Michael Gartenberg

Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:23:32 -05:00

As I'm sure you all know, JupiterResearch is now a part of Forrester Research. It's been a great (if, somewhat bumpy) ride at Jupiter over the years but with this transition, for me this part of the ride ends. After much thought, I have decided not join my colleagues at Forrester and instead will be pursuing other interests.

My last day at Jupiter (er, Forrester) will be today, Friday, August 15^th. I'm going to take a little time off and rest for a bit, but I'll be back soon and tell you all what's next. You can follow my adventures at gartenblog.net, on twitter.com/gartenberg and reach me at gartenberg AT gmail. Or just give me a call at 201.862.0443. Talk to you all soon.

I wish all my colleagues at Jupiter good luck and much success as they become part of the Forrester organization. It has truly been an honor and privilege working with you side by side over the years.

Vongo -RIP

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:40:51 -05:00

With a whimper and not much of a bang, Vongo is closing the doors. The service had some potential at launch way back in Jan of 2006 when along with Windows Media 11, MTV Urge, and the Toshiba Gigabeat (before MSFT caught Zune fever). They are still looking at offering "white label" services but this pretty much closes the door on the service for the most part. RIP

Blackberry Bold in the house

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:00:09 -05:00

Have the new Blackberry Bold in the house. First thoughts? Excellent. Love the fit and finish. New updated UI is wonderful and it's fully loaded with all the features and radios you'd expect in a flagship device. My software build isn't final (should have an updated build shortly) so I won't get into a formal review just yet.

Typing one handed is not fun

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:34:44 -05:00

Typing this with just my right hand. Yesterday my left hand started acting oddly (i am of course a lefty) and with enough pain that I actually called and made an app't with a doctor for today. This morning, my fingers were not working well at all, I did a few meetings this morning in NY and then went to see the doc. After a long wait for an X-Ray and some tests, doc says it doesn't *seem* to be a big issue and is likely related to long sessions with laptops in coach as well lots of mobile device use (he yelled at me when I was twittering waiting for the X-Ray). Looks like I will likely need a cortizone shot and was told to stay off the keyboards for a few days... what this all means is posting and twittering as well as email responses are going to be light. Going to see how well Vista speech recognition really is.

UPDATE - just dropped my coffee cup... hand couldn't hold it. That was not good. Might call doc back tomorrow.

Laptop Mag's XP OLPC Experience is Not Mine

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:27:21 -05:00

Cant' speak to the exclusive nature of Laptop Mag's running an OLPC running XP as I've been running one here for several weeks. I am finding a totally different experience with performance and load times much different and much better than the Laptops folks are getting. I checked with MSFT and it seems there's came from the OLPC folks directly (mine came from MSFT) and our builds it seems are different. Overall, I think the hardware itself is just lacking (my first unit developed keyboard problems after a few days and needed to be swapped out) and the overall performance is hardly going to meet the needs of the uber user. It is much better than the stock OLPC OS IMHO and I imagine much more useful as well.

I have had a few students use the machine and my next phase of testing will be to give it to an elementary student to use for a bit when school starts. Will keep you posted here.

Nokia E 71 - First Look

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:25:49 -05:00

When I got back from Seattle there were a few surprises waiting for me (I'll have to wait a bit to tell you about some of them) one of the cool ones was Nokia's new E71 Handset. Nokia's E series has been popular in various parts of the world and folks loved the big screen, good keyboard and of course the really big battery which meant talk time and data use were excellent. The E 71 is much smaller and slimmer with a wonderful screen and a great keyboard. It has a nice metal and verysolid feel to it that make it very comfortable to hold and carry. My first concern was battery life. After all, there's no magic in this. Small devices = small batteries which equals less use. So imagine my surprise that Nokia is using the same battery it used in the older and larger E devices. It's so odd opening the phone and seeing how much space is taking by the battery that one has to wonder, where is the phone mechanism? Magic indeed.
Specs are impressive at half VGA with GSM/GPRS/EDGE , 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA support, Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g, Bluetooth 2.0, and GPS. Whew. Lots of tech in here. Support POP/IMAP and Exchange Active sync make it easy to use this at work and at home. Speaking of which, there's a super cool feature that lets you set two different profiles, presumably one work and one for home. Theme changes totally to reflect. Would be great to see more choices in the future as to what gets switched with each profile but this is the start of something really cool. A device that finally reflects that people go back and forth between business and personal personas in the course of a day and especially when they're out and about. Web apps perform well but it's still frustrating not be able to cut and paste a URL from the web browser to the podcast application. Media functions for imaging and music are good and on par with other offerings from Nokia. Sadly, the E 71 does not support N-Gage just yet.
Call quality is excellent and with that big 1500mAh battery, it passes my battery of test of getting through a heavy day of talk, email and web with plenty to spare. My biggest issue is lack of app eco system around the E Series. No Tetris that I could find, forget the S60 series version of the Slingbox player etc� I'd love to see Nokia work with developers get some more cool functions on here. For now, it's a great phone and email device and for many users, that will be more than enough. The device also needs a carrier. Right now you can get these unlocked directly from Nokia at their stores in the US but this device really needs a carrier behind it to help Nokia tell the story to the mass market.
Bottom line? Excellent form factor, great battery life and performance for phone, email, and web with some nice secondary media features.

