In the Pocket
I was cleaning out my closet the other day and came across one of my old friends from a decade ago, a Palm IIIx PDA. I popped in a fresh set of batteries, turned it on, and was pleasantly surprised to see it still worked perfectly. The IIIx was the cutting edge when I picked it up in 1999.
As a basis of comparison, I put it next to my iPhone 3gs which I purchased two years ago. That puts these two devices a decade apart:
So what has a decade bought us? And did Moore’s Law carry over to the pocket space? In ten years, that would imply a 32x improvement.
| Feature | Palm IIIx | iPhone 3gs |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 16mhz | 600mhz |
| Memory | 4mb | 256mb |
| Storage | Memory | 32gb |
| Screen | 160×160 Grayscale | 320×480 16M color |
From both the CPU and memory standpoints, the iPhone surpassed Moore’s Law. Screen pixel density doesn’t come close to a 32x improvement, but a iPhone 4 with a Retina Display would be hit 16x, so not too shabby.
The only area that hasn’t kept up is the one I’m sure most smartphone users are painfully aware of: battery life. The Palm IIIx could go for weeks with a pair of AAA batteries. My iPhone needs charger love every other day. This is going to become an even bigger problem as devices get even more powerful. The typical smartphone is mostly battery already.
It’s pretty exciting to think where we’ll be in another 10 years. The PDA/Smartphone is really going to evolve into a “personal” computer. I bet we’ll see:
- 8 Core, 2ghz CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
- 1TB of Storage
- Built-in projectors that can display HD+ video in excellent quality over 1M
- Virtual keyboards projected by the device via laser onto the desk for typing
- Integration with an embedded sensor in the user for health monitoring
- Earphone patches you stick to the inside of the earlobe for audio
- Screen navigation through eye movement detection
Of course, the battery is only going to last 30 minutes, and your head will explode from the RF energy if you get it too close, but it will definitely be a sight to behold.
Spring and Apples
Apple finally dropped their Macbook Pro (MBP) refreshes this week, and it was pretty exciting from a geek standpoint. One of my biggest complaints about the prior revision was they only had dual-cores. Now, the 15″ and 17″ models have quad-core i7 CPUs. Couple that with 8GB of RAM, an SSD, and awesome AMD graphics, and you have a true coder’s laptop.
The best thing about MBPs is you can spend 3K on a laptop and still feel like you got a good deal. Apple completely dominates the high-end laptop market. Maybe, one day, Dell and HP will quit racing to the bottom of the hardware market and build a comparable quality laptop. Their biggest problem will be brand perception — they’ve produced low-quality crap for so long that most people would laugh at the thought of buying a 3K Dell or HP laptop.
Cut Short
Alright, I lied. I said in my last post I would give IE9 a fair shake for a week. I only lasted two days. The relationship started going sour the first day when I tried viewing the ExtJS API documentation and samples. None of them would render. I had to drop in to “compatibility mode” to get things to show up. Now maybe this was the fault of ExtJS, but I’ve never had to do this in a prior version of IE, so I’m blaming Microsoft.
My second annoyance is the IE9 notification system with dialogs popping up from the bottom of the screen. It is counter-intuitive and my eye does not naturally get pulled in that direction. This is a major usability failure for the IE9 team.
The final straw is that IE9 feels exactly the same as IE8, which I hate everything about. The “workflow” of web browsing is pretty much perfect in Chrome and Firefox 4, while IE9 still feels a decade old.
So the default browser setting got changed back to Chrome 9 48-hours later. I’ll keep the icon on the desktop for testing, but I’m disappointed this was the best Microsoft could do.
2011 Wish List
Happy New Year! Like every pundit geek with a soapbox, I made a bunch of predictions about last year. Looking back, my skill with the crystal ball definitely went down from the year before. Here’s what I predicted for 2010, along with how those panned out:
- Three Words: Dead Cat Bounce – I expected the economy to double-dip in to another recession and we’d be worse off in 2010 than 2009. While we didn’t hit the double-dip, employment is still in the gutter so there hasn’t been much improvement either. I’ll call this a narrow miss.
