Author: John Herrman

It’s clear that Microsoft will bring something to Mobile World Congress. This is inevitable, and necessary. But yesterday’s report that it’ll be Windows Mobile 6.6 has been met with another saying it’ll be Windows Mobile 7. So which is it?

The conservative choice would seem to be Windows Mobile 6.6, especially given the nagging reports that Windows Mobile 7, which we basically know to exist in some form, has been delayed—in release, if not unveiling—until late this year. But here’s the thing: until yesterday, nobody had even heard of Windows Mobile 6.6. We’ve only just been introduced to the final version of Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which appears to be the ultimate expression of the wrongheaded 6.5.x ethos, and any interim releases, even assuming a late 2010 release for WinMo 7, would have a hard time finding handset support.

Now that Bloomberg is chiming in to say that WinMo 7 will be unveiled at Mobile World Congress, I think it’s fair to bet on seeing for the first time in February. As for 6.6? I’m not convinced that it even exists, or that Microsoft is oblivious enough to press forward toward such an obvious, self-imposed dead end.

On another note, this has been some uncharacteristically tight leak control from Microsoft—we know practically nothing about Windows Mobile 7 right now, which is as refreshing as it is frustrating. [Bloomberg via Silicon Alley Insider]

Pundits, humanitarian organizations, and even the Haitian government haven’t fully assessed the devastation on the earthquake-shattered half-island. Seen through machine eyes, yesterday is a blip; through human eyes, it defies description.

If you’d like to donate to an organization that can help, here are some places to start:

• MSF/Doctors Without Borders
• The American Red Cross International Response Fund, or text “HAITI” to 90999, which donates $10 to the same—Thanks, Complexified!

Additionally, online tech store SmallDog is matching any MSF/DWB donations up to $200. [The Big Picture]

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs have developed a system of “whack gestures” that could allow any phone with an accelerometer to be silenced with a punch. This is brilliant.

Tap gestures as a concept aren’t totally new, but the new software promises a much lower error rate than previous solutions, as well as a much simpler philosophy. Chris Harrison, developer:

I think for whack gestures to be commercially viable only two gestures might be desired: one to silence the phone, and a second to postpone an alert, ask the caller to try again in 5 minutes or snooze an alarm.

The potential here, in you haven’t noticed, is huge. Imagine the time you’ll save, with this shortened call-killing routine! Not to mention the instant, visceral gratification. It would take this process:

1.) Receive call during funeral
2.) Panic, violently strike outer thigh
3.) Calm down, internalize shame
4.) Remove phone from pocket, interrupting somber moment further
5.) Switch off phone in conspicuous way, as if to apologize
6.) Sit through the shutdown jingle you totally forgot about, because who switches off their phones anymore?
7.) Continue mourning, now tinged with embarrassment

and condense it into this process:

1.) Receive call during funeral
2.) Don’t panic, violently strike outer thigh.

Perfect. The project is still in research and presentation stages for the time being, though any company run by people who’ve owned a cellphone, ever, will license this technology. Obviously. [New Scientist]

If your subscription is paid, you can watch Netflix for free on your computer, your Blu-ray player, your PS3, and soon, your Wii—but not on the Xbox 360. Microsoft, it’s time to kill the Xbox internet tax

In case you don’t own an Xbox, what I’m talking about is Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming/content/social network system for the Xbox 360. The free, or “Silver” version of the service offers a slim set of online capabilities, limited to game demo and add-on downloads, and some downloadable video content. But all the other stuff the Xbox does online—the online gaming, the movie and music streaming, the social networking—requires an Xbox Live Gold subscription, which costs $50 a year, $20 every three months, or $8 a month.

In return, Microsoft gives you online gaming, something which has obvious costs for them, and which I can understand paying for. But they’re also effectively selling you access to services that aren’t theirs, services that are free, or services that you’ve already paid for:

• Netflix. If you have access to Netflix instant streaming, you’re already paying at least $9 a month for the service, and whatever you pay for your broadband connection. You can stream it for no extra charge on all other consoles, and the content is streamed from Netflix’s servers, so why are we paying Microsoft for this?

• Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook. These are recent additions to Xbox Live, and Microsoft obviously spent a fair bit of time and resources devising new interfaces for these services. It would be fair, then, to charge a set number of Xbox Points for these apps, but to charge a recurring Live Membership fee to access these otherwise free services doesn’t make sense.

• Zune. This, of all the services in the Xbox Live Gold ghetto, makes the least sense. In the Zune video marketplace, you pay for movies with Xbox points. In other words, you have to pay for Zune movies or TV shows twice: once with your Live Gold membership, and once with your actual media purchase. UPDATE: A Microsoft rep got in touch:

All Xbox LIVE members, including Silver, can rent, buy, and stream videos from Zune on Xbox LIVE.

That did seem like a little much—I stand corrected.

I’m not saying that Microsoft should scrap Live altogether, or that there can’t be a paid tier for the service. I’m also not saying that other companies are innocent here—Sony, while they’re not charging for Netflix access, do require a Sony-tied login to access it, which seems like an unnecessary, albeit costless, extra layer between you and the external service you’ve already paid for. I’m just saying that Microsoft needs a Live subscription system that only asks you to pay Microsoft when Microsoft gives you something in return. Charge for online gaming, charge for Netflix Parties, charge for things that cost money.

Just stop charging us for things that we’ve already paid for, or that we don’t—or even can’t—pay for anywhere else.

I sort of expected the nudist community to be a bunch of hardline civil libertarians or something, but that doesn’t change how wonderful this story is: Nudists? Totally OK with the TSA’s new, aggressively denuding security scanners.

The American Association for Nude Recreation defuses the situation with one of the most masterful PR segues in the history of man: Put this issue in its proper perspective,” recommends AANR Executive Director Erich Schuttauf.

A trained security professional in a remote monitoring station takes a few seconds discreetly screening passengers to be sure they’re only bringing what nature gave them aboard. In exchange for safer skies, AANR believes it’s completely worth it. But you don’t have to be a nudist to agree these measures are based on common sense.”

Adds Schuttauf, “Polls regularly show that about one in five North Americans have skinny-dipped in mixed company already. So if travelers just think of the screen as a virtual skinny dip, something regarded as American as apple pie since before Norman Rockwell, everyone wins in the name of better air travel security. And as an added bonus, you can add the experience to your ‘bucket list’ as a virtual dipping of one’s toe into taking a Nakation – that’s a nudist vacation!

I’m sold! My heart, to the nudist cause; my basic privacy, to the government of the United States, for basically nothing. [Neatorama]

Speculation about the Apple Tablet mostly focuses on what the device is, not how it works. Text input, more than anything else, is the problem Apple needs to solve to make this work. So how will they do it?

CES was rotten with new tablets, some Android, some not, some with fascinating screens, and again, some not. But one thing they all had in common was that they hadn’t quite figured out the text input problem: How do you create text without a keyboard?

The Problem

We’ve been comfortably typing without physical keyboards for years now, and this is largely Apple’s doing. One of the great triumphs of the iPhone was to make onscreen keyboards bearable—something that, even if you hate the concept of virtual keys on principle, you have to admit they accomplished. This works:

Extending this to the tablet, though, would be a mistake. I had a chance to play with a few different sizes of tablets at CES, nearly all of which had traditional onscreen keyboards—in particular, the Android 2.0 keyboard, which is aesthetically different but functionally almost identical to iPhone OSes. None of them worked, at least in the way that I wanted them to, for one reason: they were too big. Seven-inch tablets were too large to comfortably thumb-type on, while 10-inch tablets made text input all but impossible. The onscreen keyboard as we know it doesn’t scale gracefully, and unless Apple wants their tablet to be completely useless (our sources say they don’t) they’re going to have to figure this out. So what are Apple’s options?

