I’m not sure how to answer that question. In my mind, cameron i/o doesn’t change. I change. This website is a representation of myself on the internet, my endeavors and passions. I change over time, and my website reflects that, but my website will never change in it’s extension of me.

I think the same can be said about michaelmistretta.com.

Along come these video-shooting DSLRs, with enourmous sensors, the wrong form-factor for video, and none of the features that turn an DVX100 into a battle-ready companion. They make awesome images, but they do so at the expense of the operator. When you only see the images, these cameras seem like they must be the best thing going. But the images are the result of a process, and that process is painful. It’s up to you to decide if sexy DOF is worth giving up control.

It’s a sensitive topic among filmmakers. Which camera is better—the one with sexier images or more control? That’s not to say a D90 is unusable for shooting a movie (Judson Collier and a couple friends are shooting a short movie for a film festival on it), only that it isn’t ideal. And when we get into the world of professional videographers, ideal is everything.

There is a reason there haven’t been a convergence of video and DSLRs until the last few months. Not because of a technical limitation, but because it’s impractical. The form factor for photography is completely different than that needed for videography.

Photography is more than simply image quality. It’s about capturing an image on the spur of the moment that says something. And that takes a photographer that is completely in control of their camera.

This Thursday, when RED reveals their new cameras, I’ll be looking at features and specs along with everyone else. But I’ll also be evaluating whether these cameras seem to be filmmaking companions that allow me to craft an image intuitively and effortlessly. The camera should disappear, leaving only me and the images that, for better or worse, I created.

I’m intrigued as to how they will overcome the challenges that Nikon and Canon are facing, and how their products will work for professional photographers and videographers.

(PS. I love Prolost)

There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what GTD is—people are mistaking the culture that has sprung up as a true representative for GTD. A lot of times that is just not the case. I’d like to get back to the fundamental concepts of this methodology as well as other productivity ‘systems’. I hope I’m not beating this dead horse, but if we can help people improve their habits instead of their systems, than reduced stress should be a result.

And that’s why I hesitate to mention the term “GTD” on this site—not knowing whether it represents a cult-like following of tinkerers, or people that just want to be productive.

I like the new direction we’re seeing from Chris and others like Merlin.

It’s not about how many projects you can do, it’s about how many you do well.

It’s not about finishing the race, it’s about how well you run it.

The underlying problem with GTD is that it implies that the goal is to one day finish everything on your todo list. To finish all the projects and tasks and simply finish. On the contrary, you will never finish. There will always be another something after the current something. It doesn’t end—and that’s not a particularly bad thing. A sucessful person isn’t defined by someone with all their tasks complete, but by someone who can balance everything they do, and do it with excellence.

Taking your eyes off the finish line and onto your performance today is what GTD is all about.

(Via SimpleBits)

“Why does everyone hate advertising?”

The actual principle of advertising is sound: provide a solution that allows the writer to generate revenue and give away their content for free while providing publicity for the advertiser. Essentially, advertising should allow you, the reader, to get better content.

Then, this little thing called “Flash” was developed.

And the advertisers said “Hey, everyone has this installed on their browsers, let’s make our ads flashy. And bouncy. And interactive”. Slowly, we became desensitized to the ads because a) they weren’t appealing to us, and b) treated us like we had the attention span of 2 year olds.

And then stuff like this happens.

We wanted to create something better—a solution that would benefit the writers, advertisers, and the readers. While there are some rare exceptions to traditional advertising, they are way out of the league of the average blogger and advertiser. We wanted to open up premium advertising to a whole new market of websites and advertisers.

Enter Fusion Ads.

The idea: take a bunch of websites with a similar audience, and bring them together to provide a way for advertisers to distribute their messages to a targeted audience. The end result: beautiful, relevant ads that don’t detract from the content on the site.

There are a couple conditions to these advertisements:

• Only a single ad will be shown per page.
• Ads will consist only of relevant products and services.

• There are a set number of ad spots per month, and each ad receives an equal slice of the network’s traffic over a given month.

• Animation is verboten.

To quote the Fusion website:

While this is contrary to the traditional wisdom of advertising — cramming as many ads as possible on a page — we believe that the value of Fusion’s ads are that they’re exclusive. With a single, unobtrusive ad shown on each page, sponsors don’t have to compete for attention among other advertisers, and readers don’t feel insulted by flashy banner ads.

If you are interested in purchasing an ad on the Fusion network, there are limited spots available for December and January.

