Status-Q

At a recent business meeting, an acquaintance referred to “The Flying Saucer Company of Peterborough”. I assumed that this hypothetical company was one he had plucked out of the air and given an amusing name for the purposes of illustrating his point.

But no, there really is a company making flying saucers in Peterborough. Small ones, at present, and battery powered, but the little video clip on their front page gives the impression that they’ve managed to make them work pretty well. Stability has been one of the problems to plague similar projects in the past.

Their site says:

The craft will be most useful in urban environments, where its ability to hover and fly close to and within buildings will enable close quarter surveillance and intelligence gathering. Having no exposed rotating parts, brushes with walls etc., do not compromise the craft’s flight.

There was an article a couple of months ago in the Daily Mail which includes some more information and links to a video clip giving a better idea of how it works. Of course, being the Mail, they focus on the fact that the US military is interested, and how the inventor “set about turning his workshops into his own mini-Area 51s”!

Good God. I can’t believe I actually referred readers to the Daily Mail. Standards are slipping. I apologise. Will attempt to rectify.

About a month ago, I lost my Nokia E61 on the far side of the world. This wasn’t as distressing as it might have been, because I knew I had my trusty old Blackberry 7100t waiting for me when I got home.

The 7100t is the best phone I’ve owned, in terms of reliability, quality of manufacture, and design of software. I’ve been thinking it would tide me over until an iPhone came along. But, in Europe, that’s likely to mean waiting until at least the New Year, and 6 months is a long time in gadgetland.

The Blackberry is just as good as I remembered, but I’ve been spoiled now by some of the E61’s features… Spoiled by having the TomTom software in my pocket. Spoiled by being able to use my phone as a 3G modem on T-Mobile’s very reasonable data rates. Spoiled by the wifi connection and the quality of the loudspeaker which meant it was a great way to listen to podcasts. Some of these were a real pain to set up, but once working, they were really quite useful. It’s not clear that even the iPhone will offer any of these. And now Nokia have their Media Transfer suite, which looks like good news for Mac owners with N-series phones. I could be tempted…

On the other hand, I’m not sure that I want to forsake Blackberry software for the rather buggy and disjointed interface that Symbian has, sadly, become. Come on, RIM – give us a 3G modem, at least!

Ah – now, this is really quite interesting. I’ve been watching and playing with a variety of smartphones and similar devices recently. They’re starting to get large amounts of storage, quite reasonable email apps and web browsers, and, with the advent of reasonably widespread 3G and Wifi, decent connectivity. In short, they have most of what I need, most of the time – especially while travelling. The one thing they lack is a decent-sized screen and keyboard, and for some time I’ve been thinking that something like an Ndiyo terminal, driven by a smartphone, might be the architecture of the future.

Palm have been thinking the same way, and this summer they’ll be launching the Foleo.

This may look like a laptop, but actually it’s a ‘mobile companion’, designed to accompany your smartphone on those occasions when you need to type more than a few words or browse the web on something more than a tiny screen. It’s not clear yet how the processing tasks are split between the two, but it’s an appealing idea.

I think they could be onto a winner here.

I think I’ve lost my UK mobile. It may be in the back of a cab somewhere, or under a plane seat, or lying in a Wellington gutter. Anyway, I can’t find it. (So friends and family should note that it is not a good way to contact me at present!)

Normally, you have a good chance of finding mobiles simply by calling them. But this one is switched off, or the battery is dead; I just go straight through to my voicemail.

I want a way to switch it on remotely. Perhaps a phone could wake up every half hour, check for any messages, and if you had sent it a special text it would respond in some way – emailing you what it could deduce about its position, for example, and staying on for a while so you could call it.

The frustrating thing is not knowing whether it’s here in my hotel room somewhere, or hundreds of miles away in Auckland airport, or lurking under some Wellington restaurant table… I may never know.

I’ve just realised why the concept of ‘the paperless office’ is fundamentally flawed. Inherently self-contradictory. Can’t possibly work.

If our ever-more sophisticated electronic gadgetry finally produces a really attractive reading and writing medium, we may live in a world without paper. Without staplers and punches. Without paperclips. It will seem wonderful for a while.

And then what will we use to press the little recessed reset buttons on those gadgets when they go wrong?

It’s nearly a year since I started wondering about this as a way of combining my paper and electronic worlds. Then I came across the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, but certain recent events made me consider one more seriously, and after reading enthusiastic reviews by several owners I decided it was worth trying.

The default modus operandi is that you put one or more sheets of whatever size in the hopper, press the Scan button, and you get a timestamped PDF file in the directory of your choice. Very handy. See Fujitsu’s little demo video to get the idea.

Now, I realise it’s a bit unsportsmanlike to push my advantage when you’re probably already reeling from the staggering coolness of it all, but, yes, there’s more. This scanner isn’t the only gadget I’ve acquired recently that deals in PDFs. So I can take what comes from the scanner and copy it straight onto my Sony PRS.

I should have chosen a more subtle paper colour for my example, to make it more readable on a monochrome screen, or done some image processing on it. This was just a simple copy of the PDF.

Anyway, I could now carry the contents of many notebooks with me, if I wanted, in something rather smaller than a single one! Of course, I’d have to introduce my old Moleskines to Madame La Guillotine before I could feed them through the scanner, but it’s worth considering…

It’s now official – Samsung has announced their 940UX monitor, which has DisplayLink‘s technology inside, so can be connected to the computer by USB. News of this leaked a few weeks ago, but, contrary to the reports that spread across the web, this model does also have VGA and DVI connections. Here’s DisplayLink’s press release.

If you already have a monitor, but want to connect it using USB, you can get the technology in adaptor form from IOGear – you can find it from around $73. Sunix are about to follow suit with their VGA2625.

Disclaimer: I’m no longer a director or employee of DisplayLink, but I am still a minor shareholder. And proud of it.

Got interference on your wifi? This looks like a cool toy: