The Internet has a very, very long memory. I can find postings I made over a decade ago on obscure online forums. When putting anything on the Internet, I do so with the assumption that it will be there for an extended period of time and will be available to anyone who wants to look for it. Even if Facebook offered excellent security controls and you’ve set them up the way you want them, you should still think very carefully before posting that photo of you at the ball game when you called in sick to work. Somehow, some way, your boss will still find it.

You can also unwittingly expose yourself via malicious applications and fan pages. There have been numerous instances where fan pages are used for phishing attacks. Fan pages can pull a huge amount of data from your profile and there are not sufficient controls to let you control what is disclosed or allow you to pick what data is shared. I know you want to tell the world that you hate Justin Beiber, but joining that page just might open you up to serious identify theft.

Even if you follow the best security and privacy practices, you still have a weak link in your defenses: your friends. Facebook allows rather permissive access to any personal data to your friends. Even if you do everything right, your friends could be exposing your personal data with every click of the Like button or invitation to join MafiaVille. Unfortunately, we can’t do a whole lot about our friends other than try to educate them as best we can. I’d hate to delete a bunch of pertinent information about myself from my profile because of a few folks who behave in a reckless manner.

Ultimately, it comes down to Facebook getting a little too big for their britches. Clear, powerful, and easy-to-use privacy and security controls took a back seat to growing like wildfire and making money hand over fist. There’s no disclosure as to what information an application or fan page is requesting to use, there’s no way to control what they use, and there’s no way to control what your friends use. Those are holes big enough to drive trucks through. I don’t have a lot of faith that Facebook will do much about it without a significant public outcry, lawsuits, and maybe even Congressional action.

I’m not going to jump ship from Facebook. The convenience factor is simply too great for me to ignore it. What I will do, though, is expect each and every one of you to be a lot more careful when using it. Not just for you, but for me.

Battery life. A lot of users have complained about the battery life of this device and with good reason. Out of the box, you can sometimes exhaust it in as little as 6 hours. You have to put a little bit of effort into squeezing the most juice you can out of this sucker. Android 2.1 adds a new widget, the power bar, for quickly and easily turning on and off common battery suckers like WiFi and Bluetooth. I found that shutting down the syncing of e-mail, calendars, and contacts can as much as double your useful battery life which is now just a mere touch away. When I’m at a PC, odds are that I’ve got Gmail open anyway, so it’s not like I need my phone to tell me when I get new mail. I’ve been able to get around 16-18 hours before the phone hits 15% and starts warning me to charge up. It’s a marked improvement.

Also note that signal strength plays a huge role in battery life. I was at a friend’s apartment on Saturday with poor signal and my battery went from 60% to 15% in just a couple of hours. The best way to beat this is to use WiFi where it’s available. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the most power-intensive part of a wireless connection of any type is getting the initial connection going. When you’re going in and out of signal, you’re draining that battery life nobody’s business. Using WiFi at home consistently has made it much easier to keep the battery going.

If you find yourself unable to figure out where the juice is going, the new built-in battery meter has your back. It will give you a detailed breakdown of what’s chewing up your battery and give you suggestions to fix it. It’s almost a tacit admission that they didn’t quite get it right the last time.

Google Navigation. Throw away your Garmin, this is just as good. In addition to getting traditional directions from Google Maps, there’s a new Navigation app that will give you turn-by-turn voice directions. It works fairly well, though I could stand it announcing the turns a bit sooner. This is a great think for hands-free operation.

Voice dictation. The voice commands in 1.5 were limited to things like “call Bob Jones” and the like. Now the voice part is turbocharged and can be used on any text entry field. Yes, you heard me right: you could voice dictate text messages, e-mails, or Google searches. The accuracy is sometimes a little off on oddball words (it took a few tries on ‘tahini’), but it’s a fairly handy feature. Search has also been extended to let you pick what items on your phone to search for. Several apps will also provide hooks into this search functionality.

No more face-dialing. EVER. Once of Shauna’s bigger annoyances with these phones was the tendency to face-dial when the proximity sensor couldn’t detect your face. That’s been solved by improving the sensor and moving functions such as mute and speakerphone to slider controls instead of buttons. The slider has also been extended to unlocking and even silencing your phone without having to unlock. They’re small touches, but they solve big annoyances.

