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I will be heading to RailsConf 2007 in Portland this week. If you would like to meet up, drop me a line.

Today, I can finally tell you which smart phone you should get. I resisted getting one of these because I didn’t think the keyboard was going to be usable and I wasn’t sold on the trackball. I’d had my Blackberry 8700 for over 1 year and I really liked it. On the recommendation of a friend, I got a Pearl last month. This is probably the most perfect smart phone device I have yet seen. Very little about this device needs to be improved. After about 30 minutes, I decided the 8700 was no more.

Typing on the keyboard is quite usable albeit not as good as with the full keyboard on the 8700. I don’t particularly like the predictive typing but it performs much better IMHO than T9 and some of its other precursors. It’s just good enough that I can deal with it.

The screen and industrial design are great on this device. It is super slim and small. The trackball also works surprisingly well. I didn’t expect that. The fact this Blackberry has a camera and accepts microSD cards are huge pluses and erase some of the only advantages that other smartphones had over the Blackberry. All the Blackberry’s awesome email capabilities and applications are in full force on this device. The essential free, third-party applications on the Blackberry right now are Gmail, Google Local, and Blackberry 411.

If you have a Sony Reader device, please check out my new product called “Readerette Transferrer.� It downloads RSS/Atom feeds and webpages and saves them automatically into PDF files optimized for the Sony Reader device display. This is the first of many new products I will be releasing this year.

Wednesday night my girlfriend Tara and I got engaged. I spent the last month planning a very special evening that fortunately caught her totally by surprise! :) I posted some photos here of the proposal at my house. One of the highlights was the performance of mystressfyre on my front lawn. Our thanks go out to all who helped me because I could not have pulled this off without the help of several of my close friends.

We are all very excited. The wedding will be in 2007 with more details to follow.

Update: November 17th, 2007 is the date!

I just think there is an amazing amount of good educational video now available on the web. I was talking with a friend a few months back who is starting a business to sell videos online to teach simple tasks like tying a man's tie, and other common tasks. I am not sure if you could really sell something like that with all the videos on YouTube but anyway...I can see where he was coming from. Here are some videos I found interesting.

Google Tech Talks (Google engEDU) The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less and The Graphing Calculator Story both of which are non technical but fascinating. Other good ones IMO include An Introduction to SQLite and Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

I also like Peepcode has good software engineering videos on Ruby on Rails programming. These are not free however.

I found this show while cruising iTunes. It is on FX network, but I don't get that network. The show stars Morgan Spurlock from "Super Size Me" which is an amazing movie/book about a man who decided to eat nothing but McDonalds for 30 days. Everyone should see the episodes about Immigration and Minimum Wage. In the Immigration episode, Morgan has an anti-immigration American actually a Cuban American!) live with a family of illegal Mexican immigrants in LA for 30 days. I showed it to my kids. We were blown away. As some of you know, I am not a fan of US immigration policies. In Minimum Wage, Morgan and his fiancee move to a new city and try to live off of minimum wage for 30 days. Also quite amazing. I think these episodes can change your view on life in America.

Here is an interesting statistic on the power and reach of video blogging and YouTube. I posted a video to YouTube on September 26 about the Sony Reader. I didn’t promote it in anyway except on my site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iroxZHH_qeA

It got:
Views: 4,155
Comments: 8
Favorited: 3 times

That is a lot more than my review on this blog. A lot!

I get all these offers like "renew your subscription to Inc. magazine and send free a gift subscription to a friend." If you want to be my friend and get gift subscriptions to my magazines (like Inc. when it runs out), let me know. Even better, if you are also a subscriber and got the same offer, make me your friend and give me your gift subscriptions and I will save my money. Magazine buddy, where are you?

I had the opportunity to travel to Sony a few weeks ago and preview the new Sony Reader hands on and meet with the product manager. Overall, I enjoyed the Sony Reader. I love reading books so this is something that naturally appeals to me. It's clear that Sony has done a lot of work on this and has been working on it for a long, long time. At my previous company, we worked with Franklin Electronics on their eBookman product, so I understand how hard it is to build a complete system like what Sony is trying to make.

I was really impressed with the screen on the device. It uses a 2nd generation ePaper from a company called eInk . The lack of good resolution, high contrast screens is something that has held back reading documents electronically for me. It just tires the eyes too much to read anything more than a few pages on a computer screen. And while I did often carry ebooks on my Palm device in the past, the screen was just too small. Well, that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. I was also really impressed by the weight and thinness of the unit and the fact that the battery is good for 7500 page views.

