Month: October 2002

“Cognitive radio” is the solution to the to the current phoney spectrum shortage. Another must-read to on this topic is Kevin Werbach’s white paper, Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm.
The open question is whether the FCC will be true to its free-market rhetoric or its NAB masters. OK, so it’s not really an open question.

Well, I’m ready to buy, so I tried to get some information about the Sprint PCS Vision deal. Wow, what a mess.
As far as I can tell, the offer is not listed on their Web site. Nor is the phone number for customer service.
When you call Sprint, the recording tells you that “because of their new promotions” the wait time will be longer than expected. Has that message been changed since 1998?
The good news is that the offer is real. The bad news is that you have to buy a PCS Vision phone in addition to the PC Card modem. That adds about $250 to the price of admission and is another example of short-sighted bundling by the mobile carriers.
I asked the salesperson if any of the Sprint PCS Vision PC card modems work with a Macintosh. He couldn’t answer that question, so he said he’d connect me with someone who could. That turned out to be “Clair”, Sprint’s lame voice-response tech support computer. Once Clair established that she had no idea what I was talking about, “she” forwarded me to another salesperson who couldn’t answer my question and couldn’t find anyone who could answer it. He finally suggested I go to my local Radio Shack and ask them.
No wonder Sprint PCS is losing customers.

If you’re reading this in Windows (and you probably are), you don’t know what you’re missing. I recently had the opportunity to see MediaSavvy on a Windows PC. God, it’s ugly.
The difference between the Mac and PC in something as simple as rendering Web pages is blindingly clear. The most important differences are fonts (Lucida Grande vs. (yuk) Arial) and in rendering (anti-aliased vs. pixelly) and color (subtle differences become sameness).
There’s nothing I can do about this, short of doing the site as a PDF file. Publishing on the Net is about giving up control in lots of different ways.

I’ve been thinking about my ideal mobile setup. Here’s what I want: T-Mobile’s Handspring PDA/Phone, AT&T Wireless T68i phone, and SprintPCS Vision’s $10/month unlimited wireless access for my TiBook.
See the problem? It’s bundling. Because you have to buy handsets from the carriers, it’s impossible to get what you want. Until they stop trying to “add value” to their networks by controlling how you access them, the wireless carriers will continue to be distracted from their core business and serve their best customers poorly.
I think I’m going to keep my Sprint account and add the $10 data service for my laptop and forego the PDA for the time being.

Roger Fidler was legendary when I worked at Knight-Ridder in the mid-90s. He had already been saying for a decade that tablet PC’s were coming and newspapers had better get ready.
Well, the newspaper industry got distracted by a fad called the Web and lost track of its dream of a $2,000, 3 pound, single-user newspaper-reading device. Now that Microsoft is about to bring that dream a little bit closer, Roger is ready. He is working on a specification for PDF documents that are optimized for a 10.4 inch screen.