Everything is prettier. Another small thing, but the polish is nice. All of the icons and controls have been redone to look much nicer, animations are smoother, and apps now fade in from and out to the background instead of sliding from one side or the other. Most of the dialog boxes also look more finished.

Better app selection. Many apps would only run on Android 1.6 or 2.1 and it was kind of frustrating to not be able to try out the latest cool stuff. Being on the bleeding edge now opens up a lot more selection than before.

I’ve also found a lot more ways to improve this device via the software. I heavily recommend checking out LauncherPro because it not only offers a much snappier interface and some cool effects, it also lets you add up to 7 home screens instead of the stock 3. That’s a plus if you use a lot of apps and widgets, but the speed bump alone justifies picking it up. It also moves a lot of shortcuts into the same bar as a app drawer to free up home screen space. There’s icons for the dial pad, contacts, text messaging, and the default browser. In the future, you’ll be able to customize it. It’s kind of like a mix between HTC’s very popular SenseUI and the upcoming Froyo (Android 2.2).

I’ve also found that while the hardware keyboard is hard to beat in specific applications (SSH or blogging come to mind), there are some software keyboards that actually are quite compelling. My personal favorite is SlideIT, a clone of the very popular Swype. Instead of pecking out a word on the keyboard, you tap on the first letter, then slide your finger to each of the other letters in the word to spell it out. It’s kind of hard to describe, but it is a very fast way to enter text once you get the hang of it and would make me consider getting a model without the hardware keyboard in the future. If you prefer to peck things out, check out ThickButtons. It will enlarge the next key you’re likely to hit, sort of a way to apply predictive typing to your keyboard and not just what you’ve typed so far.

I feel like the Samsung Moment is a solid device that’s holding up well against heavy use over an extended period. Bigger, badder phones are coming down the pike (and aren’t they always?), but this is an excellent entry-level Android device and a good way to get into the smartphone game without spending a lot of scratch.

As I recently posted, Shauna and I picked up some new phones. I had a lot of enthusiasm for the Samsung Moment because of the capabilities offered by Android and the hardware keyboard and managed to sell Shauna on it once she found out she could “skin” the phone. (In her view, the stock model is too masculine.) Now that we’ve been using them for a couple of weeks, I thought I’d share my thoughts and opinions on the devices.

Hardware

This phone has all of the standard stuff you’d expect in a modern smartphone. A high-res color touchscreen, camera with flash, bluetooth, expandable storage via miniSD card… you get the drill. Some of it stands out a bit, though.

The screen is gorgeous. Truth be told, I would place the brightness and clarity beyond any of the other screens in the house, including our new laptop and the Samsung 1080p set downstairs. How can that be? Thank the AMOLED screen. It’s very bright and crisp without drawing a lot of power and does not require any backlighting. It’s a decent size, too, at 1.78″ x 3.2″ displaying 320×480. Devices like the Motorola Droid have bigger displays with higher resolutions, but you aren’t going to get one for $99 after rebates either. The touch sensitivity is generally pretty good, though the interface as a whole can lag if there are a lot of apps running.

I’m also rather impressed with the hardware keyboard. It’s a 4-row design with a dedicated row for numbers. The space bar sits in the middle of the last row which may throw you off a bit after touch-typing forever, but you can easily get used to it. I have a problem, however, where I accidentally hit the volume buttons on the edge when typing. The keys are responsive and have a satisfying click. For those of you used to an on-screen keyboard and predictive typing tools (both of which are part of Android), you might not get a lot of use out of it. When I have to bust out the SSH or write a long blog entry, however, the hardware keyboard is my weapon of choice.

The case as a whole has a good, sturdy feel to it. I’ve read stories of people greatly abusing theirs without ill effects. The backing on the phone is also very pleasant and seems to grip your palm as you hold the phone; I feel a lot less likely to drop it then I did my old Q9c. The slider doesn’t slip around unnecessarily and the phone feels natural in your hand when you have the keyboard extended.

While the phone includes an optical joystick (think of it as a small, clickable touchpad), I don’t use it very often. It’s very sensitive and the slightest movement can easily cause you to overshoot what you wanted to select. I’m sure I could get used to it, but I just don’t find a lot of utility. The Home, Menu, and Back buttons (all standard keys on Android phones) are touch-sensitive. It feels like a very natural extension of the touchscreen itself, though you can accidentally hit them if you’re carelessly swiping to scroll.

