After much frustration, I finally got my Virgin Mobile Huawai E160e modem to work on my MacBook Pro!!! And although it shouldn’t be that difficult, there is one quirk that I needed to do to make it work.

My solution so far has been to use a Logitech headset on my Mac when I am Skype calls or conference calls (where audio is done through the Mac), and I use the iPhone headset that is provided in the box. But I have issues with this; 1) as much as I like the Logitech headset, I don’t find it comfortable for long periods of time and always feel like its falling off my head. The other issue is the wires – they just get in the way & 2) although the iPhone headset is fine, its always falling out of my ears and I keep getting tangled in the wires.

So I have been looking for the holy grails of headset, here is my criteria;

1. No Wires
2. An inner Ear solution
3. But I also want it to hang from behind my ear (inner ear always falls out too for me)
4. stereo, so typical bluetooth headsets are out (I am partially deaf from too much Rock n Roll in a previous life, and audio in both my ears is best)
5. Something that can work with both my Mac and iPhone
6. I want to be able to listen to music on it too

So after some research I came across the 906 Backbeat Headphone from Plantronic and Altec Lansing, and after using it for a week, and although I am still trying to resolve a Mic issue with my Mac, I have been very impressed!!

These Plantronics are essentially inner ear headphones that hang behind the ear. They connect to any Bluetooth enabled device and also have a bluetooth adapter that plugin into any mini jack audio device. They also have a built in mic that seems to work quite effectively (as many people are telling me) when you are using them with the iPhone or Skype.

I paired it up with my iPhone first and that was pretty straight forward. Press the power button and hold it on until the LED alternates between red and blue, and the iPhone picked it up straight away. As soon as I hit play on the headset, my iPod started to play!!! And when I make or take a call, the iPhone sees my Plantronic headset and uses it by default.

Next I paired it up with my Mac. This was just as straight forward. Put the headphones in discoverable mode again, and the Mac pairs with it. As expected, on the Mac I can select it as an audio device and in Skype, I can also select to use the Plantronic as the audio input and output device. Although I have come across an issue at the moment that I am sure I will be able to resolve; the microphone doesn’t seem to want to work. I can get the headset to work fine and hear everything, but when I select the Plantronics as a Mic input, no one can hear anything. I am thinking I will still need to play with this somewhat to get it sorted out.

The Good Stuff

I find the Plantronics super comfortable. They feel very natural on my ears, are not heavy and unlike other wired headphones, when I move my head suddenly or quickly, they just stay in place. They sound awesome! When I first bought them, I charged them up and wore them on a flight back home from a work engagement and I loved them immediately. The don’t sit right in my ears, but have these telescopic buds the seem to transmit the sound neatly, and also unlike many other earphones, they don’t lose bottom end when they slightly pop out (which is their natural sitting positions). They are also very ‘discrete’, meaning that most people don’t even notice that you are wearing them! But the downside is when you get a call, you look like a total fool talking to himself!!!

The Bad Stuff

I can’t say that I have come across much stuff to complain about yet. The only things that seem to be strange is when I first get them working with my iPhone, the volume controls work perfectly, but 10 minutes in that seems to stop working. And turning them off and on again seems to fix that. The other thing that annoyed me is the fact that the only way you could charge the device was via the supplied Power Supply, that charges through a micro USB port. These days, most devices allow you to charge them through the USB port. The last thing I need is to have to look for a power outlet when travelling just for the headset. Quick fix; I jumped onto eBay and bought a USB to Micro-USB cable for $8 delivered! Not so much a gripe with these headphones as it is with Bluetooth, but I would prefer  to have a greater range than 10 metres. I am sometimes on a Skype call and would like to walk out of the environment that I am in to make it more private. But the limitations of Bluetooth don’t able me to go into a room down the hall. Oh well, have to wait for the new Bluetooth standard to be released

Conclusion

When I am at my desk, I have it paired to my MacBook and pretty much always on charge. So when I am on Skype, I can just put these on my head. And if I am working for long periods of time where I want to listen to some music, I’ll use these as well. Then when I hit the road, I shut my laptop and turn on Bluetooth on my iPhone and I am listening to my iPod and can take and make calls whilst driving. Perfect solution for me!!!

If you are looking for comfortable stereo headphones that hand off the back of your ear, I can’t recommend these enough. I love them, but remember its only a week that I have been using them. The bluetooth pairing is great, sound great, they are very comfortable and I can find myself wearing them all day without my ears hurting.

But in this discussion with Ross, I was reminded about some discussions I had a year ago, and that is, how useful are these machines, regardless if its an iPhone, netbook, or laptop, if I have no network connection? Pretty damn useless! As we get more and more accustomed to connected, cloud services. My iPhone would become little more than a pretty iPod, my macbook will become a word processor, and my netbook, well, it would remain even more turned off.

We have become so used to being connected to the internet, that we don’t realise how reliant we really are. A few years back I delivered a project for a large Australian Insurance company with over 7,000 users. Although email was a pivotal communication tool within the industry, they didn’t realise how reliant they were on it, until they lost it. The afternoon they lost email, 20% of the workforce went home (that’s not mentioning the ones that hung around and did nothing). Why did they go home? Because “what work can we do without email?” was the answer.

Soon after, the organisation recognised email as a Tier 1 It service and treated it accordingly. Another more real example of this pattern of reliance on the network happened more recently when I was at the Enterprise 2 show in Boston last year. We were talking about how important connectivity was to everybody, when a mysterious event occurred to prove the point. The room lost its Wifi! From a room of 300 people with 80% of their laptops open and twittering, blogging, searching, chatting and browsing, there was suddenly nothing. Laptops were closed and every one was paying attention to what was being said – just to prove my point (I swear I had nothing to do with the Wifi)!

