I’ve been think­ing a lot about legal mat­ters recently. Now that Pres­i­dent Obama (that does sound nice, doesn’t it?) is in office, sworn in (twice, for good mea­sure) and issu­ing all kinds of exec­u­tive orders and pol­icy state­ments (whither K street? or more appro­pri­ately, wither, K street), every­one is com­ing around to the same question.

Will he seek pros­e­cu­tions of Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials (includ­ing, pos­si­bly, Dubya and Cheney) for war crimes?

We’re get­ting more rev­e­la­tions by the day, now that the old gang is out of power and less capa­ble of ret­ri­bu­tion. We’ve learned that the NSA was spy­ing on all Amer­i­can con­ver­sa­tions, all 300 mil­lion of us, on our phones, text mes­sages, email and every­thing else. The NSA was lis­ten­ing to every­thing, and flag­ging what they thought mer­ited closer exam­i­na­tion. We’ve heard Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials admit to using the “T” word, tor­ture. And even as Obama has ordered the shut­down of Guan­tanamo, we’ve all had to con­front what went on there and why so many of the detainees can’t be tried under Amer­i­can law because any evi­dence against them is inad­mis­si­ble. Attor­ney Gen­eral nom­i­nee Eric Holder said defin­i­tively in his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing that water­board­ing was tor­ture, and now Repub­li­can sen­a­tors are delay­ing the nom­i­na­tion hop­ing to get assur­ances that he didn’t really mean it, or at least won’t pros­e­cute Bush and Cheney, who have admit­ted order­ing torture.

And yet, Obama seems very care­ful to reas­sure Repub­li­cans that no one is com­ing after them. He wants to put the recrim­i­na­tions of the past behind him and move for­ward lead­ing a united Amer­i­can peo­ple. It’s a noble thought, and one I hap­pen to share with him. I’m will­ing, per­son­ally, to let the trans­gres­sions of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion go if it means heal­ing the nation and mov­ing for­ward. But is it possible?

There’s a very real chance that Obama and Holder will not have a choice. In some inter­pre­ta­tions of the law, now that Cheney has admit­ted order­ing and autho­riz­ing these tac­tics in pub­lic, Holder may be required by law to charge him. We are also bound by treaties to charge and try war crim­i­nals. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion was all too ready to ignore laws they found incon­ve­nient, but the new admin­is­tra­tion is sup­posed to be about chang­ing things, right?

Obama may find him­self in a catch-​22 even he can’t think of a way out of. He wants to unite the coun­try and end the par­ti­san divi­sive­ness that has defined Amer­i­can pol­i­tics for the last three decades. And if he charges the for­mer pres­i­dent and vice-​president (along with their sec­re­tary of state, two or three attor­neys gen­eral and a for­mer sec­re­tary of defense) with war crimes and brings them to trial, he loses all hope of ever get­ting Repub­li­cans to work with him on any­thing. It would be more polar­iz­ing than any­thing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion did. And yet, if he’s required by law to do so and chooses to ignore this legal respon­si­bil­ity, how has he changed any­thing at all?

Palm has trou­ble, right here in River City. Apple’s COO and interim CEO said on their recent earn­ings call that they would aggres­sively defend their intel­lec­tual prop­erty. He didn’t call out the Palm Pre by name, but the sub­text was there.

Palm needs to be ready for this. Apple files for every patent they can think of, and they believe they have defend­able patents on mul­ti­touch and using a prox­im­ity sen­sor on a smart­phone to turn off the screen (which is why you don’t see that fea­ture on HTC devices). Apple also has lots of land sharks, I mean lawyers, and a lot more cash than Palm to han­dle legal fees.

I know Ruben­stein saw this com­ing, he’s too smart to have missed it and he knows well how his old com­pany oper­ates. So he imple­mented those two fea­tures on the Pre know­ing Apple would come after him. Why? What does he know that we don’t?

My hosted Exchange provider started act­ing weird again recently, and I decided I’d had enough. At the same time, the new Live Mesh client that was sup­posed to improve com­pat­i­bil­ity with Win­dows 7 started caus­ing my net­book to freeze up (solid, no mov­ing the mouse pointer even) about five min­utes after boot­ing up. Now while the ratio­nal thing might be to switch to a dif­fer­ent Exchange provider, I decided to shake up my whole com­put­ing ecosys­tem and see what was involved in liv­ing La Vida Google.