The camera itself is pretty decent quality, a 3.2MP that will do fine for most shots. The video quality is passable, though you will notice some pixelation. I’d say that while this isn’t going to replace your main digital camera, it will still take some quality shots for later. I do have a bit of a problem with the camera positioning. If you’re taking a wide-screen shot (and why wouldn’t you be?), your fingers have a tendency to obscure part of the lens. I know it’s just a matter of retraining myself, but it doesn’t feel like a natural way to hold it. For those of you who like to self-shoot, step away from the bathroom mirror. The camera has a small reflective piece of chrome underneath for framing those shots. I personally am unlikely to use it, but I thought it was a nice touch.

Call quality is good with no problems being heard on either end. I think the speakerphone quality is pretty good, though I have had it get a bit drowned out in a noisy environment. Audio playback is surprisingly loud when you want it to be, though I recommend a set of headphones or external speakers if you’re going to listen to music. The phone includes a set of stereo headphones with a call answer/end button, a nice feature that I miss from my long-gone Sony Ericcson T226.

Charging is done via a micro-USB port. The phone includes both a wall charger and a USB cable for attaching it to a PC. This is pretty handy for me since I can leave my wall charger at home and take the USB cable to work to keep a full charge on my workstation. Transferring files is very easy since the phone is instantly recognized as a mass storage device, the same as if you plugged in a thumbdrive or digital camera. This makes transferring files (pictures, videos, music, apps, etc.) incredibly easy.

The phone includes a 2GB microSD card with a full SD adapter and supports up to a 16GB microSDHC card. Most of you are unlikely to even use all of the space on the included card, but it’s nice to have options. All of your application data will get stored on the card, though most of the apps will reside on the phone itself. There’s a roomy 512MB of storage, so only a total app fiend could fill it. A gripe I have about the microSD card, however, is that you have to power off the phone and remove the battery to swap it. My old phone had a little slot in the side for changing cards. I can see why powering down to swap could be necessary since a running app might have data on the phone, but is it necessary to go to that length?

Android Software and Built-in/Included Apps

There’s a lot of hype around the Android platform, and it is well-deserved. It’s a very clean and intuitive interface that takes just minutes to get used to. I’m also impressed with the versatility of the applications you can get after-market. I’ll run you through some of the most useful bits.

The interface is general is very easy to use. A short tap will execute the item you just tapped on. If you tap and hold, you will often get a context menu or other alternate action (for instance, dragging an app from the Drawer to the Home Screen). Swiping left or right to swap the Home Screen makes a lot of organizational sense and swiping or flicking up or down is a natural way to scroll. While the Drawer is a collapsible list of every app on the system, the Home Screen is for the most-used apps only (i.e. Contacts, Facebook, Market, etc.). You can also add folders to group similar apps into one spot and only use one of your Home Screen icons. Many apps also have widgets you can add, icons that are updated live or support quickly performing a function from the Home Screen (like enabling or disabling WiFi).

As you would expect of any phone with Google software, Google services are very tightly integrated. I had already been making extensive use of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts with all of them syncing to my old phone. To sync them to the new phone, I just had to drop in my login information. Within minutes, my phone book was populated, my calendars were visible (all of them, not just my primary one), and I was getting new e-mail notifications.

The Contacts area is a bit cluttered, however, with e-mail addresses of people I’ve sent maybe 1-2 messages to in the entire 5 years I’ve had my account. It’s a small thing to type in the name to find the person you’re looking for, but I would have hoped that only the entries designated as my contacts would show up. A workaround for this (and a tacit acknowledgment that this isn’t the best behavior) is to star contacts the same you would messages in Gmail. You can then access this list of favorite contacts to quickly scroll through the people you call the most. Once you star at least one contact on the device, you can then add contacts to the star group from your PC. That’s much easier for doing it in bulk. The Contacts app also includes your basic dialpad in you need to call a non-contact.

The Calendars app is very easy to use and includes your standard day, week, month, and today views. I personally prefer the Agenda view, a scroll list of everything on my calendar. Since it includes all calendars and not just your primary one, it’s a great way to view all of those shared and group calendars you’re using. You can toggle exactly which calendars you prefer to see, though, if that would be too overloading.

