Rubber (or rubber-like) keys, good size, excellent response. When you type on the Peek’s keyboard you get a little bit of pushback, but not stiffness. And it makes a satisfying click noise as well as tactile feedback. It works whether you use the pad of your thumbs or the tip of your fingernails. It’s one of the best keyboards I’ve ever encountered on a handheld device.

Major cell phone manufacturers, why can’t you do this? Seriously. I am asking. You do so well in other areas. the Droid is a beautiful little phone, but the keyboard makes me cry. The LG Expo is better, but the layout causes me cramps. And the Droid 2? If these pictures are of the final keyboard, I don’t even want to see this phone. Hard plastic, pillowed keys are not good for those of us with fingernails, which is half the population (if not a bit more).

Go, now, and talk to the Peek people. Learn at their feet. Take however long you need. I’ll be here with the HTC Evo 4G suffering the Android auto-correct.

Remember back in February when  people were busy crowing about the fact that some study claimed two-thirds of Americans had an HDTV and those who didn’t were likely to buy one soon? I didn’t believe the study, and I was happy to see someone else disagreeing with it, too^[1]. The main reason why I didn’t believe that study is simply that HDTVs are expensive. Yes, plenty of people buy crap they don’t need simply because it’s newer, bigger, better. But plenty of people –especially now — aren’t buying crap they don’t need if their current device works perfectly fine.

You can still get non HDTVs with big screens for less money. And people who have cable or satellite are still doing fine with their older models. The people who buy new laptops or phones or other media devices are not automatically the people who buy HDTVs. I’m not. I have no reason to. Except none of these damned devices will output with anything but HDMI, therefore I can’t use them with my TV. That’s just wonderful^[2].

How many tech journalists and bloggers consider this? I haven’t seen many do so. I’ve seen so many journalists write off technology because they think it’s not useful when compared to better stuff, but they’re not taking into account that not everyone can afford new, expensive things all the time. Like MP3 players. How many times have I heard: “well, you don’t need one because you can play music on your phone.” Hello! Some phones. Not all. And can I point out that the non-smartphone market is way, way bigger than the smartphone market? And that smartphones don’t tend to have as much memory as MP3 players? And that not every device is made for the over-connected, spendthrift adult?

I realize that the view from the tech world is that everyone has, should have, wants, or should want the newest, bestest things. Not everyone does and not everyone can afford them. And thus the magazines and blogs and sites we produce end up just catering to a narrow audience who, by the way, is overly filled with the kind of jerks that populate the Gizmodo comment threads and not, say, thoughtful consumers who have to take a wider range of factors into consideration, including price and need.

It’s getting to the point where every time I hear someone mention the lack of HDMI a a negative or any other similar sentiment I want to shake them by the collar. Which is not good and professional behavior. So, I won’t do it. But still. Stop it, people.

Notes

1. Research Rants points out that non-tech savvy people probably don’t understand that just because the TV station tells them that they’re broadcasting in HD that doesn’t mean they actually have an HD set. This strikes me as very possible.
2. In the end I just use my desktop, which has a handy S-Video port. Yes, if I want to output audio I have to run a separate cable. Um, who cares? it’s not as if cables are like creeping death or something.

Hear, hear.

According to a poll over at MacMost.com, what most people want out of the upcoming iSlate is to be able to read books. My god, you people think so small.

I must say: the puppet is right. Seriously, people? You’re going to use the tablet mainly for reading? What do you do with your computers all day, play 8-bit Tetris? Dear Gozer.

Anyway, go read Mosspuppet because he’s far funner about all this than I am. I’m too appalled at how unimaginative the people who took that poll are to be witty today.

New York City is the kind of place you’d expect to find plenty of cafes and coffee shops with free wi-fi and that’s true, for the most part. Apparently it pales in comparison to Seattle — not surprising. There are plenty of issues, though. Like entire neighborhoods bereft of free wi-fi and even some places without anything resembling a cafe. There are places you’d think had free wi-fi, but no! They charge you, instead. Exorbitant prices. There’s a Starbucks every 5 feet below 135th, but is their wi-fi free? Not exactly. And the well-known spots are, of course, well-known, and thus are packed full of people who show up at 9am and don’t leave until the places closes at the ridiculously early hour of… 10pm.

