I immediately began abusing it, trying to get it to synch with multiple computers, confusing  the dynamic map, setting up email and wifi, and all the rest.  Then the app store.  Stupid app store.  I spent hours messing around, installing programs, surfing the web, gloating over my new iPhone online, and regularly having to plug it in because of the drain I was putting on the battery.

Then the craziest thing happened… it rang!

I didn't even know how to answer it at first, but puzzled it out and had a quick conversation with my mother.  Since then I've had three conversations, all with family.  My total talk time in the past week is 20 minutes.  If the phone stopped working entirely it might take me days to notice.  Other than my family (and total strangers), I interact with everyone else via non-voice methods.

I informally polled some fellow iPhone users and everyone pegged their actual phone-call use as 10% or less of the totally time spent using the iPhone.   It's because the iPhone is really a MID with a phone feature, and developers who start looking at it that way have a wide and profitable field in front of them.  Here's how I break down the apps eating my interest and battery life:

Social Media Applications - Keep me connected to my friends and coworkers.  Plug me into the existing networks out there, like Twitterific and the Hahlo web site for Twitter, and the Facebook app.  Beautiful and clean.  Give me new things to try, like Loopt and it's wacky proximity checkins.  Marginally useful right now, but pushes the boundaries and has lots of potential.  Make the Old Standards easy to use. iPhone's SMS utility is clean, colorful, and nearly threaded.  Don't neglect SMS over web browsing - it's critical.

Games - Port what you can, but get creative.  This device helps me pass the time, and there are more ways to do that than Tetris.  Super Monkey Ball is a discussion all by itself, and I'm personally miffed at the makers of Engimo for the kink in my neck and missing hours of my life resulting from that game.  There is even an MMO out which I would love to see tied in some way to phone location.  Or how about Katamari Damacy where you have to actually run around to roll up the ball?  Potential, meet endless.  Endless, this is potential.  I hope the developers push you both around.

Rapid Information Access - I don't want data, I want information.  Last week I used Yelp and it's location awareness to find a new, delicious pizza place.  I want to know what's cool and where it is.  WeatherBug doesn't have to do much because Phoenix just alternates between Hot and Hotter right now but if there IS weather nearby, I can see radar scans and live webcams. Pandora streams my already favorited music to me in my car.  Shazam is just downright creepy in its ability to identify which song is playing on the radio, TV, or in a movie.

This would be different for a business phone and my endless conference calls I'd have to enjoy, but I still think voice is becoming one of the less important applications on these devices.  It's an amazing shift, and I'm fascinated to see where it leads.

Fortunately for all the people who don't work for Intel and might want to enter, there are some new articles in the wiki from Intel engineers that you can start adding to.  For example, we've started publishing some internal information like "Connecting Wirelessly from a MID" and "Linux Profiling on MID".   More are on the way.

We're also trying something by taking some content that was planned for a PDF formatted "white paper" and putting it in the MID Wiki instead.  Now it will be easier for us to keep up to date in addition to getting input from people who find it the content helpful.  Loc Nguyen was the first to give this a try with his information on using the D-Bus message bus.  Feedback (and contributions) are welcome!

Hopefully some of this helps give you ideas on where to contribute to the MID Wiki.  And if you just don't like money, you can certainly contribute for the glory of it all!

Click to play

This week's show is only 30 minutes long and weighs about 28MB (it’s a 128kbps MP3). You can download the file directly, listen using the streaming player above, or (BEST OPTION!!1!) subscribe to the Bit Stories podcast feed in your favorite podcast aggregator (like iTunes). If you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get each show delivered automatically as it becomes available - probably once a week or so, with the occasional bonus video or audio segment thrown in for fun. Plus, we’ll love you forever if you subscribe! :-)

Here are some free form notes from today's show:

