Speeds and Feeds

I'm very impressed by the Nook, Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader. It's clear B&N has studied Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle very carefully.

The Nook has almost all of the major features of both product lines, plus a few more, with few competitive disadvantages. B&N has also followed Amazon's lead on support services. The Nook has a very good online e-book store as well as applications to support e-book reading on Macs, Windows machines, and smartphones.

(Credit: Barnes & Noble)

The Nook doesn't ship until the end of November, but here's what I found most significant from the announcement and the pages at nook.com:

Industrial design
I think the Nook is attractive and well-designed. It looks better than the Kindle 2, but not as good as Sony's Reader Touch Edition, which offers a larger screen in a smaller form factor. Also, Sony's forthcoming Reader Daily Edition is only slightly larger than the Nook, but offers a much larger screen.

Secondary color display
This feature surprised me. It seems expensive and insufficiently functional for what must be a significant added cost. The low resolution of this display (480 x 144, according to a CNET blog post) means it won't be useful for much beyond the basic user-interface features B&N has already described: book covers, menus, and a keyboard for note-taking. (Although I should note for the record that while B&N says "Its full-color touchscreen encourages you to bookmark, add notes, and highlight passages," I haven't found a photo on the company Web site depicting the virtual keyboard shown in some of the pre-release images. Perhaps that's one of the features still under development.)

By comparison, the secondary color screen built into the Alex e-book reader from Spring Design, shown in another recent CNET story, is large enough to be useful. Unfortunately, it's also large enough to be very much in the way, leading to an awkward device. Spring Design and B&N need to make up their minds-- are they making e-book readers or something else?

I've been thinking about buying a new gizmo, and it turns out I'm not the only one in the family having these thoughts.

My sister sent me an e-mail over the weekend:

I need a 3G card for my laptop and I'm going to get it from Verizon. What should I ask for? I just don't want them to try to sell me more or less than I need.

Coincidentally, I've been looking into the latest options for mobile broadband access for a couple of months now, ever since the two-year contract ran out on the Option GT Max 3.6 Express I bought in 2007.

Here's an expanded version of my reply e-mail:

There are four basic kinds of 3G wireless modems: USB dongles, PC Card and ExpressCard devices, portable 3G/Wi-Fi access points, and cell phones with wireless "tethering."

USB modems are the most popular type and usually the least expensive. They plug in like a thumb drive, and they're easy to deal with. But I don't like them because they can stick out pretty far, which makes them awkward and a bit fragile. The larger ones don't work at all with USB jacks that are too close to other ports. Also, the cheapest ones can have relatively poor reception.

If your laptop has a plug-in card slot, it's either for PC Cards or the more recent ExpressCard type. Your user manual will tell you. Verizon offers one of each. They don't stick out so far, which makes them a little more rugged while in use, though you should still remove them before putting away the laptop. I find them more convenient than the USB type.

The Novatel MiFi 2372 connects up to five Wi-Fi devices to 3G mobile broadband networks.

(Credit: Novatel Wireless)

A portable access point is worth considering if you have more than one gizmo to connect to the Internet while you're traveling. For most North American users there's only one such device available, the Novatel MiFi.

Sprint and Verizon offer the MiFi 2200, which provides typical download speeds from 400Kbps to 1.4Mbps (Verizon's estimate; actual speeds vary widely).

Novatel also makes the MiFi 2372, which works on AT&T, T-Mobile, and pretty much any international phone network. This is the one I want, but as far as I can tell AT&T and T-Mobile don't offer discounted pricing on this gizmo yet. If purchased directly from a mail-order supplier, it's very expensive--well over $300.

Whichever version you get, the MiFi is a standalone gadget a little smaller than an iPhone. It has its own battery and recharges with a small wall adapter or by connecting it to your laptop (which makes it work like a USB wireless modem). It connects to the cellular data network and creates its own little Wi-Fi hot spot that can be used by up to five systems at once--like your laptop and an iPod Touch.

I don't have one of these myself, but friends do, and it looks like the most convenient way to get online while traveling.

As an aside, I should mention that one of the earliest mobile broadband/Wi-Fi gizmos was developed by a friend of mine, Tor Amundson. He called it the Stompbox, and wrote about it for Make magazine. More information is available on one of his sites, Stompboxnetworks.com.

