Mobile videoconferencing is great for deaf people, as they can use sign language. (This is the only use of videoconferencing I've observed after quite a few years of pretty common availability here in northern Europe)

I've got an 2G iPod touch, with iPhone OS 2.x. This means there is software that simply won't run because it is not an iPhone (such as Sleep Cycle), and software which won't run because it is not the 3.x version of the OS (games - at least the Street fighter demo and some others). With an iPod Touch you have to buy the OS upgrades, which I haven't bothered to do.

By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.

The biggest new challenge with "iphone 4g" is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.

To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, and the vast majority actually works with 1.5. With the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".

Android is also more developer friendly, e.g. the new feature introduced just before the 2.2 release - at least my N1 got a "report this crash button" before I upgraded to 2.2. (I don't want to speculate on the developer friendlyness of Apple, but recent news haven't been very good.

I've got an 2G iPod touch, with iPhone OS 2.x. This means there is software that simply won't run because it is not an iPhone (such as Sleep Cycle), and software which won't run because it is not the 3.x version of the OS (games - at least the Street fighter demo). With an iPod Touch you have to buy the OS upgrades, which I haven't bothered to do.

By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.

The biggest new challenge is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.

To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, with the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".

I would be more interested in articles comparing the wave of 100$/100euro Android tablets which will arrive this summer..

Whitehouse.gov is mirrored through akamai (netcraft).

Transparent mirroring is of course only one way among many to use drupal (or any other cms) securely. It is my impression that the current US administration actually allows hiring someone with a higher IQ than the president, so someone probably did a google search.

Browsing through this thread I can't help but recognise the same old arguments: "It is too hard to use for casual users", "it is no fun", "windows is good enough", "developers want to make money", "the gui is ugly" and so on. These arguments are not new, you would find the exact same arguments if you look at old slashdot stories.

The reality is (as usual) quite different, and the old arguments have nothing to do with the kernel anyway. Look at the latest statistics of who actually writes the kernel: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf. From this paper it is clear that the rate of changes has increased quite a bit, and that the latest Linux release probably had something like 1800 different contributors. If you go back 5 years that number is just 400, so the assumption that there are "no new developers" is clearly false. What the first article is really about is that there are "no new subtree maintainers", but that should hardly surprise anyone. The Linux kernel is a huge pyramid (similar to a big corporation in a way), the people on the bottom of the pyramid are not the ones who get sent to the kernel summit, and the people on the top tend to like it there. I doubt that the _average_ age of all the Linux kernel developers have changed all that much in the last 5 years, it might even have gone down a bit, as more of the development is done in China, Japan and India these days.

Linux on the desktop might not be growing as quickly as some might hope, but it keeps growing faster and faster in almost every other market segment. When was the last time you heard about a new mobile phone, set-up box, web-service or computer science project which was not based on Linux? Sure, Microsoft and Apple might launch their new products now and then, but they are tiny compared to the rest of the market.

The iPhone keyboard allows chording - that is, you can hold one key down, press another key, and the other key will be registered as a keypress as well. If you type with more than one finger (or thumb) this will improve the speed.

This does not work on my Nexus One (android), but I'm not sure about the other platforms.

Another alternative, which is probably faster than any of the tested keyboards is swype, where you just draw a line which represents the word. There is a public beta at http://beta.swype.com/ (Android only)

I've got three possible platforms for "electronic reading":

• A first generation Sony Librie (bought used in Tokyo)
• An iPod Touch with Stanza
• Various portable and not-so portable computers

Depending on what I do all three can be said to be the "best device". If I'm reading technical documentation, such as a PDF manual a computer screen with easy access to search and online services is clearly the best choice. Reading fiction outdoors when the sun is shining the Sony would be best. On the subway or on the bus the iPod is easily portable and lets me block out inane chatter.

No device is currently the best one for all possible uses, and there might be a while before a single "best solution" will be available. (Some kind of A4 foldable organic led display, with a touch screen and really fast searching would do.) In the mean time I plan to buy an Android phone with 800x480 resolution (or more) for reading fiction. I would consider buying a Notion Ink Adam though, but it wouldn't be quite as portable.

The software side is of course really important - On the server / computer side I use Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) for converting content, pulling text from websites. You can also use it as a "content server", which is really neat.

It is really easy to make fun of translate.google.com based on how it translates Chinese to English. This is quite silly IMHO, as Chinese is possibly the hardest language in the world. (Travel around China and you'll find semi-literate taxi drivers, even in the major cities.[*]) This is a good article on why Chinese is hard: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html.

A better example would be say Dutch. Translate the OP from English to Dutch and back to English (i.e. a worst case scenario), and you end up with this:

"The company has an automatic system for translating texts on computers, sweetened by scanning millions of multilingual websites and documents. Until now includes 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google has a system telephone speech recognition that allows users to query websites by speaking commands into their phones instead of typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to software to understand voice of a caller and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language to produce. "

This is perfectly legible to me, and vastly better than what you got when babelfish was introduced 11 years ago. There is a good TechTalk about the topic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PzPDRPwlA which should be required viewing before making fun of google's machine translation efforts.

