I crossed paths with a couple of these babies last week – definitely some interesting stuff. Here’s another installment of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Good:
1. The much ballyhooed multi-tasking. Switching apps is a breeze and you are right where you left off when you come back. Come on, Apple!
2. A real keyboard – I have to say after years of the “virtual” keyboard of my iPhone, it’s nice to have some tactile feedback.
3. Turn-by-Turn Navigation w/ GPS. Come on, Apple! Don’t make us pay $99 for Tom-Tom on our 3GS.
4. Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange support. Seamless wireless sync of mail, contacts and calendars. No real smartphone should lack this.

Bad:
1.  Slow. Having more than one app open at a time introduces noticeable slowing to the interface. Opening preference pages makes you wonder if you actually tapped the icon – you’re waiting.
2. Questionable build quality – a definitely plastic-y feel, with a flimsy cover over the usb port – I wonder how it will stand up to daily use.
3. App Store – not ready for prime time, and won’t be for a while. It took Apple a while too. Unfortunately, the Pre is competing with a very mature iPhone app ecosystem.
4. Sprint only – for now. Yes folks, getting a Pre means a 2-year commitment to Sprint – it remains to be seen whether this LTC will end in tears.

Ugly:
1. Self-Signed SSL support. I have had this problem with every Palm smartphone I’ve every worked with. Microsoft Exchange depends on SSL for secure sync of data, and many small businesses and non-profits use a self-signed (i.e. free) SSL certificate to accomplish this. In all cases, this self-signed cert must be manually installed in order for this to function (except with the iPhone, which just asks you to accept it once). Getting a self-signed cert to work on the Pre proved impossible. I had to purchase a public cert (from GoDaddy, $26 a year, get one today) in order for Exchange sync to work. Shame on you, Palm!
2. iTunes dependency for music sync – It’s wonky and weird to depend on your competitor to provide a critical service for your product.

Time will tell if the Pre can successfully compete with the iPhone – I think the App Store is really the crux of it. I think that Sprint also has to prove that they don’t suck as much as AT&T….

This is funny, because I immediately knew what it meant, making me extremely rare (and geeky). Let’s unpack it a little.

• Fed – the federal government
• RFID – Radio Frequency Identification – a small embedded computer chip that contains information that can be scanned by a multitude of electronic equipment
• -iocy – the blog author’s belief that federal government’s plan to embed identity and security documents with RFID technology is misguided
• pwnd – this was originally a computer gamer term: “To be defeated, especially in an extremely humiliating way”
• at – well, everyone knows what that means
• DefCon – the annual conference of the computer security/hacking community

So, this is funny and ironic, but also very scary – the government wants to put these tags on your passports and drivers licenses, but the security design is so bad that someone can steal your identity and clone your credentials in the time it takes for you to walk through a doorway.

Read the whole thing here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=565

Happy Monday.

This is one sweet ride – and you can plug it in to any electrical outlet. 300 miles on a charge and 0-60 in 5.6 seconds – Yee Haw! 5 adults + 2 kids! 17″ Infotainment TouchScreen! What the hell is that!? I have no idea!

Downsides – this baby runs $50 Grand and won’t be available until 2011. Oh well.

Learn more at http://www.teslamotors.com/models/

Actually, I have been using them with clients for years, so I think they were ready before now. I guess Google finally got the message that selling a suite of services that are officially in Beta is bad for business.

Oddly, even though the Beta designation has been removed from the logo, you can add it back in if you wish. Why?

Read more at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-of-beta-yes-really.html

I’ve deployed a number of Apple Servers, and for Leopard (10.5) it took them until 10.5.5 to work out some bugs that would kill file sharing and require a reboot EVERY DAY. The Apple discussion forums were filled with posts about this – Apple never even posted a “We are working on this”. To this day, iCal server just plain sucks. It’s missing critical features that allow people to share events outside the organization, it requires end users to periodically remove their account from iCal and re-add it in order to start functioning again, and you can’t even edit calendar events on your iPhone. This is ridiculuous.

Anyway, I agree that a M$ solution can be expensive and isn’t for everyone. But let’s face it, Exchange is a mature, fully supported system that works seamlessly with the iPhone. I have never had a single problem with this combination with any of my clients. It works like its supposed to. The real competition is between Exchange and Google Apps as far as I’m concerned. Apple is not even a player in this space, and until they prove that they care about their enterprise users, I won’t deploy even one more Apple server.

‘nuf said.

Here’s the article:

Snow Leopard Server to offer low cost, secure mobile access to iPhone

Anyway, I wonder if Apple considers itself a defense contractor? Read on:

Apple’s New Weapon

It turns out that some pirated versions of Mac software available for download on the internet contained a trojan that joins your happy little mac to a global botnet dedicated to sending spam and attacking web servers.

Don’t make too much of it just yet – it’s limited to shady folks doing shady things. It won’t be long, however, until you will be installing antivirus software on your Mac. What a bummer.

Read more at

Evidence suggests first zombie Mac botnet is active

A resounding endorsement for server side filtering I feel… On a related note, why haven’t the world’s big IT players gotten together to stop spam altogether? It seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult.

Here’s the article at Ars Technica:

Study: energy cost of spam comes from user intervention

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/shaq_terrified_of_phoenix_suns