The Gmail app is just as good as using it from a desktop. You can easily star, label, archive, and delete messages with minimal fuss. Message changes take a few minutes to sync back to the desktop, so you might notice some lag between changes you make. Samsung opted to include Moxier Mail to add Exchange support and it works very well. (If your phone didn’t include it and you use Exchange, consider dropping the $25 to get a copy.) Mail messages are kept isolated in their own bucket so that your personal messages won’t get mixed in. The calendar is synced to Google Calendars, but it, again, is kept in its own space so that you don’t get any co-mingling.

The browser is a slimmed-down version of Google Chrome and it does a great job of rendering even complex web pages. That said, there is no support for Adobe Flash, so some sites might not appear the way you expect them to. In theory, Android will gain Flash support sometime this year. In practice, Google has quietly declared war on Flash by supporting HTML5 as a replacement, so we’ll see how that works out. I like that the browser supports multiple tabs (up to three active), but bookmark management is a mess. There’s no folders or tags to organize them, so I would heavily recommend installing a Delicious add-on for your bookmarking needs. You can also grab an alternative browser such as Opera if you like.

Google Maps is an excellent experience on the phone and  has a very polished feel to it. Scrolling is very fast and intuitive, and a long tap will tell you what the approximate address of the location is. You can then tap an address to quickly flip over to Street View. Directions support driving, transit, and walking (no biking just yet) and when the Android 2.1 update is released, it will also have voice navigation. Latitude is built right in for stalking your friends and integrates nicely into the overall interface. Speaking of location, the phone can be configured to use GPS location OR an approximate location based on the tower the phone is using. The tower-based location, while a battery-saver, is markedly less accurate and can sometimes place you up to several miles from your actual position.

A place where you’ll spend a lot of time is the Market. This is where you can search for and download third-party apps for your phone. Most of the apps are free and many of the rest come at a reasonable price of just a few dollars. (I’ll list some of my favorites later.) Searching generally returns relevant results, though I wish that there were more categories to browse and other ways to stumble upon an app. I also don’t like that you can’t browse the full catalog from a PC. Unlike the iTunes app store, Android has a very lax submission process and allows a larger variety of applications to come through. Surprisingly, it hasn’t lead to hundreds of “fart” applications like iTunes has; the overall app quality is much higher. Almost every part of the device hardware is exposed to applications, so it gives them a lot of power to manipulate the device. Don’t worry, though; every application will tell you exactly what parts of the device it requires access to and every application will run in its own isolated sandbox. In theory, no application should be able to crash the entire system.

There’s a lot of other apps included, but not any you’ll use on a regular basis. I, for instance, see no reason to ever use the NFL or NASCAR apps. The Photo and Video Places app is a “set it and forget it” app for sharing pictures and movies with Facebook and other services. Most of the others are self-explanatory like YouTube or CNN. The real power is in being able to grab just what you want.

Third-Party Apps

Once you configure your Google Account and get some of the preferences set, it’s time to go grab some apps. I’ve got a few dozen installed already and your needs will vary.

Facebook: Unless you live in a cave of social isolation, you’re using Facebook. Grab the app instead of only depending on the mobile website. It’s a lot faster, can directly upload photos from the camera, and provides notifications. It also allows you to add a new Facebook Contacts folder to your Home Screen to look up phone numbers from your Facebook friends. Nifty, eh? That said, you’ll be using the app and the mobile website in conjunction pretty frequently. You can also use the full site in the browser, but that’s kind of overkill unless you need to access a specific piece that won’t work otherwise (like groups).

Twidroid: If you use Twitter, there are a number of apps you can pick from. I happen to be partial to Twidroid, widely agreed to be one of the best clients available. I’ve found the interface to be very intuitive and in some cases even superior to Tweetdeck on my desktop. Like the Facebook app, it will run in the background and provide you with notifications when new tweets arrive. There’s a paid Pro version if you need support for multiple accounts and some other advanced features.

Google Voice: If you have more than one phone number or change yours frequently, Google Voice is for you. Its main feature is the ability to have one number for life that automatically forwards to your other phones based on rules you setup. It can even handle your SMS messages and voicemail including transcription (which sometimes doesn’t work as well as you hope). The app will integrate your Google Voice account with the handset so that all calls are placed using Google Voice. It also gives you a centralized point to access all SMS and VM messages you receive via your account. I find it indispensable. When using the app, I strongly recommend turning off the e-mail notifications and SMS forwarding to avoid duplicate or triplicate notifications.

