Take a moment today and thank your IT people, because it’s a thankless job. The ideal of an IT Support person is to be invisible. If you never notice them because nothing ever goes wrong with the computers at your office, they are doing their jobs perfectly.

But, of course, that rarely happens.

Disclosure: I work in IT, and have, off and on, for two decades. We don’t get accolades. Even at our best, we’re a cost center, not a profit center. We bring no new money into the company. Our job is to make sure you don’t have to spend any more than you have to in order to remain competitive. It’s a game of attrition.

And when things do go bad, no one cheers us on for the work we’re doing. If a problem drags out over hours, even days, the users typically don’t think, “wow, that must be a tough problem, or they’d have it fixed by now.” Instead, they’re more likely to think, “those stupid geeks can’t do anything right!”

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t like having the CFO breathing down my neck, fretting over the money we’re losing while some crucial system is down. If I could get it fixed any faster, I would. We’re doing the best we can, and we know you can’t do your job until we finish ours. Reminding us of that every five minutes only slows us down further.

But here’s the catch of working IT Support. Even if you’re amazing at your job and you do keep the trains running on time, it’s not enough. Then they wonder why they’re paying you so much, when they never see you do anything. Couldn’t they just replace you with someone off the street for half as much?

So keep in mind that your IT Support folks work their asses off every day just to remain invisible. Thank them for their efforts and tell them how much you appreciate it. Trust me, they never hear it.

My friend James Kendrick recent wrote about the Android Fiddling Ratio, the ratio of the time spent configuring/tinkering with an Android device versus the time spent using it. This has been a problem for me dating back to my Palm days (remember HackMaster?). Android and Windows Mobile are the worst for fiddling, but Palm OS and iOS certainly weren’t exempt (especially after jailbrraking the latter).

Last week I decided to try a different tack. A new leak of Gingerbread (Android 2.3) specifically for my Samsung Captivate landed on XDA-devs. I figured this was my best chance to return to running a “stock” ROM without all the fiddly bits without giving up the performance and data tethering I’d grown used to with Gingerbread.

That lasted a weekend, and only that long because I was still setting up my new apartment. I installed the beta of Cognition 5 by DesignGears this morning, which is based on the leaked stock Gingerbread I was running, but tweaked to avoid certain annoyances. A second beta is due out soon (edit: it’s out, and requires me to wipe and reinstall all my apps), which should support ClockworkMod Recovery, allowing me to flash further updates over the air rather than through my PC.

I need to break this habit. I have a LOT of fiction to write, and tinkering with technology is taking up time I really don’t have. How do you stay focused and control your technology, rather than the other way around?

I have probably tried every Android “home” app available. Touchwiz (which comes with my Samsung phone by default), the Froyo and Gingerbread AOSP launchers, LauncherPro, ADW.Launcher, Go Launcher, Zeam, the list goes on and on. These apps are generally considered the UI of Android, the desktop interface from which you launch apps and interact with various widgets.

I’ve had a serious Goldilocks problem with Android launchers. In a way, I think the choice itself is the problem. In iOS, you have Springboard. That’s it. You take what Apple gives you and you like it. Even if you jailbreak, all you can do is dress it up. But on Android, every launcher app does things a little differently. Touchwiz and Go Launcher try to mimic iOS’s Springboard. LauncherPro and ADW stick with the “stock” Android launcher paradigm, but try to add features or flexibility. Zeam just tries to be as small and fast as possible. All of them have something I like, but they all have something I don’t. And ultimately, I gave up trying to find the ideal and stuck with the Gingerbread-themed Froyo launcher that came with with Serendipity, the custom ROM I use on my Samsung Captivate. Nothing really stood out.

Until now.

I knew SPB well from their work on Windows Mobile. They were almost single-handedly responsible for making Windows Mobile at least look like a modern smartphone OS (well, until HTC started doing their own thing).  Now they’ve taken SPB Mobile Shell from Windows Mobile and reinvented it for Android, and in the process they’ve come up with an Android launcher that really stands out.

Carousel

The first thing you’ll notice is a little slide bug in the center of the dock. Slide this back and forth, and the screen drops away to a carousel view. You can spin the screens around as fast or slow as you need, and pick the right one out of the group. You can swipe from screen to screen like every other launcher out there, but I find this use of 3D (hence the name of the app) actually helps me find the panel I’m looking for quicker. The animation is fast and fluid, and the spin slows down with the natural, organic feel you would expect from Apple.

Panels

If you tap on the little three-panel icon in the lower right of the carousel view, you get the editing screen shown above. While this is completely intuitive in use, the screenshot looks little confusing. The carousel pulls back, so you’re now looking slightly down at it rather than directly at it. Think the difference in perspective between an MMO like World of Warcraft and a first person shooter like Quake, respectively. In front of you between you and the carousel, you see several available but unused panels lying “flat” relative to the carousel. You can pull panels down from the carousel and put them in the stack, or pick up panels from the stack and insert them into the carousel. Like I said, it’s quick and intuitive in use, and the screenshot really doesn’t do the UI justice.

The panels available range from ad hoc things you build yourself to dedicated purpose panels that you might think of as full screen widgets. The included panels include time, calendar, SMS, weather, travel, images and more. These all show SPB’s usual polish and attention to detail. I particularly liked the weather panel, complete with animated current conditions, although in the beta I used for this review, I couldn’t get the weather to update reliably. I hope they get that ironed out for the release, because it’s really neat.

Widgets

You also have individual widgets supplied by SPB if you don’t want to take up a whole panel for your calendar, say. What I really like about these is that they are all multi-state, and you can change them in size to fit the layout you have in mind. The time widget can be a 2x1 condensed clock, showing your next alarm, the time and small date, or a 4x1 clock showing the same but with longer, more descriptive date and time formats, or a 2x2 analog clock. When the screen is in edit mode (which you enter by tapping and holding an icon, just like every other launcher out there) SPB widgets have a white arrow in a green circle in their upper right corner, as seen above. Touch that arrow to switch modes.

Also note the black bar at the bottom of the above screenshot. This is the tray, where you can hold items, apps, shortcuts and widgets, if they overflow while you’re moving stuff around. SPB Shell 3D automatically reflows each panel’s contents for you, and this means you never have a “no more space on this home screen” error. It also means you don’t have to tediously try to drag something from screen to screen to screen if you need to move it somewhere else. You can drop it in the tray, swipe over to where you’re going, and drop it where it belongs from the tray.

In the lower right of the above shot, you see the standard grid icon for the app drawer. This is pretty standard stuff, smooth scrolling against a black background, but they managed to put in a nifty feature even here. When you’re in edit mode, you’ll see a little house icon over each app in the drawer that is also on the home screen. This is a great way to see at a glance what apps you have out on your panels and which apps you won’t see unless you look in the drawer. Personally, I prefer to have just about everything on the home screen, so the only apps in my drawer that don’t have little house icons are those that I launch by widget instead (BeyondPod, Rdio, etc.).

Folders

This is SPB Shell 3D’s best feature, IMO. The stock launcher has had folders for some time, and even iOS finally gave up and admitted they were necessary. But there’s a problem with home screen folders. Once you put something in them, even if the folder icon shows you tiny thumbnails of the icons, you rarely go back to that app. Folders are where apps go to be forgotten.

But SPB Shell 3D has a different approach. Yes, you can have folders that are just 1x1 thumbnails of the apps inside, but like Shell 3D’s widgets, folders can also be multiple sizes. As you can see in the screenshots above, in addition to the thumbnail grid, home screen folders can contain 3–7 full size icons that are just as tappable as anything else on the home screen. This gives you the best of both worlds. A labeled container to hold related apps, but you can still get to those apps without the extra step of opening the folder. Of course, you can open the folder and see all the apps contained therein at their full sizes, if you need to. But I find that even with big groups of apps like Utilities, there are rarely more than 7 I need quick access to. Maybe I’m OCD — okay, definitely — but I really like having my home screen apps “penned in” with like apps in neat little groupings.

