When I heard that Apple was planning to make one I thought that they would make a beautiful, elegant device that would be limited in what it could do or more importantly, would be limited in terms of what Apple would let customers do with it.  I expressed that opinion long before the original iPhone was released.  When it finally arrived, I was actually surprised at how much they allowed it to do.  It’s features were quite liberal…for Apple.  When compared to phones available outside the U.S. however, the multi-touch features and large button interface were really the only things that were new—and even then, only new with phones.  Nevertheless, it sounded interesting until I heard the restrictions Apple placed on it.  They made you pledge everything but your first-born child for the privilege of being allowed to buy one.

Obviously, the iPhone was a closed door to anyone who thinks like I do.  I’m convinced that when I buy a device, I should treat it like it’s mine.  Call me crazy.  So I stuck with my Nokia 3870, then my Nokia N-95, followed by my Sony-Ericsson Xperia.  Now that I have outgrown both Symbian and Windows Mobile, I wanted to go with a top of the line smart phone.  Since I am unable to even consider an iPhone for obvious reasons, an Android phone was the obvious choice.  This was a no-brainer especially because I make heavy use of Google and its most popular products every single day.

I watched the Google phones enter the market starting with the G-1, slightly more than a year ago.  The Nexus One was the first one that made me drool.  I really had a soft spot for that one.  It was the one I planned to buy but others have also looked good from a feature standpoint, like the Droid, the EVO, and the Droid X.  Eventually I decided to go to a local store to hold the devices in my hand to see how my ideas, which are based on articles I’ve read, matched the reality of the actual devices.  When I got around to the HTC Desire, which is essentially the Nexus One without a front-facing camera, it seemed to call my name.  I could not bear to put the phone down, so I bought it.

I got the phone home.  I followed the simple instruction sheet, which involved essentially opening the rear cover, inserting my Sim card, swapping-in my 16GB micro-SD card for the 4GB card that came with the phone, inserting the battery, closing the cover, plugging in the power cord to charge the battery, and turning it on.  This all took about 3 minutes since I had to be careful the first time so as not to damage the fragile cover.  The phone takes longer to boot than Symbian or WinMo.  Then again, it is a full-fledged Linux operating system.

On the first start, a wizard starts that gives you a couple of tips to help you navigate, followed by a prompt for your Google account credentials.  If you do not have an account you can create one during this step.  I put in my credentials and then it asked if I would like to sign into Twitter as well.  I typed in my Twitter credentials and off I went.  After I got to the home screen, I was quite impressed.  The resolution was great and the graphics were beautiful and very fast.  What was even more impressive was how quickly Android pulled in all my contacts and other info.

I had previously synchronized my outlook contacts list with my phone contacts from an older Nokia.  Then probably a couple of years ago, I imported those contacts to my Gmail account.  Previously, I had to manually import those contacts on every phone that I had prior to this one.  Not this time.  Just by signing into my Google account all of my contacts, calendar events, and tasks (integrated into my calendar) were there.  When the phone rang, I saw the caller id immediately without having to import anything.  That was awesome.  One of my 7 home desktops had my Twitter feed running already.  The interface of the Twitter client is nice and has the functionality you need.

[Side note: For anyone unfamiliar, a home desktop---and I'm not certain that's the proper term---is the main interface where icons, widgets, and shortcuts can be placed. It is what you see when people are scrolling left and right past rows of icons. There are essentially 7 desktop screens placed side by side and you navigate them by scrolling right or left. Except for the first, default screen they are empty until you place your frequently used items there. Each desktop can have 4x4 rows of icons or 16 per screen. Widgets, like a live weather app or the Google search box usually take several spaces, which of course decreases the number of icons that can be displayed on that particular screen.]

I continue to be surprised about the Google account integration.  Some of it may actually be unsettling if you are not aware of how well Google knows you.  When I used the Google Maps app the first time, it remembered the last destinations I had searched for on my last phone and my laptop.  Since I was going somewhere near one of these points, I just selected the nearest one with the intention of modifying the address if needed when I got near the destination.  Also, when using the “mini-Chrome” included with the system, it knows my browsing history already.  Even without importing bookmarks, after I type the first few characters of a URL, it correctly fills in the rest most of the time.  Auto-fill has been around a while but what is different about this is that while you are typing, a drop down list with matching URLs opens under the address bar.  Listed for me were not just matching URLs—but only URLs that I had visited before.  An interesting trick on a device I’ve only had for 20 minutes.  Later on, I configured my Google Apps domain and 2 other non-Google, IMAP email accounts.  I can customize each account individually so that each downloads as often or as seldom as required.