• Yet Another Audio Setup

• Embarrassing Confession: We recorded the last two shows using the built-in mic on my MacBook Pro, instead of the elaborate mixer/condenser mic that we have set up. Because I'm an idiot. The saving grace? It sounded pretty darn good! :-)
• Have developers let the Tablet PC community down?
• Brian paved and reinstalled Windows XP on his Samsung Q1 UMPC
• Why XP instead of Vista? Not quite enough horsepower.
• Josh has done the same thing (gone back and forth between XP and Vista) on his Asus R2H UMPC
• Speaking of mobile device operating systems... Moblin.org
• What the heck IS Moblin? Is it an OS?
• Moblin is a stack of tools to help create OSes and applications for Mobile Internet Devices. It's sponsored by Intel, and hosted by Intel Software Network
• Ubuntu Mobile Edition (UME) sneak peak is out there, if you have a Samsung Q1 Ultra
• Brian feels that he won't be able to use a Linux-based MID because of the lack of mature ink/handwriting input support
• It's really hard to do an ink interface well
• Will Atom-based devices ever have the horsepower to do handwriting well? Is this a hardware or a software problem?
• Do open source projects do better when there's a common, widespread demand and need for the result (like a web browser)? Do enough people in the open source community need and/or want good ink and handwriting support to motivate them to write it? Would enough people use it and care about it to make it worth their time?
• Since Mobile Internet Devices are all about the Internet, having a good browser is going to be essential.
• Windows versus Linux on these small, pocketable internet devices.
• In general, lack of UI "polish" in Linux applications is a deterrent for non-geeks to adopt it.
• Brian's "essential" applications on his Samsung Q1: Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Microsoft Money
• Is Firefox the exception to the "Linux applications don't have a good interface/user experience" stereotype?
• How easy is it going to be to "install any app you want" on the upcoming Linux MIDs?
• The challenges of adapting applications to devices on smaller screen.
• UMPCScrollBar - a great little app that lets you scroll windows around the smaller UMPC screen, so you can get to the "Install" and "OK" buttons that get pushed off the bottom of the screen.
• Intel Software Network's mobility community makes tons of resources, tools, and smart people available for people writing applications for these devices. Take advantage of us!
• Without great software, Intel products are just a bunch of really tiny hot plates. :-)
• Have we discovered the REAL reason Intel has chosen not to deploy Windows Vista? Is it because NetMeeting is no longer there? Microsoft stopped distributing NetMeeting in 1998 - TEN YEARS AGO. But Intel lives and breathes NetMeeting - old habits die hard. (Update after the show: according to Wikipedia, Microsoft released a hotfix that allows you to download and install NetMeeting on Vista. Guess we were wrong! ;-) )
• Macs do Screen Sharing, based on VNC, but there's NO way on a Mac to participate in a NetMeeting call, because it's a closed, proprietary Microsoft protocol.
• Google Docs is GREAT for live collaboration.
• PowerPoint is a great presentation tool, but it is NOT a collaboration tool! It gets abused WAY too often. PowerPoint abuse starts early - Brian's 7th grade son is already doing it!
• New recording time - Wednesday morning instead of Friday afternoon. Hope this gets the show out faster, and Josh and Brian perkier.
• Josh's morning voice - he's not a morning person. Brian gets up at 5:30 AM.
• Stuff we didn't get to this week: Brian dips his toes into the world of Twitter and FriendFeed, and next week is iPhone 3G day! Come stand in line with us!

The show is picking up steam - we're hitting our stride, and cranking them out. Many, many thanks to our listeners - we love you guys! We love connecting with people through the show, and getting to know who's listening. But the only way we can do that is if you talk to us, so leave a comment, email us, or find some other way to say "hi", and let us know what you think of the show! :-)

Imagine Intel engineers having their own blogs!!
Imagine letting you have direct conversations on our community!!
Imagine letting you have your own blog!!
Imagine publishing articles written by you!!
Oh well .. Imagine actually listening to you!!

In the past, nothing was said on the external website without going through multiple reviews including a legal review, let alone publishing something written by a external user without much scrutiny.We have changed that and we continue to break other barriers.

We really like to increase your participation on the community and make you feel that you own this community as much as we do. To build communities, we put "web 2.0" capabilities such as blogs/ videos / RSS / exciting contests, etc. on ISN. We also continue to push for transparency, giving up control, and getting you to participate on the community.

Are we successful at it? Our metrics says that we are consistently growing , and you continue to participate through your comments and discussions. But, honestly we really don't know if we are successful. And, we know for sure that we have a lot of work to do.

To help us better understand your needs, we’ve engaged OnSurvey, Inc., a third-party, independent market research firm. Our intention is to be completely transparent with this process so that you will be able to express your thoughts/opinions freely. We will also be reporting back to you on our findings later this summer.

OnSurvey will be conducting 2 online virtual focus groups in a few weeks. They will be tentatively held on Wednesday, July 30 (7 to 8 p.m. EST) and Wednesday, August 6 (7 to 8 p.m.).