Cafes that close before 1am should be banned in this city.

Anyway, this is all an extremely rambly way to get to the reason I’m making this post. Last week McDonald’s announced that in January they would be offering free wi-fi at the locations where they currently offer non-free wi-fi. This comes just a little while after Barnes & Noble started offering free wi-fi and Borders followed suit in order to keep up. Just thinking about the numbers of B&N’s plus Borders plus McDonald’s in this city my heart starts to go pitter patter because, well, there’s barely a foot of space below 125th street that isn’t covered by free wi-fi.

It’s like some kind of beautiful dream.

Except. Most of that wi-fi is from McDonald’s. And, well, I don’t really want to spend any time in McDonald’s, much less a whole day. Then again, in my neighborhood free wi-fi is sparse, and the cafe around the corner from me is wonderful but has horrendous, horrendous seating. Even more horrendous than McDonald’s. So if I want to get out of the house and get some work done, where am I better off?

This is, of course, just a gimmick to get more people into McD’s and it will most likely work. I’m not the only freelancing writer in need of outside wi-fi. Here’s the thing I wonder: how long will it be before every McDonald’s in the city looks like a Starbucks? A sea of laptops, nary a seat to be found, and obnoxious people complaining about the quality of their latte.

Oh yeah, this is a glorious new era.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can’t see it yet? Then I’ll tell you: services that give the impression that it’s a good idea to build a business website using templates^[1] are lying to you. That’s right, lying. Universal template-based websites are rarely a good idea for anyone, and certainly not businesses.

You run the risk of your website looking just like a ton of other people’s but with slightly different colors or a different picture in the corner. Plus, I’ve rarely come across a template service like that which results in good-looking websites. They claim they’ll make the site building process easier, but easy too often means so simple that you might as well use MS Frontpage for all the good it will do you.

Not all small businesses have the money to hire fancy web design firms and it’s true that the president’s nephew probably isn’t the best way to go. But do not make the mistake of thinking that those are your only two options. There are tons of independent and freelance designers who will not charge you as much as a firm yet will still do a good job. If you’re really, really in a budget crunch, a college student studying design will do you better than a template site.

So please, whenever you see a commercial such as the one above: run away. Run away screaming. Because sites like that may seam easy and a good deal but it is all a horrible lie.

Notes

1. This is different from websites that use WordPress templates. Though you do want to make sure your WP doesn’t look like everyone else’s, you can still use a template made by someone else and tweak. The kind of templates I’m talking about are generally for non-dynamic sites. And sites shouldn’t be non-dynamic, anyway.

The idea of a netbook as an accessory to your busy or even not-so-busy life is a fine one. But the Samsung promo video I posted over on LAPTOP’s blog today has me truly mystified.

Brad Linder claims that it’s supposed to highlight the netbook’s all-day longevity. Could have fooled me. All it seems to highlight is that model’s ability to stretch her lanky body and possibly to warn young ladies from trusting that their boyfriends will pick them up at the train station as promised. Seriously, go look (and please comment there, I am eager to watch you all apply your creative minds to the plot and message).

When I compare that video to this one Nokia did for their new netbook, I find myself much more drawn to the Booklet 3G. This video tells me what this device is, what it does, what makes it special, and even includes some heart-tugging music that somehow makes me want it even more.

But if we must have models, here’s what I’d like to see: women actually using netbooks in some way that shows off what netbooks are good for while providing the eye candy that someone is convinced consumers need. That way it appeals to those of us to buy tech for what it does and those of us who buy anything because hot women are peddling it.

On your PHONE? Someone asked with far, far too much emphasis.

Yes, on his phone. Tao proceeds to flip the screen up and, oh, look at that, a T-Mobile G1. If I wasn’t aware that this phone was called a G1, a shot of the back of it revealed G1 in huge white letters on the back of the screen. (I don’t think that exists in actual, real-life models of said phone. I could be wrong.)

There is some more waving the phone around. Chief Johnson wants to see this picture of the address (provided by Google Maps/Google Street View) for herself. She grabs at the phone, but Tao says, “Let me e-mail it to you.”

I think at this point someone actually exclaimed, again far too emphatically: E-MAIL!?

Yes, show, we get it. The G1 is a marvel. You can see maps on it and it can send e-mail. Woo.

I don’t usually mind product placement. I don’t know if most people even register the model of the laptops and other computer equipment TV people use. I do, usually because I find it funny or I’m scoffing. But man, this was a bit beyond.

So anyway, just so you know, the fake LAPD Major Crimes Squad prefers the T-Mobile G1 for finding pictures of suspects’ houses. And E-MAIL!?

I shall not be buying an iPhone because I dislike paying gobs of money for crappy service. I’ll pay a pittance for my crappy service, thank you.

I shall not be buying this Kingston $900 flash drive… yet. When it’s $100 I’m all over that.

Okay, I needed a third thing and that’s all I got.

When I bought my first netbook I wanted to use it for very specific tasks and it fulfilled its function perfectly. I sometimes tax my NC10 a bit more than I should, but that’s more because I end up doing too much at once instead of concentrating on my most important tasks. Still, I’ve never found myself unhappy.

One could say that I’m an over-informed consumer, so of course I’m not going to be disappointed. Still, every consumer should be informed. They should know how netbooks differ from notebooks, their limitations, and which netbook will give them the best experience. However, I know this is not often the way consumers approach buying electronics.

I wonder what the return rate is on laptops in general…?

I don’t know if it’s an issue on the hardware or software side, but I suspect it’s more software side, especially considering the capabilities we’ve seen in touchscreen smartphones like the the iPod. Every time I’ve ever used a touch notebook I’ve found it nice, but limited. Yes, I can hand write text into documents, but I haven’t seen a program that allows me to draw on or create notes in the margin of documents like I can with a pen and paper. This may exist and I’ve missed it, but I feel like something of that nature should come standard with every touchscreen computer. It’s a basic need from my perspective.

Beyond that, I’ve not been bown away with any touch software ideas or concepts. Why bother having a touchcreen at all if it just means that you can write in small, yellow boxes that have to be cleared periodically, anyway?

Before touch can blow up on any laptop format, someone has to make touchscreens worth having. The iPhone did, and it rode on the coattails of other smartphones and PDAs that tentatively pushed the touch envelope before it came along. For once I feel like Apple’s insistence on controlling both software and hardware was the right move.

Apple, please.

I realize that copy/paste is a new feature on the iPhone, but it’s not an “incredible” thing, it’s a thing that should have been included in the original iPhone. It’s not a complicated process, it’s a basic process. You can’t make people forget that it’s a basic function of most computers and smart phones by producing commercials like this. It will only make you look silly.

How about a commercial that says: Finally, we’ve added copy/paste to the iPhone since we knew you wanted it!

I’m sure the next commercial will be: The new iPhone will wow you with it’s ability to call any number in the U.S.! Wowee!

Really, now.  Every quarter you just make me lose confidence in your sanity over there.

However, I feel that these blissful days are a long way away.  Because even though programs like the OpenOffice suite and GIMP emulate the non-free programs in broadstrokes, it’s always some small, seemingly marginal function that’s missing or doesn’t work as well that puts me right off.  I find myself even angrier, because I want to shake the open source community and scream “Why do you tempt me with a brave new world and then smack me in the face?!”

For example: OpenOffice Writer.  In many ways the parallel of MS Word.  I can create and format documents just the same in both programs as far as I know.  When I’m doing basic to intermediate tasks, Writer serves me well.

But then.

I want to do something that is really easy to do in MS Word: find paragraph marks and replace them with two sequential paragraph marks, thereby inserting a line between every paragraph. This is especially useful when posting things to blogging software. In plain text mode, two line breaks means insert a p tag.

In MS Word, it’s very easy and quick to do this.  You click Find & Replace and, if you don’t know the code for “paragraph mark” by heart (it’s ^p) then you click More>> and you’ll see a dropdown for special characters — paragraph marks, tabs, em dashes, a whole long list.  If you want to insert two breaks, you put ^p in find and ^p^p in replace. Simple, easy.

