Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and I were at an Orange party tonight. His Amazon Kindle didn’t show up yet (it comes tomorrow) so I showed it to him. He hated the UI, so I turned on my cell phone and recorded him goofing around a bit.

Etch a Sketch is better, huh? Yikes.

Oh, Mike’s always saying my videos are boring (although he admitted to me that he watches them). I wonder what he’ll say about my videos now that he’s been on one?

Oh #2 Ben Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist ACTUALLY HAS TWO SONY READERS and gives us his 12-hour video review of the Kindle and he disagrees with Mike, saying the navigation is “sexy cool.”

So, I’m watching the Android video and talking with my friends who are developers. Man, I thought my videos were boring, this one takes the cake.

Steve Jobs does NOT have to worry about losing his job to the folks from Google.

I didn’t see ONE feature that will get normal people to switch from the iPhone. This comes across like something developers developed for other developers without thought of how they were going to build a movement.

How do we know this developer API is uninspired? They are bribing developers with $10 million in prize money.

Compare to the iPhone. Steve Jobs treats developers like crap. Doesn’t give them an SDK. Makes them hack the phones simply to load apps. And they create hundreds of apps anyway. Now, Apple is getting is act together. Early next year an SDK is coming. So now developers will have both sexy hardware, a sexy OS (under iPhone is OSX, an OS that’s been in wide use for years now), AND a well-thought-out SDK.

But, here’s why Android is getting received with a yawn from me:

1. It was released without a personal approach. When Steve Jobs brings out new stuff he does it in front of people. Not in a cold video (as much as I love video it doesn’t inspire the way sitting in an audience does and getting to put my own hands on it).
2. This stuff is still vaporware. No phones are available with it. At Microsoft I learned DO NOT TRUST THINGS THAT THEY WON’T SHOW ME WORKING. Remember Longhorn? Er, Vista? The first time I saw it was largely in a format like this — it looked cool but it wasn’t running anywhere and they wouldn’t let me play with the cool demos. I’ll never make that mistake again. If you want my support for your platform I need to be able to use it and show it to my friends.
3. The UI looks confused. Too many metaphors. One reason the iPhone does so well is because the UI is fairly consistent. Fun, even. How do I know this? My ex-wife hates technology and she bought one and loves it. I try to imagine her getting a Google Android phone and getting very frustrated with a mixture of drop-down menus, clicking metaphors, and touch metaphors. At some point she’ll give it back and go back to the iPhone, which only presents a touch metaphor.
4. No real “love” for developers. Heck, I don’t know of a single developer who has had his/her hands on Android. And all we get is this cold video that just doesn’t inspire me to believe in the future of the platform. I know Dave Winer didn’t feel the love from the Open Social “campfire” event, but at least there we heard from quite a few third-party developers. That made me believe in the platform because I knew that they had already gotten at least SOME third-party developers on board. Heck, remember Facebook? Go back and see when I got excited by Facebook. It was two weeks after the F8 platform announcement. Why then? Because I saw that iLike got six million users in two weeks and was staying up. So, that communicated two things to me: 1. that the platform attracted interesting developers. 2. that Facebook was well enough architected to stay up, even under pretty dramatic load. Android is a LONG way from demonstrating either of these things to the market.
5. Google needs to get atomic videos. On an announcement like this there shouldn’t have been one long video, but rather 50 small ones, each demonstrating a separate API. Developers today are busy. Fully employed. They want easy to understand instructions for how to integrate platform stuff into their stuff. It’s amazing that Google itself doesn’t understand how its own search engine works. If it did, they would see the advantage of creating lots of video, not just one (because then they would be more likely to get found for a variety of search terms, not just a few — it’s one reason I create at least a video every day and it’s paid off very well for me). I’m giving Vic Gundotra the same advice — his long Open Social “campfire video” should have been cut up into the atoms that made up that video. Sure, put the long complete video up too (the molecule) but cut it up. Yes, yes, I know, I don’t take my own advice but then I have an excuse: it costs money, er time, to edit video and I don’t have a lot of it. Google doesn’t have that excuse.
6. Google’s PR comes across as “only caring about big bangs.” Last week I was in the Open Social press conference. Everyone else in the room worked for a big-name media outlet. Business Week. Wall Street Journal. Los Angeles Times. CNET. Barrons. etc. etc. Even TechCrunch was relegated to a phone-based seat and wasn’t in the room. That tells me that Google’s PR doesn’t get the value of small people. In fact, if you were tracking the mentions of that press call you’d have seen my use of Twitter during it got mentioned many times on blogs. Google’s PR didn’t seem to even understand why Twitter was important. They also kept me from using my video camera during the press call (the only reason I got video is cause I carried a cell phone with me — they asked me to leave my professional camera out in the car). Compare that to presidential candidate John Edwards who let me film, even on his plane during “off times.” And he has a Twitter account too.
7. It looks too much like a poor copy of the iPhone. They didn’t talk about ONE thing that the iPhone doesn’t do. Where’s the car integration? Why didn’t they focus a LOT on GPS, or video creation, or something else the iPhone doesn’t do. Do we really want to spin a Google earth map? Really? That doesn’t turn me on. Showing me Kyte.tv working on this thing would turn me on — that’s something the iPhone doesn’t do. Showing me killer podcasting-creation features would turn me on. That’s something the iPhone doesn’t do well. Instead we get some video game that we all played 10 years ago. Yawn. OK, OK, I know Android plays Quake and the iPhone doesn’t. But, come on, we all know a game API is coming for the iPhone and is that really going to get a lot of people to buy Android?