I love this phone.  I’ve even slept with the phone (ok, ok, for listening to media, you know what I mean).  But how enlightening are the pros without any of the cons?  I immediately ran into some brick walls that made me pull my hair out.  The most frustrating were the things I’ve seen demonstrated on other phones, so I know Android has the capability but which have been removed by the provider—in this case HTC.  I will give a quick run through of the problems and missing things I had to tackle and tell you how I overcame them.  That way, if you get an Android-based phone you can consider using the same solutions.  No sense in re-inventing the wheel.

The first thing I did on my trek to configuring my new Android phone was to learn how to use the Android Market.  While this was not at all difficult, it was also not quite as intuitive as I had hoped.  This would be a nice addition to the default icons on the desktop but on this particular phone, HTC lets you dig through the menu to find it.  Since it’s how you will install most of the other apps you will need, I recommend adding the icon to the home screen immediately.  Getting to know it is a top priority.  Finding it is the easy part.  Knowing what apps to install with it is where the research will come in.  After you’ve located it, hold your finger down on an empty area of the home screen for 2 seconds (a long press).  Choose Program from the resulting dialog and select Market.  Done.

The second thing that will be helpful is a bar code scanner app. Most Android friendly websites will put bar code links called QR codes on their sites for things you should visit from your phone.  You will definitely want an app that can read these QR codes as well as the normal product bar codes.  I read many articles about Android’s adroitness (try saying that 3 times) with bar codes. It is spoken of so matter-of-factly that I was surprised to find the phone missing this capability out of the box.  In order to use it, one must first download a bar code app. The most popular apps for that are Barcode Scanner and ShopSavvy.  Both work well.  One difference is that Bar code Scanner goes directly to scan mode and ShopSavvy goes to a menu first (press Search for a Product, the top button).  I like ShopSavvy because it seems to know what to do with each code and just does it whereas BC waits for you to choose an action.  Try them both.  Search the Android Market for one of these by tapping the search button in the upper right hand corner of the Market app, then install the app and  use it to scan the other for practice.

Barcode Scanner

ShopSavvy

After learning that bar code reading had to be added manually, the other deficiencies began to add up.  Here is a list of gripes:

1. Cannot reverse tether.  In other words, I can tether my laptop to the phone’s Internet but not the phone to the laptop’s for example, to avoid roaming charges while staying in a hotel that provides a connection.  Microsoft’s Active-sync provides this functionality but not Android.  Bummer.
2. No Ad Hoc networking at all, neither secure nor otherwise.  There are supposedly some hacks but I haven’t gotten any of them to work yet.
3. No built-in management of to do lists.  I’d like to see and manage tasks on my desktop.  My task list was imported into my Calendar but aside from that, there is nothing included to manage my tasks.
4. Power options allow you to specify a sleep mode and can lock the phone.  I see no way to separate the two.  Once locking is enabled, sleep mode always requires the phone to be unlocked.  Very often I press the power button to shut off the screen, then remember something I needed to do.  I have to unlock the screen again even though I have not reached the timeout I set for locking.  This is an annoyance.
5. No integrated Google Docs support.  At all!  This flabbergasted me. This was one of the main things I hoped to use a “Google phone” for.  I have all these documents imported on my micro-SD card but can do nothing with them.
6. Can’t read .rtf (rich text) files.  Before I said goodbye to MS Word 5 or 6 years ago,  I started using .rtf format instead of .doc because in addition to being virus-proof, every word processor in the universe can read this format…except Google’s.  There isn’t a single app on this phone that can read .rtf files and I can’t find one in the Android Market.  That sucks big time because I have tons of these which will need to be converted.
7. Cannot create documents on the phone.  At all!  The included QuickOffice is worthless.  It renders MS Office documents horribly and can’t create so much as a simple text file.
8. No built-in file manager.
9. No way to attach files to emails except for photos.
10. No way to pause audio after shutting off  the screen.  Would be nice if you could pause or skip songs without having to unlock the phone.  If you shut off the screen to save power, you’ve lost control.  See number 4 for explanation.
11. The much touted voice input and speech recognition functionality is notably absent.  Why on Earth would HTC remove this???
12. No Amazon apps installed and won’t appear in Market (because I’m outside the U.S.).  This is annoying since I do have a U.S.-based account I’d like to use.  If you research this problem you find this to be a hot issue abroad.  In some markets like parts of India, the Android Market has been blocked entirely.  This must infuriate lots of people who don’t understand why their phones are crippled.
13. I noticed that a visible streak revealing the unlock pattern can be obvious when viewed at an angle in the sunlight, unless you wipe down your screen every time you use it.  An obvious security issue.
14. The built-in location awareness can be used by websites to provide you more detailed service.  It can also be used to deny you service, particularly if you are outside the United States.  Even if you use a proxy, the phone “narcs” on you by giving the website your location directly.  This makes it harder to specify language preferences.  Even my Google pages keep switching me to Dutch though I specify English over and over.  If I cross into Germany, the language of my pages changes.  How does that make sense?  I still have the same brain no matter which border I cross and I’m still signed in.  I know what you are thinking—but this problem is far worse than IP-based location awareness because the problem took on new life after switching to this phone.

