daverea.com

The end of October has arrived, and as surely as tonight will bring scores of trick-or-treating young’ns to many, tomorrow will bring the start of NaBloPoMo to the blogosphere. For those who didn’t (wait…who wouldn’t?!) watch the DaveRea.com NaBloPoMo escapades last November, or who just don’t wanna click the link, NaBloPoMo is the National Blog Posting Month, where bloggers with the time and inclination post at least once a day for the entire month of November. Think of it as the “online” version of NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month.

As much as I’d like to participate in NaBloPoMo this year, I probably shouldn’t get your non-existent hopes up… Because life is a little different going into this November than it was in ’08. The week before Labor Day, I took a leave of absence from my kickass job at GM, said goodbye my cooshy 250 horsepower Saab and took a few final photographs of our home’s former kitchen. In the days that followed, I purchased my awesome brother Andy’s 2-door Honda, tore apart the kitchen, and started my first day back at school. Graduate school. Pursuing a Master’s in Software Engineering (as if I weren’t geeky enough…)

Since then, life has been somewhere between a blur and this:

Despite being welcomed by 4 courses, 16 credit hours, 5 projects and 2 research papers, I think transitioning from “upstanding adult with a full time job” to “grad student living on coffee and pulling all-nighters” has gone quite well. And despite wanting to curl up in a ball and hide a few times, or asking myself “why the hell did I do this?” on several occasions, I’m still convinced it was a good choice. New chapters in our lives wouldn’t be all that interesting without a spectrum of emotions to go with them, and heading back to school is about as easy as it is an exception to that rule – which would be not at all.

So given that our kitchen still isn’t all back-together (but it’s coming along nicely), and my commute takes a little longer now (though I get 35 MPG and I’m thoroughly attached to the adorable Civic), and (oh-by-the-way) I’ve got homework to do, I hope you won’t mind me taking a pass on this year’s NaBloPoMo. I’ll try to keep up with posts – and I’m sure I’ll have some experiences with the new Droid to share in a little under a week – but to assemble a daily post that’s anything approaching intelligent, in the background of exams, Thanksgiving, homework and projects would be about like to trying to clear the leaves from our yard by blowing through a bendy drinking straw.

And with a pair of maples out front that are a decade older than either my wife or me, we have a lot of leaves…

As I sat down to write this post – after a three-day stretch that has seen me write hundreds of lines of code and six pages’ worth of academic prose (you’ll learn why soon) – there’s a shade over 12 hours left on the DaveRea.com “countdown to Droid” timer. In a few short hours – several of which will be consumed by sleep for those of us in the Western hemisphere – Verizon and Motorola will make a major announcement around the upcoming Droid smartphone.

On the eve of the big announce, I can’t help getting the feeling that Big Red and the folks at Moto and Google have something up their collective corporate sleeves. While the stream of rumors, hype, leaks and advanced marketing around the Droid has been plentiful, I just can’t believe they’d let everything slip. Part of me wants to believe that, in this age of stealth marketing, blog-based viral campaigns and other such underground productspeak buzzwords, nearly everything that’s made it to the wire so far has been planned that way. That same part hopes that tomorrow’s announcement will do more than confirm what anyone with a passing interest and a web browser already knows – that they’ll unveil something revolutionary.

Could it be carrier-independent Turn-by-Turn navigation? Perhaps something related to the new Google Audio service? Maybe the revelation that all the leaks and rumors and specs out so far have been carefully deflated, and the real Droid is made of even more awesome than everyone is anticipating?

Only time will tell…

Update: Here’s what today brought…
- The Droid will indeed launch 6-Nov-09 (I will be camping outside the Verizon store!)
- It’ll feature 16GB of on-board flash, the largest storage space of any Android-based handset on the market
- It’ll have Multi-Touch!
- Also carrier-independent turn-by-turn navigation, with speech-recognition and live traffic, delivered via carrier network
There are plenty of other sites carrying the particulars, and though I wouldn’t qualify the above as the revolutionary revelation I had hoped for last night, everything here is definitely noteworthy and indicative of major advances for the Android platform…

Long before Google and the Open Handset Alliance announced the Android platform to the world, there were plenty of folks speculating that Google might be concocting their own smartphone – the mythical “gPhone” – sparked by Google’s acquisition of the fledgling Android OS and its parent company waaaaay back in 2005. The mass realization that Google actually had no plans to build their own handset led to a lot of temporary disappointment, but if Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent proclamation that “Android adoption is about to explode” is any indication, that disappointment has worn off.