Speed

The last really cool feature I don’t have any screenshots for. You’ll just have to see it for yourself. Given all this eye candy, you’d think SPB Shell 3D would be slower than the competition. But the folks over at SPB have optimized this down to every line of code, and it runs not only faster than “full service” launchers like LauncherPro and ADW, but it runs faster than the stock launcher in my testing. Everything is quick, taps are responsive, and animations are smooth. It doesn’t feel like it weighs down my phone at all. And as far as launcher replacements go, that’s really saying something.

Downsides

While it’s fast and pretty, that all comes at a price. Battery life. I noticed my battery draining noticeably faster with SPB Shell 3D than with the stock launcher. The drain isn’t dramatic or crippling, but it could be a factor if you’re just barely getting by with battery life as it is. I still get through a full day with my Captivate, but the battery is almost completely dead by the end of the day rather than around 30%.

With the caveat that my test copy is a beta, I also found a few issues with crashing. Sometimes things would just stop responding, and I’d need to reboot, or I’d get weird feature lockups like the weather panel refusing to update. I’m sure these are normal development bugs and will be fixed in the release version.

It’s also a little pricey compared to the competition, selling for $14.95. This is really expensive by Android app standards, three times the price of LauncherPro. Is it worth it? I think so, but your mileage may vary.

Conclusions

SPB Shell 3D is my new default launcher. It makes my Android phone more capable, and more fun to use. It’s a little pricey, but well worth it if you use your Android device heavily. SPB Shell 3D is available now on the Android Market.

Amazon dropped another bomb this morning, right on both Apple and Google. For a while know, Amazon has been quietly building something. Something involving Android. A tablet? Maybe, but we don’t know yet. I think Bezos has his sights set a little higher. He’s not building yet another Android tablet. At least not yet. What he’s building is iTunes for Android.

One of the things that makes the iPhone and other iOS devices so compelling is their end-to-end integration with Apple, mostly through iTunes. If you have an iOS device, you have one place to go to get apps, music, movies and books. Apple has you covered and it’s all easy to deal with if you’re already used to buying music on iTunes and syncing your iPod.

Until now, Android didn’t really have that. Google offers some stuff, but it’s fragmented and doesn’t all work together. Google Books is still pretty much a beta, and currently Google doesn’t have a music service, though they are rumored to be working on one.

But now thanks to Amazon, anyone with an Android phone has a music store, a book store and an app store. They can also store whatever else they like (documents, movies) in Amazon’s Cloud Storage, and download those to anywhere. And all of this comes with Amazon’s famous commitment to customer satisfaction. For media, they’ve not only beaten Google to the punch, they’ve pretty much edged them out of the picture. I doubt Amazon will launch their own email and organizer service like Google Apps or MobileMe. They don’t have to. They can let Google continue to provide the free stuff, while they set up to take all the money.

Apple was smart with how they rolled out their mobile devices. They already had music and movies available when they released the iPhone. They already had apps available when they rolled out the iPad. Is Amazon doing the same thing, creating the demand before they release their Android tablet, their answer to the Nook Color?

Maybe, but don’t hold your breath. If Jeff Bezos really wants to knock people’s socks off and take a ridiculous lead in this market, he needs to wait. Others have noticed that the price of a new Kindle is dropping linearly, intersecting with $0 this fall. A lot of people have guessed this might be something else they add to Amazon Prime, as they recently did with video streaming. Pay $80/year, and you get free second day shipping, free video streaming, and a free Kindle. But what if that free Kindle, wasn’t the Kindle 3, but rather a 7″ Android tablet preloaded with the Kindle app and Amazon’s Android Appstore?

I keep seeing news articles about Amanda Hocking, and they’re all careful to point out that her experience isn’t representative of indie publishing in general. Even Hocking herself doesn’t understand why writers she believes to be better than her don’t sell as well. A lot of it comes down to luck.

I’m getting a chance to look at the indie publishing experience through a different set of eyes, and I’m coming to realize it takes an unusual collection of skills, as well. My friend Rachel is gearing up to publish several of her short stories and her first novel on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu, etc. Let me get this out of the way. Rachel is a superwoman. She’s a better writer than me, she is good at just about everything she does and she and her husband have resumes that make you think they’re genetic mutants, superspies, or both. But Rachel doesn’t know much about indie publishing yet (she’ll be an expert soon, I bet), and by watching what she’s going through, it’s showing me why I think this indie thing is so easy. It isn’t. It just looks that way to me because of an accidental education.

Here’s some of what you need to know, besides the actual writing, to do well at indie publishing.

Editing

On the editing thing, I know what I don’t know and have hired an excellent editor whose opinions I trust to help me out with that aspect. But it took me a long time as a writer to realize what people meant when they said I “needed an editor.”

The real value of a professional editor, freelance or otherwise, isn’t in finding typos and subject/verb agreement. That’s a copyeditor, and while you need one of those too, and sometimes they’ll be the same person as your content editor, that’s not what a content editor does. Your editor is there to sanity check your choices as a writer and make sure the story is as good as you can make it. The telling of the story is important, but if the story itself has giant holes or inconsistencies, it doesn’t matter how beautifully it might be told.

Kathleen provides this for me. She checks to see if the story really makes sense, if this character would really do that, and points out where I really need to rethink that three page monologue (hint: anywhere you have one). She’s not changing the story, or putting her stamp on it. She’s helping me make it what I wanted it to be in the first place.

This is extraordinarily difficult to do by yourself. You’re too close to the story to really question the fundamental choices you made when you wrote it. That’s why if you’re going indie, it’s a worthwhile investment to find an editor you can trust and pay them what they’re worth.

Graphic design

Like it or not, people do just a book by its cover, especially online. Your cover is the first thing, along with the title, that a potential reader sees, and how it looks tells them a lot about you as a professional. If the cover looks attractive, with solid design, good typography and imagery, that tells them that they can probably expect that same attention to detail in the text. An weak cover, something that looks slapped together in five minutes in MS Paint, can drive readers right past your book. Remember, this isn’t the old days when people took what they could get. Entertainment in the 21st century is a marketplace of abundance, and you’re not only competing against both the other indie authors and the big NY publishers, but you’re also competing for your readers’ time with Call of Duty, Netflix, Angry Birds and who knows what else.

Here I really lucked out. Not only do I have a background in graphic arts myself, but my editor Kathleen designs book covers as a hobby and offers that as part of her editing service. She’s really good, and I’m going with her covers for Revelation and Crusade, along with one of my own for Jihad.

Book design

This is something I picked up partly by hobby, partly by accident. I’ve been making ebooks for years, both my own work and converting downloaded scans or conversions into properly formatted ebooks for my own collection. I’m an old hand with eReader’s old PML markup, and I watched the XHTML-based Open Ebook Format develop from the very beginning.

More to the point, I’m a (recovering) professional web developer, and a pretentious one that jumped on the “separate content from presentation” CSS train early on. I’m the type that uses styles in Word for everything, and never just italicizes a word ad hoc (that’s what the “emphasis” style is there for).

For modern ebooks, design returns to the web of ten years ago, keeping things simple and using basic structural tags. Converting text to very basic HTML is second nature to me, as is cleaning up a manuscript to get rid of anything that isn’t supposed to be there. I know regular expressions, dammit, and I’m not afraid to use them. I didn’t set out learn these techniques to format my own ebooks for publication, exactly, but they sure come in handy now.