Wow.  Looking at the list above, you can see that my gripes are more extensive than I thought.  I overcame most of the problems.  I will go through the status/solution one at a time in the order of the previous list.  For any of the apps that are not in the Market, you will have to enable “Unknown Sources” by selecting Menu->Settings->Applications->Unknown Sources, otherwise you will get an error.

1. There is currently no solution for the reverse tethering deficiency.  According to what I have read, it will be addressed in the next version of Android.  This is inconvenient but acceptable considering how young the platform is in its development.
2. There is a website that claims to have a fix for the Ad Hoc networking.  It readily pops up when you search this topic but I find no way view the topic.  It acts like a honey trap.  Makes you sign up to view the page but never delivers the info.  Wait for the next version, which should also address this or search it out yourself if you can’t wait.
3. To address my to do list issue. I installed gtasx.  It has all the functionality I need but is a bit bloated for managing tasks.  It seems to want to manage all your Google tools including Buzz and others.  For a more streamlined app, try GTasks by Dato.  It has become necessary to be very specific on which app you mean because variants of the name GTask is being thrown around by several developers.  Try as many as you like but these 2 will give you an idea what to expect.  I recommend GTasks.  It’s simpler and has widgets that you can pin to your desktop.


GTasx



GTasks

4. Haven’t found a solution for the sleep mode hassles yet.  Maybe a developer will fill that niche at some point.
5. The lack of Google Docs support is unacceptable.  There is a tool that makes using Google Docs bearable for the time being.  It’s called GDocs.  It has 2 massive Achilles heels.  First, it’s allows little more than basic text editing.  You can edit and sync with your cloud docs, but you will lose ALL of your formatting!


GDocs

This is acceptable for editing lists and notes.  Actual word processing is out of the question.  The second irritant is that it gives you no way to upload a document that isn’t already in the cloud.  Want to create a new document and upload it to your Google Docs?  Or maybe to upload some of those imported docs from your transferred SD card?  FORGET IT!  (Update:  A recent update has remedied this situation. Through a menu option you can now create and upload documents. However, you will still lose your formatting.)  Anything more than simple text operations and you will need a laptop (or heaven forbid, go back to WinMo because it can do word processing).

6. Obviously Google has something against the .rtf format.  I don’t know what.  But they won’t support it on Docs or Android.  There is a tool that claims to support it that I won’t mention.  It requires you to upload the file to a remote server where it is rendered and sent back to your browser.  The very thought of doing that makes my skin crawl.  If you are interested you can search for rtf and you will probably find it but I prefer to wait for a real program rather than a gimmick that wants me to send my documents to their server.  Who do they think they are?  Google?
7. In addition to #6, you can’t create any documents at all on this thing without 3rd party apps.  I sincerely hope Google will address this.  You should never ship a product that can’t do “hello world” at least to itself.  Unless you count email, you can’t write any documents.
8. The file manager is not only important for familiarizing oneself with the file system but is also solves #9 as well.  After installing the file manager Astro, it became a browse target that I can choose after I select Attachment in Gmail.  I can now select and attach any file after browsing with Astro.  There are limitations to Astro.  It will not show you hidden files or folders and cannot modify permissions like Root Explorer can on a rooted phone.


Astro File Manager

9. Install Astro File Manager:
10. The only workaround that I know of is to not lock your screen.  Hopefully I will find another way to resolve this.
11. Voice input and speech recognition are some of the coolest features of Android.  Someone at HTC was on some serious drugs when they removed it from the Desire.  The good news is, you can reinstall it.  If you have 2.1, you will need the voice search package and the microphone keyboard if want a mic button on your keyboard.  It will work with your original keyboard however.  Here I will list the QR codes for the Desire/Legend.  Scan and install the Voice Search code on the left for the basic apparatus.  Get the mic-enabled keyboard with the code on the right or follow this guide for other configs or more detailed info about switching keyboards after install.  After this step, your phone is now officially cool! [WARNING: If you later update to Froyo, remember you have to uninstall the keyboard mod HTC_IME mod or you will get errors.]