Weather Channel: This one is included, but you’d probably want to download and use it anyway. It comes with a widget to include the current conditions and weather alerts. The app itself also includes 36-hour/10-day forecasts and weather maps. It will also adjust depending on location, so you don’t need to update it just because you took a trip to San Diego.

Barcode Scanner: Why this isn’t included by default is beyond me. It’s just what it sounds like: a simple barcode scanner. In and of itself, the usefulness is somewhat limited. Standard barcodes don’t do anything without a helper app (we’ll get to that in a minute), but it can read QR codes. QR barcodes can embed information such as a contact, a website address, or how to find a specific app on the market. Want to share a contact? Bring up their barcode from Contacts and have the other phone scan it with Barcode Scanner. Want to download an app you found from your PC? Scan it with the phone and it will open in Market. I think you see where this is going.

Google Shopper: Do you need this? Yes, yes, a million times yes! It can instantly scan the barcode or cover from DVDs, CDs, books, and other products, then provide immediate product information including price comparison and, in some cases, where the item is in stock locally. Yes, it’s that awesome. You can also bookmark the products you find to shop for them later. If you aren’t shopping with this, you’re likely paying way too much.

Key Ring: Grab your car keys right now. How many of those little barcode loyalty card things do you have cluttering it up? How many of those cards do you also have in your wallet? Most of us have at least a half-dozen of them. Key Ring allows you to scan those barcodes and define which store they’re for. You can then pull up the barcode on your phone and scan it instead of the actual card. It’s a nice way to organize those cards and free up some wallet space.

ConnectBot: This is for serious computer nerds only. The kind of computer nerd who, like me, uses SSH on a regular basis. If you don’t know what that is, you don’t need this app. Personally. I find ConnectBot to be every bit as good as puTTY. The interface is clean, the app is responsive, and it’s just like a desktop app.

Setting Profiles: This is, so far, the only app I’ve paid for, and it’s worth it. There’s a zillion different settings you can pick from on your phone. Between vibrate mode, ringer volume, notification volume, turning WiFi on and off, etc., it can be a real chore to change a bunch of settings at once. Setting Profiles allows you to create collections of these settings to easily switch from one to another. You can also define a time when and location where it will be active. For instance, I have my phone go into silent mode if I’m within 1/4 mile of church on a Sunday between 7AM and 9PM. I also have it shut off notifications but turn up the ringer nightly between 11PM and 6AM, when I will normally be sleeping. Trust me when I say you want this, especially at just three bucks.

Last.fm and/or Pandora: Everyone seems to have their Internet radio of choice and both of these sites provide their own apps for streaming. Unless you have a big music collection and a correspondingly large microSD card, you’ll probably want to opt for one or both of these.

Battery Indicator: Android comes with its own battery indicator, but it’s a kind of fuzzy “not sure how much juice is left” type. This app gives you more precise reading, or at least as precise as the hardware will let you get. In this case, the Moment goes to 10% intervals.

eBuddy: The Moment includes IM apps for Google Talk, MSN, AIM, and Yahoo, but I demand more than that. I still have an old ICQ account (though I haven’t talked to anyone on it in many, many years) and I want Facebook IM support. Meebo is fairly popular, but I kept on getting random disconnections from the various chat services for seemingly no reason. Fring is also popular and worked well on my Q9c, but it doesn’t use the contact groups you spent forever setting up and doesn’t show what IM service someone is using on the list of contacts. eBuddy seems to solve all of these problems while giving you support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Facebook, and, if you still use it, MySpace. I highly recommend it if you need IM on the go.

Movies by Flixster: This is the best way to find movies, period. I would pick it over any website I’ve ever used. It will, based on your location, show you what’s playing, the Rotten Tomatoes score for the movie, where its playing, and, for select theaters, allow you to buy tickets online. It’s like Google’s movies feature kicked up a notch.