Thanks

I want to take a quick moment to offer my sincere thanks to all those who made Fusion possible: from fledgling concept to completion. These are all wiser, smarter, and more talented people than myself that have pushed me along, and have helped fix some of the mistakes I made.

• Chris Bowler: helped me keep my sanity
• Shawn Blanc: told us when we were doing something wrong
• Cameron Hunt: came up with the exceptional design of the Fusion site
• Chris Thomson: mastermind behind the adserver

Also, thanks to all the bloggers and advertisers that chose to trust and partner with us for the very first month. I think we’ve truly come up with something great.

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

-St. Frances of Assisi

Chris Bowler and I have been exchanging emails over the past three months, resulting in a 7000+ word interview with yours truly, covering everything from blogging and GTD to photography and Africa.

It’s fun to watch my writing progress over the course of the interview. The last six or so questions and responses are my favourite.

While at Wordcamp a couple weeks ago, I was asked about what I write about on my blog. Good question. Something I often wonder myself. I proceeded to delay my response while I thought of some answer that would best communicate how I felt inside:

“Umm, well, some photography and technology news I guess, but not—”

“Ahhh, so it’s a personal blog?”

There was something about the way they said “personal” that was demeaning. As if no blog could possibly be worth reading if it’s personal. Looking around that room at the blank faces of “social media probloggers” trying to make a penny off a new medium, I could see that they missed it.

Write top ten lists with killer post titles. Spam your blog on every social network out there. Don’t be passionate, personal, or exhaustive. Make your posts easily skimable and don’t write about more than one topic. Build a community, entertain your readers, and make sure you submit to Digg. And for goodness sake, NEVER write a post over 500 words—the readers might get bored.

And then I get criticized because I don’t want to “embrace new media”.

Listen here: spamming people and treating your audience like mindless zombies is not “new media” or “social media”. It’s more like old media than anything else. The Internet doesn’t exist so we can constantly pamper the reader in a desperate attempt to plead with them to stick around. We don’t have to constantly push “punch the monkey” ads in the reader’s face, or tease them with juicy headlines and Digg bait. That’s what television is—reporters repeating the same rhetoric while teasing viewers with headlines and yelling them not to go away because, by golly, they’ll be right back.

You’re missing the point.

The Internet exists so that anyone with something to say can say it. And be heard. Everything has an audience—you just have to have something worth listening to. Unfortunately, we’ve over-saturated the world of “personal blogs” with stories of our girlfriend’s brother’s dog, diluting our message, and giving personal blogs a bad reputation as useless, mundane, and senseless.

I like how Jack Shedd puts it:

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience.

Back to the question: “What do you write about on your blog?”

Such a simple question. What do I write about? Well, anything that I find interesting. It is MichaelMistretta.com after all, and if you’re not interested in what I’m interested in, why are you here in the first place?

But I want to go deeper than that. Something more.

Ideas.

That’s what I want to write about. Thoughts and ideas that inspire. Sure, there will still be photography and tech-related posts as those are still things I love. But my focus has changed. I guess you could say this blog has always reflected Michael Mistretta, and Michael Mistretta’s direction is changing.

This ‘change’ probably won’t affect you at all. My interests have stayed the same. But I’ve decided to publish this more for me than for you. Everything I’ve written up to this point has been a steady progression towards this decision.

Looking at some of the blogs that have inspired me over the last 10 months, I’ve also decided to change the way MM.com will be published.

• From John Gruber, I learned that it’s okay to have a linked list—and make it interesting at that.

• From Shawn Blanc, I discovered the novelty of publishing an exhaustive post, written masterfully down to the 5000th word, debunking the myth of readers only wanting short, scannable posts.

• And from Seth Godin, I found the value of consistently writing short, succinct posts that communicate a single idea in the most powerful way possible.

Anyone can grasp onto one of the three of these concepts, and claim it as their writing style. And that’s how I treated them for awhile—one being better than the other. If you were lazy, you posted a link. If you didn’t have much to say, you wrote a short post. And if you had a lot of time on your hands, you wrote an exhaustive post.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

You see, none of these mediums are better than any of the others. They can all suck, and they can all be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I used to think of a post topic and ask myself which type of post—short, long, or link—I felt like writing. No more. Now, when I think of an idea for a post I ask myself what the best way to communicate is.

If someone else said it better than I ever could, why waste time repeating them? Use a link. If you have an idea that doesn’t require a 4000 word post, by all means, don’t write the 4000 word post. It’s not a matter of one being better than another as much as it is one complimenting each other.

