Faster Forward

Whatever happened to the Verizon Wireless we knew -- the carrier with the great network but the boring, uncompetitive phones, the company that never met a phone feature it didn't want to limit or disable?

The Motorola Droid, this carrier's first phone to run Google's Android software, doesn't come from the Verizon I've gotten used to. As I write in today's column, this phone reboots the company's presence in the smartphone industry.

(I suppose Verizon's PR types are wondering what happened to the Rob Pegoraro they knew, the guy who kept trashing every device they shipped.)

The Droid isn't cheap, at $299.99 before a $100 mail-in rebate and with service starting at $69.98 before text messaging and visual voicemail. But like the first Apple iPhone, it justifies that price and lives up to its advance billing with its fusion of advanced hardware and smart, capable software.

Let me share a few more details about the Droid that I didn't have room to get into in the column:

* The camera's LED flash is a lot brighter than most cameraphone flashes. Learn from my experience: Don't test this thing's performance by taking a self-portrait. (For a look at how the Droid's camera compares with that of the iPhone 3GS, see this collection of sample shots on Flickr.)

* The Droid's physical keyboard is pretty big, as phone keyboards go -- if you're used to hammering away on the skinny keyboard of a Research in Motion BlackBerry or a Palm Treo or Centro, you may find that your thumbs aren't used to all the horizontal travel this device entails.

* The Droid's screen, at 854 by 480 pixels, has a substantially higher resolution than the iPhone's 480-by-320 LCD -- and you can easily notice the difference if you bring up the same page on both phones. On the Droid, text appears sharper and fine details in photos aren't blurred or bitmapped out.

* Without multi-touch gestures to zoom in or out of Web pages, the Droid limits you to double-tapping the screen to zoom in --most of the time, its browser correctly zooms in just enough to have a column of text fill the screen -- and plus- and minus-sign buttons. They work, but they're not nearly as fun or flexible as multi-touch. (Android allows outside developers to add multi-touch capability, which is how Sprint's HTC Hero includes it in its browser.)

* To go with its new navigation software visible in the photo above, the Droid includes a helpful "Car Home" interface that replaces its usual home screen with a strip of five large icons (Voice Search, Navigation, View Map, Contacts and Search), all easily selected with a fingertip when the phone is in a car cradle.

* The Droid's default notification alert is a robotic voice saying "Droid." You will want to turn that off, unless you want to advertise your choice of phone to bystanders every time a new e-mail arrives.

* The Droid's e-mail software worked with both my home and work accounts and includes a "Combined Inbox" view of all your incoming traffic. But as I noted in the review, it balked at opening a few random attachments. It opened most PDFs but said others "cannot be displayed," then coughed up the same error with a Word and an Excel file -- right after properly displaying word-processing and spreadsheet documents saved in Microsoft's newer, less widely supported Office 2007 formats.

I have to think that bug-fix updates will address those issues -- and considering how rapidly Android has advanced over the past year, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the necessary patches.

Other reviewers share my high opinion of this device.

At the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg compliments the Droid, although he didn't appreciate the physical keyboard. Read through to the end of the piece to see his assessment of the Droid's optional car cradle and home dock, two accessories I haven't been able to try out.

In the New York Times, David Pogue applauds the Droid as well but identifies two shortcomings in how it deals with add-on applications: You can't shop for apps on a computer, and you can install them only in the Droid's limited internal memory.

PC Magazine's Sascha Segan compares the Droid wityh, in succession, every other Android phone available in the U.S. (in addition to the Cliq and the Moment, T-Mobile's G1 and myTouch 3G and Sprint's HTC Hero), Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm 2 and HTC's Windows Mobile 6.5-based Imagio, and the iPhone. (He pronounces it better than all those competitors save the iPhone, which he sees as slightly superior.)

Have any other questions about this, or about Android phones in general? Fire away in the comments ... and read on after the jump for my assessments of two other new Android phones.

