As one can imagine, the rush to get one was crazy. At first I tried to get my well-known and long-lasting standard username ‘ulfw’, which I tend to use as much as I can. My car’s number plate says it, my yahoo and aol accounts are ulf and even my URL as you all know is ulfw.com
Sadely Facebook permits 5+ character names only (like Google). So instead of going with something like ‘ulfmw’ or ‘uwaschbusch’ I opted to go with something different this time and made my profession the user name.

You can now find me on http://facebook.com/productmanager

Here are a few other funny ones:

• Tom Anderson
• Swine flu
• Sexy Girl
• Sweet Lover
• Super Slut
• default.aspx
• Tech Support

In unrelated news. I am scared. We just had a 5.0 earthquake literally less than a handful of miles of my apartment. Everything and everyone’s alright, but I got pretty shaken.

PS: Several aftershocks after the quake. Today we had a 4.0 while I was at work. This one felt more like a fighter jet going supersonic rather than an earthquake. I am getting worried about the amount of them lately. I had nothing like that in San Francisco.

Might still have to work a little on your results though, no?

When browsing around today, we ended up looking up basic human anatomy. Hilarity ensued when we got this result back for the query ‘average woman‘:

Ouch…

It took me a while to become a real fan of twitter. I tried it real early when it came out, played with it again when I was working at Google and doing the communication piece for Google’s acquisition of Jaiku. Surprisingly they didn’t build the service out and now made the Jaiku platform open source.

Now that I am using twitter again, I’ve grown a bit frustrated with the reliability of the service. Now, a fast growing service does have scalability pains. I realize that. But these outages and problems have been there for years. How come that can’t be under control?

Well – I hope they will make the service more stable going forward. I for one can’t see any of my friends’ tweets for over a week now. twitter.com/public_timeline works, but twitter.com/home doesn’t, nor do any third party clients. I can update tweets, but just not follow any friends. At least they know about the problem (and are hopefully!) working on a fix.

Oh and while you’re at it – follow me on twitter.

Update: Seems like I’m not the only one with that (and other) problems on twitter right now.
Update2: Over a week later, Twitter is finally aknowledging the problem and working on a fix. Woohoo.
Update3: Problem got fixed. Woohoo. Took a while and I hope it’ll stay up for a while

MySpace users can also update their status. Setup your account once at http://www.myspace.com/mobilesettings and then send a text message to MYSPC (that is: 69772). The text message content will be your status on MySpace. Right now we set your mood to (empty), but we’re working on allowing you to set your mood too. Go try it out!

The original:

Darth Vader coming back from the dentist:

Techno remix:

Christian Bale meets David:

(Too bad it has too many f.. words, but it’s still funny )

I have to admit I really thought Palm would not be able to pull this off after years and years of out-of-date offerings.
Now – will this save the company? Or will it be too late? – I don’t know. But they do have a shot! A real good shot!

It seems that US carriers are aligning themself with their unique high-end touch device:

at&t – the iPhone carrier
Verizon – the BlackBerry Storm carrier
T-Mobile – the HTC G1 carrier
Sprint – the Palm pre carrier

Frankly – out of those, I don’t think Palm/Sprint got the worst deal. Sprint will make sure to market the hell out of the device and if it’s priced right, they might have a killer offering for once. It will be interesting what strategy wins at the end:
- the integrated approach with beautiful hardware/software in one hand (iPhone/Palm)
or
- the open approach with hardware/software from different sources (WinMo, Android, Symbian)

For now, I for one welcome our new Palm overlords! Competition never hurts.

At the beginning of the year some blog statistics from January 1 2008 through January 1 2009. It turns out that readers of this blog are more tech affine than the general population and are happy to use alternative web browsers:
1. Firefox 51.9%
2. Internet Explorer 26.2%
3. Safari 11.8%
4. Chrome 6.8%
5. Opera 1.9%

The overall web statistic for Internet Explorer seems to be more like 70%.

I would like to wish you all the very best this holiday season and a successful and happy 2009!

