A mad Dash

Just a few days after the announcement of Chumby comes another small device, this one focused on driving. Dash’s Web site humbly notes that its product will do for driving what TV did for entertainment and cell phones did for communication. Not only did these seminal devices result in different kinds of changes, but the CrunchGear report would indicate that at least one of Dash’s main features is real-time traffic using a mesh network that goes beyond what TomTom has done with its Friend Finder feature.

Accurate traffic reporting can turn portable navigation devices from products used only opportunistically to ones used almost every day, but I still wouldn’t put it on the magnitude scale of the cell phone or certainly the television. If it can get the viral network effect rolling (and it will be hard to lowball what sounds like a feature-rich device), Dash’s approach should have advantages over several approaches used to deliver traffic today. However, I’m still waiting to see far more natural ways of giving directions based on contextual cues, directions the way a human would give them. — “Turn left at the Mobil station on the right three blocks away.”

Children’s Machine arrives on the scene

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) recently announced that its device designed for use by children in developing countries is now claled the Children’s Machine 1 or CM1 (an homage to project adviser Seymour Papert) and will begin field trials in September. According to Ars Technica, the device now has 512 MB of integrated flash memory — more than 11 times the storage I needed to store all of my Mac applications and documents throughout college – and can be further expanded through USB slots and an SD card slot. The open-source word processor Abi Word has been modified to use the product’s “Sugar” user interface based on Fedora Core Linux.

Other impressive specs include a camera for taking stills and videoconferencing, a microphone and speaker — perhaps for VoIP — and an 8″ screen with an incredibly high resolution of 1200 x 900 pixels.

I wrote last year that such a device would likely to be of interest to American school districts although doing so might raise the ire of OLPC partner AMD. With a different industrial design, it would also be a godsend on cramped airline trays for business travellers (and more practical than the far more expensive UMPC. It will be interesting to see whether the folks at AlphaSmartc an integrate some of the best technology from the CM1. Its $249 Neo costs almost 80 percent more than the CM1 wth a fraction of the capabilities.

Which handtop is tops?

In 2003, I spent a few days with a Tiqit Windows handheld or “handtop.” That product and the similarly themed Flipstart PC, have yet to ship to consumers, but the third proposed handtop around at that time from Oqo finally did. Following the introduction of the Sony Vaio UX50, MeanSquare’s Miscellany posted an excellent comparison of the two Windows handtops last month and fiound that the Sony product came out on top in terms of performance, battery life and display. However, the Oqo remains a much smaller product.

With Oqo turning more toward the enterprise, I would expect that its next product may sacrifice some portability and style for greater functionality and especially battery life.

GigaBeat vs. Zune’s zombies

No, it’s not a cross between 1960s Japanese and 1940s American monster movies. iLounge got some hands-on time with Zune and its initial report doesn’t turn up anything dramatically threatening to the iPod. As with Vista, Microsoft is paying more attention to eye candy and animations with smooth transitions (I must admit I’m a fan of the “dissolve”) and overlays of letters while scrolling are a nice navigation aid. Beyond that, it looks like Apple’s competitive advantage is still intact. The Zune has no scroll wheel and it’s thicker. As I’ve advocated, it also looks like Microsoft has put the kibosh on iTunes reimbursement as well. Toshiba’s GigaBeat S has the aided navigation and it’s just as small as the iPod with a larger screen like the Zune.

Of Zune’s much-touted Wi-Fi features, iLounge notes that you can “lend” a song to a friend for a day (what’s with the content industry’s infatuation with a 24-hour cycle?) While iLounge does a fine job of pointing out limited utility of this feature until both the Zune and its store achieve critical mass, it does represent one of the first advantages that protected music might have over unprotected music.

For example, you can stream MP3s across a home network, share them on as many PCs as you like, and download them to practically any portable music player, but Zune would only enable peer-to-peer sharing — even in its limited form — only for protected music. Microsoft may be banking on users wanting to reanimate a bunch of deactivated music files on their Zune as a distant way of driving viral music purchase. Microsoft will probably also work to enable this kind of sharing on Zune’s community-focused music service as well, where it can spread more quickly.

When is a platform not a platform?

The Wireless Report asks whether advanced music phones will ever be able to compete with the iPod and comes up skeptical owing to the product’s extensive ecosystem. I’m more bullish on such products. Yes, we’re in the early days but we’ve already seen great strides forward and even Apple concedes that music phones are bound to improve, hence the empty admission that they’re “not doing nothing” in the space.

Something I haven’t seen much coverage about regarding the iPod is that, despite its increasing functionality, media support and vast range of accessories that have developed over the years, Apple has not opened it up to developers the way Palm did with the original Pilot. Want to develop a new game for the iPod? You can’t. One could argue that a platform or API didn’t really save the PDA in the end, but it continues to be important in the realm of smartphones, which could be the iPod’s future and is certainly one direction for portable digital music in general.

My-lo point is no Bluetooth

Sony recently introduced Mylo (My Life Online), a device with a resurrected name that resembles its PSP (but is actually much smaller) and boasts an integrated slide-up keyboard. Early coverage labelled it an instant messaging appliance, perhaps a higher-end version of the Wi-Fi-enabled K-Byte Zip-It, but it really is more of a mobile Internet appliance akin to the larger but comparably priced Nokia 770, which Nokia unfortunately sometimes treats like an open-source science project.