Exchange email to Gmail

This was prob­a­bly the eas­i­est tran­si­tion to make, because of the way I was using my email in the first place. When some­one sends me an email to jeff@jeffkirvin.net, it goes first to my domain host, then redi­rects to Gmail, then gets aut­o­for­warded to my Exchange provider. So all I had to do was turn off that for­ward­ing, and start using Gmail as my mail client instead of Out­look. Frankly, this has worked out bet­ter than I expected on my net­book, since I don’t have the over­head of run­ning Out­look to deal with any­more. A lot less ran­dom (The pro­gram is not respond­ing) mes­sages in title­bars now.

It was a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to make the switch from Exchange to Gmail as the email client on my phone. Win­dows Mobile is, obvi­ously, designed to work with Exchange. Set­ting it up for any­thing else is a lot less auto­matic. I opted to go with Google’s IMAP option rather than POP, which meant I wasn’t able to use Microsoft’s auto­mated setup (which defaults to POP). I went with IMAP for two rea­sons. One, it syn­chro­nizes with other mail clients should I decide later I’d rather use some­thing like Win­dows Live Mail or Mozilla Thun­der­bird on my Win­dows 7 machines instead of Gmail’s web inter­face, and two, it sup­ports sub­fold­ers for labeled items, par­tic­u­larly starred items. I went through the man­ual IMAP setup instructed pro­vided by Google, and have email sync­ing to my Touch Pro with­out a hitch. It’s not push, like my Exchange email was (Google doesn’t fully sup­port the IMAP IDLE pro­to­col), but I’m okay with pulling new mes­sages every 15 min­utes. In fact, I might even change that to 30 or even 60 min­utes to reduce dis­trac­tions. If some­one needs to con­tact me quickly, there’s always SMS, Twit­ter, or an actual phone call.

Exchange cal­en­dar to Google Calendar

This was a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. First I recre­ated every recur­ring appoint­ment I had in Exchange in Google Cal­en­dar. I could have exported from Out­look to .csv and then imported into Google Cal­en­dar, but I have only a dozen or so recur­ring appoint­ments and very few one-​off appoint­ments, so it was prob­a­bly faster to just recre­ate them, espe­cially given how easy it is to cre­ate new appoint­ments in Google Cal­en­dar. That took care of the desk­top easy enough, but mobile is a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. For that, I had to down­load Goosync. A one year sub­scrip­tion is about $30, or you could go for $60 for a life­time sub­scrip­tion. This is way less than I was pay­ing for hosted Exchange, so it seemed like a no-​brainer. I down­loaded and installed the Goosync Win­dows Mobile client and set it to sync my cal­en­dar and con­tacts. It runs in the back­ground and syncs every half hour, which seems to work okay. Appoint­ments on the device retain full fidelity includ­ing repeat set­tings and alarms.

Exchange con­tacts to Gmail

I solved this the same way I solved the cal­en­dar issue, with Goosync. The one prob­lem I had was that I need to re-​add my con­tact pho­tos and weed out dozens of incom­plete con­tact records Google saved for me auto­mat­i­cally that I really don’t want. Once they’re set up, though, they work well enough in Win­dows Mobile for email, SMS and dialing.

Exchange tasks to Remem­ber The Milk

Gmail sup­ports tasks now, but the fea­ture is still in its infancy, and I can’t find any good way to sync them to other devices. So instead, I went with the most pop­u­lar of online task lists, Remem­ber The Milk. This has great inte­gra­tion with other ser­vices like Gmail, iGoogle, Twit­ter and SMS. I could use their MilkSync appli­ca­tion to sync tasks from the web inter­face directly to Win­dows Mobile’s Tasks appli­ca­tion, but since Tasks is gen­er­ally ignored by Touch­Flo 3D on my Touch Pro, it’s just as easy for me to man­age my tasks on the device in Opera through RTM’s mobile inter­face as it would be to keep them in the Tasks appli­ca­tion and dig that up every time.

Live Mesh to Google Docs

Don’t get me wrong, I love the con­cept behind Life Mesh, and it’s still tech­ni­cally a tech­nol­ogy pre­view, not even a beta. I’m sure the issues I’ve been hav­ing with it recently will be ironed out, espe­cially now that Mesh has been moved under Steve Sinofsky’s Win­dows divi­sion (which is on track for their best release ever in Win­dows 7). But for now, it’s just not sta­ble enough and requires way too much CPU, espe­cially on my Win­dows Mobile phone and my net­book. So instead, I’ve uploaded my cur­rent projects to Google Docs. This works well enough on my net­book and desk­top, though I can’t do much offline because Google Gears doesn’t sup­port Fire­fox 3.1b2 yet. It also means I can view, but not edit on my phone because Google Docs doesn’t sup­port that through their web inter­face. I’m still try­ing to come up with a way around this, but all I’ve come up with so far is sav­ing doc­u­ments from Google Docs to my desk­top, then using my phone’s drive mode to copy them to the phone, then reverse the process when I need to get the doc­u­ment from the phone back into Google Docs. Usu­ally this won’t be worth the trou­ble. I might just write new mate­r­ial in an email addressed to my Google Docs address and then copy and paste it where it should be the next time I’m online. Still not ideal, but it should work for the rare times I have to write some­thing on the phone. Writ­ing on the phone itself isn’t as big a deal for me as it used to be now that I carry my net­book every­where I go.

iGoogle or Gmail Labs?

