It was pretty surprising to read Dr. David Anderegg's comments in the New York Times yesterday. Dr. Anderegg, who's a professor of psychology at Bennington College, is claiming that the words "nerd" and "geek" should stop being used, as they're "damaging, much like racial epithets."

Years ago, certainly before my time, the term "geek" actually meant something entirely different to what it does now. The first reference came from the 1976 version of the American Heritage Dictionary, describing a performer in a freak show who bit off the heads of chickens.

You could say the word has changed at least three times over the years, as following 1976, a geek was someone who was a heavy gamer, computer platform-agnostic, and most likely grew up to be a developer or web designer. Movies of that era portrayed geeks as being the basement-dwellers who very rarely got the girl, with films like Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science, and even James Bond's Goldeneye, with the Boris Grishenko character perpetuating the stereotype. Even Bryce in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is the quirky geek who just amuses everyone, but no-one would want to actually be. It just wasn't glamorous, but you could certainly say it was the most "hardcore" form of the word.

In the last couple of years though, the word has changed again. The "geek" accolade is a badge of honor, people are proud to call themselves one. It's now used to describe someone with a Twitter account, a wide selection of iPhone cases with Mario characters on, a Tumblr log-in or a penchant for ironic t-shirts. The girls read GeekSugar, the boys search eBay for old Dreamcast games, and they all think they're pretty cool—and different to everyone else.

It's become such an overused—and misused—word that it's lost its meaning along the way.

Now, a geek is just someone who's vaguely techie, knows how to use the internet properly, and has an appreciation for ironic throw-backs to their childhood. It also suggests a pride behind the intelligence one possesses, but with everyone throwing it around willy-nilly, the meaning has become extremely muddy.

Even the geeks in films have changed in the last few years. See Matt Farrell in Live Free or Die Hard, and any character Simon Pegg plays. TV shows like the The Big Bang Theory and The IT Crowd—these new geeks are being portrayed in almost every form of entertainment going.

It's become pretty frustrating watching it all, but recently I'd been feeling like the word "geek" wasn't being used quite as much—that one day it could be reclaimed, and the square-rimmed glasses-wearing brethren could go back to just being the normal people, normal for a period of time when everyone uses the internet and knows how to download iPhone apps.

Dr. Anderegg's comments show a dated view of the word "geek," similar to the geek 2.0 meaning I mentioned, when film characters leaned more towards Poindexter than to Chloe O'Brian from 24; one he feels will stop young people from studying the more "geeky" subjects, such as science and math.

On the contrary, I think they actually encourage people to take a closer interest in those fields, especially with role models like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Evan Williams from Twitter and Stephen Fry out there today. But I do think it's time the proper geeks reclaim their word, if only to stop me from bristling every time I overhear a 14-year old girl being called "geeky" for knowing how to use BitTorrent.

The winter months are the hardest time to not want new stuff. We're inundated with sales, and in a few short weeks we'll be ogling next year's tech at CES. As the resident Gizmodo "no I won't upgrade my PowerBook" curmudgeon, I'm here for support. Take a look at the gear I use, and how despite its age, all (well, most of) it has plenty of life left.

I Call Him FrankenPod

No, you're not seeing things. The image above is indeed a picture of my primary media player, and yes, it is an iPod mini.

Go ahead, get the Borat jokes out of your system.

Done? Okay, now hear me out. Don't judge a book by its cover. As far as I'm concerned, this little guy can blow away nearly any other MP3 player on the market.

Under the hood, I swapped the 6GB microdrive with a 16GB Compact Flash card. I can easily change it out for a 32 or a 64GB card once prices come down. It's also running what I consider to be the most feature-rich firmware around, Rockbox. What looks like a beat-up iPod mini is actually a robust, nearly indestructible flash-based portable audio player, all built for a fraction of what a new one costs.

The mini isn't the only old iPod that's easily moddable. Considering about 118% of the United States' population has an old iPod lying around somewhere by now, chances are you've got what you need for a fun weekend project. Even if your heart's set on the Zune HD's OLED display or the Touch's app catalog, some love and a little elbow grease can breathe old life into that old iPod, and give you a great secondary PMP.