Two main differences are that the 770 has a high-resolution screen better suited to Web browsing and Bluetooth. The absence of Bluetooth in Mylo is a quandary; I’d prioritize it more highly than Wi-Fi. If Sony is concerned about the difficulty of pairing or the availability of DUN-capable phones among young hipsters, it should recognize that they can already get a capable Bluetooth-enabled handset (and headset) for less than the Mylo.

In any case, like the 770, the Mylo has the de rigeur music and photo capabilities as well as an integrated Web browser. Mylo reportedly uses Trolltech’s QTopia operating environment; let’s hope its browser is better than the PSPs and that its keyboard is better than the Vaio UX’s. Unlike the 770, it includes a Skype client and hotspot directory, the latter of which it wouldn’t need (as much) if it had Bluetooth.

Portable Xbox could be media-free

With the Zune announcement today came much speculation that the company that used to be known for powering other company’s devices is working on a portable game system. This would likely be somethng at least as robust as the PSP, the weakest link of which is the UMD distribution system. With Bill Gates having decried physical distribution, now would be an ideal opportunity to distribute games the way Zune would distribute other forms of media. Such a radical move would cause retailer revolt, but it could also pave the way for a much sleeker portable gaming system that offered a great user experience in terms of the flexibility to carry along a wide variety of games in flash or a an entire catalog on a hard disk.

Zune exploits the iPod’s weaknesses

Microsoft officially announced Zune today and, despite some assurance that Playsforsure will continue – the message to its hardware partners couldn’t be more negative: do as I do, not as I say. I can only imagine what implications this may have on other Microsoft platforms. What if Microsoft isn’t satisfied with its smart phone market share? Will it provide its own? And Napster and the like won’t be the only ones feeling the heat of competition. What about MSN Music? Does it support the home team or the new castoffs?

In any case, in addition to the dubious headline-grabbing strategy of buying out the music purchases of iTMS customers, Microsoft is going after two areas where Apple has not pushed forward -Wi-Fi and recommendations. Yes, the iTunes Music Store has a variety of ways to discover music, such as iMixes and it’s “Just for you” recommendation engine, but the sum of it isn’t as effective as the recommendation engine on even, say, Yahoo! Music. I’m a bit skeptical of community recommendations like the kind Microsoft is promising, but they’re more effective if they’re explicit rather than implicit.

As a way of transferring music, Wi-Fi has some convenience advantages, but the intereting application comes from music sharing. The nut here is that the users will have to have music subscriptions — still a tough sell — for this to be effective.

Microsoft musical musings

Make no mistake. Microsoft can do hardware right, and its list of PC hardware innovations and successes is long if imperfect. (CNet has a surface-skimming retrospective that includes the fictional iLoo, a subject of some elaborate toilet humor. It should be noted, though, that MSN TV actually uses RCA-branded hardware.)

There’s also no disputing that there’s room for innovation in the portable media player market, but it sure doesn’t sound as if the company has anything up its sleeve dramatically more compelling than what its partners have developed, or the iPod for that matter. Count me among those who think this will do more to hurt Microsoft’s hardware partners than Apple. And Microsoft would have to cap the alleged reimbursement on songs purchased through iTunes. For heavy iTunes users, such compensation could certainly exceed the price of the player. My colleague is more sanguine.

The best thing Microsoft could do with its player would be to introduce a slew of accessories that no other Playsforsure device has been able to muster because none have reached critical mass — speaker docks, car chargers and integration kits and the like. Microsoft’s hardware partners have been talking about the need for a dock connector to compete with Apple’s for a long time and are apparently working with CEA to make it happen, but such a standard has still not surfaced. Microsoft could jump start that with its own player.

There’s anothing thing it could do that might make a difference – advertise it on television a lot.

Car talk

After much on-again, off-again debate, CNNMoney cites a Detroit News story that DaimlerChrysler will bring its compact Smart cars over to the U.S. in 2007. We’ll be getting the “real” Smart car popular in Europe and Canada, the ForTwo, as the larger ForFour has been a financial disaster for the automaker.

I have mixed feelings about the Smart. Oh sure, it’s possibly even cuter than the Beetle or Mini and gets 60 mpg, but I’m not a fan of the two-tone swipe and — like ultracompact notebook PCs – it’s not inexpensive; Smart’s European configuration sites even offer leather interiors. Sure, it has great youth appeal for the hip urbanite, but most entry-level car buyers would likely gravitate to an offering like the Toyota Yaris, Chevy Aveo, or maybe even the better proportioned Scion xA.

In terms of iPod integration, two approaches recently surfaced that bring us back to the days of the CD or cassette player, allowing car owners to insert their iPods directly into their car stereos. Macsimumnews reports on DashJack, which is apparently developing an aftermarket head unit that can accommodate any dockable iPod. The company has filed a patent for its approach. Mitsubishi has also shown an in-dash slot (pictured) that would be able to accommodate an iPod nano in its funky Japan-only iCar (which actually resembles an elongated Smart).

Other manufacturers are offering alternatives. One of the most simple yet clever responses to portable MP3 players (and cell phones) I saw at the New York Auto Show a few months ago was inside the machismo-exuding Dodge Caliber. A panel on the adjustable center console flips forward to secure such a portable device in a rubber-lined compartment.