Not so with OpenOffice.  Not only is there no helpful dropdown in the Find & Replace window, the method for doing the operation I described above is completely counter-intuitive and flawed. After over an hour searching I was able to learn a bit about Regular Expressions and how they applied to the Find & Replace process. In order to get something approximating the simple process of finding one paragraph break and replacing it with two, I had to look through 7 web pages and I still did not find a method that produced completely satisfactory results.

And forget about doing my other oft-used Find & Replace maneuver: find all text formatted a certain way (ex: italicized) and put certain text or characters on either side of said formatted text (like HTML code). This is another fairly simple process in MS Word. I spent 3 hours trying to find a way to do this in OpenOffice one day. I gave up.

Another aspect of OpenOffice that bugs a lot of users (though not so much me) is the inability to have a “normal” page view. Not the Print Layout or the Web Layout, just straight text all the way down with a little dotted line indicating the page break. MS Word has this and OpenOffice users have been clamoring for it since 2001, apparently. And yet there is no satisfaction. Sad.

This kind of thing means that I can never use OpenOffice as my primary office suite. I will continue to need Word. I don’t want to need Word! And  I should not need to take a course in programming in order to do really simple tasks.

I could spend another 1000 words talking about the problems I have with GIMP over Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro 6. I feel like every intermediate or advanced function of GIMP takes more steps or requires more hunting than is necessary for an image program. And having the tool menu in a separate window from the window with the image is maddening. Every time I have to use GIMP to do something as simple as crop then resize an image my blood pressure rises.

Take those frustrations with individual programs and apply them to a whole operating system – yeah, I’m looking at you, Linux. As Laptop Magazine commenter Gary Reaves so elegantly put it:

How would you like to own a toaster that requires you to design a timing circuit switch every time you want a piece of toast? Try marketing that to consumers. That’s basically what Linux Distros are all about…

Most problems don’t quite reach the timing circuit design level of complication. Still, any time a simple function or feature isn’t there or requires a lot of work and research to do, users are going to be unhappy. Heck, even non-free/open source software and operating systems run into this problem. Windows Vista, anyone? How about Office 2007? (That travesty of an office suite has kept me using Office XP for almost a decade now.) But Microsoft is the dominant force here. They can afford to pull crap like this (somewhat).

If open source software wants to play with the big boys, the programmers need to step up their game. It’s not the broad strokes of functionality that are going to make or break you with consumers, it’s the little things.

I was in this same position last year. I’d been with one host (American Web Hosting) for several years. I’d been happy with them for a lot of those years. But in that last 12 months I was with them there was a slew of problems. My site would go down randomly, my email wouldn’t work, the server I was on got blacklisted so my email wouldn’t even get to the folks I tried to contact. It was a mess. Plus, I was tired of having little space, limited sub-domains, and no ability for add-on domains at a non-crazy price.

When I went looking for a new host I did some research. I looked at rating sites and asked friends for advice. Many people suggested Dreamhost, but I kept seeing so many others having issues with them. One host kept popping up with high ratings: Lunarpages. Lots of space (unlimited!) lots of bandwidth (more unlimited!), as many sub-domains as I wanted and add-on domains included. For a not bad price, either. I signed up, paid a full year in advance, and was generally happy.

Then about 3 months ago something weird happened — I got an email from Lunarpages saying they’d disabled one of my scripts (actually the index.php file on a WordPress blog I had), claiming that it was taking up too much CPU on the server. Like 85%. The day before I’d installed a new plugin and I figured that must have triggered something odd.  I disabled the plugin and asked to have my index page restored — it took them 2 days to do so.

A couple of weeks later I recommended Lunarpages to someone. They Googled and found this page right away: Lunarpages sucks.

Oh crap.

I was alarmed because the situation described on that page matched what I’d gone through, just my scale was smaller. I started to worry because If LP was just making up this stuff about my index page actually causing some problem in order to upsell me and continue to do so until I bought a way expensive package, I was not down with that. But as I was still half convinced that the plugin had been the real culprit I decided to stay on with LP.

Big. Mistake. In the past three months they’ve disabled that same file 4 times. Each time they claim not to know exactly what my page is doing that causes all of these problems, so I can’t diagnose or fix it. They always disabled it without telling me beforehand, which is so professional, right? And it always took them 24 – 48 hours to undo.