Last Friday, Twitter rolled out a feature it had been testing for a few months: the ability to sort the people you follow on the popular micro-blogging site into lists, much like how Facebook lets you create multiple friends lists.

My initial concept of lists was no more sophisticated than that: They'd help me keep from being overwhelmed by the volume of new postings on Twitter. But this site's public nature -- by default, anything you do on the site is visible to the rest of the Internet -- quickly ensured they would become a new social currency.

When you log into Twitter, you not only see how many people follow your updates but how many lists include you -- a higher number, as ever, being better. You can then check out lists created by the people whom you follow; if one looks particularly interesting, you can click to follow it. Finally, you can create your own lists -- start by viewing the people you follow -- and then see how many people choose to follow those.

(You can keep your lists private, but that's not the standard setting.)

That's exactly what this San Francisco company intended: "We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts," co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the site's blog when lists debuted.

So far, I have shown up on 108 lists. Of those, 36 have "tech" somewhere in their title and four incorporate "geek" or some variation thereof. I've also made one person's list of people who "mademelaugh2xormore." So far, I've yet to appear on any lists with titles like "hacks," "scribblers" or "fanboys" -- but I'm sure that will happen at some point.

I've set up a dozen or so lists to spotlight some of the people I follow -- for example, I have one for current and former Post staffers and another for tech-industry analysts I think are worth quoting. But since I didn't get around to creating most of them until this morning, none of them has drawn its own group of followers.

This feature seems to be taking off in a hurry -- Twitter users' collective lust for lists has yielded a site devoted just to spotlighting good lists, Listorious. But I'm not sure how interesting this curatorial effort will seem a month from now; one of my favorite things about Twitter has been its utter simplicity compared with the likes of Facebook. If you're on Twitter, have you played around with lists? If so, please list ... I mean, enumerate what you like or don't like about them in the comments.

At the end of November, I traditionally devote a few dozen column inches to shopping suggestions for a wide variety of gadgets. Last year, for instance, I used my column to outline my advice on computers, flat-panel TVs and smartphones, then covered digital cameras, MP3 players and other devices in accompanying blog posts.

We're now planning this year's round of gadget guidance, and I could use your help in putting it together -- subject to two fundamental constraints. First, I generally can't recommend individual products in any one category; I just haven't tried enough of them to offer such specific advice and so I'm better off suggesting features to seek or avoid. Second, I don't have the room or the time to cover every single category of product you're likely to see in an electronics store.

With those two things in mind, what would you like me to talk about in this year's gadget-guide package? Assume I'll be able to cover one topic in depth in my column and will then have a series of smaller sidebars to address other kinds of gadgets. So what should they be?

Say I use the column to take care of computers (most likely the most expensive tech purchase people will make); if I'll only have five sidebars, what should I write about in them among, say, digital cameras, smartphones, HDTVs, MP3 players, e-book readers, Blu-ray and DVD players, digital picture frames and all the other devices that beep or blink and come with inscrutable manuals? Please let me know in the comments...

I voted earlier today, and I'd like to think that it was the last time I had to deal with an electronic voting machine. But knowing how long old software and hardware can stay in service in large bureaucracies, I fear that I'll have the same experience next year. And the year after that. And the year after that ...

My gripes about the e-voting machines used in Arlington should be familiar to regular readers. (Disclosure: My wife works in the county's IT department but has no involvement with elections or voter registration.) Ever since my first experience with these WinVote terminals in 2005, I've resented the casual idiocy on display in their interface: When you select a candidate, his or her name appears in red with a red X to the right--what you'd expect to see after picking somebody you wanted to vote against -- and not the more logical indicator of a check mark.

In the real world, I doubt too many voters are confused by this. But why did the company behind these machines -- formerly Advanced Voting Solutions, now Elections USA, Inc. -- flub such an easy thing to get right? What did they miss in the parts of the machine I can't see when I cast a vote?

(If you require further cause for concern about these folks' computing competency, note the horrific ugliness and general uselessness of their current and old Web sites. Would you hire somebody whose résumé looked that bad?)