Add Voice Search



‘Voice Search’ enabled keyboard

12. Some Amazon links seem to only appear in US versions of Android.  The Market is observing location to choose results for app searches.  Thatworks in most cases.  But what about servicemen and DoD civilians overseas who are entitled to use U.S. accounts?  You can get results tailored to a region by installing the miraculous Market Enabler.  It lets you emulate a carrier in the desired region.  This will let you list the apps but they may still refuse to work (like Amazon MP3 did) because of an incorrect system region setting.  You can change this setting with LocaleSwitch(QR code below).  Using these 2 apps I was able to download and configure Amazon MP3.  Of course Amazon’s policy states that you must use an account that bills to a U.S. address to download mp3′s so if you don’t have one, don’t be surprised if this doesn’t work.


Market Enabler

13. What’s the fix for streaks that reveal your lock code?  Kleenex.  Not actually a defect but it’s worth pointing out lest one feel too confident.
14. After installing the apps mentioned in #12 and disabling the location settings, this problem went away.  If you are U.S. bound, you should not encounter the language issues in any case.  Just be aware that your IP address is not the only method a website has of establishing your location.  They can get a pretty accurate position by interrogating the browser.  You do not even need the gps enabled.

LocaleSwitch

Amazon MP3

Now what?

Now that the problems that can be solved have been solved, it’s time for some more advanced things, which will only become available once you root your phone.  Why would you want to do that?  If you are not the kind of person who knows what all the Windows Control Panel items do and don’t know a few of the shortcuts to get to them without having to navigate the menu, then you probably won’t want to go any farther.  A rooted phone is for geeks.  Not normal geeks though.  Rooting your phone is for the kind of geek who is prepared to buy a new phone tomorrow if anything goes wrong.  I used a simple, 1-click tool to root my phone.  You  can do the same.  But before starting, I resolved in my mind that I was prepared to buy a new phone and that the possibility of having to do so was worth the risk.  I cannot over emphasize this.  The authors of this tool have said very clearly that they do not want any frantic emails or pleas for help because such pleas will fall on deaf ears.  If that does not deter you, then proceed.  No shortcut.  Read it first.  I found it to be pretty straight forward.

Busybox

Audible Player

After you are rooted, check this page out.  It lists some tools that will make any geek happy.  You definitely need Root Explorer if you want full access to your file system.  It’s well worth the cash.  Busybox is great for anyone who is familiar with the Unix command line (The market app says Busybox does not work with the Desire yet but the version that comes with Titanium Backup does.  Sit tight for an update.).  If you shell into the phone you won’t have most basic commands like ‘ls’ unless you install Busybox.  I also included a link for the Audible Player for those who like audio-books.  This player was actually the last thing I had been waiting for before diving into Android.  They’ve done a great job with it.

If you have any questions about my adventures with the things on this page, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments or on Twitter.  Enjoy.

The poster child example of such a company is Rambus. In the early 1990′s, Rambus convinced a number of computer chip manufacturers to participate in developing a new memory chip technology with higher clock speeds. Part of its process was using enhanced square-wave timing and modulation mechanisms to allow data manipulation without relying on only one specific portion of the wave.  This allowed retrieval and storage instructions at a higher frequency than the actual clock.  The idea greatly decreased the impact of certain bottlenecks in memory performance and impressed hardware designers so much that they all signed up.  The participating companies assumed that since the development was a collaborative effort, that they would all be able to freely deploy the hardware derived from the project.  Rambus remained silent about its patents (which other companies claimed they surreptitiously obtained) until after the chips were in widespread use and the corporations involved had invested tens of millions of dollars in retooling, marketing, and manufacturing costs.  Then they sprang their licensing demands (some say trap) on an unsuspecting computer chip industry in wave after wave of litigation.  In addition to the royalties, millions of dollars in legal fees were passed along to consumers in higher chip costs.

Given the amount of litigation we see in a typical year from companies trying to stifle competition in order to artificially boost their profits, I’m surprised the U.S. Patent Office hasn’t issued a patent for making ice from water.  I expect any day now some company (like Apple for example) will be filing an injunction against Switzerland to force them to stop letting so much water freeze up there in the Alps.  Frozen water in the Alps would no doubt infringe on someone’s patent by now wouldn’t it?

Take this BBC article about Apple suing HTC for instance.  Now what do you suppose Apple might be suing HTC for?  Perhaps the use of touch screen and multi-touch technology?  The big deal of late has been Google’s implementation of multi-touch technology in the Android-based Nexus One  mobile phone, which was built by HTC.  Apple claims that some patents that have been infringed-on are older patents it owns dealing with operating systems.  Google did not implement any radically new features that have not been used by EVERYONE making operating systems of every kind already, so how could it be possible that Apple’s decision to litigate NOW is not related to the Nexus One?  It is very disingenuous for Apple to enter into a well established industry where mobile phone titans such as Nokia, Blackberry, and Motorola just to name a few, have spent billions of dollars building a market for smartphones only to have Apple arrive on the tail-end claiming that THEY are the only ones who should be able to profit from the sale of phones with certain features, which they suddenly claim to own.