Anyway, so far I’m disappointed in Android. Maybe they’ll get it together, but until then I’ll remember the Russian Government official’s cell phone. He’s running Windows Mobile. Why? Cause developers in his community are building stuff for it. I’ll keep checking in with him to see if Android has gotten any traction.

Are you sensing that Google is just not very good at technology evangelism? After all, look at how successful Google has been outside of search. It hasn’t really had a good home run that we can point to outside of that. I think that’s because Google is coming across as too arrogant, too interested in only “important developers and people,” and doesn’t understand how to pitch end users and developers at the same time (developers only really come after end users do anyway, look again at the iPhone).

But what do I know, I’m just a blogger, right?

UPDATE: Patrick, on TwitterGram, says “it looks like a ripoff of the iPhone.”

UPDATE2: other responses are rolling in from around the Internet. Engadget. GigaOm.

Lawblogger Denise Howell has the sexiest iPhone around. Where did she get her skins? DecalGirl. They include stickers for the front and back as well as a matching wallpaper. That rocks.

Here she shows off both the front and back of her iPhone:

It’s real interesting that many of the blogs are playing up Skinkers and Microsoft’s new P2P video distribution system as a “Joost killer” or, more humorously, a “Slingbox killer.” My Slingbox has a tuner. I don’t remember seeing a tuner in my Media Center box upstairs so how could a piece of software kill my Slingbox? I don’t get that.

These things have another problem: the Web is a better video distribution network cause we don’t have to leave our browsers where we all feel comfortable.

Why else? Cause the Web can be fixed. The Web can be added to. The Web can be participated in. AOL-style clients lock us in, can’t be updated on our timetable. And how do we get our own content into Joost? Anyone know? I don’t.

I look at how my son uses media. He dives in and through various Web sites snacking on media along the way. A YouTube video here. A New York Times video there. A PodTech video next. A Kyte.TV video later. Now he’s already using his camera to upload photos from the street. He’s joined the media creation revolution. Can’t wait until Apple turns on the video camera on the iPhone. Wait until he sees that Facebook has a video feature. THAT is the thing everyone in the video industry should be worried about and focused on. Anyone notice that you can upload video to my Kyte.tv

Why would he start up another environment just to watch video? Especially when many of these let him participate by throwing comments up, or chatting, or doing other things?

I just am not a big believer in yet another AOL-style client. I think the Web is far more interesting. Don’t miss what Facebook is doing with video, though. It’s totally not sexy. Not wrapped in a pretty client. No big deals with Viacom, etc. But I bet that in two years it’ll be something that changes the industry. Joost? Skinner? I don’t think so.

What do you think?

Oh, and don’t forget about the iPhone. Heheh.

So, it’s been non-stop in line here. I haven’t had my hands on a keyboard until 3 a.m.

Why did I wait in line in Palo Alto and not the more sexy San Francisco? Easy, I knew there’d be more geeks in line here. And the line did not disappoint.

First of all, Bill Atkinson is in line here. He was Apple’s first software developer. He wrote Mac Paint. Hypercard. Did the windowing system. And much more. Most historians believe he’s one of the top software developers Silicon Valley has ever seen. And that’s no hype.

He’s been telling folks in line all sorts of old Macintosh stories (he was on the original Mac team). We streamed his conversation live and it really was incredible. Loren Heiny was watching our live stream tonight and said the conversation was awesome. Plus his photography (what he’s passionate about now) is stunning. We’re going to try to do a photo walking with him soon.

Steve Gillmor filmed the conversation and we’ll have it up on PodTech.

Anyway, I’m going to try to get some sleep and see ya in a few hours.

There’s 125 people in line at 3:36 a.m.

Also in line? The Quicken Mac Team. Zooomr. Smug Mug. TechMeme. Quite a few others.

I have a few photos on my Flickr account. I’m sure there are other ones too. Plus we’re streaming live still over on Ustream.

