From my perch I see Blackberry’s

First Generation Smartphone Grows OOOOLLLLDD

interest waning; its major strengths are pushed email and a wide variety of phones with keyboards.  If you’d rather type than touch it’s the way to go.

Apple’s iPhone has matured as a fabulous media/entertainment device.  Apple’s own website touts iTunes, HD video capabilities, and millions of apps on its own list of accomplishments.  Yes, it also searches the Internet and well, but…

Google Android’s got search, navigation, and mail at the soul of its machine. Androids ships with strong connections to Google’s apps and services, including App Pack Gmail, Google Talk, Messaging, Voice Mail, Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.  Apple’s iPhone can certainly handle the same tasks, but the emphasis is on media–my photos, music, video.

With this logic, my clear choice was the Google Nexus One, but yours might be very different.  (And after Apple’s news that it would go after the Nexus One and other Android phones for violation of patents, I’m getting that cold feeling back in my feet.)

Other reasons I find Google phones appealing:

Less Is More: Apple passed the 150,000 mark for apps developed for iTunes. It could take the better part of a day to sort through crossword puzzle choices.  Android has only 20,000, Blackberry less still. Me, I’d rather have an edited list of best of breed apps than a free for all. I find iTunes offers hundreds of apps for each of my interests, but a large number of them turn out to be underwhelming.

Google Docs: As someone who knows how to get things done in Microsoft Office that even Microsoft can’t do, change does not come easy to me. I find many aspects of Google Docs inscrutable, but as sharing docs amongst devices and collaborators is becoming increasingly important, Google’s got the lead.

Though I expect Google will push its way into the content market (e-books from the Google store, for example, will be able to be read on most computers, phones, or e-book readers), I’m not going the single device route quite yet. My iPod Touch is still the best way to enjoy music, podcasts, photos, and videos.  And my Amazon Kindle is still the best screen format for e-books. But, when it comes to business, my soul is going to Google (at least this year).

This year’s show feels a little recession strapped in that the toy manufacturers are packing volumes of value into their packages and not designing big expensive toys.

There was a time when plush animals costing thousands were plentiful on the floor.  Today’s show was a bit more austere but amazingly creative, which goes to show you that having less can sometimes be more.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Lego: Lego introduced a new breed of  board games at Toy Fair. Your job is to build the game out of Legos (and decide the rules of engagement) before you play.  It’s a brilliant idea–a twist on the family board game, capturing the love of Legos. What a mashup!  The digerati are awaiting Lego Universe, the company’s huge online world. Most of the games, like Pyramid (pictured here), are priced between $10 and $20.  At the high end, Creationary costs $24.

Mattel: Mattel’s star of the show was a dog collar aptly named Puppy Tweets. Once the collar is placed on the pup, he can send a tweet (or is it a woof directly to Twitter).  The USB collar uses Bluetooth to communicate with Twitter so proximity is important. For $30 it’s pure unadulterated fun–a mashup of pets/gadgets and social media. You can follow your dog and have them make other doggie friends on Twitter. 

E-readers: I wondered when the first e-readers for kids would appear and they have. Systems like Leapfrog’s Tag Reader have been serving the function of e-readers for a long time. Fisher Price announced a super-duper 5-in-1 product called the iXL. It’s a 3- to 6-year-old’s rendering of My First iPod, combining a photo album, e-reader, notebook, game machine, and music player into one crash-proof device.  Price: $80.

TRAKR: One much buzzed about fave on the show floor was Wild Planet’s new Sky Video TRAKR.  At the upper end of the price range ($129), this packed-with-technology gizmo is a toy that looks like a tank/robot.  You control it with a gameplayer-like remote control that has a small LCD VGA-quality screen, joystick, and buttons.  Using simple downloadable programs or even creating your own programs, the TRAKR transmits color video and audio and data.  It can memorize a path to your kitchen or be trained to scare the pants of your mom when she enters your room.  It’ll even have night vision just to make things interesting.

Talkatoo: Of course some of the coolest products are found in the recesses of the Javits Center, usually start-up companies with some very passionate owners.  For instance, there’s talkatoo–a small, colorful pendant that allows for a 30-second voice recording.   For $16 bucks, you can carry your kids’ voices everywhere with you.