The Little Computer that Could

When I walked into Gizmodo HQ on my first day, I was nervous. Some of that anxiety was the new job jitters, but I was mostly afraid that my 12" PowerBook wouldn't cut it. Gizmodo moves fast, and my aging machine certainly doesn't. I was on the verge of upgrading, but decided to see how my old hardware fared before taking the plunge.

Long story short: It did the job. Barely. But through compromise, I made it work. I love Firefox and all of its extensions, but Safari runs at half the resource load. Photoshop Elements does what I need without the huge footprint of CS. With a little thought as to what applications I was running, which ones I didn't need, and where I was willing to compromise, my plucky PowerBook and I made it through the summer.

As much as I love the little guy, it's not like I haven't thought about replacing him. I almost pulled the trigger on a new MacBook last month. At the last minute I decided that instead of buying a computer that would last me 2-3 years, I wanted another that could feasibly last for 4+. Whenever that computer comes out, I'll probably bite, but until then I'm happy squeezing a little extra life out of my aging hardware.

Look at how you use your computer. If you're rendering all day, never leave Photoshop, or doing any other heavy computing and you need the speed, then upgrade. But the rest of us can probably hold off a little longer, even tech-obsessed gadget bloggers.

Nice Peeling Chrome Paint, Dude

I'm fairly certain I'm the only writer at Gizmodo without a smartphone. Yes, dumbphones must die, and someday I will upgrade this one. But for now, it makes calls, texts, and even has an almost acceptable music player built in that works in a pinch. Google services run surprisingly well in a WAP browser, too, so I can get email and read my RSS feeds when necessary.

Would I love to have a smartphone? Sure. (Hey Brian Lam and Jason Chen, skip down a few sentences) But it's also really nice to be disconnected sometimes. My Gizmodo email account receives a very steady stream of emails, to say the least. I like being able to walk away from the computer and cut myself off every once in a while, without my phone constantly reminding me that there's work to be done (Okay overlords, you can read on from here).

Just Because it's Old Doesn't Mean it Sounds Worse

No, this stereo doesn't do DTS-HD Master Audio. It has zero HDMI ports. But it still does 2-channel audio pretty well, more than well enough for what I need it to do.

Repurposing old stereo equipment is one of the best ways to build a great system on the cheap. The turntable and receiver are my dad's old gear, coupled with a pair of speakers I yanked off of a CD player I've had since I was 14. The setup won't win me any audiophile cred, but it definitely does a much-better-than-OK job at playing music.

Not to mention that it's pretty cool to listen on the same equipment my dad once used. When I was 17, I found his old record collection in the basement and immediately started spinning it on his long-forgotten turntable. Call me corny, but I think it's pretty awesome to know that 30-some years ago he was listening to the same records on the same deck.

If you aren't lucky enough to have access to your parents' old stereo equipment, it's not uncommon to find some real gems at your local thrift shop on the cheap, tossed away by someone who thought McIntosh is a cheap Apple knock-off.

Okay, so Maybe I Want to Upgrade Some of It

I do have one thing that I desperately want, and will upgrade to soon: an HDTV. I've never owned anything besides tube TVs under 20 inches. The fact that flat-panel prices are finally reasonable, combined with the digital switchover makes it prime time for me to jump the CRT ship.

I want to say that it always makes sense to hold onto your old TV after you upgrade, but in this case it might not. Television sets were at their saturation point well before HDTVs came along. In 2009 there were more TVs per household than people. By now it's likely that you just don't have room for a fourth or twelfth tube anywhere.

If you find yourself needing to dispose of an aging TV, please do so properly. Donate it. Sell it on Craigslist. Or look into electronics recycling centers in your area. An old TV may not have a place in your house or apartment, but it might find a place in someone else's home. It certainly doesn't belong in a landfill.