On my phone, I’m access­ing my data pretty much the same way I always have, other than the afore­men­tioned dif­fer­ence with tasks. (Hey, Lla­m­a­graph­ics, any chance of a web-​based LifeBal­ance? You could knock RTM right off the map!) On my Win­dows 7 machines, though, I have more choices. I could keep using Out­look (right!), but even if I opt to go with the web inter­face, it’s still not cut and dried. I could use Gmail for every­thing, or I could use iGoogle, Google’s wid­get dri­ven home­page. Gmail labs offers the abil­ity to insert small side mod­ules for Cal­en­dar, Docs and RTM to the right and left of the mes­sage list, which has every­thing on one page, but pretty tiny, espe­cially on my net­book. It is nicely arranged, though. With iGoogle, I can spread stuff out over mul­ti­ple tabs, change the lay­out at will, and add in other stuff that I can’t do in Gmail. (Also, Gmail is blocked by con­tent fil­ters at the office, but Google isn’t.) I have three tabs set up in iGoogle. Orga­nizer con­tains Gmail, Google Cal­en­dar, Remem­ber The Milk and Weather. Media con­tains Google Docs, Google Reader for my RSS feeds and Google News. Social con­tains wid­gets for Twit­ter, Google Talk (my IM of choice), Face­book and MySpace. If I open these up in sep­a­rate tabs in Fire­fox, that’s pretty much every­thing I need for my daily use.

A method to my madness

And last, an ulte­rior motive. Part of the rea­son I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to tran­si­tion off Exchange to some­thing a lit­tle more open is to make it eas­ier to move to a Palm Pre when they go on sale in March (yes, I’m stand­ing by that pre­dic­tion), or to an Android-​based vari­ant of the Touch HD. I’m still happy with Win­dows Mobile today, and with a lit­tle third party help and some choice reg­istry tweaks it can be as slick and mod­ern as any other mobile OS (more on that to come), but I’ll state pub­licly that I’m not sure they can over­come the pub­lic per­cep­tion that they’re “old and busted” before such rumor fes­ters into fact. For­tu­nately, cloud com­put­ing offers choices enough to build your own solutions.

It’s about time some­thing went Palm’s way. And now, sud­denly, every­thing seems to be going Palm’s way. They blew every­one away at CES, are get­ting tons of pos­i­tive press in the national media, and now, their biggest rival in the mobile space looks primed to falter.

I don’t think any­one at Palm was root­ing for Jobs to step down for health rea­sons, but the sit­u­a­tion is what it is. Cur­rently the mobile mar­ket is Apple’s to lose, but their hold is a lot more ten­u­ous than it ini­tially appears. No one has a lock on the still grow­ing mobile mar­ket, no one has estab­lished numer­i­cal dom­i­nance, and Apple’s early lead in a field that has only just recently pen­e­trated the con­scious­ness of “nor­mal” con­sumers could eas­ily repeat their early lead in per­sonal com­put­ing, and we see how that turned out.

And now, Apple is los­ing their rud­der. Steve Jobs, the “tyrant with excep­tional taste” that has dri­ven Apple in all their suc­cess­ful years, is tak­ing an indef­i­nite leave of absence from the com­pany. He says he’ll be back by sum­mer, but given how much he’s pub­li­cally under­es­ti­mated his health prob­lems already, many ana­lysts think this is really the end of the Jobs era and he won’t be com­ing back, ever. As 2009 wears on, Tim Cook will offi­cially lead the com­pany he’s been de facto lead­ing for a while now.

But there will be a dif­fer­ence. Cook may have kept the trains run­ning on time, but Jobs was the vision­ary. Jobs was the cre­ative force behind Apple’s big moves. With­out him, Apple will have a ten­dency to coast, to con­tinue doing what they know already works and stop inno­vat­ing. (It’s worth not­ing that the inter­nal force at Apple really respon­si­ble for two of their big Jobs 2.0 inno­va­tions, the first iMac and the iPod, is Palm’s Jon Rubenstein.)