Now on the surface, Apple’s actions may seem to many to be anti-competitive and harmful to consumers (nothing new there) but whose fault is that? It is difficult to blame a company that owes as much greed as they can muster to its shareholders when they are required by law to increase share value where ever possible.  A great deal of blame lies with the U.S. Patent Office for issuing vague, broad-stroked, and far-reaching patents on generic concepts. This hits the tech industry like a sawed-off shotgun blast. The legal buckshot leaves pock marks everywhere with few companies escaping unscathed.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed, “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.” This begs the question, what does he mean by “create?”  What does he mean by “original technology?” What is an invention?  Webster’s Dictionary defines an invention as, “the creation of something not previously in existence : purposeful experimentation leading to the development of a new device or process.”  The only way that operating system patents could be applicable here would be considering the word “process” in a literal sense.  “Device” would not be applicable sense the iPhone was neither the first smartphone nor was it the first such device with a touchscreen.  Also, before Apple’s much-lauded “pinch” and “squeeze” pan and zoom features, I seem to remember CNN anchors fumbling on the screen with their clumsy 2-fingered map gadgets.  Essentially, there is prior art all over the place so considering a “pinch” to be a “process” according to Webster’s definition would be fantastically generous.

What are patents designed to protect?  According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office there are three types of patents:

• Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;
• Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and
• Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

At casual glance, we can rule out the third rule for Apple’s iPhone. The second rule could apply to the iPhone as an article of manufacture.  “Ornamental design” would be an example of the broad strokes I mentioned earlier.  No two phones look exactly alike and the iPhone did not introduce an entirely new paradigm in terms of its ornamental look even if its form was thinner or sleeker.  That is really just a natural progression of the direction phones are heading. The first rule is more interesting if you are a lawyer making the case for Apple because the term “new and useful improvement” is as vague and non-specific as you can get.  The addition of iTunes to a phone could be considered an improvement in the same way that adding cream and sugar are improvements of coffee.  [Oh gosh. I hope I didn't just give Starbucks some nutty ideas.]

Nokia is not taking all of this lying down. It has filed suits against Apple as well.  The main thing for consumers to know is that companies are not just protecting their rights.  They often abuse patent laws to prevent consumers from having a choice who they buy their products from.  Sadly, in the case of Apple it has a vibrant “fan-boy” community.  These are the individuals who love Apple so much that they are unable to find fault with anything that Apple does, no matter how decisively negative the impact to consumer rights may be.  So while there are few people coming out to support Nokia (mainly because folks just looove their iPhone), you can expect tech pundits—who tend to favor Apple—to write articles in typical Apple-apologist fashion telling us why Apple is an underdog; just a little train-that-could; a tiny fish swimming in a hostile sea of big, bad sharks. They do this even as Apple bricks its user’s phones for unapproved updates, erases unapproved applications without permission, and maintains obscure, undocumented, and secretive criteria for approval to its iPhone app store.  Developers wake up to find that their applications have been booted from the Apple app store for arbitrary reasons, or they spend months developing applications for the iPhone only to find out after the work is done, that Apple won’t approve the app for sale and won’t even explain to the developer why they are being refused. The developers are denied the chance to make the necessary changes to their software to avoid being forced to watch their hard work die on the vine.  Yea, poor little Apple.

As you can see in the preceding paragraphs, the wording of the patent types description is catastrophically vague.  The problem is that old, antiquated  ideas about product design have not kept up with technology.  It is interesting that Congress has passed the wretched DMCA, modernizing copyright law to protect companies in the digital age but no one has updated patent law to make it appropriate for digital products.  Therefore a company can add functionality of questionable merit to existing devices and then call it a new “creation” as Jobs did.

Let’s put it in context. Long ago, someone figured out how to send a voice signal through wires. Another guy figured out how to build a radio.  Yet another smart guy figured out how to send a voice signal through a radio after which an even smarter guy figured out how to distribute that signal over the entire Earth within seconds. Concurrently, a different guy figured out how to take a computer the size of an office building and reduce it to the size of a slice of bread, and then another guy increased the speed of computer chips by orders of magnitude, many times over.  Subsequently, an entire  industry grew itself by finding clever ways to make those things even smaller, faster, and more efficient, then they improved battery life tremendously, and put the Internet, email, and even TV at your fingertips in a device they dubbed the smartphone.  Finally, after a hundred years, untold BILLIONS of dollars, and all of that work, Steve Jobs figured out how to pinch it and stretch it.  And for that, he wants recognition essentially for INVENTING THE TELEPHONE! To top that off, he wants everyone building the current generation of smartphones to PAY HIM!…For THAT!

