Not a notebook or a netbook or a UMPC (or any of the other variants). I’ve come to realize over the years that the current classifications and niche computing devices are missing out on one form factor and the current attempts to fill it are pretty horrible.

Current devices like the iPhone or the Touch Pro are limited – they are too small to be “computer” replacements yet they don’t work really well as phones either. They are a compromise and perhaps the solution is to pair a more basic featurephone with a very portable device that’s actually useful.

What I want is something the size of an A5 notepad with a touch screen covering the whole of the front of the device – no need for a keyboard or extraneous buttons (they would be flush in the bevel or on the edges along with any ports) that I can interface with using a pen (similar to my UMPC) but with enough battery power to easily last a full day and enough processing power to deal with handwriting recognition and speech recognition.

This device would need WiFi and Bluetooth to enable it to pair seamlessly with my Cellphone and a headset. The headset would ideally be able to connect to both the notepad and the phone – so I can dictate to the device, break off and answer a call and the continue to control the notepad while listening to music from it, all seamlessly.

The connection to the phone would be ideally be more synergistic than just being available as a modem. Ideally transition from WiFi to the phones 3G data would be seamless (let me set preferences but it should be smart enough to take the optimal data path) so I can always stay connected. Beyond that the phone and the notepad should be aware of each others status so when the phone rings my music pauses, caller ID information is displayed on the device and I can hit and answer button on the screen or the phone and route the call to my headset, the phone or speakerphone on the notepad, and text/MMS messages could be composed and read on either. The notepad should be able to access the phones camera to record images or video (as well as having a built in one) and via a standard USB connection they should be able to share power as needed.

There’s no reason the phone shouldn’t have limited internet capabilities (web browsing, email, a social networking client, GPS mapping) and, of course, some games so it’s a useful device in it’s own right but it’s primarily a phone. At the weekend for instance people might not want to take both devices but a smart-enough phone to keep them in contact would be the right balance.

Using software that has learnt lessons from the iPhone UI and Microsoft’s Origami Project and InkSeine the device would need to work with pen (both for tapping as well as handwriting recognition), finger (gesture control) and spoken input. Applications like Outlook and OneNote would need optimizing for maximum usability on a screen this size and layout with these input methods but simpler cut down versions would help performance and battery life.

Accelerometer, light sensor and on-board GPS would open up other possibilities for control, and of course being able to use a dedicated Bluetooth keyboard (or the phone keypad or an on-screen keypad) to extend the ways you can interact with the device.

Not only would this device offer a more practical replacement to the iPhone and N80x type devices it would also be a platform for Amazon to extend the eBook capabilities to – much like they have extended the Kindle Reader to the iPhone.

Coupling a device like this with a service like Mesh and Exchange Active Sync to ensure your data is always available (and offload processing of things like search indexing to the cloud) and live updates (weather, stocks, traffic for mapping etc) and you have an ideal personal companion device.

In fact, with a standardized mount / connector architecture you could check your schedule on it over breakfast, slot it into you car and use the GPS to route you to your appointment (with live traffic updates) and via the connector have it monitor ODB-II information to remind you you’re running low on fuel and suggest the cheapest gas station or remind you that you’re due a service soon (maybe add a task to your to-do- list!)

In William Gibson’s Virtual Light Yamazaki takes his notebook for granted. I just want one now ;) Maybe it’ll need a kinetic charger to keep going as long as I want, but the rest shouldn’t be too hard…

So I made my choice.

I got a Black Zune 8GB rather than an iPod Nano.

There were a lot of factors in the decision (I probably spent way too many cycles thinking about this purchase!)

Initial impression out of the box is good. Nice packaging and the battery had enough charge to play while the software was installing and configuring.

It feels nice in the hand, though (like my Shadow which is bears a resemblance to) it does show fingerprints - the black gloss and the glass screen need some texture! Given the shiny nature I'd expected to find a cloth case in the box but it's pretty minimal - and the official case was brown!

Build quality seems pretty high on the unit. It feels quite solid, especially compared to the rather plastic nano. There's one seam (the small silver insert at the top) that's not quite flush but I don't think that'll be a problem.

I've had a lot of problems getting it to do a WiFi sync. I was impressed that it was able to connect to my protected network, but it's proven to be a little unreliable staying connected - I've yet to manage a sync unless it's cabled.

Sound quality is great. Even on the pretty nasty earbuds in comes with it's clear and crisp. Certainly better than the iPod I had before. The earbuds themselves are a let down - pretty cheap feel (though I like the magnetic attraction to reduce tangle.. though could be stronger). I hate having to wrestle those stupid foam covers onto them though.