Wordplayer: There’s dozens of ebook programs for Android, but none of them is nearly as awesome as Wordplayer. That’s because it integrates directories of free ebooks you can download instantly. Most of the selection is, obviously, limited to classic titles (so you can easily brush up on your Twain and Shakespeare), but it’s wide-ranging and claims to have access to over a million books. (Bear in mind that some of these are dupes with alternate layouts or translations.) If you need something to read to kill time, this is the way to do it.

Beelicious: Remember how I said that the bookmarking feature in the browser stinks? Go get a Delicious account and use this app instead (accessed from the Share menu). You can then easily tag bookmarks and access them from your PC as well.

Remember the Milk: I’ve been using the website for a long time now to generate to-do lists and recurring tasks, features that Gmail just isn’t any good at. The app provides an easy way to interface with your tasks, especially handy if you’re using it for your grocery list. It requires a Pro account for $25 a year (the app itself is free), but you’ll get a 15-day trial to see if you like it first.

SNESoid Lite and NESoid Lite: What, you thought I wasn’t going to play games on this baby? As the names imply, these are SNES and NES emulators so you can play your favorite classic games on the go. I loaded up TMNT IV: Turtles in Time and the play was smooth with no lag or glitches. The paid versions add save states and some other features, though most folks won’t need those.

There’s obviously many more apps that I use, but these are the most useful ones I’ve found.

Conclusions

I’m very impressed by the Android platform and this phone in particular. It’s more like carrying around a small computer than a phone and is flexible enough to meet a variety of needs for many different kinds of users. Sprint’s data network really shines when using the features of this phone and I find myself using it almost as much as a PC.

Gradually, though, it became painfully obvious that Windows Mobile was getting a bit dated. The number of apps available for it was limited at best, mainly because many required a touchscreen. I also found that many mobile websites didn’t much care for the shoddy browser that came with the phone. Alternatives like Skyfire, while functional, would often disconnect for no reason and prove only useful in absolute emergencies. While I was initially excited about all of the things I could now do that I couldn’t do before, I was now running into the frustrating wall of hardware and software limitations. It was time to swap out for something a bit more functional.

Being soured on Windows Mobile, I needed to look elsewhere. I already knew that Blackberries were right out. I had one about six years ago and didn’t much care for the way it worked at all. It also seemed like the application selection was running into the same limitations as Windows Mobile despite a very large user base. And the iPhone? As exciting as the initial announcement was, Apple has earned my ire over the years. I don’t want to deal with their insane application rejection behaviors (I would say policies, but that would imply consistency), I don’t want to deal with AT&T’s crappy and oversaturated data network, and I don’t want to suffer through an on-screen keyboard. Palm was also off of my list since it appears that company may not have long left in this world. WebOS is a pretty darn amazing platform, but the lagging sales make me think that Palm’s offering is too little, too late. I didn’t want to be bitten the same way we were by investing in Sandisk Sansa MP3 players.

Enter Google and Android. For those that don’t know, Android is what’s powering hot phones like the G1 and Motorola Droid. The open app store and easy-to-use SDK has lead to a lot of apps being available for it. The phones are also reasonably powerful and come with a lot of useful features. Once Sprint announced the Samsung Moment, I knew I had to have one. It had all of the hardware features of my old Q9c, but it also added WiFi and a large touchscreen. Once I heard it would be updated from Android 1.5 (Cupcake) to 2.1 (Elcair), I was sold.

Oddly enough, Shauna got kind of excited about the idea of a new phone too. Yes, my wife Shauna. No, she was not abducted by aliens, brainwashed by a cult in the jungles of South America, or the recipient of any blunt force trauma to the head. (For those of you not in on the joke, Shauna has used her phone so infrequently over the last several years that it often would have a dead battery for months at a go.) So two weeks ago, we jumped in the car and drove on down to the Sprint store to check this phone out. A few days later, we had them in our hot little hands and were excitedly grapping apps left and right and playing around with them to our heart’s content. Funny enough, the new plan we got on actually gives us triple the minutes of our old plan, adds unlimited texting, and gives Shauna unlimited data, yet we’re now paying less than we used to. Go figure.

Both of us love these things. I’m very excited to see Elcair rolled out sometime next month to unlock even more features. If you like Sprint’s data network (which, FYI, is the best as far as I’m concerned) and want an awesome smartphone, this is the way to go.

(I’ll be writing up my own review of the phone and what apps I think are must-haves later on. I’ve already rambled on enough.)

