Karma – what goes around comes around

After my previous outlook of ‘everything’s great’ and my theory that there was a genie sat behind me, it seems that karma has come back to get me. It is true that good luck must be followed by bad luck, and my bad luck has come in the form of an Asus eeePC.

The Asus eeePC IS a revolution. Screw all the media and rave reviews about this device, just go out and buy one right now. It is so simplistic that my nan could operate it without being told what to do, and yet it really packs a punch with the power and streamlined Linux distro combination. I love it. There’s just one problem though – Asus didn’t deem it important enough to make the little Xandros distro compatible with WPA PEAP encryption.

Asus’s target audience with this device is simply anyone that wants a great little machine for on-the-go work, play, and most importantly quick internet access. They won’t tell you this (and for some reason neither will 3) but the 3g usb dongle that you can get for just £10 per month works out of the box, which surely makes this device the best completely mobile device out there at the moment, especially as you can do all that for under £300. I spent £250 on my black 4g 701 eee at PC World because I was impatient, but online retailers are dispensing them at an alarming rate for just £220. The 2g version is going at £190, but I’m struggling to see why anyone would get one as you lose out – no space for any documents and no inbuilt webcam.

To me, the natural audience fit for this device is students of literally any age. It’s cheap, the solid state disk makes it more robust, it does everything that a windows laptop does and it is TINY. The massive downside for this demographic is that most of them frequent educational establishments during office hours, most of which have some kind of wifi (good thing) with WPA PEAP encryption (bad thing if you’re an eee user). The UK rolled out a fantastic project called JANET eduroam, which means that any student from any university can go to any (not just their own) university and use their login and password to access the wifi. To protect this, eduroam employs the use of WPA PEAP, which is admirable as universities have always been a real sore spot in terms of infrastructure security.

So WHY then does the eee not have the ability out of the box to connect to WPA PEAP? That’s just nuts. I’ve done much trawling of the awesome forums and wiki run at eeeuser.com and no one seems to have hit a solution for Xandros. The only answer is to install Windows or Ubuntu.

Kudos to Ubuntu BIG TIME, as I’ve now entirely switched from Windows XP to Gutsy on my main desktop; and I’m astounded at its customisation tools, general out of the box compatibility and speed. The only two things I’ll say is that no one should try this at home without a nVidia graphics card, and if you invest in a printer have a good check on the Ubuntu site for which printers work out of the box. I now have dual screening working all lovely and I’m really impressed.

But I shouldn’t have to install XP or Ubuntu onto my eee. WPA PEAP wifi should just work. So wake up Asus, start shipping with this feature out of the box, and release a patch for those already purchased! It’s frustrating to the extent that the iPhone is. I watched the latest episode of Diggnation last night, and Alex Albrecht pointed out that the iPhone is SO close to being the perfect mobile handset, but there’s really silly details missing like MMS. The same goes here with the eee, it is amazing, and I love my new eee and find it hard to put down, but it’s still a couple of features short of being the dream ultra mobile SSD laptop.

Danger Inc.

Om’s article on the Sidekick purchase by Microsoft held for me a real gem at the end, where he says that “Clearly, Microsoft needs help and Windows Mobile has been relegated to the Business segment”. What I find interesting here is that despite this claim, certainly here in the UK, Windows Mobile phones certainly appear to have a large presence. Just walk into any high street phone store, and the selection of smart phones is somewhat limited to pda-phones running the Windows Mobile OS. I’ve had one, it was perfectly usable and ActiveSync is a dream. I’m actually happy if that’s what the business segment uses.

But it’s not just that, I think that the next few years are going to hold bigger business development in store. Or at least I hope they do! The reason for this is that I, and those in my age range that I’d like to term ‘my generation’, have grown up around technology – more specifically very user friendly consumer technology. My generation expects a good GUI, help and support, good compatibility; but at the same time we have a certain arrogance about us when it comes to things like instruction manuals. We have a basic underlying understanding of technology based on our growth around these devices developping with us. The average ‘young person’ has their own mobile phone, their own computer (or regular access to one), an mp3 player, and after that it depends on lifestyle as to what other gadgets they might have. When this age band hits the job market properly, I think we’re all going to get a shock at how backwoods and out-dated these working business systems are, and I look forward to how demanding we are and how much pushing we provide to development of business back ends.

I just hope that efficiency always remains really close to the absolute top of every firms’ strategy and operations, and that rounding the corners off and smoothing the edges on systems isn’t something that creates a conflict of interest against this efficiency drive.

The first comment posted, from Curtis, has an excellent and obvious point. Microsoft must have been grumbling throughout the release of the iPhone and subsequent handsets that followed that tried to clone some of its features. I reckon we’ll see Windows Mobile landing comfortably on a Danger device, thus combining killer hardware with a very smooth desktop experience. Hopefully, the full functionality of a Vista/XP desktop will be available through one of these such devices.

In a way I’m kind of sad. My friend made the excellent point  that Microsoft seem to suck at innovation. From Day 1 they have been keeping an incredibly close eye on Apple and copying lots of their innovations and new features. Now we see that instead of innovating their own device to compete head on with the iPhone, they buy out a pretty excellent pre-existing company and all their products.

On the other side of the fence…

On the other side of the fence from this ‘Microhoo’ situation, I believe the following will come to be over with Google, Apple and AT&T:

AT&T will work on developing stronger ties with Apple inside their current partnership. We all hope that things only get stronger for the iPhone on AT&T. This will evolve into a working relationship in the area of the 700mhz spectrum. AT&T will get Apple’s appetite wetted for using the available blocks to get into Android alongside Google. Apple will drag AT&T into the Android Google field as it has shown interest in knocking other companies out of D block bidding by themselves not bidding. AT&T then wants to go on and develop their own strategic relationship (possible alliance) with Google to provide a pure feed to access Google’s own mobile internet.

If you remember, Google was buying up all those old cables across the United States. Attaching their massive network of super computers to these cables would be enough to build their own “Googlenet” that can be accessed on Apple Devices. It can also be reached running an Android-Google-OpenSocial-OpenPlatform device so created by various other companies can compete with Apple and with Microsoft-Yahoo! Devices. You see, Yahoo! will bring to Microsoft a suite of media services and an enormous user base that it can latch onto its mobile OS.

Microsoft will now also apparently have a hand in the development of devices such as Side-Kick. This will of course have the effect of finally driving people from 2g to 2.5g and through into full 3g, which is perfect as our infrastructure greatly needs investment. We will consequently begin to run WiFi much more on devices, hopefully pushing the gradual jumps into the 700mhz blocks and encouraging both the blending of WiFi and Bluetooth and the development and growth of WiMAX.

If only…