See? I'm Not a Total Luddite

I might roll with old stuff, but I'm not some sort of quasi-neo-luddite. Plenty of other gadgets in my arsenal are much more recent than what you see here. I have a PS3, my music gets fed to my stereo through a Squeezebox, and I do have another receiver that handles multichannel audio, albeit a relatively cheap and older one (and in case you're wondering, I did take these pictures with a DSLR, but it's not mine).

So yes, even I don't always live by the "never upgrade" mentality. Planned obsolescence and the industry's fast pace make it impossible to live by that creed. But I also think that a lot of the time we feel "forced" to upgrade we're really being driven by gadget lust, that powerful desire which makes us overlook the benefits of using old stuff.

Here's what I always think about when that ol' familiar "gotta have it" feeling hits. The biggest and most obvious perk: buy new stuff less often, save money. I don't know about you, but if I walk away from a big purchase, I feel like I've won. It's like trapping money that was trying to escape from my bank account. And if you've got a bit of the tree-hugging hippy spirit in you, you'll feel good about cutting down on your e-waste output, even if only by a little bit.

Not to mention the freedom old gear provides. I imagine it's similar to the feeling of operating the Mars rovers. I know that my gadgets have gone far beyond their planned mission length, so I throw them around without caring if they get damaged. And once that old gear inevitably goes belly up, I'll feel no remorse upgrading something that lasted for so long.

But that doesn't mean I won't be sad to lose my gadgets. I've heard other tech junkies say that we should never fall in love with technology, because we'll just end up heartbroken when it's time to say goodbye. In my opinion, that emotional connection is exactly what we need nowadays. If we all try to love our gadgets, to start treating them more like companions than disposable tools, a lot more perfectly good gear could be saved from an untimely retirement.

I know more than a few of you out there are eyeing some new toys for the holidays. I am too. But before we let upgraditis get the best of us, let's consider what we already have. Maybe it's still good enough. Maybe there's a new part that could make our gadgets better and provide a fun modding project to boot. Take it from me: There's almost always some way to squeeze extra life out of old gear.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's an old Dell tower around here somewhere that's begging to become a NAS.

Android's most serious problem right now is fragmentation: with each new phone, it seems, comes a different version of the OS. In theory, these differences are superficial, and come down to handset manufacturers' and carriers' custom interfaces, which sit atop a mostly unchanged Android core. In practice, it's much worse.

Just look at the current top tier of Android devices. The Motorola Droid runs Android 2.0. The HTC MyTouch 3G and G1 on T-Mobile run Android 1.6. The HTC Hero, a newer phone than the MyTouch and the G1, is still stuck on 1.5, along with the even newer Motorola Cliq, which shares one parent—Motorola—with the 2.0-loaded Droid. Why is this something to worry about? Remember Google Maps Navigation, the free turn-by-turn app for Android? It only works on Android 2.0 and 1.6. An app written by Google doesn't even work on every new Google phone. Imagine how things are with third party apps. (Spoiler: it's a shitshow.)

Google's been fairly diligent about updating the free, open-source heart of Android moving forward at a steady pace, and supplying handset manufacturers with the tools they need to keep their handsets running the latest software. That said, Google still deserves some of the blame here. That their software updates include new, exclusive functionality is fine on its own. And yeah, their eagerness to allow for Android to be skinned and deeply customized by handset manufacturers is fine on its own—in fact, it's implicit in the project's open source ethos. But mixed together, these ambitions create a gurgling software slurry of incompatibility, user experience inconsistency and general frustration. (See: Samsung Behold II) So what happened?

The problem is in the model. Android updates seed out through carriers, over the air or with special installers. This is because the updates are their responsibility: once handset manufacturers (and carriers, through handset manufacturers) have built their own version of Android, they've effectively taken it out of the development stream. Updating it is their responsibility, which they have to choose to uphold. Or not! Who cares? The phones are already sold. And there's very little to motivate a carrier or handset manufacturer to update their Android phones, because the consequences tend to fall on Google: If Android fragments, the App Market doesn't work. The public sours. Android starts to suck. This is where the Nexus One comes in.