Ulf

Danny Boy:

So now I had to go through every single embedded Youtube video on this blog and add the &showsearch=0 parameter. Thanks Youtube for messing with an experience that has been fine for years. Why not make the search bar blend in after viewing a video?
I wonder if they are THAT desperate to increase their search numbers now. Why would anyone want to search for a video on an embedded player before (or even instead of) watching the embedded video they came to see in the first place!? Beats me. But hey – what do I know…

Anyways fellow bloggers – here is how to get rid of it.

Update: Dec 5th – apparently they must have fired the useless designer & PM or something and now replaced the search bar with a more black/gray (instead of pale blue) and not-as-invasive one that only blends in when you mouse over the video. I still don’t see the point of searching instead of viewing the movie you intended to see in the first place, but at least now it’s not as annoying.

Since then BlackBerry users sent and received more than 15 million messages and updated their mood and status settings via MySpace over 2 million times in the first week.

Go get it while it’s hot at http://www.myspace.com/blackberry

Here is my latest futile attempt to get online:

Time Warner Cable
Price point: $57.95 per month + $20 sign-up cost. Useless. Completely useless. Alleged connection speed: 10 MBit/sec. It’s Sunday morning. There is barely anyone else online.

To welcome the Android platform, I am happy to announce that we launched MySpace for Android today – the first social networking application to hit the Android platform and the T-Mobile G1. More than two million daily unique users visit MySpace’s mobile website, and according to ABI Research 70 percent of people who use social networks on mobile have visited MySpace.

Features:
- Instant photo uploading from an Android device to a MySpace profile
- Check out tour schedules on band profiles
- View and comment on photos, profiles, and bulletins
- Search and add new friends
- Send and read messages
- Update and view mood and status
- Integrated with Shazam for Android. Just tag a song via Shazam and befriend a band at MySpace

Besides m.myspace.com, we now have developed native applications for Android, Sidekick, iPhone, and soon Blackberry.

Just go and grab a copy from the Android Market!

I really TRIED to like my white 16GB iPhone 3G, but I just couldn’t. The phone is completely incapable of doing a 3G->2G handover, resulting in 1 to 0 bar coverage and subsequent call drops or ‘No Service’ notifiers. Never in my life had I seen more ‘Call failed’ or ‘No Service’ notifications on any phone (even back in the day on my Ericsson T28 nearly a decade ago).
At home? No possibility to hold or make a call reliably. 0-1 bars reception. No 2G fallback.
At work? No reception.
On the 5 mile stretch to work? Reception, but 2-3 times the call is dropped.
Essentially I had a phone with ‘no bars in more places‘.

Also when the phone was on 3G it barely even lasted till the afternoon, let alone a full day. If there ever was reception, download speeds were barely twice that of EDGE. Most of the time they were pretty much the same.
So I ended up having 3G deactivated the lasts two weeks. Now that I was nearing my 30-day return window, I did the only sensible thing I could do and returned my 3G. This in itself was a horrible multi-hour experience at The Grove Apple store in LA and subsequently the at&t store on Beverly and things are still not worked out right (e.g. they haven’t reverted my 2-year contract extension, even though they should). AT&T says I need proof I returned the phone to Apple. Apple says there is nothing they can do. Their system should automatically do it. So now I’m on a 2-year extension without getting a cheaper or free phone. Just to show my love to ma’bell at&t.
Speculation is running wild on whether it is at&t’s bad network (though other 3G devices allegedly work well), Apple’s secrecy behind developing the phone and thus limited testing or Infineon’s 3G chipset.

Update September 27: With firmware 2.1 a lot of those problems went away. I now have a black 16GB iPhone 3G from work (I have returned my personal one last month) and while I still have reception issues, it’s not ‘as bad’ as it was before. Sadly in my apartment reception still jumps from 0-1 bar of 3G to 5 bars of 2G which still results in call drops from time to time.

Whenever one of these dreadful things shows up on a website (e.g. to add a user on MySpace or change your user info on Yahoo! or change your password on Google etc.) I have to give to between two and three tries on average before I get to the next screen. No matter how thoroughly I try to read them for some reason I always get the wrong at first.

I mean, come on. What do these really mean?