Let me take a moment to explain myself. Apple, for a long time, did a great job of driving the market in places it needed to go. The iMac, while often derided as a kiddie toy by hardcore PC users, brought a much-needed sense of style to a market dominated by the same old gray and beige boxes. The iPod single-handedly dislodged MP3 player as the word for a portable music device and became the de facto standard. iTunes defined what digital marketplaces are supposed to look like and function like. The iPhone created the concept of an easy-to-use repository of simple applications that anyone could create or download. All of these things are truly revolutionary changes to the way we use technology and we owe Apple a great big thanks for making it happen.

Lately, though, most of Apple’s products are more evolutionary than revolutionary. I don’t know if Steve Jobs has been losing his touch or if the cancer has forced him to delegate to the less capable, but none of the company’s PC products have really been more than a periodic refresh of the latest technology. The new generations of iPhones, while improved, haven’t really been compelling enough to entice everyone to upgrade ASAP. And the iPad? Aside from an unfortunate name that’s become the butt of far too many immature jokes, it’s really not much more than a really big iPhone. Apple’s biggest opportunity is in really putting something behind the Apple TV, yet they don’t seem to be willing to make that necessary investment and truly transform the emerging web video market with a subscription-based service and, heck, an extension of the app store. There’s more innovation on this set-top box from XMBC and Boxee than from Apple and that’s a big problem.

Therein lies the real issue. When a company can’t come up with any more game-changing products or ways of doing business, it tried to jealously guard its existing products and business models by any means necessary. This inevitably turns into a game of legislating or litigating success. Telecom companies are notorious for getting all kinds of regulatory special favors; their last Christmas present, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, has cost us all around $300B and growing. Now Apple, by deciding to sue HTC, has started down the same slow death spiral that so many failed companies before it have gone down.

What this is really about is Steve Jobs and his enormous ego. Google managed to out-iPhone the iPhone with the Android platform and the Nexus One handset. Apple hasn’t been beaten at its own game in quite some time, especially not with a flagship product, so this is serious egg on their face. Now, instead of realizing that they have ceded the market lead through relative inaction and only minor product updates, they want to try and stamp out the competition for doing it better. (Kind of ironic since CEO Jobs said that stealing ideas is a good thing.) Apple has admitted, in so many words, that it’s out of good ideas. That’s the sure sign it’s as good as dead.

• Program launching is much improved. If you want to launch a program, press the Windows key on your keyboard, type the program name (or a part of it) and press Enter. That’s it. No scrolling through a Start Menu a mile long, no setting up quick launch toolbars, no cluttering your desktop with a million shortcuts each with their own hotkey. It sounds like a small thing, but it makes opening programs much more convenient and a lot easier. It also searches files on your hard drives automatically, an added bonus.
• Aero is a very slick interface. If you want to get rid of all but the active window, grab the title bar and give it a shake. Just like that, all over windows will minimize themselves, You can also drag windows to either side to have them take up 50% of the screen. Setting up side-by-side windows is a snap now and much better than the old “tile” options holding over from Windows 3.0. It’s also a lot prettier with animations for minimizing/maximizing windows and previews of open windows on the taskbar.
• My 3D graphics are now supercharged. Nvidia has a nifty feature where you can pair up your on-board graphics with an add-in card and make them both do the graphics work. It only works on Vista and Windows 7 because of the new driver model they use. Games, prepared to be pwned.
• Installation was the easiest of any OS I’ve ever installed, period. It asks you where you are and where you want to install, then does its thing for 20 minutes. Give the PC a name and create a user account, then you’re done. That’s it. No more 20 questions, no more ugly blue text setup screen, no more trying to find a floppy (yes, you heard me) with drivers for your fancy new hard drive controller. Everything on my PC worked out of the box and it’s not even really all that old. Bonus? I plugged in my phone and it immediately recognized it and installed the appropriate software from the Internet. How slick is that?
• I didn’t have to reconfigure the AppleTV after reinstallation. Windows automatically recognized which folders I had been sharing before and shared them for me. I’m not used to software making assumptions for me AND being right about it.

If you have the hardware to run it, this is a most worthy upgrade, especially for 64-bit systems. I highly recommend it.