TV Hat: Now here’s one that’ll have you laughing and shaking your head in amazement. But no one will be able to see you because you’ll be under the TV Hat.  This sub-$30 hat (or visor) has a tiny pouch for you to insert your iPhone or other video player. Underneath the hood, a prism brings the image into focus and built-in earphones create your own private studio.  As long as you’re comfortable looking like a cross between a Klu-Klux Klan’er and a HAZMAT worker, you will fall in love with the TV Hat–a poor man’s solution to TV glasses.  (Imagine each kid in your car wearing these in the back seat! You might get pulled over for kidnapping!)  Of course it made the worst of show list over at http.bored.com, but it’ll either be the next pet rock or not.

Geocaching: For the family that likes finding its way together, GeoMates Jr. from Apisshere is an entry-level $70 GPS.  It’s filled with 25,000 geocache locations from all over the country. Geocaches are markers or hidden boxes or anything you want that you place somewhere and mark its coordinates on a GPS map.

My Ami: Finally there’s My Ami–created by a mom after giving her kid an iPod and watching it tossed from the shopping cart one too many times. My Ami is a bear that conveniently holds the iPod or iTouch securely and out of harm’s way.  There’s the suction cup version for strollers or car seats and the clamp-on for shopping carts. Advocates of less screen-time for little ones will go apoplectic over this one, but hey, for many moms, it’s whatever it takes to get you through the day.

The signs of the impending wreckage are everywhere. In London, they’ve padded certain phone poles to stop overly focused texters from walking into them. In the U.S., approximately 40% of automobile accidents (one occurs every 13 seconds) are based on inattentiveness, with cellphone distractions being the primary cause. Facebook makes it way too easy to fritter away the day trading repartees with kindergarten buddies, leaving you wondering where the day went. Our kids are more comfortable texting it than saying it. The latest study from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds our kids spend more than 50 hours of screen time each week. Not 50 serial hours though; they just multitask screen time better than the rest of us. (The homework/iPod/Facebook/texting/TV combo is fave.)

But this week was the high tech equivalent of the fat lady singing. The original zealots have started to defect and ponder what tech hath wrought.

The first time I heard Jaron Lanier speak, he was a dreadlocked college student talking about something he coined “virtual reality.” He talked of avatars floating around new worlds. Well, he’s just written a new book (that’s right, a book) called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. In the book he laments that some of the Internet’s most basic tenets like anonymity and crowdsourcing (the notion that the crowd always knows best) have made the Internet a place where quality information is hard to come by.

Last week in Davos at the World Global Summit, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, slipped off the tech bandwagon when he suggested that kids would have a “deep reading” problem—reading for deeper cognition—because of the proliferation of instantaneous (never mind small-screened) devices.

And on Tuesday evening (for the few of you who don’t watch On Demand), you can see Digital Nation, a PBS special devoted to the yin/yang of living digitally. Does it bring us further apart or closer together? Open our minds to new ideas or shut them down? There you’ll find Douglas Rushkoff, another early cheerleader for all things digital and a co-producer of the program. Rushkoff makes the Internet sound a bit like Woodstock—the ideal that will never be realized again and admits that he does not use the Internet for fun.

There’s some truth to the notion that, like Woodstock became Altamont, the Internet became big business. But there’s even more truth and an imperative to the notion that we’ve got to learn some new digital survival skills. Those who know how to get the information they need and then get out will be the smart ones moving forward. Those who learn to control the Internet, and not vice versa will win. I could surf the web all day for more anecdotes in defense of my story. Discipline, willpower, and knowing that none of you have the attention to read this in its entirety trump more surfing.

The TVs came to CES in a dizzying display of shapes and sizes. Mobs of people wearing special 3D glasses made it feel like you were walking into the cast of Mission Impossible. All were staring at cathedral-sized walls of 3D piled upon 3D. Those of us old enough to remember the red/blue cardboard glasses we got at the movies remember that the only decent part about the 3D experience was faking those “scary moments” as an excuse to grab the hand of a dates.

After three decades of hibernation, 3D is back to stay. The buzz on the street was that the Samsung quality was unbeatable. One of the features that people really loved, called proximity sensing, turns on the TV for you automatically when you pop into view. Most of the TVs on the show floor were LCD TVs that use special active shutter glasses. The glasses provide the illusion of 3D by switching quickly between your two eyes.