Earlier this year, Tor told me about an interesting alternative to the MiFi. Cradlepoint makes gizmos that are functionally equivalent to the MiFi, except they work with a user-provided USB or ExpressCard modem. While this approach is noteworthy, I think the MiFi is generally a better solution for most users.

The last option is to get a 3G-compatible cell phone that supports "tethering"--that is, using the cellphone itself as a modem. This can work pretty well, though I had a lot of trouble tethering the Cingular 8525 phone I had before I got the Option card.

The major downside of tethering is that you may not be able to talk on the phone while using the Internet. Apparently AT&T and T-Mobile 3G phones are more likely to support simultaneous operation than those on Verizon or Sprint. I regard this limitation as unacceptable, though you might feel differently. The upsides are that tethering can be somewhat cheaper than getting a separate 3G modem because there's only one contract, and there's nothing else to carry around.

(The iPhone still doesn't allow tethering.)

The most important thing to keep in mind, no matter how you get online, is that mobile Internet usage is quite strictly limited by all carriers. Verizon's $40/month service provides only 250 MB/month of data transfer, and that can run out very quickly. Even the $60 service's 5GB limit can be exceeded in mere days if you spend too much time on YouTube or some other video streaming service.

If you go over your plan limit, per-megabyte charges are really painful. According to Verizon, the 5GB overage rate is 5 cents/MB and the 250MB overage rate is 10 cents/MB. In other words, a single HD video on YouTube could easily cost you a few dollars to watch once you're over the limit.

For comparison purposes, AT&T's overage fees are $10/100MB for its $40/month plan and 49 cents/MB for the $60/month plan. The latter rate is the cell phone equivalent of the death penalty, since hardly anyone is going to go only a few megabytes over the 5GB allotment. A careless user could easily incur hundreds of dollars in overage fees in a single month.

So whatever you buy, be careful how you use it. And if you share your connection (using a MiFi, or via Internet Connection Sharing in Windows), make sure your friends stay away from Hulu.

Another thing to consider is whether you need international access. If you intend to travel a lot, you can get a wireless modem that will work in most foreign countries. Be sure to ask about the countries that matter to you; Japan and South Korea, in particular, have very specific requirements. What Verizon calls "Global Ready" modems are somewhat more expensive to buy, but again, be warned: international roaming can be *very* expensive. (In the U.S., the charges are the same as for any other 3G modem.)

In my opinion, the best way to get Internet access while traveling internationally is to find cheap or free Wi-Fi hot spots and skip the mobile broadband. This approach is less convenient, but there's no risk of coming home to a very expensive bill from your cell phone company.

If you've flown on a commercial airline since 2000, you've probably seen people wearing Bose QuietComfort headphones. They're expensive and large, and I don't like them.

Their noise-cancellation circuitry actually generates noise of its own, and my ears are good enough to hear it as long as I'm not seated too near the engines.

I started wearing earplugs on airplanes in the 1980s when I discovered the squishy memory-foam type. They block noise better than headphones ever could, and they don't make any noise themselves.

Klipsch Image S4i In-Ear Headset

(Credit: Klipsch Group)

But when I bought my first iPod, that strategy didn't seem quite so perfect anymore. The ear-bud headphones that came with the iPod never fit me at all; they just fell out. After some experimentation with small folding travel headphones, I decided I was happiest with in-ear headphones. They gave me most of the noise reduction of the foam earplugs along with the ability to listen to music.

The problem with in-ear headphones is finding a model that fits me. I gather that this is a common problem with this type of product. I went through several low- and mid-priced models before settling on the old Apple In-Ear headphones--they just worked the best for me. (Interestingly, I had the same experience as CNET's Steve Guttenberg when he reviewed them: they only fit well when inserted upside-down.)... Read more

Disney/Pixar's latest film is being shown in 3D using state-of-the-art Sony projectors in some theaters.

(Credit: Disney/Pixar)

I went to an opening-day screening of the new Disney/Pixar film "Up," on Friday. I had a great time and not just because of the movie. There was an interesting technology story, too.

The Camera 7 theater in the Silicon Valley city of Campbell recently installed four new digital cinema projectors. They're the best on the market today: Sony's SRXR220, which lists for about $200,000 with the usual required accessories.