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

Then again, I think it is fair provided that you take the entire paradigm of the telephone into account and pay Apple its fair share for its contribution to the OVERALL capability of human beings to communicate via mobile devices.  Apple should get only those revenues for ALL retroactive iPhone sales based on its total contribution to the entire suite of technologies that are integrated into an iPhone.  Apple gets what it does now because it builds the interface that people using its devices SEE. They don’t see the Cell tower.  They don’t see the microwaves. They don’t see the computer chip fabs (fabrication factory), microcircuit motherboard fabs, the clean rooms, the fiber optic labs laying fiber spanning the Atlantic, satellite transmitter/receivers, LCD engineers, and on and on.  Everything that Apple has ever made has been built on backs of other people’s work.  That is not to belittle their contributions in terms of the sheer genius of  their interface designs.  They are clearly the best at that. But looking at the big picture, I bet the typical Apple engineer couldn’t describe for you how the buttons are made, much less all of the back-end infrastructure needed to make all of this stuff work together—nevertheless they still want royalties for an entire generation of phones.  It’s outrageous.

If you gave people the interface without all of the underlying telecommunications technology that is integrated into mobile phones (none of which Apple has a clue about) what you would have left is an iPod Touch (how’s that for irony?).  Remove the computer innovations that Apple did not invent, you’d have the world’s smallest Etch A Sketch or at best, a Sony Walkman.  For Apple’s “invention” they want you to pay one of the largest fees around, sign on with arguably the worst carrier service, get joined at the hip by a 2 year contract, pay the highest fees around with one of the worst data subscription plans, and to top it off you have to agree to allow them to tell you what software you can put on the phone and how you can use it.

When you read that last paragraph and then find out that millions of people are willing to sign on to such a deal, you can begin to see why companies like Apple can get away with what they do. The patent laws are tilted in their favor.  The DMCA is ALL about empowering the corporation and restricting the consumer. They can throw large sums of cash at lawmakers.  What little power people have left lies in their purchasing choices.  For whatever reason, people are loathe to vote with their cash.  It is a symptom of the got-to-have-it-now society we have today where no one is willing to take a stand for what they believe in if it means giving up a cutesy device like the iPhone, even where there are dozens of other choices available.  Or alternatively, does it mean that people do not believe in anything any more when they are willing to accept such draconian, zero-sum business practices like Apple’s?

There seems to be little hope that people will vote with their dollars but maybe the patent can be reviewed.  I think there is a better chance of people organizing to challenge patents than there is of people giving up all devices from companies with draconian business practices.  Consider the case of the Amazon 1-click patent.  Amazon actually began suing people whose checkout process did not require at least 2 clicks.  My first instinct was the 2-click patent but you see where that leads. I’d hate to see the 5,032-click checkout process that would eventually arise.  The reversal of that decision was pure luck if past history is any indication.  What we need is a comprehensive review of the U.S. patent regulations for starters, followed by a worldwide patent review to ensure that companies have a fair field on which to play.  This will benefit consumers in the long run because consumers ALWAYS benefit when companies have to compete to earn their place within the market.

The Patent Office is currently soliciting comments (until March 8, 2010) on how to “enhance the quality of issued patents” at patent_quality_comments@uspto.gov.  Feel free to chime in.

What do you think? Know any other example of patent law abuse?  Post your example in the comments section.

Comments

One reason that Google is so enthusiastically followed by tech watchers is that they have engaged in several David and Goliath type struggles. [Nexus One – iphone, Chrome-MS/Apple, Gmail, Docs-Office]  Of course if Google is David, how big is Goliath and how do I keep him off my foot?  If you think about it, Google’s initial launch into search came after Yahoo had already become the planet Earth’s first default search engine. In fact, Yahoo had already gotten bored with search and had moved their focus to other areas of the online experience. The future of search was set at that point because Yahoo had what everyone thought was an ironclad lock on it—everyone that is—except 2 nutty guys named Larry and Sergey.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Yahoo’s homepage stuffed in whatever new junk they were focusing on at the time.  They put as many products on the screen as they could. Consequently, the load times for most Yahoo pages were quite slow. I was a progressive at the time with an ISDN line. I had 64kb/s of raw speed, which I thought made me a rock star among Net savvy users. If my load times for Yahoo were slow, I didn’t want to think about the poor souls using the typical 56k modems, which were never able to reach 56kb/s actual speed.