I hadn’t originally intended to really participate all that much via Twitter, to be honest. Then I saw a few friends posting their thoughts, so I thought, “hey, why not share what I’m thinking?” So I posted a few times on Saturday. And then a lot more on Sunday. And by the afternoon session, I was following the #ldsconf hashtag to see what complete strangers had to say. I felt like this level of participation let me get a lot more out of Conference. By sharing my thoughts, I took the time to really process what was being said and see how others were reacting. It was like real-time collaborative note-taking.

If you’re into Twitter, I strongly recommend trying it out during Conference to see what you get from it. If you’re not, you might want to think about it. I know I’m glad I did.

Yesterday, Sprint sent a text that they now have a free Picture Mail app for Windows Mobile smartphones to fix the problem. Once I got it installed, however, it warned that using the feature was $5/mo. That didn't seem right since the plan I got for my phone is Sprint Vision Unlimited with Phone as Modem. It was a really good deal at $40/mo, a special promo rate that was a good $25 cheaper than the features purchased separately. I checked the website today and found that, per Sprint, I had unlimited Picture Mail and shouldn't be charged extra. Just to be sure, I decided to ask Sprint's chat support if that was the case.

I was disappointed to hear from them that the plan they show in their system didn't include Picture Mail at all. Now I could have left it at that and said "oh well", but I certainly want to make sure that if I'm paying for something, I get to use it. Since Comcast has gotten a lot of press from their customer service ninja Twitter team, I thought I'd see if Sprint had a home base there.

Within minutes, I had sent Justin Goldsborough from Sprint a tweet, gotten a reply and had my information forwarded to Executive Customer Service. About 75 minutes after that, I got a call from Mitchell who confirmed that what I saw on Sprint's website didn't jive with what they have in their computers. And he hooked me up with Picture Mail at no extra charge. Customer service win!

This is a really important lesson for companies when it comes to taking care of service issues. Be available, resolve it promptly and embrace support channels outside of your website and phone queues. Comcast, for all of their failings, has done a good job at springing into action when there's a negative blog post or unhappy tweet. When I posted a rant about how much their support sucked, I had someone from the local office give me a direct line for any future problems without me doing a whole lot of anything else.

So what does this mean for you? Go grab a Twitter account, do a search for a company you're having a service problem with and get satisfaction. I heartily recommend it.

First, go to Comsumerist and use their flowchart to figure out what exactly you need to do in very simple terms. You basically have three options: subscribe to a cable or satellite package, buy a new TV with a DTV tuner (if you don't already have one) or buy a converter box to use with your old TV.

If you're going for a cable or satellite package, note that cable companies are required to support analog TV sets until at least 2012 due to FCC mandates. That said, a lot of cable providers are moving a lot of their analog channels onto more expensive digital packages, so make sure you're getting the channels you want. I don't think Satellite providers are under the same mandates, but support for analog TVs is not going away anytime soon.

If you're buying a new TV, it might be a good idea to wait until after Christmas to do so. Most analysts predict that a 32" LCD HDTV will drop to around $300 by that time as consumer spending continues to drop and retailers become eager to dump inventory. If you have the funds, consider going with a plasma TV instead of LCD. The colors are brighter and richer than an LCD, but it's only available on larger sets. Also save money by buying a 720p set instead of a 1080p one. Unless you're getting a screen larger than 50" and plan to watch HD content (like Blu-Ray movies), you're wasting your money.

If you plan to stick it out with your old set and a converter box, sign up for a converter box coupon NOW. Not tomorrow, not next week, NOW. The cut-off for coupons is December 31, 2008 and they're good for up to $40. Most converter boxes are $50-60, so this is a significant savings. Consumer Reports has a shoot-out of various converter boxes and you can get the coupon from DTV2009.gov.

If you go for a HDTV or converter box, you need to pay special attention to what antenna you use. Unlike current analog TV signals, DTV signals do not handle interference well and just like with a cell phone, a bad signal results in chunks of what you're watching disappearing. AntennaWeb lets you punch in your address to see a list of available TV stations, what compass heading they're broadcasting from and what type of antenna you need to pick them up. In some cases a cheap antenna pointed in the general direction of the broadcast tower is enough. In some extreme examples, you might need to have a new antenna professionally installed on your roof and aimed more precisely at the tower.

If you still have questions on the digital TV switch, go to DTV Answers for for information. And don't say I didn't warn you if you can't watch your favorite programs on February 17.