Sony also has a slightly less expensive model, the SRXR210, for smaller screens. What puts these projectors ahead of the competition is their native resolution: 4,096 pixels x 2,160 pixels, a standard known as "4K." That's over four times as many pixels as HDTV, which displays 1,920 pixels x 1,080 pixels.

I wrote about 4K technology back in August 2007 ("After HDTV, what's next?") and predicted that "you'll be seeing it in theaters within the next few years." I'm pleased to say that 4K is ahead of that schedule.

I wrote that post after attending a screening of some of the earliest 4K content at the ACM Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, including "Crossing the Line," a short film by "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson. The Siggraph demonstration also used a Sony projector, the much smaller SRXT105.

I was amazed by the picture quality in that screening, and I'm even more impressed by what I saw from the newer SRXR220. As I wrote in 2007, these projectors create smooth, sharp images using LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) technology, which I think is inherently superior to TI's DLP (Digital Light Processing) micro-mirror chips, which are used in other digital-cinema projectors.

On Friday, we got to see more than just a movie, too. Sony has provided the Camera 7 with a bunch of PlayStation 3 game consoles and configured the projectors to display multiple games up on the big screen so that up to 64 people can play at the same time.

Before the movie, we got to see just one game, Sony's "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue," filling the whole screen. Coincidentally, that's my favorite game on the PS3 (though I must admit to limited experience with that platform since I don't own one), so I was happy with the choice.

Although the PS3's native output is limited to HD resolution, the image quality was very impressive. The movie itself was even better. I don't know what the movie's native resolution was, but it looked great, with bright, saturated colors and good detail in both highlights and shadows.

Photos: How to animate 10,000 digital balloons

The movie was presented using RealD's 3D technology, re-branded as Disney Digital 3-D in the advertising for "Up," though the glasses we received were marked RealD as usual. Now that I've seen movies in state-of-the-art theaters using both RealD and Dolby 3D Digital Cinema, I think they're both fairly similar in overall quality.

While I'm on the subject, I'd like to make another comparison: between Sony's 4K technology and the new small-screen "IMAX Digital" theaters that are popping up around the country, generally as one or more screens out of several in a multiplex.

I've seen a couple of movies ("Watchmen" and "Star Trek") in IMAX Digital theaters now, and the quality didn't measure up to my expectations. According to the Wikipedia article on IMAX Digital, these theaters use a pair of HD-resolution (also called 2K) projectors--but I don't think this approach will produce better than HD-equivalent resolution. Two superimposed images can be brighter than one, but the resolution can't be twice as good as a single projector.

In my experience, IMAX Digital theaters fall short of the quality of these Sony 4K projectors...and, of course, they're vastly inferior to real IMAX theaters. Every time I've attended a showing in an IMAX Digital theater, I've heard other customers expressing their disappointment. I don't know why IMAX is diluting its brand this way.

Similarly, I don't know why Sony hasn't established a new brand for these 4K projectors. I know I'm going to be tracking the arrival of this technology in other Silicon Valley theaters, but Sony isn't helping.

Anyway, the new Sony 4K technology is out there. If you can find it, I bet you'll like it.

I saw the new Star Trek movie in its limited release on May 7, and enjoyed it a lot (although I did think giving the Enterprise the new hull number NCC-90210 was a bit much).

Anyway, the movie includes scenes set in Iowa, which got me thinking about what life is like for the average person in the Federation of Planets. I think it probably isn't very different from life here on our Earth.

(Credit: Paramount Pictures)

For example, we don't have warp drives, transporters, food replicators, or phasers, but I don't think these are part of the daily life of the average citizen of the Federation either.

In the new movie, I was struck by several scenes in which the technology of the mid-23rd century seemed to be markedly behind our own. I assume these anachronisms were considered essential for consistency with the various Star Trek television series, but I think this movie could have provided a good opportunity to retcon these awkward precedents and make Star Trek seem more futuristic to today's audiences.

But no. Today we have cellphones the size of Zippo lighters, whereas in 250 years, communicators-- even for intraship communication, as shown in the new movie-- will be larger, and somehow they will lose any kind of display screen.

Indeed, Lt. Uhura sometimes wears the trademark huge circular-finned earpiece from the original series, though most characters get to wear something much more like today's Bluetooth headsets.