Sold without a carrier, software updates for the Nexus One will be in Google's hands. They will be able to keep it up to date as Android develops, without having to depend on some other company—or companies—not to drop the ball. Users won't have to bother learning Google's esoteric dessert-themed version codenames, and life will be better. This approach to software updates already has a case study: the iPhone. There's a good reason Apple didn't entrust AT&T with keeping the iPhone up to date, and that they didn't want the company that actually manufacturers the phone—Foxconn—to have any responsibility for its software. Smartphone software is finicky and complicated, and so is the experience of using it. It needs to be tightly controlled to remain consistent, and because apps are the most important part of a smartphone platform nowadays, consistency is life or death.

Without totally changing what the Android project is, Google can't put an absolute stop to fragmentation. What they can do is provide an example of how an Android phone should be done. With the Nexus One, Google probably isn't getting into the business of making hardware; they're just trying, in their passive, Googly way, to regain control of a project that's spiraling toward chaos.

Update: Some input from someone who works in a major carrier's device development group:

There is TONS of incentive for carriers to update their
software. Take a look at Verizon hosting the only Android 2.0 device.
Are you going to tell me that Sprint and T-Mobile wouldn't love to
have their Android devices on 2.0 yesterday?

The truth is, there's very little incentive for the Handset maker to
provide an update. All those phones are already sold and in the
carrier's inventory. Any investment in updating those models will
bring them no additional cash flow. However focusing on their next
model will.

He's partly right: carriers have a motivation to keep their software up to date, in that they are the ones who have to deal most with customers. Handset manufacturers are the one's with the least motivation, since their sale has already been made. But in branding a handset with their name, effectively selling it as their product, and assuming responsibility for seeding updates, a carrier becomes responsible for making sure their customers have up-to-date software, and exerting pressure on handset manufacturers if they don't hold up their end. —Thanks, David!

And I don't mean to say that I don't understand what the Nexus One is, or what Google's trying to do. Nor am I saying that Google plan for the Nexus One—to offer a different type of cellphone buying experience than US customers are accustomed to, and to provide a model for future Android handset—is a particularly bad one. I'm saying that I don't get the hype: Google's Nexus one is an interesting experiment, not some kind of heroically disruptive Google coup, as many people, changes everything">including us, have implied. Consider the facts:

It's an HTC Android handset. This means that on a material level, it's barely more of a Google phone than the G1—which Google passively oversaw—or the Motorola Droid—which Google actively helped design. And hey, people remember: Google still isn't a hardware company. Not even close.

The hardware isn't revolutionary. It's the third (at least) Snapdragon-powered Android phone we've heard about. It's got a 5-megapixel camera. It's got dual microphones, to help with noise reduction. It's fairly thin. These are nice features for a new phone, but they're more or less exactly what we'd expect HTC to be working on next.

It's pretty much running Android 2.0. People are talking a lot about how Google had full control over the Nexus One user experience, and how it's going to be unlike any other Android we've ever seen before. But we've seen other builds of 2.1, albiet covered in the Sense UI, leaked for the HTC Hero (spoiler: not that impressive), and combined with the early glimpses we've caught from spy shots, they give the feeling that 2.1 isn't much of a step up from 2.0, which is what the Droid ships with, which, mind you, Motorola doesn't seem to have touched almost at all. As far as I can tell, the Nexus One will have some pretty new UI flourishes, and maybe a few UX changes. Again: this is typical, paced progress, not a drastic overhaul.

The new business model isn't really new. Even the most breathless commentary on the Nexus One admits that what it means is more important than what's on its spec sheet. And yeah, it'll be the first phone marketed as the Google phone, and Google's sales strategy—to offer the device without contract first, and probably unlocked, with a (hardware limited—possibly just to T-Mobile, if you care about 3G) choice of carriers—is foreign to the US market. But it's far from unheard of—you can buy unlocked phones at Best Buy, for God's sake. Oh, and Nokia's been handling their US smartphone releases like this for years. It hasn't gone well.