One day while I was surfing, I refreshed my Slashdot window and saw a post asking users to test out this new search thingy called the Google (LOL). When I think back on it, I was probably one of the first humans among the general public ever to use it. I chuckled at the name since I thought the Google-plex was the coolest thing in math and wondered humorously if they got it from counting all the bits on the Net. After clicking the link, Google’s page was fully rendered before my finger completed the click. I typed in a generic search term and as with the first click, the results were displayed before my finger left the enter button. I thought, “Wow! Well what have we got here?” Since that day, I think I can count the number of times I have typed the word yahoo on one hand.

The point I am making is that Google has always focused on the experience. Since that first historic Slashdot post, Google has never (okay, rarely) done anything that has not improved the user’s experience online in some significant way. Google lives in the cloud so it is in Google’s interest to incentivize people to stay in the cloud as much as possible. The longer a person surfs, the more ads they can be served. That is the source of Google’s revenue.

That said, it is easy to see how Google wants to become the master of its own destiny. Microsoft has crushed many businesses that have come along that had the audacity to…uh, get big.  Getting big seems to be a threat to Microsoft because it means you might some day challenge them, well…in one way or another. Just off the top of my head, I could list 20 or 30 companies driven out of business by them over the years but the most obvious example is Netscape. This American success story was cut short not for anything they did but for what Microsoft envisioned they might do some day…maybe. Somehow, Microsoft let Google slip by and since noticing that they were…well…big…is trying desperately to undo that mistake with their new online offerings such as bing search, Windows live products like Office Live, and cloud-based storage. In fact if Google was a bug, Microsoft would be building the biggest can of RAID that money can buy.

Right on Microsoft’s heels is Comcast, who despite what John C. Dvorak says in jest, is NOT Comcastic in my view. Comcast has been fighting with its own users for quite some time now over bandwidth utilization. They claim that so-called “bandwidth hogs” are costing them money, so they throw cash at lawmakers, who then respond to their crocodile tears about file sharing and so forth by trying to pass legislation to harm bittorrent users. It is interesting that a company can make the case that a customer is abusing a product just by using it.  The problem is that many people use even more bandwidth to watch services like Hulu, YouTube, and TWIT (my personal favorite) as well. These services require lots of bandwidth, in some instances well over 100GB/month, especially those that offer high definition content. Comcast sees these services as competition because the more people who can watch online, the less demand there is for premium cable services like HBO, Showtime, or sports channels. So in a way, the online services that Comcast provides as an ISP is competing directly with, or they might even say, cannibalizing their premium cable business.

Comcast has joined a long list of businesses that sees growing online competition as the 12 o’clock freight train that is about to run them down. Others include cable news, print media such as news papers and magazines, and the music industry. Given that most of these are run by aging business types who have been used to having absolute control over their medium, they are unhappy about having to allow users to wield some control over the content they consume. The music industry tried in vain for over 10 years to put the online genie back in the bottle and wasted tens of millions of dollars in the process. They could have embraced the inevitable and saved that money but power and control are the corporate executives ambrosia and the Internet is their kryptonite, so they simply could not help themselves. Rather than learn from the music and movie industries’ failures to control the online community Comcast, News corp, et. al. are determined to revisit this doomed path.

Rupert Murdoch has said that the Wall Street Journal as well as his other interests will be placed behind a “paywall” in order to force people to pay for content. Murdoch has specifically mentioned Google as enemy number one because Google indexes and then links to articles on those services, allowing people to jump directly to the article. While this is fantastic for the user experience, it may circumvent the content creator’s intent of how the content was to be presented. For example, if you want to read a NY Times article, traditionally you went looking for the newspaper and the banner on the front page was the first thing you saw. As you turned the pages toward various stories, you might pass several ads on the way. Well, the NY Times online may want to guide you past some ads as well and then perhaps some other sections that they want you to see before you leave. Deep-linking (as Google’s direct linking is called) prevents the content provider from structuring your trip through their arena in ways that they feel are most advantageous to them. Of course it can be argued that considering how lame their initial efforts have been, maybe Google is doing them a favor because the very nature of their complaints seem to prove that they do not understand the culture of the Internet at all. If they did, they would understand how to make a profit from the millions of clicks that Google is sending their way on a daily basis.