In another scene in the movie, a courier delivers a message to a senior Starfleet officer by carrying to him-- likely over a significant distance-- a large electronic clipboard. We've had Short Message Service support on cellphones for over ten years! If you've seen the original Star Trek series, you've seen these clipboards-- Yeoman Rand used to bring them to Captain Kirk on the bridge.

These clipboards-- also known in the Star Trek universe as data slates, or most commonly, Personal Access Display Devices (PADDs)-- shrank over the years; by the 24th century, they were down to the size they are today.

The engineering areas of various Starfleet facilities and even the new Enterprise were even worse; some of those scenes could have been filmed in a 19th-century boiler room (or maybe brewery) with a new coat of paint.

I also noticed a very futuristic forklift truck in the movie, but it turns out that too (the exact product) is an early 21st-century product.

But generally, life in the Federation does seem to be much more relaxed than life on our Earth, and technology presumably plays a role in that, even if it's usually behind the scenes. I wouldn't mind living there.

Actually, there are the occasional planet-shattering alien attacks. I wouldn't like those. Maybe I'd be happier somewhere I can combine 21st-century technology with a mellow 23rd-century lifestyle, like Marin County.

I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.

Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most Internet applications (Web browsing, e-mail, chat, etc.). And as I described yesterday, small notebooks are quickly lifting themselves out of the "Netbook" ghetto, gaining performance and cutting power consumption to become reasonable alternatives for those times when a smartphone just isn't enough.

The tokidoki edition Fujitsu LifeBook U820 mini notebook.

(Credit: Fujitsu Computer Systems)

But I think there's still a legitimate niche for MIDs and other miniature mobile PCs. As I've mentioned here before, I used to carry around a 1.5-pound computing gizmo along with a conventional laptop. It was an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100--officially a PDA, not a MID--but it was as close to a MID as the technology of the time allowed. It came with a Web browser, and for a while I had mine equipped with a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, so I could access the Web and e-mail on the go.

It often seems to me that I would like to go back to that kind of device, rather than trying to make my iPhone and my laptop do the same jobs. In fact, I think my note-taking capability has actually declined with each new handheld platform I've adopted--the Newton was better than the Palm Treo, and the Treo was better than the iPhone. Today, when I attend conferences or want to scribble down some idea that can't be represented in a paragraph or two, I grab a Moleskine notebook (the pocket Sketchbook version).

My own experience is merely anecdotal evidence, however, and I know better than to rely on that. So what are the real markets for the MID?

Coincidentally, I think it works out to three E's: education, entertainment, and executive applications. All three areas lead to situations where a person might want access to more computing and communications resources than a smartphone can provide but won't necessarily want to carry around a notebook--or try to use one while standing--to get that.

The educational market for these small machines has yet to develop because current MIDs don't yet offer the right combination of small size, all-day battery life, and low price, but I believe they'll get there within the next year or so. People often talk about e-book readers as being the right answer for educational computing, but e-books are more about static content, and education is ideally an interactive process.

The entertainment focus was clearest with UMPCs (another dead category, though I'm hardly the first to point that out). UMPCs were marketed as "lifestyle" gizmos, as if many people were ever going to make a relatively bulky 7-inch display tablet PC with two-hour battery life part of their lifestyle. But in a smaller form factor--say a 5-inch display, a total weight under a pound, and battery life of at least five or six hours--a MID can fit this bill. As long as it's small enough (and rugged enough) to carry around in a purse or jacket pocket, and cheap enough to be written off to the entertainment budget like a Netflix subscription or a new TV, a MID could indeed become a lifestyle product.

The Viliv S5 Entertainment MID provides full PC compatibility in a PDA-size package.

(Credit: Yukyung Technologies)

I saw a gizmo at CES that fit this definition pretty well, the Viliv S5 from Korean consumer-electronics maker Yukyung Technologies. Yukyung is one of many companies making portable video players, but its new offerings are quite distinctive.

The S5 is like a right-sized UMPC, with a 4.8-inch touch-screen display (800x480 or 1024x600 pixels, depending on model). It can play HD video, and it comes with Windows XP on a real hard disk, so there's no problem installing other software.

The S5's Intel Atom processor provides very good battery life: the company specifies six hours of movie playback. The device is about 6 x 3.3 x 1 inches in size--a lot smaller than my old Newton--and weighs less than 14 ounces.