The Mojave Experiment - the good and bad

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:09:16 -05:00

So by now you've heard of the Mojave Experiment from Microsoft. Joe Wilcox, thought it was good at first and then offers a second take. I'm not sure I agree with all of Joe's analysis. This is good news for Microsoft in many ways as it underscores that Vista often suffers from a bum rap in terms of perception. Score one for MSFT. On the other hand, nothing here changes the overall perception and that's what MSFT needs to do. Moreover, the fact that all these folks could see Vista and NOT RECOGNIZE it at this point in the lifecycle tells you something as well at how Microsoft has failed to generate proper mindshare. Finally, some of Vista's issues are based in reality and these are all things Microsoft needs to address and address soon. Well before Windows 7.

Off to Seattle

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:17:15 -05:00

I'm off to Seattle next week. Looking forward to some very fun meetings. Posting will be light but feel free to follow me over at Twitter for updates.

Taking a peek at Peek

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:51:05 -05:00

I had dinner last night with Amol Sarva last night, the CEO of Peek, a mobile startup that's taking an approach in the face of conventional wisdom. While everyone is striving to create the next mobile platform, device vendors are trying to add more functions to their gadgets, Peek is going the opposite way. Less is more. Their hardware is probably best described as the original Blackberry for the 21st century. It does email. That's it! No MP3 players, cameras, games, IMs, social network apps or telephony. None of it. It does email. The result is a device that's uber thin (even thinner than the iPhone) with a color screen and a nice qwerty keyboard. Buy one for $99 at Target, take it outside, enter your email address and password. That's it. Peek supports all the major consumer email services such as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and of course, POP and IMAP (but if you know what IMAP is, this probably isn't the device for you). Peek's using TMobile's network and there's a monthly fee of about $20 for all the email you can, well, mail.

Can it work? Yep. It sure can. We know consumers will carry up to three devices and also know that not everyone wants a super high end phone. Yes, there's a market for advanced telephony devices as Apple has clearly proved but there's other markets as well. Think of the curve of those who said they didn't need a cellphone a decade ago but know wouldn't leave the home without one. Well those same users are starting to get the idea that mobile email might be as good an idea as mobile voice, especially when it's only $99.

It's nice to see a company take a different approach, Amol told me last night how he's getting some pushback. Where's the web browser? What would it take to add to make it a phone? were some of the questions he's been getting. I think this is a case of less is more and it's nice to see someone making a Blackberry... for the rest of us.

Update - it's $20 a month not $200 :)

Blackberry Media Sync - First Take

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:11:51 -05:00

Blackberry Media Sync is now live and official. For those how aren't familiar, it will let you sync your Blackberry directly with iTunes. Playlists, songs, album art all come over perfectly. I've been using the first version that got pulled a few weeks ago and it works well. Makes it super easy for those folks who use iTunes to get their content over to the device without losing their investment in album art, playlists etc. Of course. DRM content won't work but that's a small issue for most folks.

Sync is important, super important and it's not just calendars, contacts and in-boxes. Both Microsoft and Nokia must create solutions that integrate media sync with iTunes easily, simply and as well done as this. Nice job RIM. Now, where is the Blackberry Bold?