Even the best e-voting interface can't overcome the generic flaws of commercial electronic voting systems: the closed-source code that governments and citizens can't inspect for flaws, the lack of a separate record that can be audited in a recount, the inability of voters to verify that their choices were recorded accurately.

As a result, in 2008, Virginia and Maryland each voted to end their experiments with electronic voting and return to machines that generate paper records. But while Maryland is supposed to complete that switch by the 2010 elections, Virginia cities and counties face no deadline to retire e-voting systems; they simply have to buy paper-based ones the next time around.

Considering the tight budget situation at every level of government in Virginia, that means you may see me to write a version of this entry every November for quite a few years to come. I'm afraid that e-voting has become the government equivalent of that aging PC at the office running the same old installation of Windows 2000 and the same old copy of Internet Explorer 6, which nobody ever seems to get around to upgrading.

What's the state of your voting system today? Post your critique in the comments ...

It's now been almost two months since I reviewed Apple's Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X -- enough time for Apple to have shipped its first major patch to that operating system, and enough time for any new-release shininess to have dulled.

Granted, Snow Leopard (aka, Mac OS X 10.6) wasn't that shiny in the first place, as I wrote here at the time. Apple itself calls this version "refined, not reinvented" and sells it for the low, low price of $29.

But after two months of using Snow Leopard every day on a roughly three-year-old iMac, how do I appreciate this update? Not all that much, honestly. Some of its improvements have grown less noticeable over time, one problem has become a little more objectionable and one promised improvement has yet to surface.

Take Snow Leopard's changes to the Dock: While I find its scrollable "Grid Stack" pop-up listings of the Documents, Applications and Downloads folders' contents a big upgrade over Leopard's less flexible interface, I never use its "Dock Expose" preview -- clicking and holding an application's Dock icon to see thumbnail images of its open windows just takes too long.

The Quick Time X video player has also been somewhat of a non-entity, perhaps because most of the time I don't do anything with a video clip but watch it inside a browser window -- and that works about the same as ever in this new software.

Since my review ran, I've discovered another weird conflict with a third-party program: the PhotoStitch panorama-assembly tool included with Canon's cameras no longer works. Canon deserves most of the blame -- this application, which looks like a refugee from Mac OS 9, should have been updated long ago -- but the Snow Leopard installer offered no warning about this problem, and Apple's list of incompatible software has yet to mention it.

My biggest Snow Leopard disappointment, though, has to be the crash protection allegedly built into its Safari Web browser. Apple's site brags:

Apple engineers redesigned Safari to make plug-ins run separately from the browser. If a plug-in crashes on a web page, Safari keeps running. Just refresh the page and get going again.

I have yet to see this happen. Safari crashes about as often as it did before and also seems just as vulnerable to slowdowns and stalls once I have too many pages open. Just like in Leopard, Safari will stop responding to any input a second or two before the cursor changes into the dreaded "spinning beach ball of death," and then the only thing I can do is wait for the browser to snap out of it.

At least Snow Leopard's Activity Monitor utility now breaks out the processor and memory footprint of each plug-in, so I can accurately condemn Adobe's Flash plug-in for its appetites.

A few Snow Leopard users have discovered a much more serious problem: a rare but gruesome bug, still fixed, that caused Snow Leopard to wipe out all of their data after somebody else logged into the Mac using its Guest Account option.

I still consider Mac OS X a more pleasant software environment than Windows. I also still think Snow Leopard will bring worthwhile changes over time, both as successive bug fixes address its flaws (the next big one is supposedly due this month) and as third-party developers write new software to take advantage of its foundation-level improvements. But two months in, my not-all-that-glowing review looks a little too positive.

Were you an early adopter of Snow Leopard? What's your assessment, now that you've had some time to get accustomed to the software?

The odds are pretty good that many of you found this article with the help of a large technology firm based on the West Coast. The odds also suggest that many of you will move on from this page to sites or services operated by the same company -- and that you may also use this firm's software to do so.