There are also two 7-inch screen Viliv machines, the X70 slate-style tablet and the S7 convertible tablet. Both, amazingly, are still smaller than my old Newton.

Executives have always been the focus of some high-end handheld PC developers such as OQO, Sony, and Fujitsu.

Fujitsu didn't have any major updates to announce at CES for its LifeBook U820 series, though it was showing a model with case art from tokidoki, an Italian (but Japanese-inspired) lifestyle brand, and I got a chance to talk with a couple of PR people from Fujitsu about the U820 and other Fujitsu products.

The U820 is basically a complete convertible tablet PC squeezed into a 1.3-pound package: a 5.6-inch touch-screen LCD with 1,280x800-pixel resolution, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB or 120GB hard disk, Windows Vista Home Premium, and so on. It offers pretty much every kind of communication technology a person could ask for: Bluetooth, a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional AT&T wireless broadband, and even a GPS receiver.

From my perspective, the U820 is actually smaller than it needs to be, which is most apparent in the micro-sized keyboard, but it's an impressive technical accomplishment nonetheless.

For many people, the new Sony Vaio P-series (a CNET Best of CES award winner this year) may prove to be more practical, with its 87 percent-pitch keyboard and 8-inch widescreen LCD. But the Sony is beyond all but the largest pockets. Sony has made smaller machines in the past, such as the Vaio UX series, but these have been discontinued.

The OQO model 2+ brings better performance at a lower price than earlier OQO models.

(Credit: OQO, Inc.)

OQO also made a big splash at the show with its new model 2+, an unprepossessing name for a product even more technically impressive than Fujitsu's. The new OQO machine has almost all the features of the U820, but in a considerably smaller, lighter package. There are some differences; the model 2+ has a lower screen resolution (800x480) but is available with a faster CPU and more RAM. Also, the OQO is available with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that really looks fantastic, with high contrast and deep saturated colors.

The model 2+ is in the same enclosure as the older OQO model 2, hence the trivial name tweak, but there's another big difference from that older product: the 2+ has a starting price of just $999, $500 less than the starting price of the 2. And the base model of the 2+ is a much better system than the high-end model 2 configuration was.

Just as there were some ARM-based Netbooks at CES, there were also some ARM-based MIDs on display. With no clear advantages over smartphones except for display size, I don't think these products will attract customers. But that problem is CPU-specific; it doesn't apply to the more powerful x86-based products.

So okay, there's some good MID hardware out there. Unfortunately, that isn't enough. What MIDs need are lower prices, more rugged designs, and some MID-optimized software. The fact that Windows runs on these small displays doesn't mean that style of user interface is right for them. I know people at Microsoft who are working on this aspect of the problem; I hope they get the chance to bring their solutions to market, ideally in the Windows 7 time frame.

All in all, there's a lot of interesting activity in these smaller form factors. I think these tiny machines face a long uphill struggle to gain market share, but at least they have a unique and clearly defined product concept: a PC in a pocket.

I suppose most of the excitement from MacWorld Expo has died down by now, but I'd still like to talk a little about two new Mac laptops introduced at the show-- Apple's own 17" MacBook Pro, and Axiotron's Modbook Pro, a tablet computer made by repackaging the components from Apple's 15" MacBook Pro along with some new parts.

Axiotron's Modbook Pro tablet computer

(Credit: Axiotron Corp.)

First, the Axiotron product. Externally, the ModBook Pro is radically different from the Apple notebook that provides most of its component parts.

In this publicity photo, the Modbook Pro's beveled edges are apparent. The shape is functional, making it easier to hold the device in one hand while writing on it with the other. The shape also facilitates picking up the machine from a flat surface as well as flush-mounting the Modbook Pro in a rotating mount to create a modern version of the traditional animation desk.

