Just when I thought the major music labels have begun to understand this new invention called the Internet, I read http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10047311-93.html. While it’s nice that they are finally selling music in most consumer’s preferred format (non-DRM’d MP3), I don’t understand why they are insisting on selling it to you on physical media that you have to buy at a store. Do I have to go to a bookstore to buy an ebook? Perhaps the music companies believe they are in the business of selling a physical product? Or maybe they’re trying to resurrect the concept of the album, making you buy nine tracks you don’t want in order to get the one track you do. According to Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/22/sandisk-major-labels-announce-slotmusic-microsd-cards-preloaded/), they even expect people to carry around metal binders full of microSD cards.

Perhaps retail stores are seeing the trend to legal digital downloads of music, and are beginning to feel like Blockbuster when Netflix took off? In that case, it’s the retail stores that are being shortsighted; there’s no reason for consumers to prefer to purchase digital content at physical stores.

During our summer vacation, we drove around rural Missouri guided by an in-car GPS navigation system. As I listened to the directions from the nav system, I found myself wondering if GPS will obsolete most freeway road signs. Signs indicating the name of an exit or freeway will still be useful, but will we still need navigational signs that indicate how to get a specific town, park, or point of interest? My nav system tells me my exit is 15 miles ahead, so why do I care how many miles it is to Rolla? My nav system tells me where the nearest state park is and which exits have gas or fast food, so why should the highway department put up and maintain signs with that same info? (Obviously, businesses would still want to put up billboards, but that’s different — I’m talking about the official highway signs.)

You may be saying, “but not everyone has a GPS nav system”. That’s true, today.  Ten years ago most cars didn’t have CD players or air bags either; today most have them standard. In ten years will in-car nav systems be near-ubiquitous? Today excellent handheld GPS systems start around $150, and the price will almost certainly drop as they get more common.

A good historical reference may be the payphone. 15 years ago it would have been inconcievable to suggest that payphones would be killed by cellphones. Anyone raising the idea would be ridiculed: “What about people who don’t have cellphones?” “What if you need to make a call when your cellphone isn’t working?” “Payphones will always be cheaper than cellphones!” etc. Now, most people have cellphones, and payphones have died. Not everyone has a cellphone, and cellphones have a number of shortcomings, but in the end they took away enough business from payphones that it wasn’t worth maintaining them.

Likewise, in ten years will enough people be using navigation systems that the money currently used to put up and maintain signs be better spent elsewhere?

In the past, about a week before a dentist appointment my dentist’s office would call me to confirm. Because they would usually call at an inconvenient time, they usually ended up leaving me a voicemail message. When I got around to listening to my voicemail, they would inevitably be closed for the day. Then, for the next few days I would remember to call them too late in the day. Finally, about a day or two before the appointment I would remember to call them early enough. While not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, this twice a year hassle was an annoyance.

When my most recent appointment drew near, I was expecting to go through this hassle again, but I was pleasantly surprised. Instead of a phone call, I got a text message reminding me about the appointment. Even better, I could confirm the appointment by responding. And, just in case I sent the confirmation and forgot about it, about 2 hours before the appointment they sent me another reminder text message.

Not only did this change make the appointment confirmation process go much smoother for me, it’s a labor savings for the dentist’s office. Before, a receptionist would need to spend an hour or two calling people to confirm, and then handing callbacks; now with one click a receptionist can send the reminder messages to everyone, and replies are processed automatically.

There’s no major technological breakthrough here — automated text message send/receive systems have been around for a while, and so have patient appointment databases. Like with many innovations, the solution to the inconvenience of appointment reminders did not require new technology; it just needed someone to connect existing technologies in a new way.

Rackspace held a sysadmin contest at LinuxWorld. I won first place, and got the top prize, an iPod Touch. I’ve never belonged to the Cult of Apple, and have never been particularly fond of iPods. They are expensive relative to their competitors, and I hate the iPod scrollwheel UI. Also, I think iTunes, especially the syncing UI, is awful. Still, my previous MP3 player (from Toshiba) died not too long ago, and I wasn’t going to turn down a free $299 MP3 player.

The first thing I tried to do was upgrade its OS, since it came with 1.x built-in. I paid my $10, downloaded the upgrade, and tried to install it. The install failed, leaving my iPod in recovery mode. Over the next week and a half, I spent hours reading forums, waiting at the Genius Bar, and trying various things, I was finally able to upgrade a replacment unit to 2.0.1. At last, I could play with my new iPod Touch.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the iPod Touch is not really an MP3 player. It’s a full-blown PDA whose marketing emphasizes music and video. It can do everything Palm’s last real PDA, the Tungsten TX, can do:

• sync calendar/contacts/email
• surf the web using WiFi
• play music & videos
• view photos
• play games
• install third-party applications

The iPod Touch has all the improvements Palm should have included in the TX successor:

• More colorful, friendly, and polished UI
• Enough internal flash memory to store a decent amount of music and videos
• A better web browser
• Easy music, photo, & video syncing
• A higher-resolution screen
• Easy over-the-air application, music, and video downloads

There are a few things I miss from the TX, but not much:

• Ability to install applications from anyone I want. (For the iTouch, Apple has to approve each application, and only allows installation from the iTunes store.)
• Page up/Page down hard buttons. A must when reading lots of text
• Copy/Paste
• Stylus support for precision tapping without fingerprints on the screen. Stylus support would also make working with the onscreen keyboard much less frustrating.

When I was at Palm there were a number of people, including me, who advocated taking an existing Treo design (the 650 or 700), replacing the cellular radio with a WiFi radio, and releasing it as a PDA. Palm Product Marketing at the time emphatically stated that there was no market for such a device, PDAs were dead, and building a WiFi Treo would be a waste of time. The iPod Touch proves that they were wrong; one small item in a long list of missteps by Palm in the last few years.