Google doesn't have superpowers. Using their unmatched internet superpowers, Google can do more to convince the general public that an expensive, unsubsidized phone is a good idea than Nokia, whose marketing efforts have been wimpy and ineffective. But they can't do anything crazy, like give this thing away. They can sell it for cheap by relying on their own advertising network—or hell, their homepage—for advertising, as well as the massive press coverage they're already getting, and selling it at little to no profit. To be able to match carriers' prices, though, will be a stretch: A Verizon or a T-Mobile can absorb the cost of a phone in month-to-month fees and overage charges. What does Google have? Theoretical future Adsense revenue?

Even if what we see now is exactly what we're going to get, the Nexus One is something worth paying attention to—it will be a way for Google to demonstrate what their vision for Android is without carrier interference. They'll control the software experience on the phone; they'll control how it's updated; they'll control what software is and isn't allowed on it. And they could use it to convey an vision for Google Voice, in which Google supplies your number, your nonstandard calling rates and your texting allowance, while carriers simply supply a neutral, dumb and ultimately out-of-sight cellular connection. But even if that is what they're doing—we don't know!—the Nexus One is a first step. It'll be an early product to guide the progress of an industry, not the product that'll define it.

Whenever we talk about Google, we need to factor in a little windage. They're buzzy, they're huge, and they've thrown plenty of other industries curveballs before. This phone sits at the hype nexus (for lack of a better word) of Google Voice, Android, Google's online services and HTC. For now, to say that the Nexus One has somehow changed everything is to buy into these company's hype too earnestly, to ascribe to Google mystical qualities, and to take for granted a series of future actions that Google hasn't even hinted at fulfilling yet. Apple isn't the only company tech watchers recklessly project onto.

Or, to compress it to 140 characters or less: "The Google phone matters as much as Google makes it matter." For now, people, calm down.

Disney, who is probably the most IP-protective company in the entertainment industry, realizes that I'm a lot more likely to buy their Monsters, Inc. Blu-ray for a small price premium if it includes every other format I could possibly want.

So why isn't the video games industry offering me the same choice with multi-platform titles like Call of Duty? Or, put differently, why is it that buying Call of Duty on the 360 doesn't give me a portable version for the DS or my iPhone?

I know, how ignorant of me to ask such a question! Porting a Call of Duty title from the Xbox 360 to PS3 is an expensive endeavor—we're talking huge development teams costing millions of dollars. For the DS or Wii, it's likely that game is designed again from the ground up to accommodate the unique hardware and lower processor specs. If I own an Xbox and a DS, they can't just give me the DS version for cheap or free!

Or could they?

Let's use Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's numbers as an example. According to data from VGChartz, 4,890,348 discs sold of Xbox 360 version alone in the first week. Imagine, for a moment, that $5 extra would buy you Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360 alongside a bonus version for the DS. If only 10% of buyers were tempted into this upsell, that's 489,000 additional DS version sold, or an extra $2,445,170 in DS-related revenue for Activision.

And for all of you think this would just cannibalize DS sales, I respond, what sales? Only 12,000 units of the DS's Modern Warfare 2 sold over the same period of time. (More figures on Kotaku.) Plus, by using digital downloads tied to existing PSN, Xbox Live and Nintendo accounts, software companies could greatly limit sharing/resale of these extra versions.

Assuming my rough numbers aren't too nuts (actually, I believe they are quite conservative), why isn't the games industry following the movie industry's lead? Why can't buying a game on one platform allow you to play it on many?

The real limitation isn't development costs, it's that the video games industry is fundamentally designed to ignore competing formats and charge developers licensing fees that would cripple such a model. Nintendo doesn't want to acknowledge that a gamer might want to play Call of Duty on the Wii for motion controls, on Xbox 360 for networking and on an iPhone for the road. Nintendo wants Nintendo gamers to live in a digital bubble. And the same can be said for Sony and Microsoft.

We're not supposed to want to play games on more systems than one. But you know what? We already do. According to the NPD, 42% of Xbox 360 and PS3 owners also own a Wii. And if those same numbers were run in relation to mobile devices, including cellphones, the number would skyrocket to nearly 100%.