As a token of our appreciation, each participant will receive a $75 gift certificate from Amazon.com. We will be selecting the focused participants based on the comments on this blog post answering ANY ONE of the following questions:

1. Why do you visit ISN? What ISN features you like/dislike?
2. Do you feel your voice is being heard by Intel? Yes/No & How/Why?
3. What other online communities you are actively participating in and why?

OnSurvey will be contacting individuals later in July with details. Space is limited so I encourage you to volunteer by leaving a comment on this post as soon as possible. Thank you and appreciate your continued participation on ISN.

We launched the wiki last month as part of the Atom Software Developer Community, and we've identified a fair amount of internal Intel content for the wiki, but we do not want it to end up being an Intel only repository.  We aren't just hoping for people to get involved, we think it is absolutely essential for the wiki to be a success.  This is a big shift in our approach so far, so thought some incentives might get things moving.

Each week we're offering a $100 US to a random contribution (real content, not just changing punctuation!)  So the more content you add, the more chances you have to win. Of course, no fair taking content inappropriately from other sources, and make sure you read the full rules because you need to sign up for the contest in addition to making the wiki edits. Content is not limited to Intel related MIDs, and we've love contributions on Google Android, Apple's iPhone SDK, and other players in the industry.

So get in there and get involved, and if you have suggestions on other content you would like to see in the wiki let us know!

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren't fully 64-bit capable?). I'll leave all that to the people who know what they're talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, our group Intel Software Network, Intel's developer community, have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a "netbook", like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple's throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you'd be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they're still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won't get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there's the new "Grand Central" technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I'm sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It's the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can't wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don't name any one company's products or technologies, but it's well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support "GPGPU" - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it's because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they'll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that's it for today's dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I'll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I've seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can't wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I'd love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment! :-)

(Crossposted from my blog, TinyScreenfuls.com.)

As a token of our appreciation each accepted content contribution will receive a $25 gift card and your photo posted on the Intel Software Network home page.

Guidelines for submission :

• Content should be related to Intel technologies like Mobility, Multi Core, Graphics, Virtualization, see complete list here http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/3822.htm
• Intel Software Network is the final judge on which submissions are accepted to be published
• Gift card offer valid only to submission addresses in the United States and Canada

Send an email to arti.gupta@intel.com with the following details

• Your full name
• Email Address
• Article topic
• Content you wish to share or any questions you might have

I look forward to reading content from our community members!

This is more groundwork, like the launch of the MID Wiki a few weeks ago, and the community will continue to grow as we add more internal content and get feedback from you.  If there is something you would like to see from Intel around Atom or MID development, leave a comment after this post.

Mobility technology provided by Intel & its partners such as Lenovo makes the rest of the world a step closer to the Everest. At the 5200M base camp, the world's highest Internet Café is serving & hosting the journalists from around the world, including CNN & Reuters. In this tough environment, there are 10+ Thinkpad T61 notebook powered by Intel, connected through wireless and reach out to the world. The latest Intel Atom based Ideapad U8 Olympics edition which is the first MID product from Lenovo provides convenient connectivity to the digital camera and help the press folks send the picture home with a few clicks. From base camp & up, you can spot a lot of notebooks powered by Intel mobility technology, providing the access to the internet for personal blog or heavy duty work such as editing the HDV video footage using software Non Linear Editing system and photo retouching & send information back home.

How mobile can you be? It is up to you. But guess what, there is a Lenovo X300 notebook that is up at the top of the Everest, which is a place thinner than air. Now it has been safely back to the 6500M camp with his owner and working happily there. How high can your mobile go?

Photo Courtesy of Xinhua News Agency.

Photo Courtesy of CNet - ZOL China

Fundamentally, it's all about how open your project really is. I thought the days of saying your product was "open" when you published the APIs developers could use was over but based on the panel discussion, I was clearly mistaken.

To me, openness is about doing your development in a manner that allows people who are interested and capable to contribute. Clearly, you don't want to give world write access to your source code repositories but you do want people who have proven their ability to contribute positively to do so during the course of the development process. And this is one of the things that differentiates the projects under Moblin.org from some of the others that are trying to create a mobile Linux stack.

There is more that we plan to do in the Moblin project to make it easier for developers to contribute, but for now I think the approach we are taking is being well received by the community.

If you are a developer interested in creating software for MIDs and other devices but you haven't looked at the Moblin.org project yet, I strongly recommend you do so. Go to http://www.moblin.org and check it out. There is a lot of good stuff there with more coming all the time. We appreciate your input and feedback - please sign up for the Moblin developer mailing list at http://moblin.org/community/community_mail-list.php

Thanks,
Derek