- Oracle will buy VMWare – I’m really surprised Oracle didn’t buy them, given all the other acquisitions they made last year. I’ve been betting on this for two years, so maybe its not going to happen. This is a miss, for now.
- .NET 4 will be a Killer – I called it right, but nobody actually cared. 2010 turned out to be the year of HTML5 and JavaScript. .NET 4 was just plumbing.
- Java cements its position as the new Cobol – yes, this was akin to betting the sun would come up tomorrow.
- Silverlight starts to kill off Flash – I could call it a hit, but similar to .NET 4 above, no one cares. Silverlight and Flash are trying to kill each other off in a race to irrelevance.
- Chrome starts to kill off Firefox – definitely a hit. As I mentioned in one of my posts, all the geeks I know are on Chrome. Firefox 4 might change things, but they’ll be coming in as underdogs.
- Someone buys ExtJS – another one of my two-year-running predictions, and a miss again.
So for another year, I batted about 50-50. For 2011, rather than betting as a bystander, I’m going to change things up and get more proactive. Below is my list of things I want to see happen in 2011:
In 2011, I want….
- Google to kick Oracle’s ass over Android – Oracle has become a public nuisance, and Google needs to bring them down a notch.
- Someone to finally build a good Windows notebook – yes, I’m a heretic; I like Windows 7. But is seems Apple is the only company that knows how to make a good notebook. Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc… are all too interested in scraping the bottom of the laptop market. Hopefully one of these morons wakes up and builds a machine as good as the Macbook Pro.
- ActiveState to push out ActiveRuby – I suspect this is in the works, and it would be a huge push for expanding Ruby’s footprint in the enterprise.
- Google to buy Sencha (ExtJS) – I really love ExtJS, and my only reservation with selling my technology soul to them is the fact they are still a VC-funded startup. Someone is going to have to buy them so the vulture VC bean-counters can extract their pound of flesh. if Oracle or IBM bought Sencha, I suspect most the community would drop it like it were toxic, radioactive waste. Google needs to step up and buy them so this awesome product has a future.
- World Peace, or more specifically, lets quit wasting money on Iraq and Afghanistan. We already know how these are going to end, so lets just cut to the chase. Leave tomorrow. While we’ve been pouring a trillion dollars down the drain, China has been building massive infrastructure like cross-country high speed rail. Lets take the money we would waste in Afghanistan and start building next-generation wireless infrastructure for the whole country, laying our own high-speed rail and developing real renewable energy sources.
Browser Brawl
I actually installed the beta version of Internet Explorer 9 on my Windows 7 box. My first reaction was “hey, this looks a lot like Chrome”. Even Firefox 4 steals heavily from Chrome, so it is pretty clear where the thought leadership on browsers sits.
I will give Microsoft some credit. IE9 is a lot snappier than all its predecessors. It only has two major annoyances. First, the URL box is way too small. Second, I don’t like the notification popups in the bottom center of the screen. If something needs my attention, don’t bury it at the bottom of the screen.
Rendering is pretty good. ExtJS 3.3 looks good in it, unlike Firefox 4 which had a few CSS issues. Google recently updated their V8 Benchmark Suite, so I ran Chrome 7 versus IE9 just to see how they compared.
Chrome 7 gave me these results on my silly-fast 6-core AMD beast of a desktop:
Chrome 7 Benchmark Results
And the beta for Internet Explorer 9 came up with these results:
IE9 Benchmark Results
I won’t rule out Google tweaking their benchmark to make Internet Explorer 9 and the rest of the competition look bad, but based on this benchmark, IE9 doesn’t hold a candle to Chrome 7. I’m going to have to go fishing for some more vendor-neutral benchmarks to try out.