I'm not sure I'm sold on the ZunePass. $15/mo for unlimited tunes sounds good, but I've not had much luck browsing round the selection yet. It'll be interesting to see how that market evolves over time. It would be nice if the device came with a months access out of the box as a taster.

I like the fact that the Social tracks what I listened to on the Zune as well as the desktop client but I hate the face I can't scrobble that data (rather anti-social!) and I'm really annoyed that we couldn't sort out my account nickname to move it from AU to US so I've had to create a new identity for Zune and Xbox (to which I have little or no emotional connection).

There's lots of little things I dislike about the desktop app and the device UI but a lot of that may be lack of familiarity. We'll see in a week. I'm hoping Microsoft continue to evolve (in a good way) and keep upgrading the firmware...

Now off to load up some music and videos and have a play!

It looks like the portable music player saga is going to be painful either way. Ignoring the fact that they both use proprietary connectors instead of doing something smart like using a miniUSB connector they both have some rough edges that I'm not too excited about.

Apart from needing the bloated and invasive iTunes the Nano is unfortunately inching ahead at the moment.

First factor in its favor is totally unrelated to anything Apple related... it's simply the fact that the Last.FM application can scrobble what I listen to and feed it back to their service. Sure, it requires another app to be running and that's not exactly optimal but I've got psychological investment in the Last.FM data and while I'd love to join the Social I don't want it to be at the expense of that. The app does support WMP but not the Zune desktop app or music played on the Zune itself.

Second negative for the Zune is the account tag. You may remember I ran into some problems with my XBox Live account when I moved from AU to US. Well, it turns out my Gamertag was used to "reserve" a Zune tag and... I can't log in with my AU LiveID (because it's not supported in that region), and I can't transfer the tag to my new LiveID because.... well, if anyone has a good reason please let me know. So it means, like with the XBox, I can't use "Offbeatmammal" as my online identity and have to create something else - a problem I don't have if I just get another iPod.

On the general desktop bloat... Vista comes with WMP and it's a fairly good music/video player. Why do I need a second player from MS? I actually think the Zune desktop client is pretty cool (installed it and had a play today) but it makes me wonder why we didn't put the effort into improving the one core product... unless we've written the Zune client so I could run it on the Mac (I'd like to see OSX support to help the Zune reach out to that market. I can use Fusion or Parallels but it is a barrier for some adoption)

I've read in some places that the Zune and Media Center integration isn't that smooth. Not really an issue for me as I use mostly SlimServer for our home audio though it would be nice to be able to sync recorded TV shows etc to the eventual winner.

Oh, and while the Zune has WiFi (not sure how useful it'll actually be) the iPod can be docked and output movies to a TV... now that would be useful when traveling (though I'd probably have my laptop and be able to use that)

No closer to a decision... need to make it before the next plane trip though ;)

My trusty old iPod is finally dying on me... battery doesn't even last through a flight to San Francisco any more!

I'm not a huge fan of carrying multiple devices - if I had my way I'd just stick music onto the 4GB microSDHD card in my T-Mo Shadow but the non-standard speaker connection (the phone headset isn't really hi-fi!) and the battery life mean I probably won't want to do that with a full day of travel.

So, the top 2 tiny music players are the iPod Nano and the Zune Flash. Both are 8gb, about the same size and match on a bunch of features (the iPod screen is a bit bigger, the Zune has an FM tuner etc)

iPod means I'm stuck installing iTunes which is a horrible piece of software (I like it on the Mac, but on the PC it just doesn't play well) vs the Zune which has a great desktop client from what folks tell me.

I have iPod accessories (car adapter, home stereo adapter with remote control) but we don't use them that often these days (Satellite radio and a 6 CD stacker in-dash in the car, and Logitech Squeezebox streaming music at home), I don't buy DRM music so iTunes Music Store and MS Marketplace are not really going to be much influence.

Guess I'll have to see which fits the hand better and make a choice. Of check out what Creative and others have

I just got a new set of speakers for the living room. While they're not high end audio for a family room where ease of use is pretty important the Logitech Z-5500 seem to fit right in.

Of course out of the box all the cables are the wrong length and we're going to have to move some stuff around but it was really easy to get it set up and wired into the main audio source via digital co-ax and the Media Center PC via the (supplied) 3x3.5mm adapters. Unfortunately (and if I'd have read the small print) there's no optical links (or co-ax) where supplied so I've got to pick one up tomorrow to finish getting the TV and XBox360 all plugged in.

I love the wireless remote. It's a big step up on what we had in the living room for the first few months.

The Z-5500s are replacing a Z4 2.1 setup (also Logitech) which have now been banished down to the rumpus room where Rhiannon has her PC, the washing machine and my elliptical all live. The main reason for them going down there is to let me not have to reply on the iPod when I'm working out, and let Rhiannon stream music from upstairs when she's doing her homework.