Voice recognition is harder, but for continuous untrained speech recognition google voice is pretty cool - I've gotten some barely intelligible voice messages on my google voice number, and where google voice is sure (i.e. black text) it is 95%+ correct, where it is not sure it is maybe 30% correct, but for another 30% it is not possible to figure out what was said, except when taking context into consideration. Google Voice transcribing a call from a mobile phone is better than what you got with Dragon Dictate 5 years ago even with a good microphone, so it is not unlikely that in a few years it will be better than naive human transcription. Humans will be better at guessing based on context thought.

Basically, in 5 years the kind of system google is talking about will work good enough to successfully flirt with a french girl (see http://www.youtube.com/user/searchstories) :P

[*] This is why you should always bring a mobile phone, and have the number for the place you're going.

This is in addition to the earlier posts:

Make sure your phone is GSM and unlocked, and you can pick up a cheap "pay as you go" sim card in most countries. GPRS is slow, but with the Opera Mini browser (http://mobile.opera.com/next) and the Gmail applet (http://mail.google.com/mobile) it is quite cheap to stay connected, and often much more convenient than trying to find a wifi hotspot.

Post your new number on facebook or similar if people need to keep in touch with you..

If you don't speak the local language a local pone number is quite useful - imagine it is late and you're lost you can call the place you're planning to stay, and have them explain how to get there to the taxi driver. (That call would probably cost more than the stay if you used your US SIM card ;)

The current lowest price I know of for an unlocked windows mobile phone is 136.50$ including shipping worldwide. (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12811)

It is a pretty conservative prediction that by early 2012 you'll be able to buy a number of 99$ unlocked android phones - something similar to the HTC Hero I would guess, or similar to the 2G iPhone. This makes it an impulse buy much more than the iPhone. What the label is on the phone won't matter - by then phone hardware will be even more of a commodity hardware than today, basically just a big screen, and the vendors will differ based on software.

The 99$ market is not where I expect Apple to go, they'll probably stay with their current market, which is limited to what, the richest 10% of the world?

As an aside: By 2012 I expect a high end phone for the European market will have a 5" 1024x480 screen (the same resolution you find on high end Japanese phones today, but lower dot pitch), 2Ghz main cpu with multiple specialized cores, and a 10mp camera which can record 1080p HD. The screen will probably be borderless on two sides, the phone itself will be even thinner than today's phones. I've not seen many signs that Apple are planing to extend their platform to the next generations of hardware, but Android certainly is. (Things like resolution independence and APIs for social media and close integration with web services are really important imho.)

What I would like for myself is a phone where I can boot Windows (Mobile), Apple OS (iPhone), and Linux (such as Android), much like you can do with a modern PC if you really want to. Something similar to this: http://intruders.tv/inqtv/2009/04/20/nvidias-tegra-demo-dual-boot-to-boot/.

Telenor operates over much of Europe and Asia these days, through subsidiaries and such.

My point was just that enforcing competition is a good thing in the long term, even if the companies involved will complain a lot in the short term. The operators complained a lot when the reforms were implemented, but I don't think they would have been where they are today without being kicked away from their complacent near-monopoly status. Both the companies involved and the consumers (citizens) made a profit from the reforms. IMHO the same would have been true for the banking industry, even if they would have had to hire a lot of cobol programmers to implement bank account portability :P

I forgot to mention the website, it is http://www.telepriser.no./ Oh, and a more accessible site (English, worldwide) is http://www.yr.no/ probably the best weather forecast site on the net.

Since 2002 the "Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority" has had a calculator offering much of the same for the Norwegian market. In addition to mobile phones it also covers telephony and broadband. Basically, all providers are required by law to provide their pricing structures to the authority, so that the services can be compared. For mobile phones this will involve entering your typical number of minutes (to other mobile phones and landlines), text messages, mms messages and kilobytes.

I'm sure someone will moan that this is socialism, since it is a service that could be offered by the market, or that people could do themselves, or that services such as this can never be efficient anyway. There are some arguments against this: The Norwegian market is small (4.5 million people), with lots of mountains and a low population density, and strict rules about required coverage by the licensees. Manpower is also extremely expensive, and most workers are members of a union. So, clearly, Norway should have really high prices, right?

Wrong - according to the calculator my mobile phone costs should be about 0,- every month, with a 0,- establishment fee for the contract. (About 100 outgoing text messages, 100 minutes outgoing, and 1mb. No mms messages)

Why is this? It is of course hard to find the "perfect truth", but here are some informed guesses: The market is very regulated, in order to enforce competition. Perhaps the most important (to the consumer) point of this is that you can move your phone number to any other operator, either for free or for some very small cost. While there are only three GSM licensees there are 16 or so "virtual operators", who operate by putting a box inside the switches of the GSM licensees, and basically resell their bandwidth. The authority is also able to punish any collusion between the operators, and to require changes in price structures between the operators.

Clearly, all this (regulated) competition is good for the Norwegian consumer, but is it good for the telecom companies? The biggest Norwegian operator (Telenor) has according to wikipedia 143 million subscribers, so clearly all this competition does something to the companies, which can't be all bad. Telenor used to be a state-owned monopoly, which was well known for being hugely inefficient and slow. In markets where there can only be a limited number of providers (such as bandwidth in the GSM bands) there is no natural encouragement for companies to become more efficient, if you want to make more money it is easy to just add another hidden fee. Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.

(The same system was implemented for electrical power providers, but it failed for the banking system - allowing people to move their account numbers between banks was evidently too expensive..)