The New York Times’ David Pogue has a good article on the Flip’s demise that thoughtfully contradicts my earlier hypothesis that video functionality in smartphones would kill the Flip.

But most of the world doesn’t buy iPhones. Of the 1 billion cellphones sold annually, a few million are iPhones. The masses still have regular cellphones that don’t capture video, let alone hi-def video. They’re the people who buy Flip camcorders. It’s wayyyyyy too soon for app phones to have killed off the camcorder.

True, but don’t you imagine people very quickly deciding to put the $200 they might have spent on a Flip towards a better phone? I mean, who wouldn’t rather put their $200 into a better phone than a unitasker, unless they really do a lot of on-the-fly video?

Second, it isn’t true at all that nobody’s buying Flip camcorders. So far, 7 million people have bought them. Only a month ago, I was briefed by a Flip product manager on the newest model, which was to hit the market yesterday. He showed me a graph of the Flip’s sales; Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 bestselling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast.

Good points, and I agree that this was probably a premature death, although I still think that death was inevitable given a bit more time. Hopefully one of Flip’s competitors can step up with their products and fill the hole left by Cisco’s bumbling. I feel most sorry for the 550 people who lost jobs because of Cisco’s mistake. It’s tough to work on an exciting product and have it get killed; having that happen to a well-liked product like the Flip must be particularly galling.

Panic has released Prompt, a simple, clean SSH client for iOS devices. I’ve installed it, used iTunes to send my SSH keypairs to my iPad and it works flawlessly. Recommended.

In this case, I really do hate to say “I told you so” regarding Flip, which is being shut down only two years after being acquired by Cisco. I really like the Flip cameras, but it’s clear that there’s no room for a unitasker when modern smartphones do so well with video. I have some friends working for the Flip division at Cisco, and I wish them well; I hope they’re able to land softly.

I finally got out on the mountain bike, with others from Passion Trail Bikes. It seems like forever that I’ve been thankful to get out on the bike at all, even if it is the road bike. I guess I can’t slag roadies altogether, though, since on top of having fun my last couple of road outings, the road bike has at least given me some small level of fitness. With that, I was able to enjoy today’s ride without completely destroying my cardiovascular system. Of course, other riders are also feeling the early-season, lots-of-rain effects, so the slower group helped me survive intact too.

Waterdog is in remarkably good shape, given the weather. It’s only been a couple of days since the last rain, too. There were a couple of trouble spots, but nothing too bad, and the great traction that was available in the rest of the park more than made up for it.

One spot that really is unfortunate is what we used to call “Tony Hill”, which is officially Chaparral, just below Elevator. It’s always been a nightmare, environmentally—steep and rutted, with poor drainage—but as a fun trail, it’s been mutilated.

Last season, the bottom of it fell partially away where water is forced across the trail and down the fall line. A new bridge had been built there, which stabilized the sketchiest part. Late in the season, someone (I assume the city) completely sanitized the upper portion and really made a reasonably challenging section pretty weak. But they didn’t really change the grade, nor did they add additional drainage, so water still flows down the trail. Now that the rains have hammered the area, this section is rutted again, and the bottom (before the bridge) is a total mess. Once it dries and crumbles, I think it’s going to be worse than before, but less fun. Too bad.

But that’s too much bitching about a small disappointment from a fun outing. The weather was impeccable, and it was great to get out.

Back at Passion, the post-ride food was sashimi and other Japanese treats, put on to benefit Japanese affected by the earthquake. The food was good and the cause a good one. And the Silicon Blonde on tap is always a great way to end a ride. Good stuff.

It’s been 22 days since my last ride on the bike, mostly because of the soaking we’ve been getting here in the Bay Area. But today was pretty nice out, so I got in a ride on the road bikes with Shane and Greg. The ride was similar to what we’d been doing before the rains, but it’s amazing how 22 days just destroyed any (admittedly small) amount of headway I was making in the fitness department. Still, I’m enjoying the road bike a lot more than I used to. The rest of the week is supposed to be nice, and since the trails are going to be soaked for some time, I’m planning on getting a little commuting on the bike in.

Also, since the last time I rode, Strava finally rolled out a feature to include a ride embed that I can include here. So, here’s today’s ride:

Ars Technica has published its review of the iPad 2, and it’s as complete as is the norm for that site. As I read it, they had many of the same opinions of it as I did in my first impressions. There are some interesting technical details in there, making it well worth the read.

Great story.