The base unit of the Modbook Pro. Clockwise from lower right: the 2.5-inch hard disk, the battery, the motherboard (with I/O connectors at left and two fans for the CPU and GPU), and the optical drive.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Inside the Modbook Pro's base unit, the original MacBook Pro components are mounted to an aluminum baseplate. The angled side pieces, machined out of a single piece of aluminum, connect that baseplate to the display and touchscreen assembly above. The result is a very solid assembly, but one that is rather heavy. The system's target weight is 6.9 pounds, though the prototype shown here was somewhat heavier. The other benefit of this assembly method is that the Modbook Pro can take any CPU-GPU combination that can go into a MacBook Pro, unlike most Windows-based Tablet PCs, which are thinner and lighter but can't handle the fastest, hottest chips. Axiotron says the Modbook Pro is the fastest tablet computer on the market (or will be, I suppose, when it ships), and as far as I know, that's true.

The new unit is scheduled to ship by June, 2009. In the meantime, Axiotron is also selling an updated version of its original Modbook, which is made from an Apple Macbook. The custom Axiotron software on the Modbook will carry over to the Modbook Pro, including the "Synergy Touch" feature which is optional on the Modbook and will be standard on the newer system. Synergy Touch provides translucent on-screen icons that can be used to control applications while the user is simultaneously drawing with the digitizer pen. It looks like an effective enhancement to the usual tablet user interface, and better for some applications than the usual combination of keyboard plus mouse or stylus.

The Modbook Pro is aimed at professional users and is priced accordingly: $4,998 and up for turnkey systems (which includes the price of the new MacBook Pro that Axiotron must buy in order to make the machine), or $3,049 and up if you send Axiotron your own MacBook Pro to be turned into a tablet.

Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro

(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)

Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro

The other big notebook news from MacWorld Expo was Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro, joining the previously announced 15" MacBook Pro and 13" MacBook systems that I reviewed in October (see "The new MacBooks: Beauty more than skin deep" and "Hands-on with the new MacBook Pro").

The 17" model has the same type of milled aluminum unibody chassis introduced with the other systems in October. Like them, it also has a sheet-aluminum bottom cover. But that cover is also the first indicator of the big difference between the 17" MacBook Pro and its 15" sibling: there's no battery cover because the battery in the 17" model isn't removable.

Instead, Apple built in a 95 watt-hour lithium polymer battery featuring two kinds of new technology: new chemistry developed by Apple's own "team of scientists and electro-chemists" (according to the page on Apple.com about the 17" MacBook Pro battery) and a more advanced battery-charging circuit also developed by Apple.

I'm familiar with the basic principles of this technology from my time at Montalvo Systems, where I led the company's system architecture work. Most notebooks treat lithium batteries as if they contain just a single cell, even though internally they consist of multiple cells in series-parallel connections.

For example, the most common six-cell notebook battery arrangement is two parallel strings of three cells in series. This produces a battery with an effective output voltage around 10.8 volts (3.6V per cell times three cells, sometimes also marked as 11.1 volts depending on the average cell voltage) and twice the current capacity of a single string of cells.

(Incidentally, while I'm on the subject: please, all you OEMs, stop referring to the ampere-hour specification of an assembled battery. This is a meaningless figure without also knowing the number of cells and the average cell voltage. It's impossible to compare amp-hour figures directly. Just state the energy capacity in watt-hours. That number is far more useful.)

When such a battery is charged only through its outermost connections-- the ground and 10.8V points-- it's inevitable that one cell will become charged before the others in each string, and one string will be fully charged before the other. Eventually, some of the cells wear out before the others because of overcharging, and some cells aren't used to their full capacity because others discharge first.

Good manufacturers do the best they can to match the cells in each battery pack, but this only goes so far. This is why some battery packs will age much faster than others even though they have the same basic components-- their individual cells weren't as well matched.

In the new MacBook Pro, according to the figures on that battery page, the built-in battery pack is configured as four cells in series by two parallel strings. But the charging circuit can sample the voltages between each cell in the pack and adjust the charging current so that each cell is charged in the best possible way. Apple's website refers only to intelligent charging, but this optimization could in principle extend to the discharge side as well, allowing the power supply to cut out each cell as it becomes drained, avoiding the stress that goes with being pushed past that point.

Once Apple decided to go with this kind of charging circuit, it may have been persuaded to make the battery non-removable simply because the battery connector would have been huge-- as many as ten high-current contacts just for the cells (the two endpoints plus three internal nodes for each string of four cells) plus more for the usual temperature sensor.

Whatever the exact mechanism, Apple says that the combination of better chemistry and better charging technology gives the 17" MacBook Pro far better battery life-- and lifespan-- than other notebooks. Apple says that the model with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU can run up to 8 hours from a single charge. That corresponds to an average power consumption of less than 12 watts.