This means I can format my books quickly and easily to what Amazon, Barnes&Noble, etc want when it comes time to upload. Speaking of which…

Content management systems

Anyone who has a blog should be right at home with the content management systems behind the bookstores at major ebooksellers. Web based forms are easy. Right? Not necessarily. Rachel’s having trouble getting her first Kindle ebook out of  “publishing” status. It keeps reverting to “draft” and no one seems to know why. I haven’t had the chance yet to look it over myself, and I might not be able to figure it out, but I didn’t have any trouble getting “Do Over!” through the system. Why? Because I’m a blogger and former developer, and I’m already comfortable working on the web.

Marketing and promotion

In the middle of the 2000s, I spend several years in various sales positions. Retail, cold calling, the whole nine yards. I learned I don’t like hard selling, but I also learned a lot about why people buy what they do, what kind of enticements are effective in getting people to try something new. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means, but I’m comfortable handling this aspect of indie publishing myself. I’ve already got lots of ideas on pricing, promotion, cross marketing, bundling, stuff most authors never think they’ll have to think about.

Social networking

And lastly, I know how to get by with a little help from my friends. A few years back, I’d vaguely heard of Facebook and there was some tweeter thing Silicon Valley insiders were using. Now, if you don’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook, you may as well not exist. Gone are the days of a writer sitting alone in a shack, sending out his novels and never interacting with his fans directly. Now, you’re expected to be present. You’re expected to engage. Answer questions. Being able to actually talk to my favorite authors on Twitter is amazing, and I’m looking forward to getting into discussions with my fans.

I welcome every aspect of being an indie author, but that’s because my eclectic education and career path has given me the tools to do so. I know I’m atypical. So if you’re thinking about going this route, ask yourself if you’re ready to do all the different things you have to do well to pull this off.

I haven’t blogged much (at all) about Android here yet. Lemme esplain. No, is too much. Lemme sum up. Loving me some droid, have learned so much about Android via my AT&T Samsung Captivate (a Galaxy S phone) and my Nook Color.

I used the stock version of Android on my phone for a little less than a week after I first got it. I knew I wanted to do things Samsung and AT&T wouldn’t let me do. To start with, I wanted Froyo, Android 2.2. And when I bought the Captivate in December, it was stuck at Eclair (Android 2.1) with Froyo due “any day now.” So I rooted, installed a custom Froyo ROM I found on XDA-developers.com and was off to the races.

Since then, I’ve flashed my phone countless times, sometimes several times a day (fortunately Titanium Backup for Android is excellent, but requires root). I tried so many custom ROMs, felt like I got to know the developers putting them together, often from source code. These ran so much better than stock that I kept running them even after the official 2.2 for the Captivate finally arrived from AT&T.

But there was a nagging problem. These ROMs were great, much better builds of Android than stock. But in most cases they were supported by a single developer, sometimes a small team. They were volunteer projects and would only be developed/supported as long as the developer felt like it.

And recently, that has begun to crumble. I’ve seen several devs jump ship from the Captivate to new generation Android devices like the HTC Inspire 4G and the Motorola Atrix. I didn’t want to be left behind.

All the custom ROMs on XDA-devs are forks, or variants, of various production ROMs leaked or taken from related devices. For example, they’ll take a new build of Android designed for the Georgio Armani Captivate, a similar but not exact sibling to the North American version, and modify what they needed to make it work on our hardware. It was all top-down development, tweaking and optimizing what Samsung gave us.

Now that the Galaxy S 2 is on the way, I don’t expect Samsung to give us any more. 2.2 will probably be the last official release of Android for that phone. But the thing is, I like this phone. It feels like Palm’s old Tungsten line more than yet-another-iPhone-clone like its Galaxy S bretheren. (The T-Mobile Vibrant can easily be mistaken for an iPhone 3GS at first glance.) So what was I to do?

Well, as it turns out, due to a leak of a different Gingerbread (Android 2.3) build for the Galaxy S line recently, the CyanogenMod folks finally had the drivers they needed to get the Gingerbread-based CM7 working on Galaxy S phones like the Captivate.

So what is CyanogenMod? If custom ROMs are a top down approach, CyanogenMod is bottom up. It’s a massive, multidev open source effort to port the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code to as many devices as they can. Other than carrier or hardware specific stuff like modem drivers, it’s as open source as possible, and just about constantly updated and improved. The ideal of CyanogenMod is to be able to use the device you want with the current version of Android. CyanogenMod is also available for my Nook Color, should I decide to install it there as well.

So how is it? I’m pleasantly surprised. The battery life is nothing to write home about, but not significantly worse than stock. Once it’s out of beta and they remove all the debug code, I expect that to get much better. But it’s stable, smooth and does everything I need it to do. The custom ROM I was using did a great Gingerbread impression on Froyo, but this is the real thing, and it’s (and this is the important part) completely independent of Samsung and AT&T.

I’m not even going to try to link to the other articles already out there on Google’s new notebook computer and the odd little OS that powers it. A quick search of the interwebs (via Bing, if you must) will turn up dozens. I’ll only point you two places to start off: how to apply for the Chrome OS pilot program, and the under-the-hood specs of this black box (literally) notebook.

Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat. I am exactly Google’s target market for Chrome OS. I use Google Apps for my own domain (for example, I get to my documents by typing docs.kirv.in into any web browser, my mail by typing mail.kirv.in, etc.). I do just about everything in a web browser already, and that browser happens to be Google Chrome. I already sync my bookmarks, passwords, etc. between my Chrome installations on various PCs. I access Twitter via Seesmic’s web client or twitter.com, same for Facebook. With very few exceptions, I live entirely in the cloud already. And even on my PCs, I adopted the Chrome OS lifestyle before there was such a thing. I run all my applications maximized, even on my 22″ monitor. I never overlap windows because not being able to see part of a window offends my OCD.

I say this because a lot of the negatives I’ve seen about the Cr-48 and Chrome OS are actually positives to me. I’m glad there’s no desktop. I’m glad there’s no file management. On my Windows gaming rig, I have Chrome — obviously — Kindle, Calibre, iTunes, Teamspeak and my various MMOs installed. That’s it. Well, that’s all I use. That’s only about half the software I have installed, because I also have to have Carbonite, Dropbox, Microsoft Security Essentials, CCleaner, Defraggler, nVidia video utilities and all the other cruft you have to have to support a Windows installation. Chrome OS doesn’t need all that. There’s no antivirus. There’s no antimalware. There’s no file system to maintain. And that adds up to getting more speed and better battery life out of the same hardware, because you don’t have the overhead of Windows weighing you down when all you really need is Chrome and the internet.

I don’t think I can stress this too hard. The revolutionary thing about Chrome OS isn’t what it includes, but what it removes. According to Google product management director Caesar Sengupta:

As that trend proceeds, Chrome OS will be a fantastic experience for them, giving them all they want from the cloud but without the legacy issues of a traditional operating system. Backups, what happens if your computer dies? Viruses or malware. Those are the parts we’re trying to solve, a machine they can use and don’t have to worry about.

What I’m saying is that most people either get Chrome OS right away or they don’t get it at all. For me, it’s exactly what I was looking for in my day-to-day computer experience. But people like Mary-Jo Foley and Matt Rosoff don’t get Chrome OS. They’re too deeply embedded in the current view of what a computer is “supposed” to be. They can’t make the paradigm shift of living completely in the cloud. No one’s forcing them to. But for those of us that grok Chrome OS in fullness, it’s a freeing, refreshing take on computing. All the stuff we want, and none of what we don’t.

