Microsoft has desperately needed to reinvent themselves in the mobile marketplace, and it looks like this may be exactly the sort of dramatic change they needed (and hopefully indicates the direction they’re heading in).

While I’m not crazy about the inability to install apps not sanctioned by Microsoft inside their Marketplace, the visual appeal and improved user experience of this new OS may still be enough to win some folks back to the Microsoft mobile platform.

Here’s a video from Engadget showcasing the Windows Phone 7 Series and some of its features.

Exactly the same thing I was.

It was then that I had a sudden realization about productivity: while technology may enhance our productivity when compared to how productive we used to be without (or with a ‘lesser’) technology, I seldom think about how little my productivity actually increases compared to others.

In the 1950s, Pancho Gonzales was one of the best tennis players in the world, and was known to have a particularly fast serve. At a 1951 tournament, officials decided to measure the players’ serves to see whose was the fastest — and Pancho Gonzales beat everybody with a speed of about 214 km/h.

Gonzales’ serve is certainly much faster than mine will ever be. But consider that Andy Roddick, the player who currently has the fastest serve in tennis, has the recorded fastest serve with a speed of 249.5 km/h. Tennis serves have gotten faster in the past 60 years.

Much like there’s more to productivity than technology, there’s more to being a great tennis player than just having a fast serve. But having a faster serve certainly doesn’t hurt.

But let’s go back to Pancho Gonzales for a second. If we could enter Gonzales into a present-day tennis tournament, his once-astounding 214 km/h serve wouldn’t be that far above the average speed of the first serve — around 185 km/h.

So as individual players have gotten faster, other players have had to get faster too, or else face getting left behind by their colleagues. But the speed of your serve is only one aspect of tennis, and as other players get better at hitting returns or improve the accuracy of their serves, that individual player has to get better at all those elements as well.

This kind of evolutionary arms race is similar to the Red Queen effect:

“For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.”

And in terms of technology, we really are evolving one technology within a broader, complex web of other technologies, where continued evolution is necessary just to stay afloat within that broader system.

So while I may be able to read and respond to email while sitting in that train, if everybody else has the same ability, then I’m not really much ahead of where I was before. And if there were some new device that allowed you to send email while the subway was underground, would I be falling behind if I couldn’t do that as well (and yes, the amount of email you send is probably the worst measure of productivity )?

I’ll try to remember to bring a magazine next time I take the subway.

While there have been a few mixed reviews about the phone, I’m fairly confident that the robust hardware (a 1GHz processor and 448 MB of RAM) would be enough to keep me happy for a while (I seem to only be able to keep a phone for just under a year these days).

I’ve had a good run with the Diamond, and can’t really say that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it (besides a few peeling edges on the casing, which probably has more to do with my rough handling of the phone than anything else). As usual, I’m just interested in having the latest and greatest… but I’m really debating whether I pick up this device or wait for Windows Mobile 7 (supposedly coming out sometime soon in 2010). I don’t imagine that HTC or Microsoft is going to provide any ROM-update ability to Windows Mobile 7.

If you’re interested in reading a review of the HD2, GSMArena’s got a pretty good summary of the pros and cons of the phone, as well as a good outline (as usual) of the features and specs of the HD2.

And just for the record, I’d still rather have one of these than the Nexus One. EDIT: If you’re already dying to get your hands on the ‘Google Phone’, first make sure you know what you’re getting. PC World’s got a bit of a different take on why the ‘Google Phone’ may not be everything the world had hoped for.

According to Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s CTO, “I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house.” Yahoo’s also not doing so hot financially. According to the article:

Yahoo’s profits are down, as are most search companies in the current economy. Yahoo earned $118 million in the first quarter of 2009, a drop of 13% year over year with sales totaling $1.58 billion.

While the article points out that Google has overtaken Yahoo as the destination of choice for people conducting web searches, one and a half billion dollars of sales still gives Yahoo quite a bit of weight in the search arena, right?

I’m not sure how a presence in the social networking sphere is going to help Yahoo at this point. While it may lend Yahoo some credibility in terms of social networking, there doesn’t seem to really be a real plan as to how that social networking presence is going to translate into increased profitability.

According to DailyTech, “Yahoo feels that its high number of users gives it an edge in social networking and that it can swiftly launch and build out a social networking backbone with ‘tuck-ins’ of interesting products that are being developed by other firms.”

Admittedly, building a user base is a tough thing to do — but is Yahoo’s user base really going to be interested in social networking (I’m not saying they’re not, it just seems to be a fairly tenuous assumption)? Usually, when companies act with the intention of monetizing their user base instead of acting with the desire to provide a useful service (and as we all know, social networking sites are a dime a dozen), spectacular failures result.

Balogh goes further to say that “for how many incredible applications we could have and should have, for all the experience on Yahoo, we are terribly under-represented.”

That’s a pretty bold statement, when you’re essentially talking about vaporware — couldn’t any company say they are under-represented in terms of what they could have? Yahoo’s starting to come off as a bit desperate here — and looking to cash in on your user base with applications you could have starts to sound like a company that’s already reached its high water mark, rather than one who’s trying to build a social networking presence.

It’s not that FaceBook isn’t useful or doesn’t allow me to keep up with people — it’s actually been quite useful for that. I’ve reconnected with people that I would have never had the chance to meet up with again otherwise, which has been fun. It’s also fun to check out people’s pictures and connections and see who knows who.