Panasonic, unlike the others, will stick to plasma and will be first to market a reasonable TV. And LG’s Infinia line of 3D-ready TVs has just the hint of an edge. Mostly it is just a beautifully designed thin piece of glass.
It wasn’t only 3D TVs–the Acer Aspire 3D is the world’s first 3D notebook. And since it starts at $799 it’s a great way to get your feet wet with 3D without drowning in expensive 3D televisions. The Sony PlayStation demonstrated future 3D qualities as well.

Bottom line: 3D glasses, though much improved, are still kinda creepy to watch TV in. Viewing from a side angle blurs the picture, and there’s still very little content to choose from.

Right now it’s a tough sell. You need to witness 3D in the flesh or you’ll be disappointed with what you buy. Animations look more natural than sports or nature photographically, probably because you’re willing to believe animation can have little butterflies flying around your head.

To my eye, real images like landscape footage seem either to be jumping at you in multiple steps, or sometimes recessed into a background that sprints out at you. Sony and Nvidia’s 3D both looked incredible, but it could have just been better footage. As of now, 3D filmmaking requires a special, very expensive film camera made by just a few manufacturers like Mitsubishi and Sony.

After 30 years of watching CES cycles of product introductions, I’ve got a rule about this. Three years from CES to mass market, so watch out, they’re coming at you–in 3D.

But just you wait. Already ESPN, Sony, Discovery, and IMAX have announced 3D networks. (Ouch about that hockey stick in my face!) As they say in CES Land: It’s not a matter of why, it’s a matter of when.

My bets on some of the hottest trends at the show:

eBook Wars: You’ll have seen most of them before the opening day of CES, but you’re going to begin to see a features war over book readers. Color readers, readers with two screens, readers with backlit screens, pocket readers, multimedia readers, and so on. The good news? All this talk about reading may resuscitate the printed word. If you’re at CES, visit the eReader exhibit on the CES floor and the HigherEd Tech Summit.* Both will be discussing how ebooks will replace those high-priced printed versions.

3D: James Cameron may be getting all the 3D glory on the big screen this season, but there are plenty of folks at CES leaving their 3D mark. Look for notebooks and netbooks from the likes of Acer (3D glasses required). SONY, Mitsubishi, and Panasonic will be showing the next variant of 3D TV (glasses required on most, not all). Even the gamemakers (keep an eye on PlayStation) will be supporting 3D output. ASUS has just announced a 3D gaming notebook, the G51 J 3D. My favorite? Fujifilm has a new camera that shoots photos and videos in 3D and requires no glasses. The trick? Two sensors built into the camera.

Mobile Phones and Their Apps: There are now over 100,000 iPhone apps; that’s a pretty big business. But the iPhone is being challenged by Android, RIM Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm, and Nokia’s Symbian environments. As consumers, we want to know what apps are worth paying for; as a developer, you’ll want to know what apps to create for. These topics will be visited in multiple places on the show floor, but the Mobile Apps Showdown should be a nice culmination of an app-ified world.

Mind and Body: Take a motion sensor, add some software and a cloud computing app, and you’ve got the recipe for a healthier body. Look for everything from digital pedometers with online recordkeeping to elaborate systems that measure your energy output and give you enough readout to put the Challenger’s dashboard to shame. Watch for biofeedback, relaxation, remote medical data collection, and more.

Telepresence: Yes, it’s a Trekian buzzword, but get used to it. Simply (probably too simply) put, telepresence creates the illusion that something is near you, even though it is not. Video conferencing, distance learning, remote medical diagnoses–all of these rely on telepresence. Look for Cisco to take the lead, but IBM, Microsoft, and others will express their violent interest in this topic.

Augmented Reality: A close cousin of telepresence, augmented reality was beginning to seep into our collective consciousness at the last CES. It’s back, and in general it describes a technology that adds a level of information on top of your physical reality. Point your phone at a person and it might automatically recognize them and offer the person’s vital stats for you. Point a digital camera at an object (say, a museum) and have entries about that object appear on your screen. Making augmented reality more real are manufacturers like NVIDIA. Its new Tegra chip packs the power of a PC onto a single, small chip.

* Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, produces the Mobile Apps Showdown and the HigherEd Tech Summit at CES.