Here is a video I took of flipping through some pages on the Reader, and I uploaded some pictures as well. The unit is small and light enough that you can hold it in one hand and just flip through the pages as opposed to paper books which require you to hold them with two hands or least use two hands to switch pages. I thought the user interface was very good and easy to use without much instruction. With just a few moments of instruction we were up and running and I am sure we could have figured out how to use the Reader without that.

I liked the fact that you could change the font size easily to make the text easier to read. This is something of course what you cannot do in a real book. The docking station is really handsome. I liked the fact you listen to audio at the same time as you are reading. I liked the bookmark system. I liked that the device could natively read PDF files. They connect store reminded me of the iTunes store and I thought that was good. I think the Sony reps said they expect to have about 10,000 or more books available at launch.

I am hoping that this product will be successful and that there will be follow on versions and further innovation in this area. I admire that Sony is trying to reinvent the category of ebooks. Here are some things that I thought could be improved upon in future versions or updates:

• I was disappointed the device is not natively support HTML or connect to the Internet directly or through an accessory like a WiFi modem. This seems especially strange to me given the importance of the web and user generated content.
• I was surprised that by default when you buy books from the Connect store you have to manually drag them to your device for them to sync. I expected that they would just sync automatically.
• The unit could look slicker. If you compare the industrial design of the Reader with something like the Mylo, VAIO UMPC, or the PSP it almost doesn't look like it comes from the same company.
• I was surprised that the cases don't have pockets where you can put notes or business cards, so this is an obvious opportunity for people who make cases. I don’t.
• I was disappointed that you need an external backlight. They showed us a third-party backlight that at only $10 seemed very reasonable. If you like to read in bed, I think you need one.

Everyone knows I love Sony gadgets. Last week, I got my Sony Mylo device. I finally got it connected last night, so now I can write about it. “Mylo� stands for My Life Online. Mylo is the new WiFi communicator from Sony. Here are some pictures of what you get out of the box for $349.

First of all, the hardware is impressively small and sexy. The industrial design is very appealing and they pack a lot of stuff into a tiny package. Sony hardware engineers did an impressive job. The Mylo can play videos and MP3s, show pictures, and includes Opera web browser, Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and more. It is an 802.11b device. The Mylo is multi-tasking so you can listen to music while you do other things, and you can keep all the communications apps running simultaneously. I found the device quite responsive.

The controls except the keyboard are well designed, and the device is fairly intuitive to use for a proprietary device. The battery life seems good. The device is lightweight, and the rechargeable battery is removable like most cellphones so you can carry a spare. It comes with some nice headphones. The device has 1GB of internal RAM plus expansion which is pretty good. You can buy it in black or white which is nice.

While the Mylo definately is a cool device, I thought some things could use improvement.

Even though I have relatively small hands, I found the keyboard a little too small and the repeat rate on the keys is not good. It doesn't have a good feel. Worse however, is that the keyboard is not backlit so I cannot use the device without good lighting. That is a pity because the screen is otherwise quite bright.

I have two WiFi access points, and I could only get it to connect to one. A third public access point in my neighborhood (yes, we have free WiFi in my Silicon Valley neighborhood) it kind of connects to but not really and it fails. And if you don’t have WiFi, the device is cute but not so useful. The process for connecting to WiFi access points while not bad, could use some improvement and robustness. It would be good if the device also supported Bluetooth (for connecting through a cellphone), or 802.11g. All the devices at my house are 802.11g so I had to switch my router back to mixed from “g-only� to get the Mylo to work. Otherwise, I would have been 0 for 3.

Since the Mylo is all about being online, I expected to see more of an online portal and wireless services for the device. When you register for your Mylo ID, you don't get too much more than 3 offers from third parties. Moreover, this device is supposed to be targetted at young people from the "Myspace generation." I tried browsing to myspace.com but the experience is not so good--I could not navigate the site. If the mylo could be used with myspace, I imagine my daughters would want one! And youtube.com videos I couldn't see either because the browser lacks Flash. :(

The Mylo is only being promoted and sold online. That kind of makes sense to me. What I didn't get is the campaign “Rush Mylo� which is some “Animal House�–esque spoof on fraternities. I know I am not in the target market for Mylo anymore, but I was in fraternity in college and I found the campaign bizarre and somewhat offensive. I don’t see how it would appeal to the vast majority of students who are not interested in fraternities at all either. I hope I am either wrong, or they come up with a better marketing campaign.