant. When something important gets posted on, say, engadget.com, it is soon retweeted or reposted somewhere else. So good bye Engadget, good bye Slashdot, good bye Ars Technica, and good bye Wired. Ditto LinkedIn. I am no longer interested somebody of my 200+ contacts chang...

There have been thousands of discussions about Microsoft and how it loses the edge and market share. And about The Cloud - how important is the strategy of migrating services and applications from personal computers and local area networks to the Internet. So here is my idea. Microsoft should start selling PCs. What? You will ask. PCs? Software company selling hardware? Well... Not exactly hardware. I mean selling personal computers as a service. For $20 a month. A Windows 7 desktop hosted in Microsoft data center, with all applications, including Office Suite, fully configured. They have all they needed. The effective and proven Remote Desktop protocol. The needed licenses for Windows and Office (of course!). The server infrastructure. Just make the client applications available on any platform. For Androids, iPads, Flash and so on. And make a complete product. With storage space plans, applications, security and support the client front end on anything that has screen and can connect...