Solution 1: A Giant iPhone

Apple has made mistakes before, but to only have a simple onscreen keyboard would qualify as an outright screw-up. QWERTY-style, thumb-actuated onscreen keyboards work on screens up to about five inches, with the 4.3-inch-screened HTC Touch HD2‘s keyboard straining even the most unsettlingly long thumbs. But to assume that this won’t work is to assume that the tablet is to be held a certain way, with hands at four and eight o-clock, more or less like a touchscreen phone in landscape mode. This may not be the case.
What if the tablet is meant to be held with one hand, and controlled with the other? What if it has some kind of kickstand or mount, so you can actually type with both hands, a la a regular keyboard. What if it’s intended to only work in portrait mode, where it would be just about narrow enough to be usable?

Apple’s filed extensive patents about how a large, multitouch onscreen keyboard might work, pictured above, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything: Apple’s got more patents than the tablet’s got rumors, and most of them never materialized into anything meaningful. The keyboard patent, for example, also includes drawings of an onscreen clickwheel, and a description of how small interface elements, like the minimize/close/zoom buttons in OS X proper, could be handled on a touchscreen—all of which are terrible awkward, and dissonant with Apple’s touchscreen philosophy so far.

Either way, a single, iPhone-esque keyboard really shouldn’t be the primary input method. It could be a supplementary input method, but to have two separate text input mechanisms seems messy, and distinctly un-Apple-y. Lame, half-baked input seems like the kind of thing Steve Jobs might fitfully shitcan a tablet for, actually, but that’s getting awfully speculative, even for a piece about a product that doesn’t officially exist at all.

Solution 2: Voice Control

Apple’s been on covert voice input crusade since it introduced Spoken Interface for OS X which, if you care to look (System Preferences>Speech>Speakable Items “On) is still there. As it stands, it’s rudimentary—the iPhone’s Voice Control speech recognition is much more accurate—and though there are quite a few customization options, it’s really just a command system, not a full text input system.

Even more developed technologies like Dragon Dictation are still niche products, and honestly, the concept of controlling a computer entirely by voice is kind of absurd. “Open Browser! Open Gizmodo! Post withering comment about Apple tablet story, with these words!” No. Not now, and really, not ever—the computer as a stenographer is an obnoxious concept, held back by practical concerns, not technological ones.

That said, Apple is very proud of Voice Control on the iPhone, and they haven’t removed voice commands from OS X in over five years. It’s likely that there will be some kind of voice input for the tablet, but that it’ll be relegated to the same job it’s held in the past, taking care of the odd command and initiating the occasional script, and not much else.

Solution 3: The Dreaded Stylus

Styli! The very thing the iPhone was so dedicated to murdering could be the savior of the Apple tablet! Just ask Microsoft.

See, the only other tablet booklet device that’s garnering remotely comparable hype is the Courier, Microsoft’s dual-screen concept device leaked to us back in September. The Courier concept is very different from the blurry image we’ve assembled of the Apple tablet—it doesn’t have a keyboard. Unlike the Apple tablet, though, we know how the Courier is supposed to work:
Handwriting. Apple staked an entire device line on handwriting recognition—the Newton—over 15 years ago, so isn’t it conceivable that they’ve, you know, figured it out by now? Before taking another detour back to the patent office, let’s take a moment to recall Steve Jobs’ original iPhone keynote:

Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away, and you lose ‘em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with – born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers.

This wasn’t a dismissal of styli. This was a dickish, public obsoleting of styli. If I were a stylus, I would refuse to work with Steve Jobs, on the basis of him being a jerk.

And yet, in November of 2009, an Apple patent, this time describing stylus input and clearly showing a tablet-like device, went public. If you have the will and patience to parse a little techno-legalese, go for it:

Upon the occurrence of an ink phrase termination event, the ink manager notifies the handwriting recognition engine and organizes the preceding ink strokes into an ink phrase data structure…The present invention, in large part, relates to the observation that client applications and handwriting recognition software in pen-based computer systems can make far more accurate ink-related decisions based on entire ink phrases, rather than individual ink strokes.

