The interestingly named magazine “wired” implies a connectivity to things, which once required a chord.

Today with the notable exception of needing to plug in to recharge (though the Palm Touchstone cut that cord too) the days of being wired are becoming a thing of the past.

Today the chord that is strangling consumers is their cellphone bills.  And not just their cellphone, but the mainstream tech sphere’s insistence on 3G (or 4G) enabled devices.  While at first that sounds like a great idea, except Verizon and AT&T aren’t going to let you share one plan for all of your 3G devices.

The better solution is something older geeks used to call “phone as a modem” or in modern times the “mobile hotspot”.  Why pay more than one 3G bill when your existing phone can blast WiFi to everything in range?

I always thought the future of the “phone” would be as a modem to PDAs and other devices, sitting in a pocket and blasting the internet over WiFi, Bluetooth, etc to everything in range.  Saying PDA in 2011 makes me sound like a dinosaur, but a PDA is simply a smartphone, with the 3G modem not built in.  Today we have come to prefer an integrated solution for our 3-4in screen (the third screen) and have come to enjoy a 7-10in screen for the fourth (tablet).  Why pay for 3G for the tablet that you will either use in your house (where you have WiFi) or anywhere else in the world where you have your phone with you.

Why pay for 3G twice?  I just don’t understand how tech blogs find that an asset, I think its a liability.

So I did it, I bought myself a birthday present.  The Amazon Kindle Fire.  I’m not in the first week’s shipping cycle, but the next.  I can’t wait.

Enough on the Kindle Fire, let’s talk about what could perhaps be Amazon’s biggest announcement in the mobile computing sphere.  Amazon Silk.  The web browser that promises to harness the powers of Amazon’d EC2 servers to serve up the web way faster.

In thinking about this awesome piece of software I thought: How could Amazon further deploy Silk without cutting out the Fire’s killer app?

Then I came up with it: Silk for Amazon Appstore… but not for anyone just for owners of the Kindle Fire.  Imagine if Amazon offered Fire owners the ability to put Silk on their android smartphone.  First off they’d have a lot of happy Kindle Fire owners and second off they would sell more Kindle Fires especially to those on the fence about buying another android tablet.

The benefits to Amazon would of course be both Kindle Fire sales and the ability to understand more browsing habits of their customers.

And those are my cents on how to expand Silk users without a Kindle Backfire.

The holiday season is upon us (I have already seen Christmas trees in stores!) and many people are considering a tablet.

There are many options in the tablet space, with the iPad 2 being the most known.  This article isn’t meant to go at length into the $500+ iPad since you either use iOS or you don’t.  If you don’t use it yet (iPod, iPhone etc), I hope I’ve already convinced you not to, unless you’re in one of Apple’s niche markets (mostly Prius drivers).

On the other side of the market we have the android OS.  With tablets starting under $100 and going up well over $500.  I’m here to talk about “The next $400″ or the gap in pricing from the base android (2.x) to android honeycomb (3.x) and why its probably not worth the extra $400.

First off, in the android “tablet” space there are more options than just the “base” 2.x tablets and the “premium” 3.x tablets.  Android is the underlying system for many other well known and unknown tablets (like DOS or UNIX sits under many other systems).

Two well known tablets with “android inside” are the Barnes & Noble nook color and the Amazon Kindle Fire (which I talk a bit about here: http://www.styrofoamsoup.com/tech/amazon-kindle-fire-to-apple-and-google-game-set-match/).  Both have highly customized interfaces running on top of android.  Both to the power user can run a host of android apps, but both are designed to run special apps for their own interface.

For those looking for more of “stock” android we’re back to the two “branches” of the OS.  The 2.x and 3.x (honeycomb) versions.  Don’t let Google confuse you into thinking 3.x is better.  Currently all smartphones run a version of android OS 2 (with the newest release being 2.3) and some costly tablets (like the Motorola Xoom) run a version of 3.

The “bargain” android tablets run the “phone” OS.  And now we will talk about the difference and why you might just want to pocket the $400 or buy a $100-150 tablet for you and one for your spouse and one for your kids!