Now, I am moving in 12 days (9 business days) and the fact is:
- Apple is not willing to sell to me even though they have plenty of devices in stock
- at&t is not able to sell to me directly, only by order and PICKUP instore
- I have to be physically at the store I ordered the phone in (i.e. I can’t order in LA now as I am not in town yet, and I can’t order in SF as I will be in LA by the time the devices get here)
- No mail order. Period. You HAVE to be PHYSICALLY at the store even though they don’t actually HAVE any ACTUAL phones to sell to you.

So – no iPhone 3G for me. No $300 for Apple, no $375 for at&t (the ridiculous $15/month price increase over 24 months). For some odd reason, I don’t feel so bad about this now.

which translates into:
“Scrolling-Display

In the video titled “Mobile Messenger” you’re not seeing fantasy functions as before. But the messages in large scrolling type, which can also be read across the meeting room table are bringing true high school behavior into a meeting.”

Whatever… I’m on DER SPIEGEL! Woot woot!
Original video is here.

Effie’s super awesome cake:

Setup your MySpace page at the Learning Annex

My favorite excerpt:
“Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

What an absolute mess.
”

Couldn’t have said it better than him…

I felt compelled to volunteer two of my own. The way those came together were pretty much:
Effie: Ulf, I need you to do at least two videos.
Ulf: Hm ok. No idea. When do you need them?
Effie: Can you come down NOW please?
Ulf: Er… hm.. ok…

Frankly I couldn’t come up with something valuable yet funny on the spot, so I just went with two time wasters.

Mobile Messenger:

I love Pandas:

One thing to mention though: the ‘cheap’ price of $199 for the 8GB model is a lie. Don’t be fooled.
Fact is: AT&T is raising data prices by $10 a month or 24x$10 = $240 over the course of the 2yr (mandatory) contract, thus increasing the total price for the phone to $439 (vs. $399 for the current model). Weird how Steve Jobs completely forgot to mention that…
Update 2: at&t is going more and more ridiculous. So – SMS are NOT included anymore either (used to be 200 SMS included), making a $5 SMS plan necessary and driving up monthly cost for the ‘cheaper’ iPhone 3G to now $15/month extra = $360 over the contract term. Thus the new ‘cheaper’ iPhone is estimated to cost a total of $559 vs. $399 for the older ‘more expensive’ iPhone.

PS: Oh and in the series ‘Ulf is traveling to LA and sees someone he knows from TV’, this time it’s Tim Speedle from CSI Miami (real name Rory Cochrane) who was buying a pair of Seven Jeans when I was in the store in West Hollywood buying myself a pair.

Here is a video of her going through the Miraflores locks on the Pacific terminus of the canal:

This will give you an idea of the stages of progression from entering the canal through the Gatun locks and Lake Gatun all the way out to the Pacific ocean through the Miraflores locks:

And here are a few pictures at various stages of the route:

Gatun locks near the Atlantic entrance of the canal

Passing through Centennial Bridge

Exiting Miraflores locks towards the Pacific Ocean

So – horray. No 80GB is suddenly enough again!

Truthfully though, I am happy I got the machine. I was seriously considering getting a black Macbook instead as it is 50% faster, can have 6x the storage capacity and twice the RAM. But at the end of the day the GORGEOUS LED display and the way the Air is constructed won me over. It truly is an outstanding machine that can only be enjoyed when seen and used in person.

Anyways, here are the must-have unpacking pics. This is the smallest box I ever had the privilege of unwrapping a computer from.

Now my friendly MINI is up for sale (interested anyone?) while I await the arrival of my new vehicle.

Supposably it’s even bigger and nicer than the one I’ve been to a few times in Las Vegas:

Now the kicker though:
A couple of days later when reading a magazine article about how Venice, Italy is about to sink when the sea level rises just a few inches I had my brain stop for a second or two.
When looking at the Piazza San Marco…

…I actually thought…

Oh my! There’s a Venetian in Venice too now!

Yea. I know. … Don’t say anything…

Yesterday I dropped off my car at E.Harms in Frankfurt to have it trucked to Bremerhaven hopefully shipped to Port Hueneme this weekend. The whole delivery time is estimated to be around 8 weeks. Urgh.. those will be tough!