If not, you’ll have to take my word for it: This is basically the Newton’s Rosetta, updated for 2009.

Stylus input would be a stunning break from Apple’s iPod/iPhone finger-only strategy, and to a lot of people it would seem regressive. Then again, if the tablet is a perfectly predictable extension of the iPhone concept, it won’t revolutionize anything at all. I’m still filing this under “unlikely,” but looking at the evidence, I honestly—and surprisingly—can’t rule it out.

Solution 4: A New Style of Keyboard

The safest bet for how Apple will handle the text input problem is not coincidentally the broadest. Any onscreen keyboard would have to be different than the iPhone’s somehow, but to say that Apple’s tablet will have a new style of keyboard is to say that it will have pretty much any kind of onscreen keyboard that is unlike the iPhone’s. This is not very useful! Luckily, we have guidance, from other companies, and even from Apple.

Split onscreen keyboards are neither new nor common, which makes them kind of perfect: the map has been charted, so Apple needs only to explore it.

The most public of the alternatives is an actual, available product called DialKeys. Coopted by Microsoft a few years ago, this tech, which splits the keyboard into two crescent-shaped virtual keyboards, shipped with a handful of touchscreen UMPCs, a category of devices that died off before it had the time to truly solve the onscreen keyboard problem. It wasn’t very good. But the concept had potential, maybe. Apple is definitely aware of DialKeys, even if they can’t use it—not that we’d want them to, or that they need to, having acquired a company with a similar concept about five years ago.

FingerWorks, a company specializing in touch interfaces and gesture concepts, was forcefully drawn into the Apple family about five years ago. A lot of their touch gestures actually made their way to the iPhone, albeit adapted from touchpad to screen use, according to FingerWorks employees:

The one difference that’s actually quite significant is the iPhone is a display with the multi-touch, and the FingerWorks was just an opaque surface. That’s all I’m going to say there. There’s definite similarities, but Apple’s definitely taken it another step by having it on a display

Interestingly, FingerWorks had a physical product with a split keyboard, which sat over Apple laptops’ regular keyboards, and which promptly disappeared after their acquisition. From the press release, which, mind you, hit the wires in 2003:

The MacNTouch Gesture Keyboard is a complete user interface that serves as mouse, standard keyboard, and powerful multi-finger gesture interpreter. Mouse operations like point, click, drag, scroll, and zoom are combined seamlessly with touch-typing and multi-finger gesture everywhere on the MacNTouch’s surface. Proprietary hardware and software allows pointing right over the keys, thus eliminating the frequent movement of the hand between the keyboard and the touchpad. The MacNTouch has been designed to minimize stress and it gives users unprecedented control of their computer using hand gestures.

Obviously such a product relates to a lot of aspects of tablet input, so let’s zero in on text: it’s exactly what the tablet needs, basically, except it’s not software. They keyboard is split for possible thumb use, it’s capable of gestures, and most importantly, it’s already owned by Apple.

Best of all, the FingerWorks domain, which proudly displays all of these concepts, was pulled from the internet this week. If this feels like a strange coincidence, that’s because, well, it is.

Making Bets

For all the evidence about the tablet’s possible input methods, there’s no standout answer. Apple’s got a thing for voice input, a history with onscreen keyboards, a patent trail and strong lineage of stylus input, and a pattern of suspicious behavior with and towards new keyboard types. We’ve got a handful of cases here, all compelling, and all conflicting. And the takeaway, if you haven’t picked it up yet, is that nobody really knows.

For my money, though, an adapted, possibly split onscreen keyboard is the best bet, and assuming the learning curve isn’t too steep, the most appealing option. But of the options laid out here, it’s by far the most vague—its FingerWorks ancestor is nearly a decade old, conceived in a time before multitouch screens—so the only truly safe bet is that whatever Apple comes up with, it’s going to surprise us.

Reverend Canon David Parrott, of the St Lawrence Jewry Church in London, blesses his parishioners’ gadgets for Plough Monday, an English holiday celebrating the new agricultural year. Smartphones are the new mules. Think about it. [via Metafilter—Thanks, Arianna!]

