tech thoughts

my thoughts on recent tech news – too long for twitter, too short and too worthless for any real forum, platform or conversation.

Google Wave: I’m in the middle of watching the developer preview. It sounds awesome – especially as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange in small business environments. But I also agree with John Gruber, not only is the technology behind Wave complicated, so is the concept. I don’t see Google Wave becoming the next Twitter or Facebook (Exhibit A: Orkut), but I can see it becoming the next Gmail.

Zune HD: I’m sorry, but I fail to see what’s so exciting about this device. HD Radio? Really. What consumer will walk up to the table and say, “Gee, I could have the iPod Touch, with access to over 40,000 apps on the App Store, but gosh, the Zune has an HD radio tuner!” And I know that all the tech media is gah gah over it’s OLED screen, but does the average person care? At all? And finally, the one feature that has at least a bit of traction is the Zune HD’s ability to play 720p video on a TV with an external accessory. While that’s nice (and a step above the iPod Touch’s ability to only show 480p), is there really a market for this? I mean, if someone cares about watching High-def television, are they really going to carry it around on a handheld device? Most HD video content will come from traditional cable, Blu-Ray or the internet. I can’t really imagine a situtaion in which a group of friends sits down to watch a movie, and Jack pulls out his Zune HD and says, “Here’s let’s hook this up and watch ‘Dark Knight’ in HD.” In fact, unless this is a hard-disk based player, which by the slim stylings leads me to believe it’s not, you’re not going to be able to carry very many HD movies on a 16GB device. I know that people put iPods into speaker docks to listen to music, but most MP3 players are big enough to carry most or all of person’s music library. Not so much with video. Set top boxes like Roku and desktop apps like Boxee and the recently released Hulu app are the in-home video delivery systems of the future, not handheld-players (unless, of course, the handheld devices eventually develop the ability to stream HD video, in which case my argument will be completely invalidated).

The netbook craze: I love the idea of netbooks. A small, inexpensive computer, built to accommodate our increasingly web-dependent lives. Tonight, I turned to my wife, who was working on her iBook, and inquired as to what she was working on. She made me guess, and I stated that there was a really, really good chance the active application she was running was Safari. And of course, she was. It made me think: how often now does she use any application besides the web browser? She blogs directly into the Blogger client, she uploads pictures directly into Facebook, she chats via Gmail and Facebook’s inline chat clients, she shops, she grabs recipes, she emails, she plays Yahoo! Games. If Google Docs had a real Print Layout view, she’d probably leave Word in the dust. The problem with netbooks, though, is that the web is increasingly a resource hog as well. Yeah, you don’t need 4GBs of RAM and a dual-core processor to IM, but you need a decent processor and video card to watch Hulu and high-quality YouTube. Online games are getting more and more system heavy, and God knows how much of a hog Flash can be. Netbooks these days handle the web well, but I can’t see how the manufacturers can stand the thought of selling netbooks long term – because they can’t develop more advanced technology at the prices that consumers have come to expect from this category.