You know how in disaster movies, people on the street gather around electronic shops that have TVs in the display windows so they can stay informed with what is going on? In this digital age, that’s what the Tokyo Apple stores became.

While not an exhaustive look, I did get to play with a Motorola Xoom today at a store. After the very heavy day of use I’ve had with the iPad 2, it was quite an interesting experience.

The first impression it made is that feels more cumbersome than the iPad 2. I’m not sure, now that I’m growing accustomed to the new form factor, if I’d have thought the same if I had been using my old iPad for the last 24 hours instead. Anyway, that’s what I thought as I picked it up.

The screen is fine. Nothing out of this world, but attractive enough. Swiping from screen-to-screen is fluid, but I was struck by how it really still felt like Android. I say that in surprise, not because it’s all that bad a thing, but because I’d read about what a significant redesign the new Honeycomb revision (3.0) is supposed to be.

I played with a few sample apps, including Gmail, the Music app, the Browser app, and a few others. The pinch-and-zoom and scrolling lag in Browser, which I noted on the Nexus S I had (with the previous Gingerbread version of Android) still persists, even with the faster hardware. This really must be a software thing if this tablet with a dual-core processor and improved graphics system still exhibits it. In fact, most of my surfing complaints outlined in that article seemed to persist on the Xoom. To be fair, I only spent a couple minutes with the browser, though it was among the very first things I checked. I did like having the more traditional tab lineup at the top of the screen, and it did seem like the UI of the browser itself had been changed quite a lot, and I liked what I saw on that front. It was quick and responsive from the point-of-view of typing a URL and having the page load and render. I’d say it seemed on par with the iPad 2 there.

Gmail is great on the tablet form factor, and appeared to have been completely redesigned for this form. It seemed smooth and seamless, as it should. Of course, I couldn’t deal with my real email load on a public device, but it really did seem well-executed at first glance.

Also much improved was the formally-abysmal Music app. I didn’t play music for long, or test the sound quality of the device, but the interface to playing music was much better than the pedestrian UI of its Gingerbread predecessor. I’d be interested to see if there’s any improvement in getting media onto the device. I’m also curious if there’s any improvement in podcast support, either in this app, or via Google Listen.

All-in-all, I’d say that it felt farther behind the iPad 2 than the Nexus S was behind the iPhone. Yes, a couple of key apps seemed improved, but it just didn’t feel like the product had been polished to a perfect sheen like the iPad does. Still, it’s good to see a real competitor on the market, and it didn’t feel quite as rushed as the articles I’ve read make out. I hope to get a longer chance to play with one again in the future.

After much deliberation, I decided to replace my iPad with the new iPad 2. Val wanted my old one, and I decided to get a 3 G model on Verizon. I’m writing this on the new one, a black, 64 GB model.

So far, the Smart Cover is by far the most impressive improvement over the original iPad. If you haven’t seen the videos of the covers on Apple’s site, you should check them out. As Steve Jobs pointed out in the iPad 2 announcement, Apple put out a cover for the first iPad, but it added thickness and weight to the iPad, but more importantly, it covered up the beautiful industrial design. To that, I’d add that the material hindered the jewel-like presence the iPad has in the hand, not to mention that I thought it was hideous and scuffed easily. I tried several other covers, with varied success. My favorite is the DODOcase, which I use to this day when I’m really going mobile with the original iPad. I typically eschew the cover, though, and was thrilled to see that they tackled this problem with the new smart covers.

So what about the new form factor? In the hour or two I’ve been using the new version, I’d say that it’s nicer, for sure, but not that much nicer. Being thinner does seem to have made it susceptible to getting a little warmer than the original.

The much-ballyhooed performance improvements are there, but in typical use, like surfing, writing email (and iPad reviews 😉, the new iPad isn’t that much of an improvement, as the original was no slouch. While I do notice some improvement in web surfing, I imagine that the newly-released iMovie and GarageBand will show off that added performance.

One performance improvement that Apple hasn’t highlighted, but is noticeable almost immediately, is the increased memory (up to 512 MB from 256 MB). Safari keeps pages as many pages as it can cached in memory when you open many of them in tabs, and flushes their contents as needed, requiring them to be reloaded from the network when you switch back to them. This reload, of course, takes time and some modern pages aren’t particularly reload-friendly. (I’m looking at you Facebook, which loses your position in the News Feed when the page reloads.)

In any case, more memory equals more caching of pages, which means faster browsing and it’s a really welcome improvement. In fact, it’s too bad they didn’t go farther and put 1 GB in, especially in the higher-end models. I mean, we really ended up paying a lot for that extra storage; a little more RAM wouldn’t have killed them, would it?