The last straw was two weeks ago. Several of Lunarpages’ servers went down over the course of two days. My server plotzed toward the tail end of it all, and I only knew because I tried to access my blogs and discovered that every database on my site was gone — that server had gone down first. 15 minutes after the servers came back up I got an email — they’d disabled by index.php again. How it could possibly have used up 85% of the CPU in 15 minutes they could not tell me. And, of course, it took a day to get back.

I was livid.

So I went looking for a different host, but I was a little unsure of my ability to find one. How can you tell which ones are paying people to write fake reviews (something disgruntled LP refugees often charge) and which are genuinely good? There are a ton of websites out there that claim to rate and review web hosts, but really they’re just making money from affiliate links.

I somehow lucked out and found WebHostingTalk, a forum where they… well, you can probably guess. There are several threads filled with people like me who had the same problem with Lunarpages and other hosts. They asked the same questions I was looking to answer: who, then, should I choose?

I found out some interesting tidbits about web hosts. The ones that advertise that they have unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, etc., completely oversell their servers. They pack in dozens, maybe hundreds of accounts and tell people they have no limit and it’ll all be okay. Most people don’t use that much space or bandwidth. For those that do, or those running small business websites or fairly popular blogs or similar, this kind of overselling is a problem. If your website/blog uses even the tiniest bit more than it “should”, the host has to put a stop to that — there are too many people for you to take up more than 1% of the CPU!  So they warn you and say your site is using too much and perhaps what you really need is a dedicated server. Most people in this situation absolutely do not.

I found two web hosts in the WebHostingTalk threads and one from a friend’s rec that looked like good candidates. I attempted to email all of them and ask three fairly important questions. I wanted to know if they had a similar policy to Lunarpages when a website or page used up “too many” resources on the server. Would they disable the script without telling me first or try to work with me to solve the problem?  Also, would they be able to restore my site from a Cpanel-generated backup? These were essentials, and my choice would depend on the answers.

One host (I forget which) required me to create a login and password before I could even send them email.  Nope!

The second (1&1) forwarded my question to the tech support people from the sales address I originally sent it to, which is fine since I asked some fairly technical questions. However, the response I got was highly unsatisfactory. The person who answered the email did not understand most of what I was talking about. I think that the issue was a combination of English not being their first language (I surmised this mostly from the answers he/she gave, which betrayed an unfamiliarity) and the person in question being first level tech support. There may have been some people there who could have answered my inquires and the person did suggest I call. But I felt that, if I were to have a problem and the first level people were so completely clueless as to not even understand “Can you restore my site from a backup?” I would have to go through tech support hell every time I emailed or called.  So 1&1 was off the list.

The third (MDDHosting) not only answered my inquiries to my satisfaction, but also very promptly. And I’ve seen the person who runs it all over WebHostingTalk being generally helpful. The people there like him. So that’s who I went with.

I don’t have unlimited space or unlimited bandwidth. But MDD doesn’t oversell and takes care to maintain their servers. I can live with paying a little extra in order to have a bit more space and bandwidth than I need right now to give myself space to grow. And I no longer have to worry about my main page being summarily disabled and down for day at a time.

The website transfer was easy and mostly painless, he helped me through it and was patient, and now I’m all sorted.  I’m a little worried that Lunarpages will try to auto-charge me for another year, so I’m taking steps to make sure that doesn’t happen.  They’re already getting a free month since my contract was technically not up until mid-April. But I was determined not to waste another second with those horrendous people.

So yes, add me to the people who say: Lunarpages suck! If you’re choosing a new webhost, do so wisely. Ask them questions beforehand. Don’t believe hosting review sites with a ton of ads and affiliate links. And ‘ware anyone who claims to give you unlimited this and that. So sayeth K T.

I’ve set up dozens of WP blogs in the past few years and I am happy to say it does get easier with time.  But there are still things that trip me up every time.  And WordPress 2.7 is detrmined to make things slightly more complicated than they need to be.

Also: plugins.  When plugins break it makes the baby Jesus cry, people.