For cheaper, low-end speakers the sound from the Z4s have impressed me over the last few months. The subwoofer makes that little bit of difference over the usual run of the mill "PC" speakers and it's robust enough to have taken a few knocks so I'm hoping they'll do well in the rougher environment downstairs.

So for both the living room and rumpus downstairs music is a pretty important part of the equation. With three of us living here with fairly varied musical tastes (if you look at my Last.FM listing it's very different to Storms!).

We could have solved the problem with CD players and physical disks but it all seemed too messy and low-tech, and with the Windows Home Server sitting upstairs a fairly obvious solution was to install SqueezeCenter and get a couple of SqueezeBoxes.

The SqueezeCenter (frankly I prefer it's previous name of SlimServer, but since Logitech has purchased SlimDevices they've gone through a bit of a re-branding) runs quietly upstairs merrily cataloguing and of our CDs that we rip to the network and allows us to play them back on either Squeezebox (independently if upstairs and downstairs are catering to different people) or synchronized so you can wander around the house and not miss a beat.

You can control the Squeezeboxes either from their own remotes, or a Logitech Harmony remote, via a web browser (the SqueezeCenter has a Web interface to control the players) or various 3rd party utilities. We use all four methods depending on who is doing what where!

Annoyingly even though Logitech have purchased SlimDevices they have not yet released any integrated products. I would love to see the Squeezebox able to control the speakers (on/off, select the correct input source etc) - especially with the top-of-the-line Z-5500s, but both they and the Z4s have control inputs so I hope we'll see something on the market that uses the SqueezeBox IrBlaster connection to directly control the speakers. As it is, when I'm done on the Elliptical I have to turn a couple of things off, instead of just one.

The other annoyance with the Z-5500s is that they're not that smart. When there's no input for (say) a couple of minutes I'd want them to go into standby, and wake up when there is input. They seem to auto-select based on a hierarchy (optical, coax digital then analogue) which is cool but it would be neat for me to be able to pre-define that (say) the coax input should always be Dolby Digital music and the XBo360x/TV optical input should always optimize for TV/Movie. I guess that's another price point though.

Oh, and while I love the Squeezebox because when it's off the screen dims (or goes completely blank - that's user configurable) both the speakers display a garish blue light when they are on, and the Z-5500s have a red glow when they are in standby mode.

As I've mentioned before I'm a fan of Pandora and I've been following some of the issues around the SoundExchange Royalty Rate battle.

Initially I thought that the only option was for Federal Govt to rein in SoundExchange to ensure any increase was fair and equitable but thanks to a strong proponent of Objectivism I'm finding out that there's more to the story and more ways to solve this problem.

I suspect the answer lies somewhere between the two extremes, but I certainly feel some form of facilitator is needed simply to ensure the process can scale. How the facilitator would be funded and overseen... that's a whole new can of worms!

Thanks to Darren for the perspective, and thanks to AppScout for pointing me his way.

Every time I get all excited and add another computer to the setup at home I get in trouble.

It means more cables (the Media Center is a big culprit there) or another remote control (Media Center and Xbox360 are in the bad books there), something new to learn (that happened when we went to Vista and Office 2007 as well) or (my personal favorite gripe) yet more flashing blue lights.

Luckily our newest addition to the family isn't going to cause those sorts of upsets for a couple of reasons.

First of all because the server is designed to be headless it's going to live in a cupboard (just as soon as we drill a hole in the floor to drop the Cat5 cable down to the crawlspace) and because it's pretty transparent in operation no-one will really know it's there until it saves the day.

So what the heck is Windows Home Server? That was the question I asked when I first had a look at what was at the time called "Q". I couldn't see what was so special about a headless box that I could back stuff onto - after all I had a Maxtor NAS that could do it already didn't I?

But because I can't help myself when there's something shiny to play with I grabbed my spare desktop machine, flattened it and installed the first of several betas. After a pretty painless configuration process I had a box sitting happily on the network with the router configured to its liking and both the house PCs, the Media Center and my laptop running the Connector client. Everyone had access to the shared storage for personal data, music, pictures and movies and backups were running happily.

We slowly moved a lot of the video content for the Media Center off the various external USB drives that I used because we'd run out of space on the internal drives to the box upstairs.

A few weeks went by and we didn't really think about it. It was great having all the media in one place again and we moved the SlimServer software from Storms machine to the WHS box and no-one noticed any different (apart from Storm who got a few more responsive machine and better web browsing because she wasn't sharing her WiFi now the SlimServer was on the wired segment).

Then my work laptop had a bit of a moment and had to go for surgery. Now I'll admit that I'm not the king of backups - in fact I've not actually done anything apart from random files here and there since we got to the US - so I expected life was going to be painful. Not so. Grabbed my old laptop, installed the connector, connected to the Windows Home Server, mapped the backup and drag'n'dropped the files I needed.