I know some people are thrilled about the cameras, and some even didn’t buy the first iPad because it lacked one. Personally, I don’t care about them, although maybe someone will do something super-cool with them and I’ll be glad they’re there. For now, they’re not much of an addition.

Bottom Line

I didn’t know how the original iPad would fit into my life and work, so I hedged my bets and bought the middle-of-the-line 32 GB WiFi model. Now that I know that I use it all-day, every day, I didn’t mess around. That, combined with the awesome new smart cover, makes this a worthwhile purchase for me (not to mention that my wife wanted the old one). Barring those reasons, though, I don’t think it’s compelling enough for original iPad owners to upgrade, unless they really just want the latest-and-greatest.

As I posted earlier, I bought the recently-released Xbox 360 version of the classic video game You Don’t Know Jack (YDKJ). For the purposes of this mini-review, I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with the game. See the last paragraph for the tl;dr version.

I played a few games as a two-player game with my wife, and played a few more with another couple who also were fans of the old PC version of the game.

The game is organized into seventy-some “episodes” (remember that you’re supposed to be on a game show). Each episode has different questions, which is an improvement on the earlier PC-based games, where random question picking algorithms sometimes repeated questions in back-to-back games. The production quality is excellent, and the game takes advantage of the Xbox’s HD output. One thing I was minorly disappointed with is that transition between questions are always the same (at least so far; I’ve played about 6 episodes), where they used to have a few different “themes” in earlier versions.

They’ve done a good job of adapting to the new environment the Xbox 360 affords: you can now have up to 4 players in a game; you can optionally use the “big button” controllers from the Scene It! series of games; you can play over Xbox Live (although I haven’t done this yet); and you can expand the game with downloadable content (DLC) via Xbox Live.

Nits & Picks

One thing that I wish they’d kept is the ability to play longer games. If I recall correctly (and I may be wrong), you could play a longer, 21-question game in the earlier version, but this one had shorter (I think 10 question) games. Whereas you’d get more “screws” in round two, this game only gives one screw per player, per game. Also, the Jack Attack is worth so many points that you can really play poorly before the Jack Attack and win the whole game with a decent showing at the end. I remember the Attack being fun, but not so overpowering; perhaps the difference in game length is what makes the balance seem off.

One thing that was a bit annoying were player names. A player can sign in with an Xbox Live account and use their name (and get achievements), but other players had to take random funny names (like in the PC version if someone waited too long to enter theirs). Unfortunately, the game didn’t remember the player names or positions between games, even if the lineup wasn’t changing. This seemingly minor issue led to the first question being a bit confusing while people figured out “who they were” in the game.

There are also a couple of minor bugs: The “Big Button” controllers seem to have a hard time selecting some one to “screw”; the A button doesn’t seem to select someone to screw, although just leaving your screw above the player selects them after a couple of seconds anyway. We did manage to crash the game once somehow, necessitating a reboot of the system.

In general, this is a worthwhile effort, and I’m glad I bought it. It’s a faithful update of an old favorite, with new, current material and a nice implementation that takes advantage of the modern Xbox 360 console and online environment. I hope they continue to update it with more material.

Back in the day, I really liked the line of trivia games “You Don’t Know Jack”. Since I got an Xbox 360, I’ve said frequently that YDKJ would be great on that platform. The old versions always had our group huddled around a keyboard trying to play and having a console hooked to a big TV with wireless controllers is a no-brainer to make this game great.

Well, I’m not sure how it slipped by me, but an Xbox 360 version (as well as a few other platforms) was just released today. Awesome! It’s en route, and I’ll post impressions once I get it.

Bonus: From reading online, it’s also compatible with the “big button” controllers that were bundled with the Scene It! games. Those controllers will be perfect, so I’ll have to dig them up, along with some batteries, to be ready for the game’s arrival. Stoked!

“It’s just like riding—uh—a wire fence.” — Lyndon B. Johnson

Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.

Instapaper creator Marco Arment has an interesting take on the sheer number of Android phones that come out. It seems like a good insight that, to geeks, this kind of super-granular level of decision-making when buying a phone is desirable but that no phone gets the kind of run needed to build a name or ecosystem around and normal people can be put off by it.

Engadget has a video of the X100′s hybrid viewfinder and it looks hot. It’s “hybrid” because it’s an optical viewfinder with camera data imposed over it in real-time. Very cool.