-

Again, to quote Jack Shedd:

If you’re worth reading, someone will read you. If you’re worth watching, someone will watch you. If you’re worth hearing, someone will listen.

And that’s exactly what I intend to do. Thank you for sticking with me throughout this ride. Things are about to get a whole lot better.

-Michael

All the tech pundits seem to be giving Android a free pass. Reading through the review, negative after negative is listed. But still, the majority of the comments are somewhere along the lines of: “Android has potential”, “it’s gonna get better”, and “it’s not bad for version 1.0″. The G1 may have been acceptable in a world of Treos from 2004. But times have changed. The iPhone 3G at $199 has raised the bar and set a new standard for which the G1 has to reach.

From what I’ve seen—not just heard open-source fanatics talk about—the Android hardware and software have been massive failures up to this point. Sure, an open platform would be nice to have, but at what cost? It’s not even about the experience anymore—I just want a phone that will work.

I still believe there’s hope for the Android platform, but the G1 is definitely not it.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”

Four, ten, seventeen, twenty-four, and thirty are my favourites. If you have a lot of time on your hands, grab ahold of the full 10,000 word PDF version.

• The 3.5mm stereo jack in the MacBooks and MacBook Pros will now recognize the microphone in the iPhone earbuds. Interestingly enough, the click remote on the headphones also work, playing, pausing, or skipping a song in iTunes.

• Apple chose to focus their new notebook lineup on graphics over raw CPU power (as seen from the 2.1Ghz white MacBook selling for $999, and the 2.0Ghz aluminum MacBook for $1299). With a big push in Snow Leopard for GPU-accelerated computing, we’ve reached the end of measuring computer performance simply by the processor. The Nvidia 9400M looks like the perfect mobile chipset—providing a good compromise between battery life, compactness, and performance.

• As I mentioned earlier today, Steve Jobs and Jony Ive seem committed to make the next generation of Apple computers as simple as possible: “We’ve refined and refined every detail in the service of the user. Just to get rid of complexity. If something doesn’t need to be there, it’s not there.” From removing buttons and latches to an impeccable attention to detail, Apple is determined to making the MacBook the simplest notebook ever.

• FireWire 400 is dead. And even worse, FireWire is nonexistent from the MacBooks. I anticipate that consumer camcorders will continue to move towards solid-state capture, and higher-end HDDs will adopt the pro FW800 standard. Similar to the uproar over Apple removing a modem from their original MBP, FW400 will die a slow and quiet death.

• Apple has had a big push towards accessibility with their new laptops. Both include removable batteries and user-serviceable hard drives and RAM.

• Steve commented on transitioning all the Macs over to the new DisplayPort “standard”, where “standard” refers to a standard that doesn’t exist yet. Apple’s always accustomed to being slightly ahead of the curve though (recall 802.11n and ExpressCard adoptions). DisplayPort is able to carry audio as well as flexible resolutions of video, and is smaller than HDMI, enabling all of Apple’s future Macs to potentially power the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display.

• The downside to DisplayPort is it hasn’t been widely adopted by many manufacturers. Want to connect to a third-party display? Adapter. Want to connect to a projector? Adapter. Want to connect to Apple’s own 30″ display? $100 adapter. It won’t be long until a third-party capitalizes on this and starts including “adapter compartments” into new MacBook bags.

• Will the new 24″ LED Cinema Displays work with older MacBook Pros via an adapter?

• Mobile storage has improved since the last time I bought a notebook. 320GB 7200rpm drives are available for the MBPs and 128GB SSDs have been added as an option across the board.

• Personally, I’m fascinated by the dual-graphics cards in the MBPs. The 9400M integrated graphics perform at 80% of the performance of the previous 8600M GT for standard use, and allow for an extra hour of battery life. When connected to a power adapter, the MBP switches over to the more powerful, dedicated 9600M GT graphics card.

  A few questions remain: Is there a UI for switching graphic cards on-the-fly? Will the screen go black for a few seconds or flicker? Can both the 9400M and the 9600M GT run simultaneously? No doubt, having two GPUs will be an interesting combo for pros looking for a tradeoff between battery life and performance.

  U P D A T E: Looks like the GPUs can be controlled from the display preferences, and require you to log out in order to take effect.

• Most interesting is how Apple is positioning the MacBooks in their mobile lineup—as mini MacBook Pros. With an aluminum finish and a decent graphics card, Apple has finally brought back the 12″ PowerBook, albeit in a larger form-factor. These beasts are more Pro than MacBook now, and as John Gruber extrapolated, the $999 white MacBook can be compared to the new MacBooks as the iBooks were compared to the 12″ PowerBook.