Ten years ago, the company in question could easily have been Microsoft. Back then, I wrote a long, somewhat angst-ridden column decrying the extent of this Redmond, Wash.-based empire: "It's easy to spend your entire day using Microsoft software and content, with every dime you spend going through a Microsoft server somewhere. Where does it all stop?"

Today's column uses similar language -- "You can easily spend a full day on the Web without leaving its sites or applications" -- to assess the reach and influence of a technology firm that only merited a one-paragraph review in January 1999.

That corporation, of course, is Google. Since my first, cheery description (its closing line "Bonus: Google, still in testing, has no ads" now seems unintentionally hilarious, given where Google makes its money), this Mountain View, Calif., firm has taken up an ever-increasing share of my coverage.

This week, Google announced improved, turn-by-turn Google Maps navigation software for upcoming smartphones running Google's Android software. The subsequent beat-down that stock markets administered to shares of GPS vendors started me thinking about Google's influence over the rest of the tech industry: When it says "jump," do other companies run a Web search for "how high?"

My answer, as you can read in today's piece, is that Google has yet to reach a Microsoft-esque dominance over the technology business. In some cases, it can knock out competitors in a hurry; in others, its product remains in third or fourth place. Here are the ComScore numbers I alluded to in the story; these cover the U.S. Internet audience at home, work and school in September, rounded to the nearest thousand:

E-mail:

• Yahoo! Mail: 105,458,000
• Windows Live Hotmail: 48,962,000
• Gmail: 39,251,000

Mapping:

• Google Maps: 51,996,000


• MapQuest: 39,801,000


• Yahoo! Maps: 10,457,000

Photo sharing:

• Facebook.com Photos: 44,796,000


• Flickr: 24,657,000


• Photobucket.com: 22,171,000


• Picasa Network: 9,701,000

So for now, I'm comfortable relying on Google for some, but not all, of my Internet services. (My major exceptions are personal and work e-mail, photo sharing, travel searches, personal finance and social networking -- but note that Google doesn't even have a viable product in some of those categories. Well, yet.)

Are you actually worried about any of this stuff, or have you learned to stop worrying and love Google? Is fretting over this company's success just a hobby of pointy-headed liberal media elites? Talk to me in the comments -- and in my Web chat, starting today at noon.

Every time I've written about the annoyances of subscription TV services--like expensive, inflexible programming packages and expensive, inept tuners and recorders--I've seen readers post comments to the effect of "You don't need to put up with that: Ditch your pay service and switch to free, over-the-air TV and free Internet viewing."

So that's what my wife and I did last week.

We'd been thinking of taking this step for a while, as our once-cheap Dish Network bundle had crept up to nearly $70 a month. Other options from Comcast, DirecTV and Verizon would not have been that much cheaper over time--though at least those other services, unlike Dish, carry Nationals games in high definition.

Then a mysterious failure of our Dish-provided DVR wiped out all of our recordings right after we paid about $1,000 more for repainting our house than we'd expected (who knew those columns at the bottom of the porch steps had rotted so badly?). With the Nats off the air, it seemed as good a time as ever to try quitting pay TV.

So I called up Dish and closed my account--I told both the account rep and the sales rep who called a few days later that they'd have a shot at regaining our business if they carried the Nats in HD and let us pay for only the channels we watch--and then unplugged the DVR and climbed out on the roof to remove the "LNBF" antenna from the dish.

This was a somewhat easy thing for us to do. We don't watch that much TV in the first place, and most of what we do view is on the networks anyway--I've never gotten into any of the cooking shows, and the last time I watched The Daily Show live was when my friend Robert Schlesinger showed up there to flack his book. Meanwhile, our home is close enough to the District to allow for good digital reception with just a pair of rabbit ears on both the TV and the DVD recorder below it; we can also catch up on shows through such free or paid Internet sources as Hulu, Apple's iTunes, Amazon and Netflix.

But we will have to deal with two issues.