In my review, I lamented that Windows Mobile 6.5 didn’t feel finished. Now that we can see what Windows Mobile 6.5.x was eventually destined for, well, maybe that was for the best. [PhoneScoop]

The crime: identity theft. The location: the Android Market. The weapon: a free “banking” app. The lesson: you should be terrified at all times, of all things, even if Google says you shouldn’t be.

Downloading your bank’s mobile app seemed like a surefire way to avoid stumbling into a phishing scam. It was the prudent thing to do! Until this week, when malicious software masquerading as an official First Tech Credit Union banking app wormed its way into the Android Market. Of course, when I say “wormed” I really mean “strode more or less undisturbed,” because that’s what you do in the Android Market—approvals take hours, not days, and the inspection process seems to be cursory, at best.

This doesn’t highlight a problem so much as a tradeoff: do you want your primary app resource to be mostly unfiltered and non-exclusive, so no company can tell you what you can or can’t download, but where you’re possibly exposed to scam apps like this? Or do you need to be held in the warm, protective breast of a multination corporation, guarded by its app approval minions, who go over every app with a fine-tooth comb?

Either way, its worth noting that this is only somewhat indicative of a weakness in the Android Market concept, because it shouldn’t have happened—they theoretically screen for malicious apps. But it did, so at the very least be more scared careful. [First Tech Credit Union via AndroidGuys]

If you trust abstract concepts like “trends” and “evidence,” it’s clear that the desktop is heading for extinction. But wait! There may be an upward spike in the PC’s downward trajectory, according to dutifully optimistic desktop chipmakers! They’re probably right.

The arguments fall into two categories, which I’ll call “the American Renaissance” and “Asia is HUGE.” First, America. Says AMD VP Patrick Moorehead, via NYT Bits:

I think you will see the resurgence of the small form-factor desktop.

The reasons? They’ve gotten very small, very cheap, and to people “in the middle of America,” where desktop PCs are more popular than on the coasts, tiny, powerful, and extremely cheap desktops represent a decent value proposition. But more than consumers, enterprise buyers, who had a five-year tryst with laptops during more plentiful times, are looking back to desktops as an austerity plan:

Desktops offer better value, they’re harder to lose and they’re harder to steal.

“Companies are tending to go back to desktops,” said Richard Brown, a vice president with Via. “That’s certainly what we’re seeing.”

Not to resort to another but, but but: neither of these factors really matter. The real source of the possible desktop resurgence, and pretty much every other movement in anyone’s economy anywhere, if I’ve been watching my cable news right, is the Asian market. China’s upwards development curve is going to plow straight into the desktop PC’s death spiral, at least for next year:

In China and elsewhere, those people have started to desire a real computer when they get home,” Mr. Brown said. “They want a bigger screen and more power. The desktop offers that.

Milk it while you can, guys. [NYT Bits]

Google’s Nexus One support forums have been flooded with anecdotes about the phone’s poor 3G connectivity, so one user decided to follow up with some reasonably scientific tests. The conclusion? The Nexus One is kind of terrible at basic cellphonery!

The test was simple and limited, consisting of one dude, user WV, wandering in and out of his house, recording signal strength as measured in dBm and ASU with Android’s built-in metering app. Assuming the Nexus One is supposed to work like a normal cellphones—that is, it connects to 3G networks when they’re available and EDGE only when they’re not—something’s wrong.

Since the phone is obviously finding and receiving the cellular signals just fine, but not handling them as you’d expect, randomly flipping between the two—and evidently preferring EDGE most of the time—no matter how strong its signal is. This points to a software issue, not a hardware issue. That, and this:

OK. I found “Phone Info” screen through “Any Cut”. This looks like a screen not intended for average users. It clearly has settings that should not be messed with. However, it does have a pull down menu that was set to “WCDMA Preferred”. I changed this to “WCDMA Only”. The phone reset, and never again saw the f’ing “E” on the signal indicator- ALL 3G. After about 1/2 hour of speed tests (150k – 800kbps) and google satellite map downloads (all definitely faster), I switched back to “WCDMA Preferred”. Guess what? After a few minutes, I was back on EDGE, even with a good signal. Switched back to “WCDMA Only”, and 3G it remains.