  I think we will see more of Apple blurring the lines between ‘pro’ and ‘consumer’ in the near future.

I love the way that we don’t reserve our very best ideas, for our very highest end products. Our very best ideas—all of our innovation—we bring to the most popular Mac that we make.

When you start using it, when you start putting your photographs on it, when you start working on your personal projects, it becomes so much more than just a collection of parts. We’ve refined and refined every detail in the service of the user. Just to get rid of complexity. If something doesn’t need to be there, it’s not there.

I don’t know how we can make anything more essential, any simpler, than the new MacBook.

Jony seems to be the person at Apple most in-tune with Steve’s obsession over simplicity and design. That may be positive of negative, but it has definitely set Apple apart from the “Made in China” phenomenon so common among consumer electronics today.

And by that, I don’t mean that Apple’s products aren’t made in China—they just don’t feel like they’re made in China.

Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn’t mean they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we’ve got.

What can I say? More thought-provoking ideas from Seth Godin.

From his latest post today:

And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

Today, everyone is a designer. Yep, a bunch of people have pirated Photoshop and have magically deemed themselves “designers”. And they’re determined to let the whole world know it. When I inquire about hiring a designer via twitter, everyone and their cat claims to be qualified simply because they have a copy of Photoshop.

The same problem can be said about blogging: I have a blog, therefore I’m a blogger; I have a digital camera, therefore I am a photographer; I have a twitter account, therefore I have friends.

Personally, I’m sick of it.

I have a fair bit of design sense. I own Pixelmator, and it does the job for me. But by no means do I call myself a designer. No, that’s someone else’s job. And so when I ask for a designer, I’m not looking for those with design tools, I’m looking for designers. Real designers. But often, the people that approach me have less design sense than I do.

We’ve become disillusioned, and have grown to think that by simply following a set of rules, we can become an artist. That if we preform a simple 1, 2, 3 process, we too can make something inspiring and wonderful.

That’s the problem. Creativity is not a math or a science. It’s not something with rules that you can break. It’s an art. It’s when a person has a story burning on the inside of them, and they use every medium available to tell that story.

Whither the Story?

Here’s my petition to every artist out there:

Stop it. Stop thinking about the tools. Stop taking pictures of things just because they’re there. Stop writing unoriginal content. With the amount of stuff out there on the Internet, your stuff better stand out among the overload of media being shoved down your audience’s throats.

But first, you have to have a story to tell.

The problem we’ve come up against are people have started to take art too seriously. A whole cottage industry has come up around digital photography and blogging and design—telling artists what they should and should not do to be successful. People making money off telling other people how they make money. And people actually believe this nonsense:

If I only follow these 53 and a half rules, then I will be successful. If I only had the money, then I could make it. If I only had the connections, the friends, the support, the equipment, the whatever… THEN I could create something beautiful.

Jack Shedd details the only requirements necessary for publishing a successful weblog, and I dare to say that they apply to every aspect of being an artist:

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience.

It’s time for the true artists to begin breaking the rules again.

Real Artists Create

I’ve never been really good at art. I was taught that art was the thing you drew in sketchbooks, and because I never felt creative around sketchbooks, concluded I wasn’t an artist.

But there’s more to being an artist than that. So I’ve assembled my own definition:

A person who can communicate their imagination in a physical form, using whatever medium available to capture and portray their passions, thoughts, and emotions—reaching across language and culture barriers to connect to a viewer’s heart.

An artist is the master of their tools, and will use whatever tools necessary to tell the story he or she wants to tell. They know their equipment inside out—every knob, button, and switch—so their equipment simply become an extension of their mind, never getting in the way. They are free to focus on creating, and not on the tools themselves.

Artist are passionate and deeply attached to their work. Usually, true artists simply create for a hobby. Most artists give up creating things they love in exchange for a living. That said, the artists that are free to create things they love for a living are often the happiest. And most productive

Artists foster creativity. They are constantly thinking and meditating on how they can communicate a story. Because after all, artists are simply storytellers.

Better

When I take a photo; when I publish a blog post—when I create something—there’s a certain level of dissatisfaction. Not dissatisfaction in my work, but a dissatisfaction in my current state.

It’s hard to describe. It’s an insatiable desire to do things better. And better. In my mind, I see the metaphorical image of the perfect artist. And everything I create is one step closer. Be content with what you create, but never let that stop you from becoming better.