At Montalvo, I tested the power consumption of many commercially available notebook, and in my experience, 12 watts is a very good figure for a 17" system. My own 15" MacBook Pro--now a couple of years old--consumes significantly more power than that.

More significantly, Apple claims the battery in the 17" MacBook Pro can go through 1,000 full charge cycles before its capacity drops to 80% of the original figure. Since a charge cycle is the equivalent of a 100% discharge--such as two cycles to 50%, or four cycles to 75%--this specification suggests these built-in batteries should easily last five years for most users without a substantial reduction in the battery life per charge.

Of course, in real life, this potential may be reduced if the charger causes the battery to cycle slightly while the machine is plugged in. High temperatures can also reduce battery longevity. So we won't really know how effective Apple's technology is until users have had these systems for a while.

Apple users may be interested to know that the "System Profiler" application will actually report the remaining charge capacity of a battery on the Hardware, Power page. On my MacBook Pro, the original battery-- which I leave in the system essentially all the time-- now indicates a maximum charge capacity of 1,364 mAH at 10.8V, or 14.7 WH-- a decline of over 75% from the original rated capacity. System Profiler also reports that the battery's cycle count is just 61 cycles. That's probably about right, since this battery usually sustains the machine only in standby mode for the time it takes to get from home to work and back each day.

This is a far cry from the promise on Apple's website that "a properly maintained battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 300 full charge and discharge cycles." Perhaps that promise applies only to current systems, not my one-generation-back machine, but still, I recommend taking Apple's battery-life claims with a grain of salt.

If I were in charge of Apple's battery strategy, I would think differently. I'd fit the 17" MacBook Pro for the same removable battery found in the 15" model... and also build in a smaller battery using an entirely different battery chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate (LFP) that provides inherently longer cycle life.

An LFP battery can be charged faster than a regular lithium-polymer battery, and can have twice the cycle life when properly maintained--long enough not to be a factor in the notebook's mean time to failure.

This combination would convey the additional benefit of allowing the machine's removable battery to be swapped while it continues to operate normally, even if the user is away from an AC outlet-- a substantial advantage for business travelers. No other notebook on the market has such a feature.

The battery compartment on a 15" MacBook Pro (previous generation)

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

I'm sure there's enough room in the 17" chassis to support such a combination. It's significantly larger than the 15" model (15% more plan area, or 21 square inches), but with essentially the same internal components. Apple says that omitting the battery packaging and retaining hardware saves a lot of space, but from my own examination of the battery compartment in a scrapped MacBook Pro case assembly, I don't think that's as big an issue as Apple says.

In this photo from the "inside" of that lower case assembly with one of my auxiliary batteries installed, you can see that the MacBook Pro battery compartment and battery casing together occupy less than a quarter of an inch around most of the battery and about a half-inch on the fourth side where the power connector is located. It adds up to a reduction in plan area of about five square inches--significant but not exactly a severe loss. Even the new 17" system must have some internal protection around the battery, if only to stop foreign objects from falling in and shorting out the cells.

Other than the battery, the new 17" MacBook Pro looks very nice, just like the earlier unibody models. Plus, it's available with an optional anti-glare display. I don't know how this effect is achieved; I've used both matte-finish displays as well as CRTs with a glass-smooth face plus an anti-reflection coating. Whichever method Apple uses, it has to be better than the high-glare effect of the standard screens on the 17" and 15" MacBook Pros. I've seen these machines in various real-world conditions now, and I just couldn't live with that level of reflectivity no matter what it does for the black levels of DVD movies.

I expect I'll be in the market for a new MacBook Pro in the coming year, and at the moment, there's no doubt in my mind--it's the new 17" for me.

I learned about the new Give One, Get One program of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation the same way most people will--from a TV commercial sponsored by Amazon.com, which is handling order fulfillment for the new program through this page on Amazon's Web site.

Like last year's program, which I wrote about here before and after I bought one myself, the deal is simple: you buy two laptops for $399, and you get one. The other goes to a deserving student somewhere in the developing world. (This is why I sometimes call it the Buy 2, Get 1 program, or B2G1.)