Honeycomb (3.0 and up) is what Google wants to see its tablets running and the reason is simple, they want them to be competitive with the iPad.  But the $500+ tablet isn’t what the average user likely needs.  The specs (processor, screen, etc) needed to run Honeycomb are much higher and therefore more expensive than those needed to run the base android OS.

What do you get for the extra $400?  You get a super snappy state of the art iPad killer that unless you need to show up people in your IT department would be like the average joe Ford driver buying a Ferrari.

The average bargain tablet might not be iPad commercial snappy (of course notice that “Screen images simulated” disclaimer on the bottom, wonder if that means there faking the responsiveness).  It will do the web and email and basic tablet functions (similar to those of a phone http://www.styrofoamsoup.com/uncategorized/the-four-functions-of-a-phone-and-the-other-four-2011/ ) just fine.

Sure some of the bargain android tablets have a different screen technology (resisitive instead of capacitive) which means you won’t be gesturing around like on that commercial, but then again until two years ago that’s what all touchscreens used and there are some benefits to it over the new technology (remember when you could use anything you found as a cheap stylus).

While some bargain tablets are a little too underpowered, a quick search of the internet can help you find a few with ok USER ratings.  Its important to NOT look for tech site reviews because that’s like a Road & Track reviewer getting behind the wheel of a Fiesta.  Somehow they forget they’re in a daily driver for the average Joe and not a weekend track car for the professional racer.

I don’t have any specific recommendations as the pricing and players in the bargain android game are always changing, but a quick trip to Best Buy or Walmart or Target will give you the opportunity to “touch” the players side by side and help you decide for yourself if you would rather pocket the next $400.

I have typical taken an anti-Apple stance.  This is not because I don’t respect them as a company or their founder, Steve Jobs as a man.  I truly feel they have contributed greatly to the modern world.

I intentionally avoided the knee jerk article about Steve Jobs as I knew there were other media sources better positioned to give a fitting commentary.

As I have mentioned before, I have never owned an Apple product (my fiancee has an iPod Touch that’s as close as I have gotten) but that doesn’t mean I am not thankful for what Apple has done.

Without Apple many technologies such as the MP3 player, smartphone and tablet would have never hit mainstream and would have been relegated to techies and road warriors.

So I would just like to briefly say thank you to Steve Jobs for his contributions to bringing big tech ideas to the mainstream.

If you have been keeping up on my blog lately you have heard what seems like rant after rant attacking android OS.  I think it is perhaps the slickest most customizable mobile OS ever and I’m happy to join the revolution.

Where I think android misses the boat in failing to understand what I have coined “The Four Functions of a Phone”.  Now this is not your Ma Bell phone circa 1984, but a modern smartphone circa 2011.  On that phone, Mainstream Joe wants to do four things: Phone calls, text messages, email and facebook.

Right about now you’re saying “I do other things on my phone”.  Sure, we all do, I use mine as an alarm clock, but really the four things the Average Joe smartphone user uses most are probably those.

After that the next two are likely images and audio.  I say that so vaguely because it might be taking picture or watching YouTube.  And it might be playing music off the device or streaming from Pandora, but those are likely next.

After that is apps/games at number 7.  Maybe its an RSS Newsreader, or your playing Duck Carnage (or more likely Angry Birds).

Finally… the full Web Browser.  For those things you can’t do in the seven previous ways.  Its a last ditch way of finding the info you need, its a backup parachute, its the full web, that you’d rather not experience on your phone.

This is where Google needs to realize the differences between 4 inches and 7-10in.  The road and the couch.  The phone and the tablet.  The tablet is for “surfing” a term which used to mean flipping channels and now means trying to find the latest blog.  The tablet is for surfing, the phone for fast info.  So while its nice to have them both run the same OS, its not needed.  More importantly when I boot my phone the things I need FAST ACCESS to are those things, in that order.  I know I can rearrange my apps to my heart’s desire, but out of the box its like Google forgot what a phone was for.

This is another reason I think Amazon got it with the Kindle Fire.  The tablet unlike the phone is for surfing and media consumption.  Which as Amazon made abundantly clear it is going to do, out of the box, better than anyone.  The new interface is Media-centric and the new Amazon Silk browser is slicker than sin.

For more on my Kindle Fire rants check here: http://www.styrofoamsoup.com/tech/amazon-kindle-fire-to-apple-and-google-game-set-match/