Nintendo, with the Wii and DS, and Sony, with the PS3 and PSP, are both advantageously positioned to make such a model work. But ideally, software companies and retailers could take such promotions cross-platform, cross-company.

I don't live in a Utopian dream state, believing that the next generation of games will play on one uniform platform. And in fact, I think diversity and competition within the market is key to innovation. So let's leverage these differences to a more consumer-centric model that will probably, ultimately, make all involved companies more money while offering shoppers more choice.

It's Cool But Makes No Business: Unlike the impending Apple Tablet, the Crunchpad was supposed to be low margin, subsidized by soft revenue from content providers and it still turned out to be $500. That's possibly too much for a tablet that only surfs the web when netbooks can do it for half that price. At this point in time, to make a web tablet a fair value, you'd almost have to give it away for nothing. But like so many of Google's side projects, the tablet doesn't have to have immediate or direct paths to monetization — Google simply likes to engage users first as Eric Schmidt said at the Google Navigation launch for Maps, a product equivalent of what Tom Tom charges over a hundred sollars for, which they launched for free.

Correction: It Makes No Business Sense Unless You Are Google: Oh wait! Google simply makes more money when more people go online, thanks to adsense. Whoa, what a coincidence! The only thing a web tablet would do is get people online! That's not too dissimilar to Google's free software model for Android, where Microsoft has to charge licensing fees to manufacturers because they don't have enough revenue from online services or ads to make up for the cost.

The Most Direct Way To Get People Online is the Physical Manifestation of a Browser: And if Google wants more people on the web, a low cost, ad subsidized web tablet is probably the least complicated way to do it from a hardware, software and business partner standpoint. There's no competing operating system with native apps competing for attention with Google's web services, and there's not necessarily a need for a contract or carrier as on smartphones. This web tablet is a straight shot to the web. (I know its cheaper to let other hardware makers solve this puzzle, but android is just as confusing of a model.)

Software Is the Issue, and They've Already Got It Figured Out: Chrome OS is the perfect operating system for a web tablet. It's a fast operating system that's completely browser centric. While Tablet hardware is somewhat a commodity (Exception: touchscreens of the size used in JooJoo aren't super cheap yet), the big issue is software. And Chrome OS is ripe for a web surfing tablet.

They're Already Supposed to Be Fishing Around In Hardware: The rumors and a source of ours says Google is already working on a hardware phone, based on an advanced version of Android. However little sense that makes, that's what we've heard. And once you're in the hardware game, what's one more piece of gear with off the shelf ion/atom netbook hardware and a capacitive touchscreen?

Let me be clear: There are no sources or tips that inspired this piece. This article is in no way anything other than a pipedream to have the richest web and user focused tech company today build a cool device that probably wouldn't make them any money, and lets face it, it wouldn't need to make them any money because, again, they're so rich they can basically give these things away for nothing. I mean, Google can give away over half a million of these things at $300 a pop and not even put a 10% dent into their profits from last quarter. If you stare at the numbers long enough, I almost think they should give us each one for Christmas. How about it, Google? I promise to click around on a lot of ads!

TV makers may think we want these things, and I think they're right we want content on our sets, but I don't want it from them. I'd believe that such extras might help sales in a world where ever ad says their set is the prettiest in picture. I believe that they believe that extras like this help sales. But I don't think a smart TV buyer would want these extras, or use them very often.

Several months ago, I reviewed the pinnacle of junk extra content in a Samsung LCD TV, which I didn't love but earned much critical acclaim. The 7000 and 8000 series in this line up had identical specs to the 6000, more or less, but for a few hundred dollars more, you could get WIDGET-FIED. There was a menu, hidden, that when you found it had an astounding amount of content. Insane, weirdo content. Receipes for dinner, lunch, desert annotated, step by step. Over 15 creepy children's songs, by a big yellow and short blue cartoon character. Bowling and a Galaga type game. Yahoo Widgets: An open API system that allows for weather, tweeting and flickr photos. Only 8 had been developed and so the openness was a joke. So was the performance. It was heartbreakingly slow to load, and therefore useless. Like all the other extras, they were poorly implemented, added cost to the set, and were instantly outdated. Here's the review, or just watch this ridiculous video:

I think some basic media playback in a TV is fine. I'll take that. Though so many Blu-ray players and set-top boxes are doing the same thing, it's almost certain to be redundant. And it's better to keep all that outside the TV itself, anyway. If you have to add processors and Ethernet connections to a TV to run shitty software and content, I'd rather they didn't.