The key is growth. As an artist, you thrive on growth. You thrive on knowing that your latest creation is a little bit better than the creation before it. All you’re looking for is a sign—one new subscriber per month—that proves that you’re growing. That you have not hit your peak; that you still have room to grow.

An artist isn’t concerned with how good they may or may not be at the moment. They know that if they have a story worth telling and continue to grow it, one little bit at a time, they will create with more drive, more talent, and more passion than anyone else.

And while I’m at it, I should plug all of Nik Software’s amazing plugins. They’re quite heavily-priced, but they do a phenomenal job at helping you tell your story after you shoot.

I sense a $600-dollar hole burning itself in my pocket…

I love reading design geekery like this.

As a developer, the iPhone is a pain. Apple’s secrecy, restrictive NDA, and AppStore rejection policies make iPhone development nothing more than a game. A game with money. Lots of money.

Regardless, I was told that there was something better. Something open. Something that would be the iPhone’s platform “done right”. And for a moment, I believed it.

I woke up last Tuesday excited about Android and the T-Mobile G1. Finally, an open platform that anyone and everyone can develop for. No more closed environments. No more proprietary systems. Must be better, right?

Then I saw it.

The G1 represents everything that is wrong with open platforms. From the clunky brick-like hardware to the typefaces used in the interface to the Android Market, everything is oozing with it—a lack of attention to detail. Screenshots look like they come from completely separate devices, and represent an overall lack of polish. Still, some say, there is more to a phone than “pretty buttons” and “business support”.

Just how much am I supposed to give up to be ‘open’?

How Open is ‘Open’?

As much as everyone would like to believe that Google can create a completely open platform where anyone can do anything, they are bound by the same limitations as Apple and other cell manufacturers. T-Mobile, not unlike other cell carriers, restricts unlocking the G1 from their cell network, and prevents tethering it to a computer¹.

T-Mobile placed a 1GB cap on the G1, hardly adequate for a power-user, and would slow any additional 3G traffic to slower-than-EDGE speeds it users passed that cap. Since then, they have backed away from that statement claiming that they will only throttle bandwidth for “a small fraction” of “heavy-data users”. Whatever that means.

There’s also the fact that you can only sync contacts and calendars with your Google account. While this is a solid (free) competitor to MobileMe, it defeats the purpose of the phone being completely open.

AppStore Methodologies

People’s excitement over Android’s “open” philosophy is only escalated by the recent news of Apple rejecting apps that are too simple, too competitive, or just plain stupid. Google takes the opposite extreme, allowing anything into the Android Market. Developers can develop whatever-the-heck-they-want, and they are guaranteed admittance.

With no gatekeeper, comes no restrictions—both good and bad. The obvious downside to this is malware, spyware, and other malicious apps. It will be left up to the user’s desecration whether or not to download an app that may drain battery life or send your personal data back to some random server in China. On the flip side, developers have no restrictions for what they can or cannot develop. They are free to develop, compete, and innovate.

An open platform may have worked had there only been a single device. But Android is a multi-year project that will encompass a wide scope of devices with hundreds of varying user interfaces. Touchscreens to trackballs to keyboards to accelerometers. How can 50+ different phones made by different companies with different interfaces possibly function with apps in the Android Market?

Mark my word, three years from now, the Android Market will be a mess. Users will download—or even worse, purchase—an app, only to find that they have no way to interact with it because their phone lacks a touchscreen. Think there are a lot of flashlights and tip calculators in the AppStore now? Wait till you see the Android Market in 3 months.

Even if Google tries to restrict apps with certain capablities to certain devices, it will still be filled with a junky, inconsistent, and buggy mess. There is no one standard that all the apps in the Market have to adhere to. With everyone and their mother able to develop and publish apps, who will sift through them to make sure they are marked as “Touchscreen-only”? Sure, certain developers will be able to innovate and create apps worth buying, but from the initial screenshots of the Android Market, they will be hard to find—buried in more junk than a landfill on Boxing Day.

Some equate this “openness” argument to the OS X vs Windows argument today. Windows can be installed on any PC, which has lead to it owning 90% of the market today. While that argument has certain merit, it does not account for the fact that all PCs—including Macs—work the same way they have for the past 25 years. Every PC has a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen: and Windows looks pretty similar across them all.

Phones are very different though. There are different ways of interacting and working with applications. There are different UIs. There are different features. Imagine supporting thousands of people using your application across hundreds of different devices.