One is sports programming. While we can watch the World Series and Redskins games in high-def over the air (it's fair to ask why I'd want to view the latter), most games are available only on pay channels like ESPN, Comcast SportsNet or MASN, leaving just radio as an option in our home.

We can deal with this over the winter (like a lot of Georgetown alumni, I've grown accustomed to Rich Chvotkin's... effusive play-by-play coverage). It will be a bigger issue in the spring, when the Nats resume play. I'd like to see MASN follow the example of other regional sports networks and offer its coverage to local viewers online--this network obviously needs all the audience it can get--but it hasn't exactly been an early adopter of technology. Then again, Charlie Slowes and Dave Jageler call an excellent game of baseball on the radio.

The other problem we have is WUSA, the Washington area's CBS affiliate. With ABC affiliate WJLA, it switched its digital broadcasts from a strong UHF signal to a weaker VHF signal on June 12, causing numerous reception problems. Since then, WJLA has boosted its transmission power, but WUSA's broadcast remains far weaker. Sometimes, it's come in perfectly at home; other times, the TV can't even detect a signal. Maybe this station will follow WJLA's example and upgrade its broadcast; maybe I'll have to get a better antenna or put one in the attic or on the roof. Maybe some sports bars will get some extra business from me in March... well, assuming my Hoyas are playing any worthwhile hoops in March.

We'll just have to see how these things work out. In the meantime, I'm certain of one thing: I can find other worthwhile uses for $70 a month.

Have you made this switch? How has that been working out for you?

Verizon Wireless may finally have a phone that can win some respect from iPhone fans. This morning, it unveiled the Droid, a Motorola smartphone running the new, 2.0 release of Google's Android software.

This device -- shipping Nov. 6 at $199 for new and renewing customers who sign up for at least a $70 voice/data bundle -- represents two big changes for Verizon.

First, the company seems to have recognized that relying on Research In Motion's increasingly uncompetitive BlackBerry devices for its flagship phones wasn't working. Second, in touting Android's "open development" and 12,000-plus third-party applications, Verizon had to abandon its usual control-freak restrictions on phones' functions.

(Analyst Michael Gartenberg, marveling at the absence of Verizon's usual "Vcast" services, Twittered that "If VZW would have done this type of deal they'd have had iPhone I suspect.")

As Verizon's promotional site (warning: Flash intro and soundtrack) and Motorola's spec sheet outline, the Droid features some interesting hardware, some absent from many other Verizon devices: WiFi wireless networking, a slide-out physical keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera with flash, a 480-by-854-pixel display (the iPhone's measures 480 by 320), and a 16 GB flash-memory card.

The Droid's software, in turn, brings a few intriguing departures from the usual Android toolkit. For example, the Droid will include a Verizon-supplied tool to synchronize data from a Facebook friends list with its own address book, matching a key (but somewhat problematic) feature of the webOS software on Palm's Pre. And a visual voice-mail utility will let users play back and delete messages in the order of their choice.

Most intriguing of all, the Droid and other Android 2.0 phones will include free turn-by-turn Google Maps navigation -- something only possible on Apple's device with expensive add-on applications. Unlike those programs, Google's application will also provide live traffic data and satellite and Street View photographs. If standalone GPS units didn't look doomed before, they do now.

BusinessWeek's Steve Wildstrom has already posted a first-look report on the device. I hope to do the same myself soon. When I do, what would you like to know about it?

The state of computing security in Windows is anything but clear for a lot of home users. So I guess I should not have have been surprised that one column and blog posts at the start and end of this month did not suffice to explain Microsoft's new, free Microsoft Security Essentials program.

Read on for answers to some of the questions I've received most often about "MSE," a free download for Windows XP, Vista and 7:

I can't get MSE to install. What should I do next?

Try booting the computer into Safe Mode: Hold down F8 as the machine starts up to run Windows in a stripped-down configuration, then give MSE's setup routine another try. If that doesn't work, I'd have to think your PC has some preexisting condition -- maybe a virus, maybe some other form of "bit rot" that's corrupted the system -- and in that case it's time to look at reinstalling Windows. (Sorry. This kind of thing just seems to happen in Windows sometimes.)