The study polled over 2,000 people to find out what most of us know. Most online U.S. adults (80%) feel there are unspoken rules about mobile technology usage, and approximately 7 in 10 (69%) agreed that violations of these unspoken guidelines, such as checking emails, sending text messages, and making phone calls while in the company of others, are unacceptable.

More than half (52%) would be offended if they were at a holiday party and someone attempted to secretly use an Internet-enabled device such as a laptop, netbook, or cellphone at the table. Funny thing is that 75% feel it is perfectly appropriate to use Internet-enabled devices, including laptops, netbooks, and cellphones, in the bathroom (yuck!).

At the Tea Room, Intel’s own ethnographer, Dr. Genevieve Bell, and Anna Post, descendant of Emily Post and etiquette expert for the Emily Post Institute, were on hand with advice. “The social rules for new technologies are continuing to be established across cultures and geographies around the world, and etiquette will continue to change and adapt over time along with it,” said Dr. Bell. “Etiquette surrounding mobile technology is becoming increasingly relevant, particularly in social situations such as holiday gatherings and events,” said Ms. Post.

One area where anti-tech bias seems to have softened is the holiday greeting card. More than half of online adults (62%) would send an electronic greeting card or email in lieu of a traditional card and, despite what parents have always taught their children about the value of a handwritten “thank you” note, almost 9 out of 10 (88%) online adults would not be offended if they received an email or electronic thank you.

Intel’s holiday lesson: No matter how great the temptation or how much the thing is vibrating in your pocket, do not answer your email or phone calls at the holiday table. Not unless you want your mouth washed out with soap or, at minimum, your phone confiscated.

Read on and I’ll tell you about Cell-R-Derm, the perfect gift for the cell phone abuser in your family.

HP's Mini-clutch was designed by fashion celeb, Vivienne Tam.

At Microsoft's Open House in NYC, a tweetie bird answered tweets from her perch below a treehouse.

Now that all PCs cost about the same and run about the same at any given price point, they’ve become commodities. All except the Mac, that is. The Mac is like the mythical siren, designed to lure us with gorgeous work from bevel to the box, and expecting a premium to be paid for its good looks. PC vendors now are trying (almost too hard) to compete on design and that hip elegance that’s never quite been the PC’s style.

To anchor the new fashion parade, there’s Windows 7, noticeably more attractive and thankfully speedier. If you’re interested in the main new features of Win 7, read this introduction by Ars Technica.

Commensurate with the launch of Win 7 come a bevy of beautiful machines with all sorts of radical designs. First to show off this fall was the HP Vivienne Tam clutch bag PC  (pictured above).  There is no Mac equivalent and women drool when they see it. The guts of this clutch bag sized PC are similar to HP Mini-Notes, the company’s netbook offering. Not much detail yet, but just having HP play a big part in Fashion Week was a novelty.

There was an audible gulp when Dell unveiled its Adamo XPS, an ultra-thin notebook computer that’s under a centimeter in width. That’s a pencil near the photo to give you some idea about how thin is thin.

It’s lovely to look at; more so if you’re a fan of modern minimalist anodized aluminum (it’s available, appropriately, in onyx (black) or pearl (white)). The glass screen (13.5 inches) has no framing. Edge-to-edge, it’s glass, creating a beauty of its own. After the blush was off the rose, the tech folks weighed in, pointing out that the PC felt heavier than it looked, was expensive ($1,499), and lacked an SD slot. I guess being thin has its price…both on the pocketbook and perf

ormance. For a fun read see, the Dell Adamo/MacBook Air deathmatch in PC World.

Of course, Dell had to have an “It” machine worthy of the new Adamo name. That would be the Dell Domo 13, a special collector’s version decorated with Swarovski crystals that form an intricate bejeweled snake on the laptop cover. (Word to the wise: Do not try to put this Dell in your laptop bag.) Available at Bergdorf Goodman only, my guess is that Dell contracted this one long before the recession took hold.

Dell joins OPI brand nail polish to come up with the finishes for Dell PCs available from Dell's Design Studio. No chipping, I hope.

Much more on price point, but equally decadent, is a partnership Dell announced with OPI (a nail polish brand used in most garden variety salons, whose colors I love but whose ability to stay on my hands for more than a day without chipping is lacking). Guys feeling left out? The MLB (Major League Baseball Association) announced a number of favorite team covers. (I’d think twice if I were a NY salesman going to see that client in Boston with my Yankee studded laptop.) The cases are available for Mini, Inspiron, and Studio laptops and will cost somewhere between $65 and $85 extra.