Because here's the thing: People keep TVs for a long time, and building TVs is serious business. They should focus on the set itself. And they can't beat the content in my Xbox, and even if they did for a second, an Xbox is replaceable rather easily, compared to a HDTV set that costs thousands of dollars. I plan to get one TV and have it last over several generations of Xboxes.

TV makers, please stick to making the pixels more pretty. We'll get our content from who we want, the way we want to.

I realize that the key reason behind all that preinstalled junk is to make a profit. After all, there are people who'll spring for subscriptions because of anti-virus nagware or purchase a full version of an application after playing around with the trial. For most of us though, we just plain take a mocking from Mac users as we hit the uninstall button over and over again.

All PC users suffer this process unless we jump through hoops like pleading with Dell or Toshiba during the ordering process, paying Sony off, or purchasing a cheap Walmart product. But now, we've finally got official agreement that the crapware doesn't belong on our PCs and a place to purchase PCs with sparkly clean installs. This is an incredible move by Microsoft, and it must've taken quite some balls for someone to propose actually going through with it. Only trouble is that we'll still see bloatware on PCs purchased from other retailers or through direct channels from makers.

So, dear Microsoft, you're doing something wonderful in your retail stores, but it needs to go one step further. Please cajole everyone else to sell PCs without the crapware, too. Pretty please. [Electronista via Crunchgear]

I mean, Sprint will gift you an Airave femtocell if you're thinking about leaving (normally $5 a month). Though we don't yet know if AT&T is planning a similar monthly fee—or a one-off charge like Verizon's Network Extender—I'd like to see users in known dead zones get the hardware free.

Even if you don't want to pay the possible $20 a month for unlimited calls, at least you'd get actual network coverage at home. Think about it: they could make everything right with these things, and make up for the last few years of shitiness.

To be fair, AT&T says it's working to not only speed up its network, but boost reliability in iPhone heavy areas like New York and San Francisco. Carriers also face opposition from local officials and home owner associations when it comes to building new towers. And you can likely get out of your contract if you get your shiny iPhone home and find you live in an AT&T black hole.

But here's the thing: AT&T users have heard about promised upgrades for years, and many still have no joy. They're angry. A complimentary MicroCell 3G would be a great apology, and help AT&T turn around its falling public perception. What do you think?

Also see: Full AT&T MicroCell 3G Details

I say this as a guy who was baptized into the tech world with a desktop; who still obsessively follows the latest PC components from Intel, Nvidia, ATI and the like; who has built, fixed or upgraded more towers than I care to remember; and who, until a few years ago, was an avid PC gamer. As someone who would be, by most measures, a desktop-PC kinda guy, I just can't go on pretending there's a future for them.

The State of the Industry
This is more than a hunch; a grim future is borne out by the numbers. A week ago, iSuppli issued a broad report on the state of the PC industry. The leading claim was predictable: The PC industry was experiencing lower-than-expected quarterly sales—down about 8% from the same time last year. This included laptops, and made sense, because the whole economy's gone to hell, right? People aren't buying computers.

Except that's not quite what's happening. In the same period, laptop shipments—already higher than desktop shipments on the whole—grew 10% over last year. Desktops were entirely to blame, dropping by an astounding 23%. That's not decline—it's free fall.

Stephen Baker, an analyst for industry watchers NPD, shared with me a wider picture of how retail PC sales break down. The way he put it made measuring the rise and fall of sales percentages seem dumb—there really aren't any sales to lose: "In US retail, 80% of sales are notebooks now," he said. "Start throwing in stuff like iMacs and all-in-ones"—which share more hardware DNA with laptops and netbooks than traditional desktops—"and it gets even higher."