But then, yesterday, we learned of something big happening in a different corner of the smartphone world: Nokia has sued Apple over 10 patents that it claims are infringed by the Apple iPhone. What’s this got to do with Google and Android? Other than that it got me thinking, pretty much nothing…

Illustration by Bob MacNeil

Nokia – which happens to be the world’s largest designer and manufacturer of mobile telephony products – is not a patent troll. But there are a lot of patent trolls out there, lurking under the moss-covered bridges of the intellectual property world. They’re companies whose only purpose is to collect patents and try to assert those patents against companies that actually create things. Perhaps Apple’s current situation – which will probably end in a settlement, if BGR’s prediction comes true – is a touch illustrative of why Google never actually designed a phone of their own…

By staying focused on the software stack and the user experience that Android provides, Google has leveraged their expertise and ability to execute to achieve the best of both worlds: They promote their services (and, in turn, monetize their efforts) through tight integration with the Android stack, and let the phone manufacturers – who already have the licenses and IP agreements in place in order to manufacture phones – take care of producing the hardware. By open-sourcing the Android operating system, and basing that system in large part on a foundation of open code, they garner even more protection from patent trolls; it’s awfully tough to find patents to assert over ideas that are in the public domain!

The lesson to take away from all this? Perhaps it’s that Android is proof-positive that a company can choose a path that’s good for their customers, good for the computing community at large, and simultaneously good for the company. This certainly isn’t the first time Google has struck that balance – and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

[image source]

I don’t watch much TV – in fact lately, nearly all of the televised content that’s reached me has been on the periphery while I did something else. So it was last night, when I saw Verizon’s “Droid Does” ad on real-live-TV for the first time during a last-minute dinner out with Kelly at one of our local sports bars…

Yes, I’d already seen the ad on YouTube, and read about the campaign on the Android blogs. Somehow, though, seeing it on live, honest-to-goodness TV is different. While there are lots of folks who could put up an ad like this one on the web, it takes a lot of effort and cash to air it during a NFL game.

I guess the experience just goes to show that TV advertising of mass-market tech products is far from obsolete in our Internet-driven age. More than simply announcing a new product to an otherwise-neutral audience, it drums up enthusiasm and anticipation among tech-heads like myself who are already eagerly awaiting a new device’s arrival.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, then you know I’ve been practically begging for Verizon Wireless to release an Android phone. I’m not down with WiMo, PalmOS is a dead-OS-walking, and I’m too spoiled by Verizon’s coverage to jump ship for one of the Android offerings from T-Mobile or Sprint… So what’s a Verizon-bound Android fan to do?

Apparently, the answer is: wait until November 6th. Because that’s when the Motorola Droid hits store shelves, and you can bet I’ll be waiting outside my local Verizon store for one. After all, they do say the best things come to those who wait…

[hat tip: Boy Genius Report]
[Update: Good pic from BGR posted]

The blogs here have been thin of late, and an upcoming post should explain why – there have been a lot of changes in my life recently, and I’m eager to share the before-and-afters with you. Just as soon as I have time to write them down!

In the mean time, I’d like to point your attention to a new product that was featured today on Springwise … the FitBit is a tiny new wearable personal activity logger that’s capable of tracking (using inertial sensors) the steps you take, calories you burn, and activity you enjoy throughout the day. The collected data can be displayed right on the device (using a sexy built-in OLED display) or uploaded to the FitBit web app for interpretation and display.

I think the FitBit product is phenomenal, as is the way FitBit-the-company has brought it to market: They’ve blogged extensively about the entire product development process, and all the cool things – and hiccups – they did and experienced along the way. Moreover, the product pushes all the right buttons for me – it’s simple to operate, unobtrusive, visually-attractive and well-designed.

There is, however, a little fly in the ointment – the fine folks at FitBit haven’t provided a Linux client, and a quick site-specific Google Search of fitbit.com reveals nary a clue as to when or if they might release one. The Linux community has done it before, and I believe it’s time to do it again: we need to let the folks at FitBit know that the Linux userbase is worth supporting! So please – if you’re a Linux user who’s even remotely interested in health and fitness, leave a pleasant comment on the FitBit blog, kindly requesting Linux support.

As a runner and cyclist – and someone who’s hopelessly dependent on the anti-depressant effects of physical exercise for my very sanity – I’m looking forward to buying and trying a FitBit. No, I don’t need it. Nor do I believe gadgetry is a necessary component of a fitness plan – the only thing truly necessary for most people to live healthily is a strong enough desire to do so. But I do believe that tools like the FitBit, or many of the myriad other physiologically- and medically-sound gadgets available to enhance well-being can be great additions to one’s arsenal.