Now, let’s get down to business. The first thing you notice about the Cr-48 (so named because while Chromium’s atomic number is 24, Chromium 48 is an unstable isotope) is nothing. Specifically, this is an anti-Macbook in terms of style. No logos, no stickers, no markings of any kind except the letters on the keyboard (which are lower case). The shell is a matte black finish with a slightly rubberized or “soft touch” feel. It’s twice the weight of the 11″ Macbook Air with only one additional inch of diagonal screen size and a similar solid state construction (though the battery is removable, and in fact you have to remove it to flip the dipswitch that enables “jailbroken” developer mode). Frankly, the minimalism of the design appeals to me. You can tell from the very first glance that this is a different kind of notebook, that it is what it needs to be and nothing else.

Starting up the computer takes 10–15 seconds to get to the login screen, and signing in is easy if you already have a Google account. I had heard that it didn’t yet support Google Apps accounts, and it didn’t let me sign in with my day job’s Google Apps Premiere account, but it had no problem whatsoever with my jeff@kirv.in Google Apps account.

First Impressions

Once you get logged in, you’ll probably notice right away there’s no desktop. This is disorienting to some people, even if they’re used to keeping things maximized in Windows. Where the min/max/close buttons would be in Windows, you instead have time, signal and battery. You can click on each for more detail, but you can’t make the browser go away. The browser is all there is.

The “home” screen, for lack of a better term, is the new tab page (or whatever you prefer to use as a homepage). By default, this is where you’ll see all your installed apps, frequently viewed and recently closed pages. It makes a decent app launcher, not unlike the how Apple is adding iOS-style app launching to OS/X Lion, but so far it’s cumbersome in that not only is there no way to sort the apps any particular way, but they don’t even sort in the same order from computer to computer.

Instead I use an extension called App Launcher that puts an alphabetized drop down in my tool bar up by the wrench icon. Everything launched from here opens in a new tab, so it’s a quick way to find something graphically.

More often, though, I use the search key. The CapsLock key has been replaced on the Cr-48 by a key with a simple magnifying glass icon. Tap it, and you open a new tab and place the cursor in the address bar. As I mentioned before, I use my own domain for a lot of things, so it’s often faster for me to type (search)mail.kirv.in(enter) than it is to use the launcher to find the Gmail icon. In a way, this keyboard-oriented app launching harkens back to my DOS days, but in a good way.

While we’re looking at the windowing system and grousing about how you can’t minimize, can’t tile, let’s look at what Chrome OS does offer. Windows in Chrome fill the whole screen, but you do get more than one of them. Similar to virtual desktops like Spaces on OS/X, you can group related tabs into separate windows and switch between them with either the “Next Window” key on the top row or the good old Alt-Tab combination. Ctrl-Tab switches tabs within a window.

I typically have three windows, or as I think of them, workspaces, open at a time. One holds my “permanent” tabs, pages I keep open by default: Gmail, Twitter, Google Reader, Instapaper, our ticketing system and wiki when I’m at the office. I have all of these pinned as well, reducing them to just the favicon to save space and docking them to the left side of the tab row.

My second window is my fiction workspace. Here I have Google Docs, the document window for the chapter I’m working on, my own wiki hosted on Google Sites, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and anything else I think I’ll need quick access to while I’m writing.

My third window is my media workspace. I’ll typically have just Mog pinned here, but this is where I’d open up new tabs for Hulu, YouTube, etc. I’ll get to how well these actually work on the Cr-48 later.

There’s one more user interface element to introduce. You know those little “pinned-to-the-bottom-of-the-screen” panels you see in Gmail for chat windows, tasks, etc.? Those go system-wide in Chrome OS. Pop out windows dock themselves as panels on the bottom edge of the screen, and they stay there even when you switch windows. I usually have several open. I have a panel for a scratchpad that syncs with Google Docs, another for my Google tasks, and often a clock panel that includes a handy timer for writing sprints. Other panels that I use from time to time are notifications, media player, Google Notebook, downloads, even the Chromed Bird Twitter client. These are great for things you need quick access to but don’t need taking up space all the time. The scratchpad panel itself was particularly helpful in taking notes for this article.

Now that we know our way around, what’s it like to actually use? A lot better than I expected.

It really does wake instantly from sleep. By “instantly,” I mean it’s on and ready to rock before I’ve adjusted the screen to the proper viewing angle. Sometimes it takes just a bit longer to reacquire a WiFi signal, but only a few seconds. Between that and the fact that you don’t have to wait for a spinning hard drive to wind down, I open and close the lid a lot more than I would with any Windows notebook. This is the first computer I’ve ever owned that I’ll actually consider for a quick lookup of something, the kind of task I used to shoehorn into my phone. I can pull the Cr-48 out of my bag, pop it open, look up something or type something, close it and throw it back in the bag almost as fast as doing the same with my iPhone (replacing bag with pocket). Factor in the full size keyboard and desktop-sized page rendering, and the Cr-48 is actually faster at some quick reference tasks than my iPhone.

Battery life really does seem to be about 8 hours on a charge. This will only get better as the OS gets optimized for the hardware and Google implements things like hardware h.264 rendering. And I think part of the great battery life is that I could swear there’s an ambient light sensor mounted next to the camera (or they’re just using the camera) to fine tune the screen brightness. I’ve definitely noticed brightness fluctuations in the screen, and they almost always coincide with someone walking behind me or something else that changes the amount of light hitting the screen.

I’ve heard tons of complaints about the trackpad. As with so many things in life, this isn’t really that big a deal if you put just a smidge of thought into it and adapt your stubborn behavior accordingly.

First, turn off “tap to click.” Make the system only register a mouse click when you actually press down hard enough to move the pad itself. This removes just about all of the accuracy issues I’ve seen. If the trackpad seems to be too sensitive or “fast,” you can turn that down in chrome://settings/system.

Second, the default gesture for “right” clicking on the Cr-48 is to touch something with two fingers, then click. This is nearly impossible to do consistently. The fix? With your pinkie or ring finger, whichever is more comfortable for you, hold down the Alt key while you do a normal single click with the same hand. Problem solved. Now pipe down.

The keyboard is amazing. I wasn’t sure I’d like the Sony-style (look it up, Apple stole it from Sony) “chiclet” keyboard. But this is the most comfortable keyboard I’ve used, including desktop ergonomic keyboards. The keys aren’t quite as rubbery as the casing, but they’re just the right balance of soft and traction needed to type fast and sure. I don’t have a problem with my fingers “sliding” off the keys like they do on my HP Mini 2133. Nor does the keyboard get so hot it’s painful to touch like the HP. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve even heard the fan kick in on this thing.

Several people have complained that the VGA out port doesn’t work. It does, but you have to push Ctrl-Fullscreen (listed as “mirror” in the Ctrl-Alt-/ cheat sheet you better be using) to move the output. And despite the implications of the word “mirror,” it doesn’t show the same image on both screens. You’re toggling back and forth between the Cr-48 display and the external monitor.

Sometimes you’ll need something a little more “under the hood.” For example, at a friend’s house I needed to supply my MAC address to get on their WiFi network. You can find this kind of propeller-head detail by going to chrome://system in a new tab. Go to chrome://flags to enable “experimental” features — isn’t this a beta OS anyway? — like the panel media player and SD card support.

In theory, you can print from the Cr-48 by first installing the beta of Chrome 9 on a Windows computer and signing into Google’s CloudPrint service. Once you’ve done that, you can print to the printers available to that Windows printer from the Cr-48, no matter where you are. I haven’t tried this myself yet, mostly because I never print anything.

Online

At 12 inches, the Cr-48 is a bit bigger than what we usually think of as a netbook, though the rest of the hardware looks familiar: Intel Atom processor, 2GB of DDR3, 16GB SSD, minimal ports, etc. In a way, this is the first time that word has actually been properly descriptive. A notebook running Chrome OS is literally a “netbook,” in that it requires the internet to function normally. While I expect more apps over time — including Google’s own Docs — to support offline use through HTML5’s local storage API, for now the Cr-48 can’t do much of anything without an active connection to the tubes.