As cynical as it may sound, there is a certain beauty to closed platforms. Having a controlled environment ensures consistency and functionality, and provides a better experience for the end user. The AppStore offers many benefits to developers, but it is far from perfect. I think the ideal platform meets somewhere in the middle. Like it or not, gatekeepers have their place. But having a closed-system should not hinder the innovation of a platform—only raise the bar on the quality of applications developed.

People much smarter than me have already dissected this issue. Wil Shipley hits the nail on the head:

The App Store needs to think of itself as two different parts - it already implements these parts, but the people who run the store need to understand that these two parts are fundamentally separate:

• Part one is a giant warehouse, where every piece of software that is not actively harmful is kept in case someone wants to buy it (remember, users can always get a refund). This warehouse can be searched with titles and keywords or an item can be directly linked.

• Part two is like a traditional storefront, with limited real estate, so only the best or coolest applications are highlighted. It’s a recommendation engine, that highlights popular, highly-rated, or innovative applications.

Here’s to hoping that Apple will listen to developers and change the way they govern the AppStore.

G1, meet the iPhone

The iPhone was marketed as an iPod, a smartphone, and an internet communicator. Now, third-party applications can also be seen as a major selling point. With the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, dedicated video player, and desktop syncing, the G1 is hardly a media-centric device. It barely compares to the iPod. Surprising for Google, the G1 has a significantly laggy web-browser with a clumsy UI that leads to a lackluster mobile internet experience. That leaves the phone side of things, which I haven’t seen a single screenshot published to date.

That doesn’t mean that Google hasn’t thought through some of the major flaws of the iPhone and corrected them in Android. The G1’s notification bar involves a single swipe from the top of any window, and is miles ahead of the “popup” notifications on the iPhone. One-time login into your Google account looks simple and straight forward, and the home screen is much more customizable than the iPhone.

But there are many more substantial flaws within the user interface. Fonts seems as if they were randomly picked on a per-application basis, and consistency is non-exsistant. In fact, looking at screenshots from the G1 user manual often reflect the UI of what should be multiple devices. But really, the problem lies with the lack of attention to detail Google has. Great engineers, but very poor designers.

Take for example the physical keyboard (the only physical feature besides the 3.2MP camera that bests the iPhone). Imagine working in a vertical-oriented app, and being prompted to enter a password. The user must rotate the device horizontally, slide up the keyboard, type in the password, slide down the keyboard, and rotate the phone back to the vertical orientation. Compare this with the iPhone, where the (albeit virtual) keyboard slides up right when you need it, and disappears when you don’t.

All this is above and beyond the clunky hardware, that looks as if it was inspired from the Amazon Kindle. One Google engineer points out that throughout the whole three-year development process, the design has remained exactly the same. With a 3-year old design, how can you compete with something like the iPhone?

My question is not whether “openness” in and of itself is good—but whether it can be a major selling feature to a device that offers an inferior user experience. The iPhone and the G1 are quite comparable in price—$179 and $199 respectively (although the G1 requires an extra micro-SD card to expand it’s measly 1GB of storage). For the same price, are consumers going to chose the G1 simply because it’s open?

My feelings about Android are very similar to John’s: it’s a platform that I had high hopes for, but very low expectations. If Google had offered a phone of this caliber for free, with occasional location-based “notification ads” informing me that I was 2 minutes away from Domino’s Pizza, and if I went in the next 20 minutes could save 20% off my order, I think this phone would be a huge success.

Sergey Brin said it: this phone is for geeks. The tinkering crowd. The ones that like to tear apart their gadgets from top to bottom and be in complete control. And for those geeks, this is the phone they’ve been waiting for. For the rest of us? I’m not so sure.

It’s too early to judge the success of the platform as a whole. There are many Android phones that will be released on a variety of carriers come 2009. While there’s no doubt Android is far ahead of other phone operating systems like Windows Mobile—and will be for quite awhile, by the looks of it—it seems to miss the mark on the reason I own an iPhone.

I don’t own an iPhone for it’s features. It’s quite pathetic to own a smartphone that can’t copy and paste or record video. I don’t own an iPhone to be open. I don’t own an iPhone to tinker and play with. I own an iPhone because I can wake up every morning and actually enjoy using my phone. The consistency—the experience—is something that other manufacturers (including Google) don’t get. And I’m not sure that an open platform of any kind can ever achieve the attention to detail and experience that Apple has given to the iPhone.