Category: Puzzled Over

Strange, odd, or otherwise WTF.

Categories
Debated Puzzled Over

It’s Pronounced “Folly-o”, Right?

Palm today announced the [Foleo](http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilecompanion/foleo/), possibly the most awkwardly positioned tech product I’ve ever seen. Billed as the “world’s first mobile companion” – which translates to “costs as much as a smartphone but useless without one” – the Foleo is a 10″ sub-laptop that “helps you do more on the go”.

To find this product useful, you seemingly need to meet all of the following criteria:

* Have a smartphone, but be the sort of person who thinks the screen is too small to be really useful.
* Feel like you aren’t carrying enough devices in a day, so much so that a 10″ mini laptop will make you feel like a more complete person.
* Believe that Palm has enough direction to make a device like this work.
* Have $600 to burn – although there’s a $100 mail-in rebate as an “introductory offer”.

They’re advertising the Foleo on three primary aspects: email, attachments, and web. Again, we’re talking $600 for a device that just does those three things.

The marketing text is completely baffling as well. It’s hard to pick just one section that irks me, but:

> It connects wirelessly with your device to let you read and write longer emails and view attachments with ease. Think of it as the big screen and keyboard your smartphone has always wanted.

$600 for the ability to read and write longer emails. $600 to look at attachments. $600 for a big screen and keyboard. $600 for a crippled sub-notebook with 5 hours of battery life.

Palm is in a desperate fight to stay alive at this point. Palm OS has languished horribly, so much so that when I got my Treo at work last year, the only significant different from the Palm V I had back in 2000 was that the Treo had a color display. Worse, the company doesn’t seem to have anyone focused on application design – the Sidekick thrashes it up and down the street for usability. If a company can’t innovate within their own product line in over 6 years, I can’t find any enthusiasm as they try and invent a new class of devices.

If nothing else, Palm has made the iPhone look like a steal.

Jonathan Greene [has more on why this is a bad idea](http://www.atmasphere.net/wp/archives/2007/05/30/palm-foleo-will-be-a-serious-miss).

UPDATE: [NY1’s Tech Beat piece](http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=101&aid=70214) this morning (Thursday) is on the Foleo; a reporter from CNET really nails it:

“When you do a companion device you start to point out deficiencies in your current device and I think that’s a problem for Palm,” says David Carnoy of CNET.com.

Categories
Puzzled Over

The Jumpty Dance

What do you get when you cross the freeform acrobatics of parkour, the rebellion of skateboarding, and the suspension of self-respect of most DDR freestyle routines?

You get jumping, or “jumpstyle”. And friends, it is not a crime.

I was inflicted with this plight by Chelsea Peretti. Not the plight of doing it, but the plight of not being able to look away from these magnificent videos.

One or two videos of this and you will have the same question I did. What is that catchy mix of gabba and hard house? It should be no surprise that it is yet another subdivision of electronic music, dubbed “jumpstyle” (ah ha!) or simply “jump”.

In a hotly contested Wikipedia entry, the dance associated with Jumpstyle is called Skiën:

Skiën means kicking one’s feet forward and backward on the bass-line, while the torso goes the opposite way (right foot forward, torso back), once in a while lifting one foot significantly higher than usual to indicate a break in the beat.

Skien is not to be confused with skanking, because skanking is done to ska and reggae, and this is done to electronic music. Don’t worry. It’s a common mistake.

This is not just a few kids screwing around. Oh no. This is a bone-fide craze.

* There are community sites.
* There are CDs. Jumping Is Not A Crime Vol. 1 hit the top 10 in both Belgium and the Netherlands. (Suspiciously, while jumping is not a crime, downloading it is a crime.)
* There are record labels.
* There are jump battles. Battles, people.
* There are parties, both in clubs and in homes.

This craze needs to come to NYC. Why? Because here, social dancing IS a crime.

Might as well jump, kids.

Categories
Enjoyed Puzzled Over

Captain Dan

Since I am in close contact with a handful of the Gothamist staff, I occasionally bat around jokes and thoughts about the news that they’re working on posting. Every now and then, they get included in the article.

This happened last week, when MTA head Peter Kalikow rushed to fix an LIRR station at the complaint of a neighbor / fellow yacht club member Deanna Banks. I had offered:

“Oh, we should be dressing up as yacht club members and protesting outside MTA headquarters so Kalikow can get to work on the subways.”

This got included in the article, and the article garnered a few of the regular MTA-griping comments that are typical of any story about mass transit.

But last night, a new comment appeared – from Deanna herself! And this has made my day:

Therefore not knowing who Mr Dickinson is, maybe I dont get his Thirston Howle humor that did not give one positive solution in order to help all of us commuters have a better experience. But hey we can dress up as yacht club members Captain Dan can wear the scramble egg hat with the monkey bars on his shoulders and we all can have a good laugh in order to relieve some of the tension that we seem to be experiencing on the train.