So Palm may have an oppor­tu­nity here to swipe smart­phone dom­i­nance out from under a sleep­ing Apple. If the Pre really is every­thing peo­ple like about the iPhone and fixes every­thing peo­ple don’t like about the iPhone, Palm really could have the tri­fecta of industry-​defining devices (Pilot, Treo, Pre) and take the lead as the com­pany every­one else wants to beat. Before CES, I wouldn’t have bet that Palm could exe­cute well enough to take advan­tage of that oppor­tu­nity, but now I’m not so sure. Ed Colligan’s expe­ri­ence with mobile and the cell phone mar­ket com­bined with Jon Rubenstein’s knack for inno­va­tion and design are prov­ing a tough com­bi­na­tion to beat.

Don’t get too excited about the Palm Pre, folks. Palm them­selves is going to kill it the same way they they killed the Foleo, which could have been the standard-​bearer net­book: by fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stand­ing the mobile mar­ket. When they should have unveiled a slick and easy Linux-​based net­book, Palm insisted on tying it to a Treo and crip­pling that the device could do on its own. They were right in that small, cheap lap­tops would be the next Big Thing in com­put­ing, but insisted that they knew bet­ter than their cus­tomers what their cus­tomers wanted. And with­out a Job­sian Dis­tor­tion Field (JDF) you really can’t pull that off.

And with the Pre, they’re doing it again. Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan made a telling com­ment at yesterday’s CES pre­sen­ta­tion to All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka:

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmen­tioned dur­ing the demo. My assump­tion is that Palm (PALM) would try to take mar­ket share by com­ing in sig­nif­i­cantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that the­ory by Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter prod­uct,” he asked, then walked away.

Again, Ed fun­da­men­tally doesn’t get it. The iPhone 3G’s release at $199 changed every­thing we knew about smart­phone pric­ing. I’ll be dol­lars to donuts Palm is expect­ing to get $299 for the Pre with a new 2 year Sprint con­tract. At that price, they’ll be a niche player at best and fade away before 2010. I’m skep­ti­cal of Palm’s asser­tion that they can go it alone with­out a sup­port­ing ecosys­tem by tying into every­one else’s ecosys­tems, unit­ing dis­parate sources of mobile data. But if they plan to do it at a 50% price pre­mium in these trou­bled eco­nomic times (drink) over the com­pet­ing iPhone for AT&T, Black­berry Bold or Storm on Ver­i­zon and G1 on T-​Mobile, they’re rid­ing the Fail Whale.

Don’t get me wrong. Palm’s keynote at CES was impres­sive (I wasn’t there, but thanks to live­blog­ging from gdgt, Tre­o­Cen­tral and cnet, I feel like I was). Palm’s webOS plat­form and Pre smart­phone take the best of the iPhone and Google Android, mix them together and fix all their flaws. It’s an excel­lent smartphone.

And a year ago, maybe even six months ago, that might have mattered.

The mobile mar­ket is crowded and get­ting more crowded. The line between smart­phones and fea­ture phones is blur­rier than ever, and might be erad­i­cated entirely if Android ful­fills its promise to become the dom­i­nant “fea­ture phone” OS. Here in the US, the bat­tle lines are drawn, with each major car­rier hav­ing a pre­ferred smart plat­form. Ver­i­zon has Black­berry, T-​Mobile has Android, AT&T has the iPhone, and now Sprint has the Pre. And even there, Palm is snatch­ing defeat from the jaws of vic­tory, hitch­ing their wagon to a car­rier that is best known in the last few years for hem­or­rhag­ing cus­tomers and money alike. The Pre doesn’t even sup­port Wimax.

See, here’s the prob­lem. The Pre doesn’t fit. It’s a great smart­phone, but that’s not enough any­more. You have to plug into a whole ecosys­tem to make it work. Palm’s intent is for the Pre (which comes with Exchange OTA sync out of the box) to plug into any­thing, and it might work, but it’s a longshot.

I’ll be stick­ing with Win­dows Mobile for my smart­phone needs at least for another year or so. Because I use Microsoft Office on my other PCs, sync my files with Live Mesh, man­age my media with Win­dows Media Player, email with Exchange, man­age my pho­tos with Live Pho­tos, etc. I use a Microsoft smart­phone because I’ve already bought in to Microsoft ser­vices. And ser­vices are com­ing to drive device selec­tion, not the other way around. And Palm, as cool as their new plat­form is, doesn’t sup­ply services.

Maybe this is where their part­ner announce­ments will pay off. Face­book fea­tured promi­nently in their keynote, as did Google. But can some­one other than Google make a bet­ter Android than Android? I wouldn’t put money on it. Palm’s last fight will be a good one, they’ll go down swing­ing, but the end­ing is not in doubt.