Speaking of which, you’re going to need the 3G, and more than the 100MB/month Google and Verizon give you for free. 100MB will get you just about a whole episode of an hour drama (so say 45 minutes without the broadcast commercials) on Hulu at 360p. Even if you plan to use WiFi as much as possible, you will inevitably want to use the device somewhere you just don’t have a WiFi connection. It’s forward thinking that Google realized this and is requiring all Chrome OS notebooks to include a 3G or better cellular radio as a backup networking source. I ponied up for the 3GB per month plan for $35. We’ll see how much of it I actually use. I’ve used about 500MB in a week, but I’ve also watched a lot of Hulu at Chipotle.

Some of you may be wondering, “why didn’t you just tether it over WiFi to your iPhone?” Well, actually that’s one of the first things I tried. The problem is that MyWi, the jailbreak app that allows you to use your iPhone as a hotspot, at current only creates an ad-hoc, or computer to computer, connection. The Cr-48 will only connect to infrastructure, or router to PC, connection. So right now, it’s just not possible to tether my iPhone to my Chrome OS notebook. That said, the folks that make MyWi are working on supporting infrastructure connections and Google is working on supporting ad-hoc connections, so at some point one or the other will make this work, and then I won’t be so worried about my Verizon data usage. Until then, I’m glad to have the Verizon 3G (actually a Gobi CDMA/GSM combo chip that will work anywhere) in the Cr-48.

If you don’t want to rely on wireless at all, you’re not completely sunk. Google says that the Cr-48 supports some — but not all — USB to ethernet adaptors. So if you find one that works, you can jack into the net over wire.

The last thing I want to mention in the networking section is that when I want to do something that I just can’t do no matter what on the web, like make changes to my Calibre ebook library or do something in iTunes, I still have the option of using LogMeIn in a fullscreen window on the Cr-48. This isn’t terribly fast, but it does work reliably for remote work. I’ve used it to do stuff on my home PC as well as remoting into the office (where I used Remote Desktop from my PC to remote into our servers; yes, I have a problem).

Media

Okay, enough work. What about the fun stuff? The Cr-48 is no multimedia powerhouse, but I’ve been impressed so far at how good it actually is at entertainment.

Let’s get the Flash thing out of the way. Flash sucks on the Cr-48. There are a number of reasons for this. Adobe’s implementation of Flash is notoriously bad on Linux, and Chrome OS is Debian Linux under the hood. The Flash library on the Cr-48 is a special, extra-secure version. Linux has no native hardware decode libraries for h.264, the most common web video encoding standard. Neither Google nor Adobe has done anything thus far to optimize Flash for Chrome OS. And the Cr-48 sports a single-core Atom CPU. Add that all together, and you’re going to get a “sub-optimal” Flash experience.

Which is why one of my go-to extensions is FlashBlock. You’d be amazed — or maybe you wouldn’t — how much crap on web pages is Flash-based, most of it stuff you don’t even want to see in the first place. So with that extension, I only load the Flash content I actually want to see — web apps, media players, etc. — and the rest never gets rendered. Speeds things up enormously, and makes all the difference on the Cr-48.

Because Flash is so slow, you have to make certain concessions with web video. Hulu is fine and perfectly watchable windowed at 360p resolution. If you stretch the 360p video to full screen, it’s watchable, but choppy. I find turning down the “house lights” in Hulu for windowed video to work just as well at reducing distractions. 480p Hulu video is unwatchable at any setting.

Netflix doesn’t work at all on the Cr-48, because Netflix runs on Microsoft’s Silverlight rather than Flash and doesn’t support Linux — including Android — at all. I’m convinced this is less a technical restraint than Netflix being unable to prove to their licensing partners that people won’t be able to reverse engineer a Linux-based Netflix player and steal their content. And if they supported Linux, that is probably exactly what would happen. But between that, Hulu picking up more and more content, and disturbing reports about what Netflix’s corporate culture is really like, I’m not sure I’ll be a Netflix subscriber long term.

One of my big obstacles to moving into the cloud full time was iTunes. I have about 40GB of music in iTunes, so not a huge library by any means, but big enough that I couldn’t copy it over. What was I going to use for tunes? Pandora is nice and all, but sometimes you want to hear a specific song.

Then I found a review of the Cr-48 that mentioned Mog. They combine the best features of Pandora (like-artist radio, social discovery) and Rhapsody (subscription-based access to a huge catalog on demand) into a single service. They claim to have a catalog of 10 million songs, and I have to admit I’ve been surprised by some of the stuff they have. I’ve also been shocked and appalled at some of the stuff they don’t have (Only Hotel California by the Eagles? Really?). The service is $5/month if you just want to stream to PCs — including the Cr-48 — and $10/month if you want to stream to mobile iOS and Android devices as well. I’m going with the $10 plan and hoping they shore up some of their weirder content holes soon. One of the things I really like about Mog is that when you’re listening to the Pandora-like “Mog radio” for a specific artist, you can specify on a sliding scale how much to mix in similar artists, all the way down to not at all. Sometimes I want to listen to Kitaro and nothing but Kitaro.

As for the iPhone-syncing element of iTunes, I don’t miss it much. I sync or stream to my iPhone almost exclusively with cloud services already: Gmail, GDocs, Google Calendar/Tasks, Google Voice, Google Reader, Mog, Pandora, Facebook, Hulu, Picassa, Kindle, Netflix, Podcaster, Twitter, and of course Apple’s own App Store and iTunes store. I really don’t sync anything from a PC. I still haven’t updated to 4.2 because I’m jailbroken. So on the rare, once a quarter or so occasion when I actually do need to sync something from a PC, I can use my Windows gaming rig at home. (And of course, once I decide to give in and sell my soul entirely to Google by getting an Android phone, this won’t be an issue at all; everything will be OTA.)

As an irrelevant aside, I ended my 10 year subscription to Audible this month when they continually refused to charge my monthly fee to the new debit card I’d entered into their system. Despite multiple calls to customer service and them swearing up and down that the billing issue was resolved, they continued to charge my old card on a shut-down account and then acted like it was my fault the charge didn’t go through, like I hadn’t told them to use the new card multiple times. Couple that with realizing that I was listening to audiobooks as a way to avoid actually thinking during what limited downtime I have as a man with a smartphone, an always connected notebook and a Kindle, and I decided not to keep fighting it. And as it turns out, I’m paying less for Hulu Plus, Netflix and Mog combined then I was paying Audible every month. I think I’m getting a lot more value out of that money now.

Okay, fine, you’re thinking. So you can edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets, you can listen to music and watch videos, but you can’t do everything in the cloud. What about about Photoshop? Huh, smart guy? What about Audacity for recording podcasts? Ha! you may be saying.

Well, actually…

For Photoshop, I prefer Picnik, which is really more like Photoshop Elements or Paint.NET. Simple stuff, but it does support layers, which is the vital feature I need for putting together book covers. More advanced graphics editing needs require heavier tools like Pixlr or Aviary. This last one in particular is an amazing web-based creative suite with raster and vector image editing, color pallete and filter creation, music mixing (Garage Band) and yes, even Audacity-style audio recording and editing. Like, for say, podcasts.

Pwned.

PC of the Future

So is Google right? Is this the future of computing? Maybe.

It’s worth noting that Google will be the first to point out that the entire OS is like a web app. In that what you get when you first take it out of the box is the worst it’s ever going to be. The whole OS is going to get constantly updated, iterated and improved. Transparently, quietly, in the background. New features will just appear like they do in Google’s other products. I’ve already seen one Chrome OS update and it was just as quick and painless as it is in the Chrome browser on Windows (and you’re even notified about it the same way, a small gold dot over the wrench icon). Most PCs start off fast and clean and then degrade over time. Google is looking to reverse that trend. Not just stop it. Reverse it.

