mamafufu

-VS-

My first personal computer was a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III.  I got it when I was very very “young”.  Just ordered my new Dell XPS 9000.  I think it would be interesting to see how technology has evolved from my first to my most recent personal computer.  Hope my math is right.

Component : TRS-80 Model III : XPS 9000 : Delta

RAM: 16 KB : 12 GB : +75,000,000%
CPU clock speed: 2.03 MHz : 2.66 GHz : +131,034%
Monitor Size: 12 in : 24 in : +200%
Storage: 356 KB Floppy Drive : 2 TB Hard Disk : +280,898,876%
Cost: $999: $2,500 : +250% (Inflation ignored)

There were also other interesting facts about personal computing at that time using the TRS-80 as an example. The monitor was Black and White. There were no bit-mapped graphic although we were quite creative with character-based graphic. Screen resolution was 64 x 16 characters. The floppy disk was 5.25 inches in size. Hard disk was not available until a later time. Mass storage was external cassette tape. There was no such thing as pointing device (i.e. mouse). Windows 1.0 has not been invented until a few years later. There were two interface ports: RS-232 serial port (i.e. for modem) and a parallel port (i.e. for printer). Modem speed was 300 bit per second. In addition to program in BASIC, the other logical option is the Assembly language with Peek and Poke.

Life was certainly a bit simpler then.

as much as i love to stay with verizon, i waited in line for over 7 hours on the iphone 3G launch day and got myself one.  why?  because i needed wanted a phone with a good music player, email, im, youtube and web browsing that supports the chinese language.  by supporting chinese i mean the abilty to display (i.e. id3 metadata), to input (handwriting and pinyin) and to operate (search, sort, sync) in chinese.  just like many of other apple products, the iphone does it beautifully.  and it is almost perfect.  almost.

when verizon made the LG Dare available just a few days before iphone 3G launch, i was so disappointed that it didn’t have chinese support.  since the phone itself certainly has the ability, i suspect the issue is with the verizon software side.  so why did verizon and many other wireless carriers totally ignore this market in the US?

in software engineering, supporting different languages and locales is called globalization (g11n) which include internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n).  i18n needs to be planned from the beginning of the development life cycle.  it will be a lot more expensive to add later as an afterthought.  do you notice the open source communities are doing a lot better in g11n than others.  i guess there is a simple explanation to this – open source projects are built by the world and used by the world.

for many of the companies out there, wake up and smell the 玫瑰 or 咖啡.

my mobile service contract commitment ended a few weeks ago. like many others may do, i shop for my next phone. it will come down to do i want to go with iphone 3G and switch carrier or do i stay with my current carrier and go with the newly available LG dare? if the LG dare provides better language support as in the iphone, it will be a much harder decision to make. while the LG phone itself certainly has the ability to support languages like chinese, don’t understand why it is opted out in the US market.

so what am i going to do with my perfectly fine moto Q that i use today? i will keep it as a piece of memory or history. this reminds me my first mobile phone. it was a moto 8800 ultra classic upright brick model. it has a LED display of 7 characters, 30 minutes talk time, expensive, ability to store about 20 numbers, big and heavy. it made and received cellular calls in very limited areas mainly outdoor. at that time mobile phone was more like a status thing than necessity for many people. that pretty much sums up all the features and characteristics of my first mobile phone.

in first quarter of 2008 there were nearly 300 millions mobile phones shipped worldwide compared with about 70 million PCs shipped and the gap is widening. with mobile technologies like 3G, wi-fi, bigger screen with higher resolution, audio, video, and web enabled applications, accessing the internet from mobile phones becomes more real, fun and practical, .

as mobile phones become more internet-centric, what does it mean to the service industry? how can existing services use this new opportunity to enhance its offerings or as a competitive edge? what innovative services can be developed to catch this new wave?