An insiders perspective on development of Windows Home Server can be found on the WHS blog on TechNet and a glossy overview on the Microsoft site. If you want some more in-depth documentation check out the various Getting Started and SDK guides.

Yes, there is an SDK and folks can develop add-ins to extend the capabilities of the WHS configuration. I'm using WHIIST but check out the list at WeGotServed for more great add-ins. They're also keeping a list of OEMs who will be shipping units you can buy and put in your own cupboard later this year... meantime you can discuss the possibilities and future directions at the WHS Forum.

We still need to drill that hole so we can hide the wiring but Windows Home Server is staying.... and I'm looking forward to what v2 will bring ;)

I've been a fan of Pandora for a while. It's a music service that based on one or two tracks you like can create a whole radio station of great music.

I use it both on my computer at work and via my Squeezebox at home and love it.

Last night though, they announced their new Pandora Everywhere platform. It puts Pandora on cellphones, Sonos home music systems (as well as SlimDevices) and... coming soon... handheld music players.

A while ago I was lucky enough to meet Tom Conrad so it was interesting to see what he had to say about it. He and the team must be so pleased with where they've been able to take this.

I want their portable device - finally be able to retire my iPod ;)

I still use the Real-ity wrapper for Pandora on my PC as it means it can keep my Last.FM account up to speed with what I'm listening to ... would be neat if the platform would push listening records no matter what device/client you were using so I could avoid kludges (but Web2.0 is all about mashups!)

Having lived in Australia for several years, and watched the weather change in both the UK and US I can't help but be aware that something is going on.

Too many people however are not even aware (despite documentaries like Al Gores "An Inconvenient Truth" ) that there is even a risk or reason to be concerned.

Luckily this July - 7/7/07 to be precise - MSN are presenting a series of concerts called Live Earth around the world (in the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, China, Australia, and Turkey) to raise awareness of the problem.

To kick the process off, for the next 7 days a new song written and performed by Madonna exclusively for Live Earth is available for download from MSN so check out the site, find out where your closest concert is and check out the new track.

Then spread the word....

I've been playing around with a shiny MacbookPro recently which I've got set up with BootCamp (and sometimes trying our Parallels and Fusion to get Vista and OSX playing nice together).

Sadly I've noticed some little things that, like my earlier complaints about iTunes, lead me to wonder if Apple are not living up to their legendry usability reputation with their Vista support, or if it's a deliberate tactic?

Using the MacbookPro under BootCamp with it's built in keyboard:

• Why do I have to hit Fn+Delete to delete something? It causes me pain in Internet Explorer, in Outlook, in several other apps. Hitting Delete on its own sends a backspace which has all sorts of unexpected and unintended results... and as I keep forgetting to hit the Fn key I end up cursing. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make the keymapping user controllable?
• Why doesn't the keyboard backlighting work? I love it in OSX. It makes typing late at night so much easier. But in BootCamp I don't get the option any more. I'm sure it's not going to be rocket science to write (after all, there are Microsoft and 3rd party keyboards on the market for Vista that already have this capability) Update: Looks like BootCamp 1.3 will support this for MacbookPros. Shiny ;)
• I like the fact that the Front Row remote works with iTunes under BootCamp, but like remappable keyboard buttons I'd love to be able to use it with the media player of my choice (for instance SongBird). I'd also like it to be able to control the media player without forcing me to hit the "menu" button to bring it to the foreground - no more running it minimised and being able to control it. The Keyspan remote has this facility which makes it so much more useful.

These are not big issues, but little frustrations that, like the issues with Parallels and Fusion, stop this solution being "prime time".

Which leads me on to another frustration with iTunes... On our home machine we have a combined library of music, but three users who can log on. Of course you can only have iTunes running on one profile at a time (so if someone forgets to close iTunes the others are locked out until they find out who it was that had it open) and even if you point the Library to the same directory it doesn't share the library and playlist meta-data. And to sync the three iPods we have in the house (a 3G, a Nano and a Shuffle) you have to log into the correct users account as well.

On the iTunes frustration subject... why does it play so badly with media keys on keyboards. My MS natural keyboard can happily control Windows Media Player, and my old Vaio T27GP media keys would control WMP or Songbird out of the box, but needed a third party add-on for iTunes.

Windows Media, SlimDevices and Songbird handle these situations so much more elegantly that once again you have to wonder why Apple just don't seem to get it....

Actually, on the subject of media keys... I'm surprised the MacbookPro doesn't include them on that huge expanse of keyboard surface.

Still on iTunes... if all I want is QuickTime (rare, but there are some media sites that like it) why do I have to installed iTunes just to get it?