My problem with FaceBook is that I can’t really keep up with the messages and notifications. A long time ago I just assigned all FaceBook messages a particular priority in my email (which essentially is ‘I will never actually look at this’). Instead, I occasionally log in to FaceBook to see if I have any messages — which I often do. I then have a ton of non-personal invites to things (like associations’ groups I belong to on FaceBook, don’t ask me why), which I try to ignore.

Mingled in with these are messages from actual people that I’d like to hear from. Unfortunately, there are sometimes actual, real, time-sensitive (think invitations to real things, not ‘association’ auto-invites) things that I’ve missed. I then sit around pondering why I have FaceBook at all if I’m never going to actually log in.

I suppose having a FaceBook account provides people I know with a reasonable expectation that I’ll log in regularly and check my messages. So I’m going to give this FaceBook thing another shot — I’m going to try to respond more regularly to FaceBook messages. And to anyone I’ve ever not responded to on FaceBook — it’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, I’m just terrible at actually logging in.

And if that doesn’t work, I may have to seriously consider just unFaceBooking.

One of the most interesting things about this demo is that the device she talks about is really just assembled from a bunch of technologies that already exist. It’s a good reminder that innovation and invention are not always the same thing, but are still sometimes tough to tell apart.

I was upgrading from the HTC Touch — and in many ways the Diamond is just a (very) upgraded HTC Diamond. There are quite a few improvements in Windows Mobile 6.1 as well (the Touch had 6.0), as well as some great new features on the Diamond that the Touch didn’t have (GPS is a nice touch, as is 4 gigs of internal storage, a much better browser etc.).

I always end up loading a bunch of games and DVD movie backups onto my phone to play or watch during those mandatory down-time moments (waiting at the doctor’s office, taking the bus, those kinds of things), and as I was loading up a copy of an old version of SimCity, I realized that this was the same version of the game that I once played on the PC about 10 years ago.

While the interface had been slightly adapted for Windows Mobile, the game was exactly the same as it had been on the PC (and yes, 10 years later, sending rioters through the streets of your SimCity is still just as fun). The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my mobile phone now did everything that my PC did 10 years ago, and a whole lot more (global positioning, Google Maps, taking photos, touch screen, to name just a few). Pretty amazing really.

Even while I had the HTC Touch, I still never really felt as if the interface and features could be defined as ‘mobile computing’. While I could send email, play some games, watch movies, listen to music and do a bunch of other things, the whole experience just felt clunky and awkward.

The Diamond just feels, well, different. The only persistent issue is with Microsoft Office applications — it’s still pretty tough to type out and format a document in Word in Windows Mobile. Maybe if I had the HTC Touch Pro (just a Diamond with a keyboard really), this would be easier?

I’m hoping Rogers will eventually include an extremely cutting edge Windows Mobile phone in its line-up like the HTC Max 4G — yes, I’m a big fan of HTC products, and no, they’re not paying me to promote their stuff. Rogers (as is the rest of the world), is still pretty focused on the iPhone however, so I don’t think Windows Mobile products are at the top of their list. But HTC, if you feel like sending me a 4G to try out, I’m all ears.

I thought this was a particularly relevant narrative about Google’s security, as I just posted a few days ago about GDrive (which could effectively store any file you’ve got on your computer). So while online storage may be convenient, it’s no fun when your convenient online storage account suddenly becomes a grab bag of personal information for malicious attackers.

I guess this is also the danger of the tendency that Google has to consolidate accounts under the umbrella of the Google Account. One login to everything means that only one set of login credentials needs to be compromised for attackers to get access to all your stuff.

Anyway, I hope you gets control of your account back Mark, as well as some kind of useful response from Google about the security of Orkut.

If you haven’t heard of GDrive before, it’s basically an online hard disk — you can store whatever files you’d like, with (allegedly) pretty much infinite storage capability. GDrive also marks a significant shift in thinking in terms of computer storage, moving away from the ‘things are stored in my computer’ approach to a cloud computing approach.

While this is a great thing for all of us who would like a ton of storage at little or no cost (and be able to access those files from any internet-connected computer), there are a few potential glitches. Privacy’s one issue that has come up over and over again whenever the GDrive rumour (yes, I’m still very much classifying a launch of GDrive as rumour).

The concern is that storing all your information on Google’s servers could lead to privacy infringements on Google’s part as well as the government being able to subpeona them for access to what you’ve got stored. While these are legitimate concerns, there are also some other more practical issues to storing stuff with Google.

The biggest issue of course is bandwidth. In fact, I already use one of my several Gmail accounts as purely an online storage drive, where I can store things that I wouldn’t want to lose in a hard disk death (I take lots of photos, so I store photos there) as well as documents I might need anywhere (it never hurts to have ready access to a resume from any computer, for instance).

Yet for bigger files, it’s not really feasible for me to store them there. First of course, there’s the obvious Gmail limitation on attachments. But even if that wasn’t there, I would have to upload every file to Gmail (or the GDrive, if and when it’s released). And for large files, this wouldn’t really be an option.

This kind of puts the notion of the ‘death of the PC’ by the GDrive’s hand (some people feel that this move toward cloud storage will mean that the notion of the computer hard disk will eventually die) to rest as well. Unless Google figures out a way to install programs on that drive, you’re still going to need local instances of programs (imagine not having access to Word because your internet connection was down for instance). So while it may happen eventually, you better hang on to your hard disk for the time being.

And one last thought on the GDrive. For those of us with a website, hosting companies are often providing unlimited storage and unlimited file transfers (I know mine does). So while I have to pay for hosting costs, anyone right now could currently have an online drive where they can store as much as they want at very little cost. Which makes the GDrive seem a little less revolutionary.