I’ve beta tested a lot of operating systems, going back at least to IBM’s OS/2 2.0 in 1992. As beta OSes go, Chrome OS is alarmingly stable. I’ve yet to get it to crash. I did push it over the edge into instability once, where extensions kept crashing in cascades and I had to reboot the notebook. But to get there I spent days installing and uninstalling dozens of extensions and scores of themes, had a half a dozen windows open, a couple with over 30 tabs each. And even then, the OS itself kept going, the engine of the browser itself never faltered. Just the extensions got squirrelly, and a simple reboot took everything back to normal and even restored the windows and tabs I had open when I shut down. This thing is solid, and it’s a beta. This is the kind of robust, bullet-proof performance you need when handing a computer to your computer-illiterate uncle. Yeah, you know the one. Him. He couldn’t break this. Think about that.

Some things are still missing, obviously. There is no official Skype client for Chrome OS, but imo.im supports Skype just fine. And obviously Google Talk video calling works. SD card and USB drive support is still experimental, one of the risky features you have to enable via chrome://flags and even then doesn’t work right. Yet. The system isn’t fully baked, and Google told us that up front.

As I mentioned above, many apps don’t support offline mode, including Google Docs. In Docs’s case, this is because it used to support offline access via Google Gears, and they’ve removed Gears support to replace it with the more standard HTML5 offline storage. It’s just not ready yet. I’d say the smart money is on that feature working flawlessly by the time consumer Chrome OS notebooks hit the streets next summer. I’ve seen a few reports of lag when typing in Google Docs, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this myself, and this entire gargantuan article was written in Google Docs.

Some people object to Chrome OS on principle. Richard Stallman is worried that reliance on cloud services will leave people a slave to their service providers, unable to control access to their own data. While he has an academic point, I don’t see it as being that much of problem in the real world. It’s easy enough for me to backup my data outside of Google’s cloud if I so choose, and the convenience and utility of a cloud OS far outweighs any philosophical disadvantages. At least they do to me.

Marco Arment (of Tumblr and Instapaper) has a different issue. He’s concerned about enterprise adoption and that with their track record of killing products that they lose interest in — Wave, Buzz, Notebook, etc. — Google has a hard sell in front of them getting businesses to even try switching over to Chrome OS. And he has a point. Most of the computers at my day job are still running XP, for crying out loud.

But I don’t think that’s where Google is heading. While you could choose to see Chrome OS as the ultimate manifestation of Larry Ellison’s network computer vision, I think it’s more likely that as I mentioned above, Chrome OS will initially be marketed as a “computer for normal people.” They’ll go for consumer adoption first, and then IT departments will be forced to integrate the devices over time as they’ve done with the iPhone and iPad. Chrome OS will be an enterprise platform eventually, but it will come in the back door.

I’ve also seen several people assert that Chrome OS is just a transitional experiment, doomed to be eventually replaced by Android. Why would Google maintain two operating systems when one could do the job, they say. Well, you might want to ask Microsoft why they have Windows 7 and Windows Phone, or better yet, ask Apple why they have Mac OS and iOS.

Fundamentally different form factors demand fundamentally different platforms. The user interface between a keyboard-based device like a notebook and a touch-based device like a tablet have to be radically different to suit the form factor. This is why Windows on a tablet has been such an abysmal failure for nearly a decade. A user interface designed for a mouse and keyboard just doesn’t work on a touch device, no matter how you try to cram it in there.

And the converse also applies. A system designed around a touch screen, like Android as we currently know it — recall that initially Android was intended for Blackberry-like thumbboard devices, and diverged sharply after the iPhone was announced — is just not going to be an ideal experience on a notebook. And we’re not just talking about the system itself. We’re also talking about every single application. You know, all the apps that people give as the reason for ditching Chrome OS in favor of Android in the first place. Those apps, especially the really good ones, are designed for a multitouch interface. They’re going to be awkward at best, unusable at worst on a notebook form factor. There’s a reason Microsoft and Apple have different platforms for different form factors, and Google would be wise to continue following their lead.

Final Thoughts

Actually, anything but final. I’ll be posting more of my observations here over time, but I think it’s safe to say I’m floored by this thing so far. It’s a fundamental change in computing when coupled with the persistence of data in web apps like Google Docs. When writing this article, I would switch freely between computers and pick up where I left off. Write on the Cr-48 when away from my desk, pop back into my cubicle, toss the notebook in the bag, unlock my Windows PC and just keep typing. It’s amazing.

After a week of use, the Cr-48 is my primary, every day computer. But I can’t say I’m going to revise Revelation on it entirely because doing so would negate one of the coolest things that Chrome OS makes possible, the “write anywhere” versatility of Google Docs. But I will say that the Cr-48 has already earned a place in my default gear set. Everywhere I go, I take my iPhone, my Kindle and my Cr-48. I didn’t do that with my HP Mini. I haven’t done that with any notebook.

But this one’s different.

I’ve had my Kindle for about a month now, so it’s time to tell you what I think of it.

I, uh, kind of love it.

I know this goes against everything I’ve ever said about dedicated ebook readers. I know I’ve said dedicated reading devices were a dumb idea. I know I’ve said I could read everything I needed to read on my phone and be happy with that, thank you. (Although I did just about nail predicting the Kindle in 2003.) I know I even said I would never, EVER buy a Kindle after the 1984 fiasco.

I was wrong. I was so, very wrong.

You’ve all seen reviews that labor over the device specs, so I won’t bore you with that here. But let’s talk about the screen for a minute. You really need to see this in person. It looks like print. It looks like a printed overlay you often find on LCD screens for shipping, as a matter of fact. It threw me a little when I first took it out of the box; I kept looking for the tab to peel it off and see the real screen. The resolution is 600x800 for the six inch diagonal, which comes out to 167 pixels per inch, about half the resolution of the iPhone 4 and just a bit higher than the iPad’s 132. And yet, because it’s grayscale, it works. It looks just as sharp as the text you’d see in the average paperback.

eInk really makes a difference. I had to install a lamp next to my bed, but I can attest that the recent studies showing that transmitted light versus reflected light before sleeping screwing with your melatonin levels and affecting your sleep have some validity. I’m sleeping a lot better reading an hour or two per night on my Kindle before going to sleep than I did reading on my iPhone, even with the iPhone brightness at minimum.

So it’s nice, and it does what it says it does. But what makes it so compelling? The real difference I think is not what the Kindle does, but what it doesn’t do.

The Kindle allows you to share highlighted passages on Twitter, but it doesn’t come with a Twitter client. Or an email client. There’s a webkit based browser, but the refresh speed of eInk will disavow you right away of any thoughts for using it for long term browsing. The Kindle displays books. You can organize them into collections, you can download them directly to the device, but what the Kindle is really about is reading. It’s the first device I’ve ever seen where I can read a book and have the book “disappear” into the story the way it does with a particularly good book in print.

Yes, I read Kindle books on my iPhone and my desktop and netbook PCs. And the Whispersync technology Amazon uses to keep your place in sync works flawlessly (with the minor exception that it doesn’t work for books you didn’t purchase from Amazon, which we’ll get to later). I enjoy reading on those devices when I have a few minutes.

But on the Kindle itself, I read for hours.

It makes a difference. So much so that I’m now woefully behind on my Hulu queue and I don’t even want to look at my Netflix Watch Instantly queue. I spend all my leisure time reading. I’ve got around 500 books on my Kindle, a mix of old favorites and stuff I still haven’t gotten around to reading. Maybe a few dozen of those are purchased from Amazon.