As time goes on we become more reliant on these cloud/distributed services. I store documents on DropBox and MobileMe, I get email through Gmail, I backup through Mozy, my calendar is with Google, many of my online docs are Google Apps, and many business documents are stored in Wikis and Blogs in various places. Add to that, online project management tools, timesheeting, CRM etc, and I use my laptop for very little outside of writing code and working in Photoshop.

What interests me is the evolution, it has been a natural evolution from where we were to where we are. Technology has evolved from mainframes, to minis, micros, laptops and now netbooks. But lets think about where the data is, and take a simple Document example;

Pre-computing era, the document was a physical piece of paper I held in my hand, it then become digital and stored on a floppy disc I could hold. From here it was stored on a hard drive in my computer, then it was stored on a hard drive on a network device (possibly in the same building), and finally we are now storing it in the cloud on the other side of the planet, or somewhere we don’t care about. This document is getting physically further and further away from me.

The important thing here is that I now no longer really care where it is being stored, as long as I can get to it when I need to. Whether it is stored in my computer the same building as me or on the other side of the world, I don’t care.

So, where is this heading? We will obviously soon see more ubiquitous storage solutions where we really don’t care where the file is. I have documents on MobileMe and DropBox, but I have no idea where they physically are, and the experience is seamless to me. My iDisk appears like any other drive, and DropBox acts like a folder on my Mac. I add documents into DropBox and they disappear off my desktop as if the folder I put them in was on my physical machine, and I could be sharing that folder with someone on a different network across the other side of the world.

I also believe that we are going to see more of a pattern of distributed computing, and there is tinkering going on at the moment. There is much to be said about the SETI@home project & Folding@home, and these projects are exploiting the fact that we are using the cloud more and our machines are under utilised. But what is stopping technology evolving to used shared storage? Nothing, its here today. Its called BitTorrent.

But why stop there? Why stop at sharing files? Or why stop at sharing files that only have a high demand? Why can’ I store my personal documents in the same way?

So here are a couple of parting thoughts. Firstly, use similar technologies as mentioned above to allow me to have infinite (or close to) storage, by allowing me store my documents on the internet, but using other individual’s machines, the files may propagate across several machines so that there is backup and redundancy. I can get to my personal files, anywhere, anytime, and I will always get the shortest and quickest path to it. Any updates, again propagate across to other machines. We are seeing a similar and interesting model with Source Code Control in Mercurial and GIT. Solve the security issue (not a major issue), and there is something there. Realistically, most users have an obscene amount of data capacity that they never realise their full potential (I have about 3TB across 2 desktops, a laptop, and several external drives, that is probably 20% used – there are so many duplicate files).

The second thought is around the use of CPU cycles, and how this helps distributed/connected computing. As already highlighted (and by others), CPUs are well under utilised. So why not tap into it (like the @home projects) but for all users, how do we do this? The limitation is still with the browser. The few functions that I still do on my laptop are; photo/image editing in Photoshop, video editing in various tools, and writing code in various IDEs. Although there is some great progress in online tools to replace these, none come even close, particularly for a power user. Once there is new models introduced so that applications can ‘really’ be developed in the browser, then we can really head down this path.

I can see the day, that I can sit at any computer, open up the browser, that is actually acting like a true operating system, and I can get to project files on a remote location (maybe on someone else’s machine), and then I can start editing, compiling the code, writing applications,  and finally deploying the application. And everything is remote. I may even be doing this on my 5th Gen iPhone.

I find it intriguing to think where we are heading, there is so much power sitting out there in  our machines, that we are not tapping into, and there is so much opportunity to embrace it.  But this is all becoming more and more reliant on the network available to us. What do you think?

Please leave comment or chat with meon twitter @snaglepus

IP convergence was a term that was thrown around last year, usually in reference to communication (in a traditional sense), but I always battled with this, because I believed that it was more about Digital Consolidation than IP convergence. Sure they refer to different subjects, and mean different things. Nonetheless, related as they refer to your methods of inbound and outbound communication.

In a recent twitter conversation with @JerryBroughton where we discussed the use of mobile in digital strategies. This conversation motivated me to write about this.

Mobile phones are undoubtedly popular. The market penetration if phenomenal. It is estimated that there is over 3.3 Billion handsets in circulation as of November 2007, which is the equivalent of half of the world’s population! 80% of the world’s population have access to mobile phone coverage and this is estimated to increase to 90% by 2010.

And yet, this seems to be an under-utilised platform when thinking about an organisation’s digital strategy. Over the years, there has been an ever increasing focus on new and emerging mobile technologies. From MMS, WAP, Online Web, Video, Online advertising; nobody has found a sweet spot in this domain. But what has undoubtedly been popular is the simple 160 character SMS (Short Message Service) Message.

SMS has been recognised as the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 Billion active SMS users. In 2004 approximately 500 Billion SMS messages were sent, at an average of US10c per message, this equates to USD$50 Billion in revenue for telcos.

Very little organisations are taking advantage of this. Advertising in SMS has been considered ‘bad manners’ and has been proven that most users will elect to opt-out of such plans, but SMS is a very good simple  and short communication medium. A great way for customers to request a price or availability of a product, request more information after seeing an ad, register to join a mailing list, submit information to a service. SMS provides 160 character for expression, which at first seems inefficient, but many services have thrived from this. Twitter has built a whole business model around it.

Many phones theses days have smart sensing in the text messages, being able to detect a telephone number for instant phone calls, email addresses and web addresses so that messages or web pages can be viewed without being retyped. Some devices are even able to sense an address so that it can be plotted on a map.

I would like to see more innovative use of SMS and Short Messages in applications and Digital Strategies in general. What are your thoughts?