IBM T30 Thinkpad / Thinkpads aboard the International Space Station

Serial ports and parallel ports remind me of years gone by - of a switch box to select a printer and floppy discs to move data around. Cars with onboard diagnostics, it seems, still use serial ports - and so I found myself on eBay in search of a used PC laptop that could ‘talk’ to my (frequently poorly) BMW. I could sketch almost every incarnation of Apple’s Powerbook from the 3400c through Wall Street G3, Titanium G4 until the MacBook Pro of today - and argue the case for their inclusion in any museum of industrial design - but a PC laptop? If there was an iconic design among the 8,148 laptops listed then I couldn’t remember it.

You realise you are a geek when you find yourself strangely excited by wading through people’s cast off laptops (viewing eBay’s list by ‘time ending soonest’ helps). But it was on another site that I saw the link ‘RS232 computers’. (If you think DOS is something you do at the weekend then those characters specify a serial port, the things we used to use before USB came along). For sale were a war chest of IBM T series laptops. Now I remember those machines for having a nipple instead of a trackpad and as anyone in the design profession knows that is no way to operate Word let alone Photoshop. They were not, therefore, on my radar. But if you look past the nipple you find a design that has stood the test of time far better than any of its contemporaries. And build quality that means they are still around, and still valuable. Why?

As ever, Wikipedia has the answer. Product of a collaboration between corporate head of the IBM design programme Tom Hardy and industrial design legend Richard Sapper, the ThinkPad is a monument to the realisation that design can be a powerful differentiator in any market; a design that is somehow so ‘right’ that it makes a modern Sony Viao look ever so slightly off the pace. No wonder Nasa’s astronauts took them on the Space Shuttle. These things are cool. They are also from IBM, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of a brand that, now it has departed the PC market, I find I quite miss.

They even made the machine for me - a 2002 ThinkPad T30 - the only model that came with a trackpad and a serial port, and mine is arriving from specialist Viper IT today. I can’t wait.

My tip for the new design leader in the land of PC notebooks? Dell, by a country mile.

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I blogged here how I’d swapped my 1st gen iPhone out 4 times for hardware problems.  So I had under my ownership a total of 5 iPhones and now as the owner of a 2nd gen, 3G-network iPhone the number is now 6.

Tomorrow it will be 7.  The casing has cracked, but I haven’t dropped it or rough-housed it at all.  It drops 1 out of 3 calls. Accessing the contacts takes about 5 seconds.  And the 3G data connection during peak hours is non existent. Yesterday (after I had applied the 2.01 firmware patch) a dropped call managed to lock the entire phone and required a reset.  Having owned mobile phones for the last 13 years, I can’t remember having such problems placing and receiving calls.

These don’t seem to be isolated to me, and don’t seem to be the fault of at&t.

Of course I’ve applied some introspection and checked with my neighbors that they aren’t running giant Tesla coils in their apartments.

So, the well trodden path to the Genius Bar will be walked again.

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According to eMarketer, North America is likely to surpass Asia Pacific in mobile gaming revenues due, largely, to the iPhone and the Apps store launch: “Screen Digest said the iPhone would drive mobile gaming revenues to more than $1.5 billion in North America in 2012, up from $930.5 million this year.” Worth a quick peek at this excellent posting I referred to in an earlier blog, that discusses the iPhone’s breakthrough from a developer’s point of view.

This again reinforces the notion that people are:

1. Hungry for content and entertainment on the move (eben if that means sitting on their couch)
2. Eager to maximize the investment they made in their spanking new iPhones
3. Happy to hand over ca$h for content if they’re given a safe, reliable, enjoyable and easy to use method (iTunes in this case).

Right, I’m off to dream up ideas for iPhone games that will make us $Millions.

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OK, my downer on Apple of recent might be a little uncalled for but even as a (very minor) shareholder I’m a little turned off at the moment.  Problems with the the latest operating systems for both desktop computers and servers, applications not being up to par, point releases coming in late and missing features and now the whole furor over the iPhone - sigh, bring me a cup of tea and a biscuit please - have made me feel a little lackadaisical towards the brand.

I do still love my iPone 1 and the latest software release has added utility and entertainment with the apps store but I’m not rushing out to get the new one.  So, I’m going on a little Apple/iPhone holiday.  As we’ve opened a new office over in London and because I’m from there I’m finding more and more excuses to jet across the Atlantic, so I’ve decided to get myself a second phone that I can plug a pay as you go sim card into and I’ve selected the well rates Nokia N-95.  Stacked with applications, 3.5G, GPS with Garmin Navigation and a whopping 5MegaPixel camera.  Most appropriate for a traveling man I reckon

If you think I’ve made a grave mistake, let me know and why.  I’ve really only skimmed over the reviews and I guess I’ll find out soon enough: the phone lands tomorrow!!

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A report out today by eMarketer takes a look at the evolving mobile marketing medium in Japan. Ahead of the rest of us by a significant factor, we’ve been watching not just the technology exploding out of the far East but also behavioral trends around emerging platforms.

The report suggests the reluctance of advertisers to push the technology to the, somewhat, advanced limits it offers and are exploiting opportunities with direct response and some sales response.

It’s important, however, to understand and discuss the relationship we have with our mobile phones and the impact of any ‘intrusion’ from seemingly pushy brands. That relationship is an intimate one and whilst we are clamoring for more and more content and functionality, we are all still demanding privacy and control. It may be the one device in the digital realm that users still ‘own’. We must be sensitive to this and encourage users to engage with the brands we’re representing in an elective manner. Any advertisers pushing unsolicited ads and sales calls via our mobile phones, will be causing more damage to those brands than they suspect.

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I love the iPhone.   I bought mine a year ago, actually the day of the product launch.  I didn’t have to queue for it - the SoHo store was strangely subdued by 8.30pm on the launch day.  So, I was rather sad when that particular iPhone broke.  The poor thing thought the headphones were plugged in when they weren’t.  So, I took it into the Genius Bar and received a replacement unit. 2 days later the earpiece speaker blew, so went back to the Genius Bar and received another replacement.

A day after that replacement #2 started to reset itself.  I tried restoring and the damn thing reset during the restoration.  Dead as a doornail.

Went back to the Genius bar and the chap set up replacement #3 which promptly died.  The genius said it might be the SIM card until he tried replacement #4 which worked.

That was Monday.  Today, Wednesday, Replacement #4 just reset itself and its touch screen no longer works, even after restoring.  So, yet another trip to the bloody Genius Bar beckons.

Beyond bad luck, I think there’s an easy answer to this:  each replacement is a refurbished unit, which itself was sent back for some malfunction.  There haven’t been any new first-generation iPhones available for quite some time, so there is no option but to replace defective units with previously defective units.  Needless to say, this isn’t the way to win and retain corporate clients.

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