And therein lies my one complaint about the Kindle 3.

I already own thousands of ebooks, purchased from various sources over the last dozen years. I’ve organized these in Calibre, which does a fantastic job of not only making such a collection manageable, but also converting books to whatever format I might need. I was able to convert all my books to a Kindle-compatible .mobi format easily. I can copy them over to the Kindle directly within Calibre, and keep track of what books are on the device. What I can’t do, however, is sync my place in those books between my Kindle, the Kindle for PC apps on my home desktop, work desktop and netbook, and the iOS Kindle app on my iPhone. In fact, on the iPhone, I can’t load the non-Amazon-purchased books at all without jailbreaking and manually copying them over via SSH. Given that these books use the same “location” alternative to page numbers as the books you purchase at Amazon, it should be trivial for Amazon to keep a list of file names and reading locations for all the books you open, even if you didn’t buy the books from them. Why don’t they?

My theory is that this is to reduce or discourage piracy, by reserving Whispersync for “authentic” ebooks they know you’ve paid for. Sure, you could have converted that .mobi file from a .pdb file you downloaded from eReader.com—I have over 500 such files—but you could have gotten it from a torrent. I love Amazon’s service—I’m also a Prime subscriber—but I don’t for a second think Amazon does what it does for the good of its customers. When it sold every ebook at a loss before the agency model, it was giving customers a better deal, but it was also selling a lot of Kindles and anchoring the sub-$10 price for ebooks, giving it power over the publishers. In providing sync services to books you didn’t purchase from Amazon, they would have to pick doing something good for their customers over their own business interest in selling you more ebooks. Never expect a corporation to do anything not in their own best interest.

That said, their vile little scheme works. I rely so much on Whispersync to catch a few pages here on my iPhone and a few pages there on my desktop that I will buy Amazon editions of books I know I’m going to reread, even if I already have a perfectly good, well-formatted copy I bought somewhere else and converted over. I doubt I’ll do this for books I expect to only read once, but for perennial favorites like The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s worth the expense. (However, note that both of those books are omnibus editions, so I’m only buying one book instead of several, and they’re longer reads and thus more likely to be read across multiple devices.)

Okay, lecture over. A few more observations:

The Kindle allows you to group your books into Collections, as well as just sorting them by recently opened, title and author. If you have a large number of books on your device, this is handy. I have all my Aloysius Pendergast books by Preston and Child in one collection, all of my Rizzoli & Isles books by Tess Gerritsen in another. I have collections for Foundation (10 books, including various prequels), James Rollins’s Sigma Force (5 books) and Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, among others. I also have 23 books in Thrillers, 45 in General Nonfiction, and a whopping 235 in To Read. The only downside to organizing your books in collections is that Calibre doesn’t understand them (and as the developer of Calibre doesn’t use collections himself, it isn’t likely to). There is a Windows app that lets you organize into collections from the desktop, but it doesn’t show you which books still aren’t in a collection, so it’s of limited use.

One of the great features of the Kindle ecosystem is that you can download a sample—generally the first few chapters—for free from just about any book. These have the same formatting and whatnot as the full book, they’re just shorter. You see a little “sample” label next to the title to differentiate it, and there’s a “Buy this book” menu item when opening or reading the book. When you get to the end of the sample, there’s another link to buy the book immediately in the Kindle store, making it drop dead simple to buy the book if you enjoyed the sample.

Samples have another nifty feature. You can add them to collections. So for series I haven’t read yet, I’ll download all the samples of the books I don’t have, and put them in a collection. The reason I have over 200 books in my To Read collection is that I’ve bought a lot of ebooks over the years I never got around to reading. I suspect that if you’re enough of a book lover to read this far into this article, you know this phenomenon well. By using samples as stand ins, I can snag the samples for books I previously would have just bought, sort them into my library and move on with my life. If I actually get around to reading them, I don’t have to pay for them until I’ve already started reading. I expect to save a lot of money this way.

Maybe. I’ve also noticed that even using samples as placeholders, I’m buying a lot more books with the Kindle than I did even when I was buying from the Kindle store and reading on my iPhone. Let’s talk about ebook pricing. When Amazon started selling the Kindle, they sold just about every “Big Six” ebook at a loss. Their deal with the big New York publishers was to pay them half the hardcover price—with hardcovers retailing for $25–30 before discounts, that came to $12.50–15.00—and then sold the books to the consumer for a flat $9.99. As I alluded above, this was to anchor the price in the minds of their customers so that book prices overall would come down, as well as to sell a lot of Kindles.

Instead of lowering their prices, the publishers, in literary terms, threw a hissy fit. They pulled their books from Amazon entirely in some cases, and eventually renegotiated to what’s called the Agency Model. The publisher gets to set the price—something they can’t do with physical books, which are priced by the bookseller—and Amazon gets a straight 30% cut. This has led to some older books, the stuff you wouldn’t see on bookstore shelves at all anymore, priced around $7, while new bestsellers go for $13–25.

But there’s another piece to this puzzle. Amazon also allows individuals to publish their own books on the Kindle store right alongside books from the New York heavy hitters. And if you price your book between $2.99 and $9.99, you get the same 70% the big publishers do (35% otherwise). This has led to an interesting phenomenon. Indie authors are pricing their books below the traditionally published books, often at the minimum $2.99. And by making the book essentially an impulse buy—I almost never download samples of books cheaper than 3 bucks, preferring to just buy them outright instead—they’re more than making up the difference in sales price in volume. See Joe Konrath’s blog for the hard numbers, but the effect for readers is that there are lots of 4 and 5 star rated books available for the Kindle under 5 bucks. You may not be familiar with the authors, but you will be.

Another great use for the Kindle is reading the newspaper. Yes, the newspaper. It still exists, and it’s actually more convenient now that you can read it without getting ink on your fingers. The Kindle allows you to subscribe to periodicals—newspapers and magazines—for a reasonable monthly fee. I pay $6.99 a month to read the Denver Post on my Kindle, updated automatically every day. I pay $2.99 each for both Analog and Asimov’s, the two big SF magazines, a price I think is more than fair per issue, and it keeps me current on what’s going on in the field. I also pay a buck or two a month to reach each of a few must-read blogs (Konrath, above, Nathan Bransford, Lifehacker) now that I no longer pay any attention to Google Reader. I declared RSS bankruptcy months ago and now get my articles entirely from the the sources above and links from people I follow on Twitter. Those links get sent to Instapaper, which also sends a compilation of unread articles to my Kindle automatically every day. Periodicals are currently limited to the Kindle itself, but Amazon is working on supporting them via their other clients.

And sometimes you want to read when you can’t read. The Kindle has you covered there as well. Amazon bought Audible a couple years back, and the Kindle fully supports playback of Audible audiobooks. In fact, as an Audible subscriber since 2000, I was surprised to find that when I took my Kindle out of the box and turned it on for the first time, it not only had all the books I’d already purchased from the Kindle store available in my archived items, but it also had my more than 500 audiobooks from Audible queued up and ready to download.

If you don’t mind the narrator sounding like the people from the “Buying an iPhone 4” video, you can also have your Kindle format books read to you via the included speakers or headphones. The publisher has to allow this, and some don’t, considering it a violation of the audio rights, but for books that do allow it, it’s kind of a revelation. I’ve been waiting years for exactly this feature. To be reading a book at home, get up, get in the car and have the same book read to me while I drive, picking up where I left off, and then be able to continue reading on my own at my destination without having to find my place. Why did it take so long to do this?