This doesn’t fully solve the problem, because as WV notes, if you fall out of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage area with EDGE disabled, you’re basically boned. But anyway, yes, this appears to be a software bug. Or, if you’re feeling conspiratorial today, like WV, a software feature:

My concern is whether T-mobile is being sneaky about this and purposefully dumbing down the 3G to Edge to reduce cell frequency congestion and/or their back-end network congestion.

I’m not sure I want to draw that nexus (haw?) quite yet, since the issue was first brought to light by comparing the Nexus One’s 3G/EDGE handling to other T-Mobile 3G Android handsets, and those, despite having the same data-sucking potential as the Google Phone, haven’t been throttled in any way. While Google and T-Mobile say they’re “investigating,” the evidence keeps mounting and the question looms larger: what’s really wrong with the Nexus One’s 3G? [Google Nexus One Support Forums]

Android in washing machines! Android in tablets! Android in… a desk phone? If you’re still plugged into a landline all day at work, you next phone might just run Google’s smartphone OS.

To say that the Touch Revolution Nimble just runs Android is a bit of an understatement, because it actually runs on an extremely thorough custom interface designed by The Astonishing Tribe, the firm that conceived the original Android UI. The result makes me very, very jealous. Or at least it would, if I ever used a traditional phone for anything, which I don’t, because I’m under the age of 35, and I have a strange job on the internet. Anyway! Here’s how it works:

You’ll probably never see the Nimble as the Nimble again, since this is a reference design to be sold to phone manufacturers and resold under a different brand. And you’ll probably never get to buy one, because they’ll be marketed as enterprise devices, not consumer phones. But who cares! CES is all about gawking at stuff you’ll never buy, in case you haven’t noticed.

Housed in a wooden, painted prototype case, the Notion Ink Adam tablet is rough. But with Pixel Qi dual-mode screen tech on one arm and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 on the other, it’s one of the most exciting devices at CES.

We’ve seen a fair share of Android 2.0 tablets at CES, some of which share not only Android 2.0 with the Adam, but the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, too. But what they don’t have is a Pixel QI transflective screen, a 10.1-inch panel that can switch between backlit LCD mode and low-power electrophoretic reflective mode, which looks more less like E Ink, and which actually gets easier to see in direct sunlight.

We got our first good look at this screen tech this morning, and we covered its weaknesses: the LCD colors aren’t as vivid as a plain LCD’s and suffers at some viewing angles, and the reflective mode suffers from the glossy screen’s glare, but in both modes, it’s good enough. (And Notion honcho Rohan Shravan says he’s working on a fix for the latter issue.) What this means is that no matter what you’re using the device for—browsing the web over 3G, reading an ebook, watching a video—you can switch between screen modes depending on your environment or preference.

As I said before, the device is still in development, so you’re seeing protoype hardware (there’s prospective second model with a curvier exterior, too), untouched software (Rohan promises a custom interface, with a solution for text input other than the awkwardly sized standard keyboard), and unoptimized performance (Android 2.1 should help the interface move a little more quickly). We’ll get a fuller picture of the device come Mobile World Congress in February, as well as pricing info—though we’re assured we’ll be “very happy” about it.

Anyway, you can stack these caveats as high as you want, and the Notion Ink Adam is still taller, if just for this reason:

We repeat: The bullet’s in the chamber. E Ink is going to die.

On stage with Walt Mossberg, Google Engineering VP mentioned that an enterprise version of the Nexus One could have a physical keyboard and longer battery life—and there could be more Google devices, including a budget model.