With a firm view of the climate in which Google has to operate, coupled with an understanding of how focusing on the user experience requires the company to present things in ways that can anger a broad cross-section of industry execs in several fields of business, you can understand why Google would need to offer its own high-speed Internet service. Right now they are reliant on services that have conflicting interests from both cable and telecommunications-based ISPs, mobile phone carriers, and so forth. With its YouTube property, Google could potentially become a competitive giant in all fields of video including television. With it’s own fiber offering, it can allow people to view “a la cart” without having to worry about the likes of Comcast, especially since Comcast is moving to control the medium as well as the content with its purchase of NBC. The battle for TV will be fast and furious. The days when some stuffy old guys got together and decided for you what night and at what time you were going to watch show ‘x’ is over. Today, people want to watch what they want, when they want to watch it, sort of like Tivo but everywhere and on any device.  This is where Google’s offerings shine.  With search, email, an operating system, browser, unrestricted devices, and targeted ads that users actually find interesting, providing their own bandwidth will allow them maximum control over the user experience without interference from a zillion different companies that are all looking out for their own interests at the expense of the Google–user relationship.

Initial reports say that Google’s planned service should operate at around 1GB/s. This would be a watershed event for users since they will no longer have to worry about reprisals from companies like Comcast that penalize users and interfere with their use of the services that they pay for. Allegations such as ISP’s having interfered with Skype to force users to buy its own VOIP service, or Comcast sending early termination packets to bittorrent users for “bandwidth shaping” will be a thing of the past. The only remaining question would be about Google’s transparency over such a new service. Would they be willing to give assurances that users can opt out of any DNS logging, targeted marketing, or packet snooping? I have to admit, Google’s offerings are very compelling unless they equivocate on privacy. I avoided their Chrome browser until they moved away from the wishy-washy 3^rd party cookie policies and such. Users want clear and definitive opt-out capability. If Google makes it clear that they are willing to sacrifice a bit of their ability to target a given user in order to ensure that individuals can share only the information that they wish, there is no reason that they should not become fantastically successful with these efforts as well.

The other concern is over Google’s future directions once Larry and Sergey retire. For whatever reason, most netizens (Internet citizens) have been willing to trust in the magnanimity of Google’s founders up to this point. It is likely that people don’t believe (and neither do I) that these 2 guys started this work thinking they would be trillionaires someday. There is no doubt that they hoped they would be successful but they likely also started out with a passion for computers, passionate ideas about data management and organization, and passionate ideas about positive changes their software might bring to the world.

It is clear, that after building Google into a juggernaut worth over $120 billion, that this company has the potential to do great harm as well as good. Going forward, the importance of demonstrating respect for privacy and individual rights will increase almost daily. Privacy is the only possible hiccup society will face from our digital futures. I quote another hero of mine, Stan ‘the man’ Lee, “With great power comes great responsibility.” (show me a geek that doesn’t know that reference)

How will Google meet this challenge? As a person who awaits each new Google product with almost childlike anticipation, I hope the answer is…exceptionally.

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The controversy has arisen following a 10 minute interview Apple granted Pogue with Steve Jobs, the company’s CEO, product visionary, marketing mogul, and iron-fisted overlord. In last week’s TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast, the tech pundits got into a sometimes heated discussion of Pogue asking Jobs weak questions and backing off when Jobs made some seemingly false statements. Apple watchers in the know–most notably Jason Calacanis who is frequently successful in getting secret information including photos of prototype iPods and such–had been speculating that a forthcoming iPod Touch would include a camera. Shortly after the reports, photos of a Touch with a camera installed were circulated. When Steve Jobs made his much trumpeted return several weeks ago and introduced new products during an expo, Apple fans were disappointed to find no camera on the Touch. Steve Jobs quickly asserted that Apple had never considered releasing such a product because a camera would undermine its pricing structure. Engineers at Apple leaked information indicating that there were technical problems integrating the camera with the Touch’s chipset in time for the scheduled release, so Jobs ordered the camera removed. Apple insiders cried foul and seemed dismayed that Jobs would be untruthful, especially since the product that shipped had the camera space intact.

Apple watchers were waiting for the pre-announced NY Times interview Pogue conducted with Jobs to find out what happened to the camera. They fully expected Pogue to get to the bottom of the issue and ask Jobs when they could expect a product including a camera. Jobs reasserted that there had never been any intention of including a camera with the Touch. Pogue politely accepted the answer and moved on. Allegations of a cop out were hurled at Pogue almost universally. Taken in context with Pogue’s recent glowing NY Times review of Apple’s Snow Leopard OS, which even die-hard Apple supporters panned as nothing more than a service pack that should have been free, tech industry writers claimed that an obvious conflict of interest exists since Pogue also wrote a “Missing Manual” book for Snow Leopard. Even Pogue admits that the NY Times column and interview have increased sales of his book. Obviously, people want to know if the glowing review of Snow Leopard and easy interview were quid pro quo for Pogue being granted access.

The question now is: Will the New York times ride out the negative press it is receiving over this incident? Or will it try to contain the perception that its integrity has been tarnished? My guess is that this is not over.

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