My very late entry to mobile computing

I'm starting this post writing on my new Android phone, though I may not have the patience to finish it on this tiny virtual keyboard. (For the record, I'm using Swype to type.)

So I admit, I'm a latecomer to Smart Phone technology, having ignored the iPhone almost completely when it was in the $500 to $600 range (apart from playing with a friend's every so often). I don't much regret waiting. Although I am a geek to the core, and love my techno toys as much as the next 21st century man, I am also a cheapskate at heart and don't like to overpay for the privilege of early adoption. My problem with the phones has been not just the initial cost, but the ongoing charge on the phone bill. In this case though, after developing a healthy case of envy from seeing my dad's Android, as well as plenty of coworkers playing with their phones, I have succumbed. The price has dropped substantially, and some of the early technical problems that were apparent in the iPhone (one unreliable phone carrier, shortage of third party apps, and various other issues that you'd expect with a brand new technology) have ceased to be a concern.

The highest tech handheld device I had before a couple of weeks ago was an iPod Nano that was a few years old, and the main interface was the five button scroll wheel. Many years ago I had a somewhat Palm Pilot with a miniature keyboard and a wifi connection, but it broke too many times and I couldn't justify dumping so much money into it. When my regular phone company offered me a deal on trading in my old (cracked) phone, I realized I could replace both phone and iPod in one shot, for less than an iPod Touch costs, and also get a fully featured GPS system. So I was sold.

So. Welcome, belatedly, to the 21st century. The internet now exists more or less everywhere. This is actually pretty close to the way things were going anyway, with free wifi connections being available in every household and classroom, and more and more public buildings and restaurants. The difference is that if I get lost on the freeway now, or want to look for things in my immediate area, all I have to do is park. I have a full suite of tools and it doesn't require me to go home or carry a laptop in order to access them.

I've been using personal computers since I was eight years old, and developing software for nearly as long (BASIC, then Pascal and C in high school). At that time, everything was pretty much self-contained. Last year I reposted Tim O'Reilly's talk on the "Internet Operating System." Part of what Tim was talking about was the fact that programs now tap into a massive infrastructure of other programs that already do stuff, and that makes it easier to just hook it up into new applications without rewriting everything.

For instance, Google did not have to write a new map program just to get navigation to work on the Android. Due to the success of Google Maps and Google Earth, they've been harvesting information for years already, from satellite photos to detailed street maps to (as I am now seeing) data mined patterns indicating exactly where and when traffic is heaviest on each day of the week. So the Android Navigation program mainly represents a new interface on an existing product.

It is, of course, neat that my Android has lots of local space. Eight gigabytes of memory totally dwarfs the computers we had in the early 80's. Our first computer had no hard drive, and had to read everything off of floppy disks with a capacity of 140 KB. Our first hard drive had, I think somewhere around 10MB of space, which seemed like a huge amount of storage at the time. My Android could host that hard drive's contents 800 times, while fitting comfortably in my pocket, and doesn't make all that noise.

But as cool as that is, it's important not to underestimate the power of having your programs tap into information that's just floating around in the air. The accumulated map and satellite data from Google obviously would not come close to fitting in a phone. But I only need a small amount of local data at any given time to support the navigation system. Everything else is handled by services hosted on web servers that are "out there" somewhere, and supply just as much data as I need to find my way around at the immediate moment.

This technology, which seemed so cutting edge and exotic to me a couple of years ago is now, apparently, a commonplace app. I already downloaded it. You hold a bar code up to the phone, and it scans it, and then in a few moments you can pull up Amazon reviews and comparison shop. This actually makes physical bookstores more interesting again, as one of the main reasons I liked shopping online was the ability to jump to all the associated data that was available.

Anyway, I'm pretty enthusiastic to see the sort of horizons that have opened up now that I've got mobile computing, and I'm already experimenting with the Android SDK to see if I can, for starters, port some of the little Java games I already wrote to a new platform. Hate to sound even more geeky than usual, but it's an exciting time we live in.



(Final note: I did stop Swyping this post about halfway into the second paragraph.)