More like a netbook, but with SONY's incredible lightness of being and gorgeous styling.

Sony has built a brand on its elegant design. This year, at a crowded NYC party amidst the work of Thomas Pendelton, tattoo artists, and Cirque Berzerk (an LA based, cabaret style Cirque du Soleil), Sony announced three new VAIOs running Windows 7. Actress Mischa Barton showed up to herald three new VAIOs running Windows 7. One of the systems, the new Sony VAIO X, nudged out the Dell by a little more than an ounce to claim the title of lightest PC, but it has a 2” smaller screen so they’re not really comparable. The Sony has integrated Verizon wireless and a much heftier price tag; many observed that it’s more like a netbook than a notebook ($1,200).

Not to be outdone on color palette, Sony CW series notebooks can be outfitted with some lovely two-tone colors, and these 14-inch screen laptops start as low as $800. For more, see PC World reviews.

Don’t they know that texting is just the tip of the iceberg? Your phone is about to distract you in so many new and exciting ways that you may never look at the road again. Take a look at the three apps I just saw at the DEMO conference this month. I think they’re out to get me.

Waze is a free app that allows you to build maps, update other drivers about traffic, police traps, and other potential gotchas. It’s available on Android, iPhone, RIM, and Windows. In all fairness to Waze, they get their dynamic traffic information in two ways. If you’re just driving around, your GPS is updating other drivers about where you are and whether you’re stuck in traffic. You can take a more active role as a traffic reporter by sending people messages about your commute. At that point Waze becomes a social-networking mobile driving application. Yikes. It’s a free app, but should be labeled “handle with care.”

TravelTrac, maker of MotoTrac, lets you build a website and update it constantly, keeping an in-depth, multimedia log of your vacation, your car pool, or any other road trip. Used wisely, MotoTrac provides the tools to build a travel site, open it to others to share, chart your route so friends and family can see you, add photos and real-time voice reports. The company’s demo reminds me of a multimedia twitterer on road trip. Great app, but take it from me, you’ve got to balance documenting your life with getting out of your car, right? There’re also versions of the product for sailors and for hikers.

Traffictalk is a voice-based traffic information sharing system. Your phone gets updates from other drivers in real time It’s meant to keep you talking, not texting. But the company demo showed that there are still plenty of buttons to press when transmitting and receiving. The new word for apps like this one and Waze are “crowdsourcing” — using the wisdom of the crowd to get your information. It may be new to us, but truckers have been doing it on CB radios forever.

The answer of course is a featherweight netbook.  I recently got a new Acer Aspire Netbook to try out for a few weeks.  The Acer weighs under a pound.  The keyboard, though smaller than full size, is big enought.  The battery life is decent enough.  The screen display is has plenty of resolution. I can even get used to the fact that the Aspire running Windows Vista is like asking Roger Bannister to run the four minute mile in snowshoes.

What I can’t give up is having my ALL of my precious data close at hand.  This made me realize that netbooks, tantalizing as they are, are just not ready for me you.  I can’t always be sure whether the next place I’ll be will have an  internet connection and there’s not much you can do with a Netbook that isn’t logged on to the web. I can talk to my PC at home using LogMeIn, but I can’t depend on my home computer to keep running reliably if I’m gone for more than a day. (Curse you Time Warner Cable.) And I’m not too keen on putting call of my most important data “in the cloud” using programs like Google Docs. I can’t back up the data that’s stored on Google Docs

I can’t accept large documents;  I can’t use Outlook — which, dated as it is — is still the best way I know to organize my frazzled life.

I’m not giving up, but I now understand the true limits of a netbook, and you should too.  There are far too many people who think that they’re buying a low cost PC only to get it home and find out that a netbook is a horse of a different color.

I’m going to face my netbook head on and start devising systems to keep my netbook and my PC in synch.  I’ll learn to trust data that’s stored somewhere in the Google ether instead of my hard disk. I will do it or my back will never forgive me. So this time ’round I’m asking you for advice. If any of you have learned to have a full life on your netbook (creating documents, answering emails, opening attachments, sending edited revisions, let me know how you’re managing. For the moment I figure that I have a very inexpensive, very small Internet surfing machine, not a working PC.