Anyway, as part of the European Delivery program, I’ll pick up my car in Munich, drive it for about a week or so and then drop it off near Frankfurt (to have it trucked to Bremerhaven and ultimately shipped all the way through the Panama canal to California). Believe it or not, but it is actually cheaper to buy a car this way than ordering it directly from the dealer. More info on the program here. After that I’ll have another 1.5 or so well earned vacation days – as a matter of fact the first ones since I joined Google over 1.5 years ago. Yes. I was THAT busy. I’m definitely looking forward to having a break, eating mom’s cooked food and maybe driving down through the Alps to Rome (with stops in Lucern, Milano, Florence…). Not sure if that’ll happen yet, but right now that’s the plan. So – expect to see more photos and infos on here soon.

Since getting my first intel Mac I was waiting impatiently for Microsoft to update their Office suite as a Universal binary. Frankly I’d have been fine with just an Office 2004 code port to the intel platform, but I understand that Microsoft wanted to go for a new release. Makes sense.
Now after waiting seemingly endless two years… I am still waiting now! More than ever actually!
Huh? The software is out, no? Well yes it is. And that’s the sad part. Since I started using it for the last 2 weeks or so, my productivity in doing anything MS Office related dropped by an estimated 90% or so. It is USELESS. U S E L E S S.
How on earth they were able to make an intel native app run (seemingly) 10x slower than an emulated old PowerPC one is beyond me. Honest to god. It flabbergasts me. Not only did they add no noticeable new features, but they did take features out of Excel (the only Office app I use. I think Pages is a better word processor and Keynote is a considerably better presentation software) like VBA or the Math ToolPak, Solver, whatnot. But no. The app is so slow that I can’t do anything with it anymore.
A large 20 MB pivot table (12000 rows) takes about 22 seconds to be generated on Excel 2004 on my MBP. While I am typing this, the same table is still being generated in Excel 2008. It started 15 Minutes ago and is now at ‘85% complete’. Unbelievable. This and the fact that Excel takes longer to start up as a native app than Excel ‘04 did with Rossetta does it for me. I am seriously disappointed and happy I didn’t have to pay for this myself, but rather got it through work. Now Microsoft does do great software, including Office 2007 on Windows, which I really like. But this? Gee…

Update: Was completed in 19 mins. Sadly I had to force-quit Excel 2008 two mins later because it bogged down my system so much that I couldn’t do anything with it anymore. Back to Office 2004 it is.

Update2: Had to reinstall OS X, this time without Office 2008. Turns out something in Office generates a spinning beach ball in many network-related tasks, even if Office isn’t running. Reinstall of OS X fixed it. After installing Office 2008, problem re-appeared. Second reinstall fixed it again. This time Office 2004 will grace my hard disk again.

Nuff’ said. Gotta pack my bags!

PS: I decided to rent a car, so as to be more flexible. Don’t really wanna hang out at Disneyland all day…

So today I finally got around to rewrite the imageviewers in  PHP and while I was at it, I updated the front page to show headers, post dates and descriptions of the five most recent posts here on the blog. Yay for technology!

Anyways, I wish all of you a very happy new year 2008! May all your wishes come true.

This is a train running through a grocery market in Bangkok, Thailand. Apparently this is a regular occurance. Also see this video.

Okay okay. Let me first say, I was a bit… shall we say.. skeptical about the iPhone before it came out.
And if you look at a pure feature-by-feature comparison with say, a Nokia N95 – the iPhone does not stand a chance. Where’s the 3G, where’s the GPS, where’s the 5MP camera, where’s the user-expandable memory, where are user-installable apps?
But the interesting thing is: That isn’t the point.
The user interface and speed together with the slickness of the device gives you pure joy day in and day out. In fact I loooove browsing the web on the iPhone when I’m hanging out at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, sipping a yummy dry Cappuccino. Apple was able to take the WebKit developments that made Nokia’s S60v3 great and added performance and awesome usability on top of it. The touch screen interface with zooming is just beyond believable.
Now, the as with every relationship – this one is a bit of a shaky one sometime:
- Switching between WiFi and EDGE can make you drop connections, which becomes a real problem with the built-in (and otherwise beyond awesome) eMail client. In fact I have to reset the device to have the email app running after a connection change or drop.
- Battery-life is ho-hum, especially when you’re constantly using the device
- I really really really would love to be able to install ARM-compiled Cocoa apps. Apple please do. Seriously.
- I need AIM/Y!/MSN/GoogleTalk on it. Now. JiveTalk is nice for now, but really – we need native apps to make IM wonderful.