Last night I had dinner at Dave Winer’s house with Michael Gartenberg, Peter Rojas (the guy who started engadget), Scott Rosenberg of Slate, and Jeremy Toeman (gadget guru). It was an incredible dinner. Thanks Dave for inviting me. This dinner alone was better than all the conferences I’ve been to this year wrapped up.

Anyway, at one point Michael Gartenberg pulled a phone out of his pocket and said that this was a just announced phone (the embargo ended during the dinner). It was an ugly device. It was no iPhone. It looked like a phone that was popular five years ago. Flip phone style. Small screen. Cheap to build. You know the style.

I asked “why is there any company crazy enough to announce a new ugly phone during iPhoneManiaWeek?”

Then he explained what it did and I understood. It’s the anti iPhone.

It’s the equivilent of the Wii when compared to the sexier Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

You know there’s a huge market of people who say “I don’t need the Web, I don’t need a cool camera, I don’t need a GPS. I don’t want a device that costs $600. I just want a phone.”

Anyway, one thing it does is use wifi when available, which saves you money on making a phone call.

Michael Gartenberg has all the details on the new TMobile service and phone.

Note that he didn’t put a picture up. Yes, it’s that ugly. It’s the anti iPhone.

Mauricio Idarraga at Puremobile.com sent me a Nokia N95. He wrote in the letter that came with the phone:

My name is Mauricio Idarraga and I am the Ecommerce Manager at PureMobile. I read your blog almost every day, that’s how I found out that you wanted an N95.

We don’t expect anything in return, but if you could tell your friends we sent it to you, that would be really cool.

I’m in love already. No, not with Mauricio. Heheh. Of course PureMobile is now going to get all my cell phone business. But rather, I’m in love with the Nokia N95. The camera on this phone is unbelieveable. As soon as I get my Flickr account back up I’ll show you some pictures. It has a 5 megapixel camera in it. The picture quality is stunning.

It also has GPS. It also has 3G and all the other bands you’d want so you can travel the world with this phone. It’s also unlocked so you can use it with your favorite carrier.

Translation: it’s going to be lots of fun to compare this to the iPhone. We all know the iPhone will sell just cause it’s cool, but this phone will match up pretty darn well. More on that after I get an iPhone.

I just wanted to tell all my friends where I got the phone and that I love this phone.

Thank you Mauricio and appreciate the phone very much and have just shown it to a bunch of CEOs and VCs and they are all in awe and want to know where to buy one.

Keep in mind that this is a very expensive phone at about $750. But I know tons of people who are about to buy an Apple iPhone for $500 or $600. They really should check this phone out before buying an iPhone.

Anyway, it’s going to be fun to compare the Nokia N95 to the Apple iPhone in a video review. The iPhone only has a 2 megapixel camera, the Nokia has 5. The iPhone doesn’t have 3G. Doesn’t have GPS. Doesn’t have a regular keyboard that you can use without looking at it.

On the other hand, Apple’s software is better and sexier. And the Nokia doesn’t have the cool factor of the iPhone. The better product doesn’t always win in the marketplace unfortunately.

Hope you’re having a great weekend. I’m off to have BBQ with Shel Israel…

Oh, and if you want to buy a Nokia N95, I can’t think of a better place to do that then PureMobile.

I just switched my life over to a 17-inch MacBookPro. Don’t worry Microsoft fans. I still have Vista and Office 2007 loaded too.

I asked the 2500+ people following me on Twitter what their ideas were for me to load up and in just the first minute got dozens of suggestions. Here’s some of the first:

@kirkmarple says “Vista.” Heh, already got it loaded. With both BootCamp and Parallels.
@rpechler says “start with iUseThis.”
@davewiner says “audio recorder, brain dead simple MP3 recorder and azureus, bittorrent client”
@endacrowley says “transmit by panic software for ftping, aperture for more advanced photography, adium for chat and twitteriffic for Twitter).”
@cbee says “Transmit, Onyx, iClip, WhatSize, DeskTopple, Typeit4me.”
@CamonZ says “optimized binary of firefox for Mac.”
@MHJohnston says “Quicksilver.”
@FANLESS says “icecoffee, menumeters, copypaste & Growl, all found via http://www.macupdate.com.”
@davewiner says “graphicconverterpro - paint program.”
@matthendry says “Triple Boot via BootCamp.”
@DonMacAskill says “AdiumX, NeoOffice, Yojimbo, Spanning Sync, Missing Sync (if you use a SmartPhone or Windows Mobile), iTerm, Twitterrific.
@johncruz says “You better get twitterrific.”
@pierre says “LaunchBar is a must if you prefer keyboard to mouse.”
@derrickpeters says “‘tickr‘ for flickr.” (now replaced by Slide).
@cbee says “Amadeus and/or Audacity, Wiretap Pro, Flip4Mac, File Juicer, Pipette.”
@autodidactus says “Where do we start, Scoble? Twitterific, VLC, WireTap Pro, Transmit, Adium.”
@autodidactus says “I’ve found myself quite hooked on Monocle lately.”
@lightandshadow says “Letterbox, plugin for Mail.app.”
@joshowens says “perian.org — a nice codec pack for all those lovely bittorrent TV shows, etc.
@edwardsterkin says “seismac.”
@tuz says “Appzapper for uninstalling, Colloquy for IRC if you do that, NetNewsWire for free reading, write room for uninterrupted writing.”
@edwardsterkin says “VoiceCandy.”
@R2C13 says “I like pathfinder.”
@edwardsterkin says “ChatFX.”
@parislemon says “Definitely have to check out delicious library to organize your media: http://www.delicious-monster.com/“
@kevinrailsback says “Synergy.”
@tuz says “Disco for a light weight burner, Paparazzi for screenshotting entire Web pages to jpeg or pdf, transmission for torrents.”
@bigwebguy says “virtuedesktops (at least until leopard spaces).”
@kevinrailsback says “Desktopple (hides all the icons/files on your desktop for a clean look).”
@MHJohnston says “Growl is also a good bet for notifications- ties into a lot of apps.”
@rpechler says “my ‘must have’ Mac apps.”
@derrickpeters says “Sailing Clicker turns phone into remote for computer and a second vote for Growl.”
@jaseone says “TextMate is the best text editor out there.”

This is all in the first 10 minutes on Twitter. Lots of very passionate people hanging out on Twitter lately. Oh, and can you pick the SmugMug CEO out of the list above?

What about you? What utilities or apps or services do you think every Mac user should load?

I’m physically ill after reading what happened to Kathy Sierra. Maryam and several others here at PodTech asked me about it and are concerned since the same sites that are attacking Kathy also mentioned me and Maryam. Maryam is really freaked out about it. So am I.

She doesn’t feel safe. I don’t either after reading Kathy’s post. I, like Mike Arrington and other bloggers, have gotten threatened and I’ve just ignored it. It comes with the territory, or so they say. But what Kathy is going through is just totally disgusting. I note that only one of the four that Kathy specifically mention has apologized. That itself is disgusting. Those people are NOT my friends and I don’t support that kind of blogging or commenting and remove such attacks if left here against other people (I leave attacks against me up, but that’s cause generally most people here are pretty cool, even if they think I’m a jerk).

We’re putting ourselves out there in ways very few people do. We should be safe from death threats and other sexual attacks and stuff, especially from other bloggers.

So, since she doesn’t feel safe. I’m going to stop blogging in support of Kathy, who I consider a friend and someone who’s voice would be dearly missed here. I’ll be back Monday.

The Internet culture is really disgusting. Today when I was on Justin.TV the kinds of things that people were discussing in the chat room there were just totally disgusting and over the top.

We have to fix this culture. For the next week, let’s discuss how.

And, Kathy, Maryam and I love you and are there for you. Don’t let these jerks get you down.

It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man.

It makes me realize just how ascerbic this industry and culture are toward women. This just makes me ill.

I just had lunch with Randal Leeb-du Toit, CEO of Yoick, and John Wolpert, executive producer of Outback Online, a 3D virtual world that Yoick is working on.

Who said cool stuff has to come from Silicon Valley? Not these guys (main developer is in Austin, Texas, and most of the team’s management is in Australia). They are building another virtual world, similar in many ways to Second Life from Linden Labs.

Anyway, why does the world need another Second Life-style thing?

Well, here’s some reasons that Outback Online gave me:

1) The quality of graphics on Second Life aren’t good enough to do lots of things.
2) The scalability of Second Life isn’t good enough to hold really large events (only about 100 people can fit into a single island, in Outback Online they claim they can get 10,000).
3) Second Life is too restrictive globally for kids and families (in Second Life it’s OK to have virtual sex almost anywhere and only 18-year-olds are allowed into the main world and adults aren’t allowed to work with kids in the teen grid). Outback Online says they’ll have much better granularity of age controls and parental controls and community controls. If they can control the flying penises, that’ll be a big driver for many of us who want to play online with our kids.
4) They see that by focusing on Windows only at first they can push the edge of graphics (and, they are working on an Xbox version too that’ll bring lots of people into this world). It’s among the world’s most graphically intensive C# applications.
5) Instead of hosting everything on centrally-located servers they are using P2P to get more people onto islands and bring better graphical performance.

Their world is under development and is way behind Second Life in lots of aspects (these worlds are built by their inhabitants, so an empty world looks pretty dull) but I saw some brilliant things here that are worth watching. An alpha starts this summer (you can sign up to get early access on the Outback Online Website) with beta coming later this year.