The XO-1 laptop from the OLPC Foundation

(Credit: OLPC Foundation)

The laptops themselves are the same XO-1 models offered last year, not based on the XO-2 prototypes I wrote about here last May. I wrote about my XO-1 in some detail when it arrived, but since I never really found any good reason to use it regularly, I never got around to writing a full review.

But there is something new: version 8.2.0 of the XO software, which works just fine on last year's hardware. I installed this on my own machine last week so I could offer some personal comments here, and the short summary is, it's a significant improvement.

The new software is more reliable, more capable, and better organized. I hope to find time to give a better review of 8.2.0 here; it has some nice features that could reasonably be adopted in more mainstream Linux distributions.

With Amazon's support--especially the TV commercial, which I've seen several times during major network broadcasts, including, perhaps oddly, football games--the new G1G1 program is likely to achieve better results than last year's effort, which resulted in the sale of about 167,000 units.

Even with the new software, the XO-1 is really just a proof of concept showing that laptops can be used in an educational context. Educating young children, however--whether in the U.S. or Rwanda--isn't about learning to use a laptop but rather about learning language, math, history, and other more fundamental facts and skills. Certainly, a laptop can be used to teach these things--but that requires a lot of software that simply hasn't been written yet.

Because the OLPC project runs mostly on volunteer labor, the best way to get that software is to get a lot of systems out there, and Amazon's sponsorship of this year's G1G1 program could do more to achieve that goal than all previous efforts put together. We'll see.

Just hours after I posted my WTF report (for "where's the feature," of course) on the iPhone 3G with version 2.1 software, Apple released the 2.2 update. I figured I ought to go through my post and see if any of the things I mentioned were addressed in the update.

But the short summary is: not much has changed. The new 2.2 software, as described on Apple's main page for iPhone updates, is mostly about internal quality.

Apple describes only four areas of new features for US users: an improved Google Maps application, direct downloading of podcasts from the iTunes Store, the ability to turn off auto-correction when typing, and using the Home button to return to the first Home screen from other Home screens.

Apple's iPhone 3G

(Credit: Apple)

Only that last change addresses one of my issues. It's a bolder change than what I suggested (allowing the screens to slide around from last to first in a circular fashion), and a bigger improvement, I think. It makes the first Home screen distinctly more convenient than the others, and I suspect this new feature will influence how I distribute applications across the available screens.

That said, it would still be useful to add the wraparound scrolling feature I described. It would save time-- and more importantly, reduce the chance of accidentally opening an unwanted application-- when accessing the later screens.

I tested the other issues I reported last week, and I didn't see any changes. I haven't had time to decide if the new software is more reliable, but I've had few problems with reliability anyway. I've seen my share of browser crashes, but Safari restarts more conveniently on the iPhone than it does on my Macs, so that hasn't been a big thing for me.

I'd like to thank CNET user IgnatiusTheKing for pointing out, in a comment to my previous post, that accented characters and some special symbols can be generated by holding down keys on the virtual keyboard. This works for accentable characters (such as "e" but not "x") and a few punctuation symbols (such as ! and ? to generate the inverted versions used in written Spanish, and $ to generate international currency symbols such as the pound, yen, and euro).

But as far as I can tell, there's still no way to get proper n-dashes and m-dashes, math symbols such as ×, ÷, and π, and other useful characters.

Also, I learned that Japanese iPhone users with the 2.2 software have access to a set of "emoji" symbols-- complex emoticons popular among Japanese users. (Back in October, MacRumors.com showed some of these symbols as found in the 2.2 beta, here.)

These emoji are also present in the US 2.2 update, but can't be generated from the US English keyboard, at least not without doing some hacking. One more reason for a little more typographical flexibility, I think.

So, anyway, I think there's still a lot of room for improvement in the iPhone software, good though it already is. I'll just keep hoping someone at Apple notices these posts and makes the changes I'd like to see.

Incidentally, before installing the 2.2 update, I checked around online to see if people were having any serious problems with it-- always a good idea, I think. I found scattered reports of various problems, but I went ahead with the update since it didn't look like there were any specific widespread issues.

After the update I tested for all of the reported problems, and was unable to replicate any of them on my iPhone. Everything seems to be fine. I can't promise it'll go as smoothly for everyone else, but this seems to be a pretty safe update.