Do I have to remove my existing anti-virus program?

It's possible to install MSE on top of another program, contrary to Microsoft's advice. I have also installed other anti-virus tools on top of MSE. But that's a bad idea overall: At best, you're going to experience twice the slowdown that any one anti-virus tool can inflict; at worst, you'll render the computer unbootable.

Why didn't you compare MSE to [my favorite anti-virus tool]?

I only had so much time and so many computers. But I can assure you that I haven't seen much difference in the accuracy of anti-virus programs in all the other reviews I've done. (One post-review anecdote in MSE's favor: It correctly identified a new trojan disguised as a Facebook password-reset utility this morning after downloading the latest updates, while the free Avira program missed it after fetching its most recent threat definitions.)

If MSE doesn't control cookies, what should I use instead for that job?

Your browser's own settings; both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, like all modern browsers, offer a variety of options in this department. But I'll repeat my earlier advice: Worrying about cookies -- little, inert, text files saved to your hard drive by Web sites and Web advertising networks -- is a complete waste of time on security grounds, as they can't do anything. It's often a waste of time on privacy grounds as well, considering the more effective ways that advertisers can learn about you on and off the Web. (Put another way: If cookies really worked to help advertisers target online users, the newspaper industry might not be in such a horrific state.)

If MSE disables Windows Defender, should I uninstall that older Microsoft program on my own?

I'd say go ahead -- except that in Windows 7, Windows Defender doesn't appear in the usual add/remove programs list after an MSE install, even though it still holds down its usual spot in the Start menu. It's as if this program has entered some zombified existence, no longer alive but not dead either. In the one XP system I checked this morning, however, Windows Defender was gone already. (I need to scrounge up a Vista system to see what happens to Defender after an MSE installation in that version of Windows.)

You're wrong to say that Windows Defender alone will do the job. You need multiple lines of defense.

Set aside the performance and reliability issues I mentioned earlier -- no matter how many anti-virus programs you gum up your PC with, you'll still face a risk from a brand-new threat that isn't in anybody's database. But here's a more basic point: If you think you need to crouch behind three or four different security programs every time you go online, that's just not right. The Internet isn't that bad, on average -- something else has to be amiss. Maybe you're going to all the wrong Internet sites; maybe you're not exercising nearly enough skepticism about strange downloads, e-mail attachments and pop-up alerts; maybe you're just so unlucky and snakebit in Windows that you need to switch to Linux or Mac OS X.

Why should I trust Microsoft to protect my computer after their history?

If you feel that way about a free Microsoft program, why did you pay good money for the company's operating system?

Any other questions? Post them in the comments and I'll try to address them there.

Microsoft announced Monday that it plans to pry the locks off the closed, proprietary format of its Outlook e-mail/contacts/calendar/tasks/notes application.

By documenting the workings of Outlook's Personal Storage Table (PST) format--one of my least-favorite locked formats--Microsoft would make it far easier for developers to write Outlook-compatible software to complement or replace that widely used program. Furthermore, Microsoft plans to publish this documentation under terms that free other developers from having to pay for it, agree to a license or contact Microsoft at all.

This move represents a remarkable concession by the Redmond, Wash., firm--on the order of its opening the file formats used by the rest of its core Office productivity applications.

The news arrived in a blog post by Paul Lorimer, Microsoft's group manager for Microsoft Office interoperability:

"...we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice."

Lorimer said that this effort "is still in its early stages" and will need more input from "industry experts and interested customers" about the usefulness of Microsoft's PST documentation. That could take a while, considering the complexity of this format--Outlook can have trouble just opening a PST file created with an older version.

Don't expect this to improve your selection of e-mail applications next year, in other words. But in two or three years... who knows? At a minimum, home users should expect more, faster and easier options for taking their data out of Outlook and into competing programs.

Do you use Outlook on your own time? What's your take on the news?