Because it IS corporate America’s toy of 2007. RIM is really on a roll here and no matter what other companies are doing feature or design-wise (Nokia E90, Apple iPhone…), RIM is hard to beat when it comes to easy IT deployment and manager-appeal.

So what’s new about it?

- It’s slicker and thinner. About 25% thinner than the older 8700 and finally up to par with the competition (re: Nokia E61)

- It’s got GPS built in. While not being a first – especially for CDMA – still only few GSM devices rock GPS. I can totally see people use this as an el chepo navigaton system in their leased BMWs and Consultants in their rental cars.

- The Pearl-esque ball is so much easier to use than the scroll wheel before. I know I know, many will disagree with this, but the addition of horizontal scrolling (as opposed to the old Blackberry-approach of only scrolling vertically) does open up new opportunities (all I say is… Google Maps…)

More about the Blackberry to come later. I’ll be attending the new AT&Ts and RIMs BB 8800 Launch party up in San Francisco tomorrow night – so let’s see what else they say to praise their new toy…

Update
- Party in the city was packed! I’m sure there were 150+ people, all waiting to see and get their new BB toy. Thankfully I got one too
- The food sucked.

About the device
Positive:
- it’s a great form factor and the dark blue, black color is very attractive with the chrome sides
- the UI is fast, especially compared to my … yawn… Series 60 v3 UI on my Nokia E61
- Data applications work beautifully. It’s so great to run Gmail and Google Maps without having to click on ‘Do you want to grant data access?’ and ‘Please choose your data bearer’ each and every time I run an app

Negative:
- The device just doesn’t work perfectly. I lose data connectivity for no reason and then neither emails nor other data gets pushed. Maybe it has something to do with me being on TMUSA instead of Cingular, but still – it’s pretty unacceptable having to reboot the device to get data again
- Where are my missed calls/outgoing calls etc?
- GPS works beautifully. When it works. Problem is: Like data – it doesn’t work consistently.

One really great software that I’d love to have on the Mac is Live Writer (beta) from Microsoft. It makes blogging a real fun event. And with Parallels’ virtualization software it integrates beautifully into the whole Mac experience. You should especially check out their new integration mode: ‘Coherence mode’. It makes the Windows desktop transparent, gets rid of the taskbar and background icons and integrates windows apps into the Mac dock. Alltogether it gives the seeming impression of running a Windows app natively in Mac OS X.

Of course everyone I asked was immediately willing to go out and take another mortgage on their home if need be, to buy this thing. Being the uberGadgeteer myself I have to admit I can’t wait for it to be released! Now that the fog has settled I have to say, the iPhone seems to be more of a technical demonstration device in Generation 1 and we’d have to wait at least for G3 before it becomes usable (see iPod 3G – dock connector et al).

Why do I say that? Let’s go through their three focus areas:

It’s an iPod

Well yes it is. And a really slick looking one! In my mind,a 480×320 3.5″ screen is finally a suitable Video iPod and a thing many people have been waiting for. Awesome! Oh wait… it’s got 4 or 8 GB only… how many videos can this fit again? 4-8 movies maybe? That’s enough for when I’m on the move, right? … Oh wait, then I can’t fit any photo or any music file on it anymore. Hm…

It’s a phone

Yay for that. Though how comfortable it will be to hold, as compared to your standard Razr’esque phone remains to be seen. Visual voice mail looks fancy, but honest to god, I think I never had more than 2 voice mails at a time and I do listen to every voice mail I get anyway. Plus, VoIP providers had ‘visual voice mail’ for years. And yes, my Nokia E61, like most phones today can do three-way calling and conferences. I don’t know why this was highlighted by some media outlets.

It’s an internet tablet

Yay! Safari for the first time on a mobile phone! Er… well…okay that’s actually…er… not the truth. While the brand name ‘Safari’ might be new, the Safari webkit (aka all the underpinnings that make it Safari) has been on Series 60 v3 Nokia phones for a year already. The sad thing is: it looks like the Nokia implementation is even better than the Apple one. Having no ability to display Flash is a MAJOR drawback in my mind. The E and N series phones are perfectly capable of displaying Adobe Flash files inside their Safari webkit browser.

So what else is not new?

- It’s got IMAP push email. Yes, as does my E61 and with BIS every Blackberry out there etc etc..
- It’s an iPod!!! Er okay, it syncs better with iTunes, but MP3 functionality is nearly in every phone today and SE and Nokia are stressing that functionality specifically with their Walkman and N series music phones.
- It syncs with your Mac. Oh well thank god, so does my E61 and nearly every other Symbian, SE and Motorola phone for that matter. And I don’t even have to connect a USB/iPod-Docking cable to do so. Bluetooth all the way.

What is missing?

- A decent camera. 2MP, non-autofocus is already giving people yawns (especially outside the US). SonyEricsson and Nokia had 3.2MP autofocus cameras built in for over a year and the N95 with 5MP is just around the corner. I’m not even gonna mention Korean and Japanese phones…

- HSDPA, HSDPA, HSDPA. With all due respect, a phone in (realistically) fall 2007 that doesn’t support 3G networks gives me a big yawn. What good is an internet tablet if the internet’s super slow. Latency and bandwidth of EDGE is becoming very tiresome.

- A VGA front camera. Where is my iSight? Where is iChat video telephony (over WiFi now, HSDPA in G2/G3…)?? This I thought was a MAJOR missing point. Many new phones have this build in already, yet Apple had a chance to build a really great franchise with iSight built into every Macbook, Macbook Pro and iMac and yet.. I won’t be able to video chat with any of them with my Apple phone. Really sad.

- GPS. Google Maps really shines on Helio’s GPS equipped phones and in general, a mid 2007/2008 high-priced phone in my mind really shines with a little GPS chip built in. The gorgeous large screen would have been awesome for in-car navigation for people like me, who don’t need a full blown navigation system, because we don’t use it every day or even every week. Most Sprint/Verizon phones now have it, as will the Nokia N95…

- VoIP. Voice over IP is an integral part of several new smartphones. Nokia’s N and E series WiFi-equipped phones come with a SIP voice client that’s fully integrated into the phone/contact book etc. And new UMA phones even do soft handovers between VoIP and GSM calls, similar to the handoffs the Apple iPhone will do for data.

- No user installable applications (for now). I like my phone’s applications, but honestly, for me it would be worth half as much if I couldn’t install extra apps and games. If it turns out to be true that the iPhone can’t install other ‘OS X’ apps, it’d be a pity.

- A user replaceable battery. This is something every $20 phone from Walmart has these days. I’m not even discussing this because I think this is a ridiculous oversight and I doubt anyone would disagree.

It’s completely and ridiculously expensive

One tiny little weeny bit that people forget to mention is the pricing. If you factor in the typical $150-$200 carrier subsidies on a 2year contract, we’re talking $899 unlocked for a 2MP, GSM/EDGE phone with 8 GB non-replaceable memory. Oookay.

To summarize it: I LOVE LOVE LOVE the user interface. Honestly, like Steve Jobs said it’s 5 years ahead of any competitor’s. The Blackberry UI is ridiculous in my mind (the font alone kills me), Palm was cool in 1990 and Windows Mobile I won’t even mention. Symbian is okayish, but often very confusing (where are Connection settings again?) and way to slow to be able to make me happy. This in my mind is the one area where the iPhone excels above everyone else.

So for me, this is a great concept. A platform that I definitely see myself, as a consumer, be a part of in the future. Yet I believe G1 is not all it’s cracked up to be and besides looking cool, all it will give you is some fun time browsing through your phone album and reading emails – for $800. G3, here I come…