The original question was about the the broader program of “Google” phones, as opposed to “With Google” phones, and generalized crap with Android. The Nexus One is the first in a series, or “program” as Rubin calls it, which could include new devices. Unprompted, though, he brought up the possibility of a new enterprise phone that’s like the Nexus One, but with a physical keyboard and larger battery; he quickly backed off, but not before Mossberg asked about the possibility of a smaller phone, to which Rubin granted a half-nod. And then they dropped it. Come on, Goatberg!

Anyway: release date, specs, price, concrete existence are all still unknown or uncertain, but the Nexus One doesn’t sound like it’ll be alone in the Google Store for long.

Without a hint of doubt, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says that chances of Netflix on Nintendo—are “excellent.” Stir that together with October’s confident rumors about forthcoming Netflix support on the Wii and, well, you get it.

The quote came in response to an onstage question from AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka, during an interview here at CES. The choice of “Nintendo” rather than “Wii” terminology was Kafka’s choice, and was kind of unfortunate, because the only caveat to October’s rumors was that Netflix may be waiting for Nintendo’s next-gen product. In any case, it’s not a confirmation, but it’s close—Wii people, don’t let your hopes for native Netflix die quite yet.

Last we saw marathon karaoke man, he was singing for nobody like he was singing for his life. There’s no evidence that he’s stopped since Wednesday, but he has accumulated a small fanbase. Feel, as your pity transmutes into respect.

CES, gadgets like this are why I love you. CES, gadgets like this are why I hate you.

The Ion iType keyboard is pretty self-explanatory, which means you already know if you think it’s a stupid idea, or a brilliant idea. If your’e conflicted, here’s a hint: it can be both.

The keyboard is limited to typing in one app, not because of some kind of engineering shortfall, but because that’s all that Apple allows—third-party apps or accessories can’t serve as text input devices, which is why dictation apps are all self-contained. Basically, you can export to email, save, or copy text in apps like that, and that’s exactly what you can do with the iType’s bundled app. Typing is fine, shift and caps lock keys behave as you’d expect, and although the text input isn’t totally instant, it’s very close. A battery is built in, which keeps the keyboard running and recharges your phone for a few hours.

It works, and its heart is in the right place, but that was never really the question. So, does it make sense? The iType, but a netbook. essentialy turns your iPod or iPhone into a netbook. A tiny, gimpy, flat, slow netbook. It’ll only be $70, so if you don’t have an iPod Touch, want a tiny-top for sofa browsing and are strapped for cash, then I guess you could buy one. It’d make a good icebreaker, too, as long as you don’t mind your new friend’s first words being “HAHAHAHAHA, LOOK AT THAT GUY”

You probably have a laptop already, and you should probably just use that. The iType should be available in Fall of this year.

No major companies are quite ready to bring a proper Android tablet to market, but they’re edging closer. When they do, they could do worse than turn out something like this 7-inch, Tegra 2 design from Compal.

Under the hood is Nvidia’s newest Tegra, which guarantees snappy interface, video and graphics performance in theory. In practice, at least on this early device which can’t leverage the new graphics acceleration in Android 2.1, menu transitions are still a little slow, browser scrolling isn’t instant, and the responsiveness of the touch keyboard poor enough to make typing a genuine pain in the ass. But wait wait wait—that’s a software optimization issue, which can almost definitely be fixed. What about the concept?

The Archos 5 Android tablet, had its issues, from lack of 3G support to inability to play Flash content, both of which have been remedied here—this Compal has a SIM tray as well as Flash 10.1 support. A shipped product would be faster than the Archos, and the extra two inches of screen are just enough to make this feel like a tablet, not an oversized smartphone. And to be honest, I could get into this.

It’s a sofa tablet, a toilet tablet, a Skype tablet, whatever—there’s a market for this, at the right price. The only serious issue now is that typing on the onscreen keyboard is almost impossible on a 7-inch screen, unless your thumbs are freakishly long. I have no idea how Google—or Apple, for that matter—could solve this problem. But someone might! And that would be great.

The first thing they teach you at mascot college? Don’t mope. The second? Try to remember to wear more than 10% of your costume. Cheer up, buddy! It could be so much worse.