Speaking of getting up and going, let’s talk portability. I mentioned earlier that I had postulated back in 2003 that the ideal ebook reader would be about the size of a DVD case. The Kindle is almost exactly the height of a DVD case, and both thinner and narrower. It’s so thin and light, in fact, that there is pretty much no stress at all in holding it for hours, and it fits nicely into the front pocket of my hoodie. I thought I would only use the Kindle at home at read on my iPhone or PCs elsewhere, but in fact I’ve taken to carrying my Kindle just about everywhere. The only time I read on my iPhone is when the lighting conditions make reading on the Kindle sub-optimal.

That said, I did purchase the lighted cover for a whopping $60. This is a nice leather hard cover reminiscent of a Moleskine notebook. It connects to the Kindle via two metal connectors which provide power from the Kindle for a pull out LED light. It works as advertised, but I tend not to use it for a few reasons:

• It just about triples the size and weight of the Kindle, and makes it as awkward to hold as a real hardcover
• The additional size is just enough to put it out of pocketability range, meaning I’d have to carry it by hand
• The battery drain of powering the LED is noticeable, putting it in the same range as the iPhone 4, 6–10 hours of reading on a charge

By the way, the battery estimates you’ve seen elsewhere are accurate. Turn wireless off and you can get a month out of this thing between charges. This goes down quickly, though, if you:

• Keep wireless on, necessary for Whispersync to work
• Add a lot of new content to the Kindle, since it has to index each book for searching (yes, you can search your entire library all at once)
• Power the lighted cover
• Use the web browser, which requires a lot of data activity and screen redraws

Oddly, playing Audible or having the Kindle read to you in its robot voice uses very little power, especially with the screen turned off.

This version of the Kindle—the Kindle 3 even though it’s not actually called that—is what the Kindle should have been on day one. It’s precisely what it needs to be and nothing more. The right size, the right shape, the right finish on the screen. And if you step back and really look at it, you might even find it looks pretty familiar.

This is one of my “brass tacks” articles. Yes, it’s wonder to pontificate about plot and theme and whatnot, but you also have to pay the rent. And you can’t do that if you hard drive crashes and takes all your work with it. So let’s talk about where you keep your stuff, and why it had better be more than one place.

It’s trendy to talk about “the cloud” these days. Keep your stuff in “the cloud” and you can always get to it, forever and ever. Well, maybe, maybe not. It seems unthinkable now, but Google could go out of business and shut down Google Docs. Remember when AOL _was_ the internet for most people? I rest my case.

But keeping it just on your laptop’s hard drive is just as bad, if not worse. Hard drives crash. Yes, even that nifty all-flash-chip-no-enclosure-soldered-right-onto-the-motherboard drive in the new MacBook Airs can get corrupted. If you only have your data in one place, you have it nowhere.

A wise and popular theory making the rounds on the internets is called 3–2-1 Backup. In short:

* You should have at least 3 copies of your stuff
* In at least 2 physical locations
* And at least 1 of them should be off-site/cloud-based

And note that all of those include the words “at least.” More is better, assuming you can keep them all in sync. If you can’t, don’t try. Multiple inconsistent backups can be more confusing than helpful. But it’s really not that hard to have total piece of mind that your data is safe. Here’s how I do it.

First, I keep all of my files in [Dropbox](http://www.dropbox.com). If you haven’t heard of it, Dropbox is a service that keeps anything you put in your “dropbox” folder on your hard drive in sync with a copy on their servers. It’s encrypted, so you don’t have to worry about security. The really amazing thing about Dropbox is how flawlessly it works to keep multiple PCs in sync with each other. If I make a change to a file on my PC at work, that file will change on my PC at home almost instantly. Add that to how many of my iOS apps also work with Dropbox, and not only do I have access to the same files no matter which PC I’m on, but they’re also all redundant backups of each other. And in a pinch, you can always download a copy from Dropbox.com. So by itself, Dropbox satisfies 3–2-1 as soon as you sync it to two PCs in different locations (like home and work, assuming you don’t work at home).

But I’m more paranoid than that. So I also backup my home PC with [Carbonite](http://www.carbonite.com). This is straight up cloud based backup, not syncing like Dropbox. But it gives me unlimited storage to backup what ever I need from my home PC. I use it not only for my Dropbox content, but also my whole iTunes library of music, movies and TV shows.

Okay, so I’ve got my data on two PCs, various iOS apps, Dropbox.com, Carbonite.com and will have a third local copy when I buy the MacBook Air I’m drooling over. But wait! Still not done!

Microsoft makes a program they give away for free called [SyncToy](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en). The name is a little misleading. It was part of Microsoft’s Powertoys collection of unsupported utilities, but it’s been through many revisions and works like a champ. What it does is sync or backup any folder to any other folder. So I have it set to “echo” my Dropbox folder to a 4GB USB drive. Any changes I make to the Dropbox folder will be mirrored on the USB drive the next time I run SyncToy. So as long as run this regularly–I’m thinking weekly, but no more in case I need to restore something that has already been changed across the network–I have a third (or fourth) local copy of my data as well as the two copies in the cloud. And those copies exist on two (three) hard drives, a USB drive, two server farms from different companies and my iPhone. Short of a full-on apocalypse, my data is secure, and every file can be recovered no matter what bone head thing I do.

I want to buy a Kindle. I really do.

There’s just one problem. A minor concern. I have something on the order of _three thousand_ ebooks already in my Calibre library. I can convert these to .mobi format and drag them into Kindle for PC. I can drag them over USB to a physical Kindle device.

But I do most of my reading on my iPhone. And while the Kindle iOS app is wonderful for reading books purchased via Amazon.com _there is no official way_ to add personal content to Kindle for iOS.

Until the jailbreaks of last weekend, there was no way at all, official or otherwise, to load personal content onto Kindle for iOS if you were using the latest revision of the operating system. Now that I can—and have—jailbreak 4.1, I can verify that if you know the specific folder on the iPhone where the Kindle app stores its books:

> /private/var/mobile/Applications/A9EB2B1F-4AA1-4FE3-9E41-3C6ECE723776/Documents/eBooks

you can copy .mobi files to the device and they’ll show up in your book list the next time you start the Kindle app. Now, this is just for Kindle iOS version 2.3.1.3. The next time I download an update to the Kindle app, that A9EB2B1F-4AA1-4FE3-9E41-3C6ECE723776 changes to something else.

But at least I can get my personal content on to the device. For now. As long as I keep playing the game of cat and mouse with Apple and Amazon to keep my phone jailbroken and keep track of where the books are.

But one of the key advantages to the Kindle platform is Whispersync, the ability to pick up where you left off on any Kindle reader no matter what device you were using last time. This doesn’t work with personal content. I even verified that if I name the files using Amazon’s product ID the way Amazon does it internally—Stephen King’s _On Writing_, which I’ve already purchased from eReader/Fictionwise _and_ Audible, would be B000FC0SIM_EBOK.azw—and carefully insert a copy in the ebooks folder for Kindle iOS and Kindle PC, even though it says it’s uploading and saving my furthest read location on the iOS device, opening the same book in Kindle for PC doesn’t jump to the same location.

In short, I’ve done just about everything I can do to make this work without access to the code.

So for right now, I can’t read _all_ of the books I own seamlessly on whatever reading platform I happen to have at hand, which is the whole point of the Kindle experience. Only the books I actually bought from Amazon sync with my iPhone. So either I deal with finding my place myself—which I already do if I’m reading the same book as an ebook and an audiobook, the only way I get through some things—or I rebuy books I’ve already paid for if I want them to sync—which also includes the ability to archive (delete) books from the device and then easily redownload them over the air later if I need to.

And yet, if Kindle 3 prices drop again for the holiday season to $99 for WiFi-only and $149 for 3G, I might have to bite the bullet and buy one anyway. I’m already hooked.

Just not completely.