I Want a NetPad

We've seen the iPad. The best thing about it is that it will start a trend of cheap, affordable, useful tablet devices. Here is the tablet I am in the market for:

1. Tablet format. It is a good idea, but hasn't been done right yet. It does not create a "laptop wall" at meetings. Draws less attention, makes you less pretentious than if you put a laptop on your restaurant table or open it up on a train. You can hold a tablet while doing a talk, discussion, lecture ... but not a laptop.
2. A4 size exact, like all the paper I carry around. Reason: so that it does not draw attention if I put it with a stack of paper on the desk.
3. 15 hours declared, 10 hours real battery life. I want to make one day trips to Brussels without a power supply.
4. Would sacrifice color for longer battery life greyscale screen, usable in bright sunshine, 720p resolution minimum, 1080p optimum. Pixel density is everything if you want to read books or newspapers. I will watch movies and play games on a big screen TV or something that does not require me to hold the device up in my hands.In the cinema, I don't have to hold the screen.
5. USB host and client. Host, so that I can give and take files from people on USB stick, connect devices such as wireless keyboard, camera, MP3 player, phone ... Client for easy upload of files and syncing with desktop.
6. WiFi in 3G with standard SIM. You can bet 3G will be available at the boring meeting.
7. VGA out. If I need to show a couple of slides or drawings to the audience with a beamer. HDMI optional.
8. Mic and headphone jacks, built in mic and speakers.
9. SD card reader. To expand storage and allow me to carry additional files with me.
10. 80 GB of internal storage so that "omnia mea mecum porto". 
11. Full featured terminal for the cloud, running Firefox and Dropbox.
12. Runs full Microsoft or Open Office. If I read something, I want to be able to annotate it, make comments etc. Just like on the big machine. Why learn two environments.
13. Runs Evernote, so that even if I read a book or newspaper, I can take notes.

A netbook with a touchscreen instead of a keyboard comes pretty close. I guess they could offer something like this for $299 by Christmas.

PS. I would also be interested in a smaller device, some 125x210mm, that would fit into a jacket pocket. Willing to compromise on Office at that size, but a decent viewer with annotations desired.

The End of the Web as We Know It?

We know it as a platform where:

• website or other on-line source (any web site or media store like iTunes),
• media (e.g. MP3),
• local software or client (e.g. Media Player) and
• device (PC, Mac, Phone, Flash Drive, Netbook ...)

are not coupled with each other. Many competing companies are providing products or services for each of the components.

This open model resulted in huge innovation over the last two decades, and spawned a lot of competition in creating the websites, media formats, software and the devices, driving the price down and quality up. All this possibly at the expense of the content providers who have huge problems protecting their content, because, to be universally playable, all parts of the system need to be well documented and interoperable, with any kind of security and copy protection clumsily pasted on top of it all.

Apple Closing the Web?

Kindle, Nook and much of the Apple Store stuff signal a possible end of this model. But with music and videos is it a lot like putting the ghost back into the bottle. Any device can play an .mp3 and any website can sell it. Not to mention the P2P networks.

The last major media area where the digital has not taken over the material are newspapers and magazines. So if one could make a closely linked system between a website, a device, its software and the media format, one could offer something very special to the content owners: reliability that people will pay for content and that they will not be able to copy it. And that is worth trillions! Rumors are that Apple is doing just that:

The press will be the killer app for the device, but if the people had their wallets out, they will try to sell any other digital stuff as well.

Turning the tables

On the short run at least, this closed model is good for the content authors. Quite likely a lot of quality content will be exclusive to this device. It offers a sustainable business model, contrary to the advertising model (the Google model) which is not. Why? With the economy increasingly digital, advertising material stuff to support digital content will eventually bite its tail. More and more of the digital will have to be supported with ads for less and less material.

But the closed system can be disastrous for innovation everywhere else in the chain, and disastrous for the richness of the content that we read. We have seen Apple censoring the content of its on-line store. Asking a single company for an opportunity to distribute information is open society's the worst nightmare. It will not be one US company indexing all (European) content, it will be a company deciding what (European) content can be available on-line.

(There is little incentive for those devices to offer access to free content. It would be like selling printers who could use free ink. But surprise me.)

Need for functional separation

Therefore, the regulators will have to look at this very carefully. In the chain of digital content production, distribution and consumption we will need what was called "functional separation of telecoms". The latter is irrelevant today. But breaking links between Amazon and its reader, Barnes Nobe and its reader, iWhatever and Apple Store and iTunes ... will be essential.

The end? Perhaps not, but it got you reading this. Major disruption? Sure.

Wishlist for a Perfect Twitter Client

From time to time I get unhappy with my twitter experience and join the install party, trying out new clients. So far I did not find a perfect one. This is what I want:

• handle multiple accounts
  
• allow me to define groups of people I follow
  
• allow the "join" and "filter" operations over streams of tweets (sounds complicated but it is in fact an enable of so many features. Think of filter like Gmail's labels and think of join like Google Reader's folder).
  
• example of a "join" would be to show a single stream of all friends' tweets across all my accounts
  
• examples of a "filter" operation would be to split a stream into groups, mentions, directs ...
  
• notifications should be based on configurable filters too
  
• show one stream (per account or not) of all directs, sents and mentions (it is a join).
  
• sort messages with new on top OR old on top (I like reading from old to new, top to bottom)
  
• display whole discussion thread at a click of a button (all replies)
• display my interaction with one person (all replies and directs exchanged with another person - it is a filter)
  
• allow to PASTE images into posts (like Digsby)
  
• manage a user (add to group, follow, un-follow, ignore X for the next Y hours)
  
• automatically split long posts into two
  
• let me choose when I want to be notified (e.g. on a direct message, on a word mentioned, on a user's post) (like ???)
  
• synchronize across machines, phones all read/unread, settings, groups, filters, joins ... (like Google Reader or Gmail)
• have a no clutter interface that takes one single narrow column at the edge of the screen (like Nambu).
  
• keep a local searchable backup of everything (like ??)
  
• ...

Now how hard is that?