The Buyer's Dilemma
To understand why this is happening doesn't take anything more than a little empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of any number of potential consumers, be it kids, adults, techies, or luddites. In virtually any scenario, a laptop is the sensible buy.

Take my dad. Despite spending three decades in front of commercial jet instrument panels, his relationship with computers is, at best, strained. When he came to me a few months ago asking for advice about a laptop to replace his desktop, I assumed it was a just a whim, based on what he saw happening around him. It wasn't, at all. As someone who uses a computer mostly for news, email, music, etc—like a significant part of the population—he was actually being intensely rational. A laptop would do everything he needs simply and wirelessly, with a negligible price difference from a functionally equivalent desktop. If he wants a monitor, keyboard and mouse, he can just attach them. Choosing a desktop PC wouldn't just be a not-quite-as-good choice—it'd be a bad one.

The TradeoffsLet's look at mainly stock examples taken (hastily) from Dell's current product line. Their configurations could be tweaked and changed to make desktops look slightly better or slightly worse, but we chose them because they are typical budget-minded consumer choices. We are not talking about workstations, and we're not talking about all-in-ones, because if anything, they are keeping this category alive. When it comes to pure household computer buying, you can hunt for deals all you want, but laptops and desktops are more closely paired than you might expect.

That's not to say that there aren't noticeable tradeoffs. Graphics performance, although I wasn't specifically angling for that with these configurations, is generally better in a desktop. Likewise, hard drives—being that desktops use larger, cheaper 3.5-inch units—are faster and more capacious across the board. Greater amounts of RAM can be had for less in a desktop, the optical drives can be slightly faster, and the ports for those and other drives can be used for expansion.

But these tradeoffs aren't nearly as pronounced as they once were, nor are they as consequential. On account of the huge demand and sales volume, newer mobile processors have become a hotbed for innovation, now rivaling most any desktop processor, and mobile graphics engines—though still markedly inferior to dedicated desktop cards—have improved vastly in recent years, to a point where most consumers are more than satisfied.

And if you really look out for them, there are some amazing deals to be had on new notebooks. (Look at Acer's 15-inch, 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3 RAM laptop with 1GB GeForce GT130 graphics card and Blu-ray for $750, and then try to build the equivalent in a desktop at the same price.)

The important takeaway here is that the performance sacrifice you make in owning laptop is minimal, and mitigated, or even outweighed, by its practical advantages. Want a bigger screen on your notebook? Hook it up your HDTV. Want more storage? Buy a cheap, stylish bus-powered external USB drive. Want to use your desktop on the toilet? Good freakin' luck.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Fall of the Gaming PC
But to say that the average user doesn't have any reason to buy a hulking beige box isn't that controversial, and even borders on obvious. The real, emotional, diehard support for the form factor is going to be found elsewhere anyway. I mean, hey, what about gamers? Have you ever tried to play Crysis on an Inspiron? Let's jump back to the numbers.

Last year saw a huge 26% increase in game sales across platforms, powered mostly by Xbox 360, Wii and Nintendo DS sales, according to NPD. Breaking that number down, we see PC game sales down by 14%. That decrease barely even registered in the broader scheme of things, since total PC game sales amounted to just $700m of the industry's $11b take. This year is looking even worse. You know what, let's just call this one too: PC gaming? Also dead. Update: Luke at Kotaku points out that NPD's numbers only cover retail game sales, where PC gaming is hurting the most. Due mostly to MMOs—hardly the exclusive domain of desktops—the PC gaming industry take is actually higher.

As the laptop is to my old man, the console is to the gamer. Just a few years ago, buying—or just as likely, building—a high-end gaming PC granted you access to a rich, unique section of the gaming world. Dropping a pile of cash for ATI's Radeon 9800 to get that precious 128MB of VRAM was damn well worth it, since there was no other way to play your Half Life 2 and your Doom 3. PC titles were often demonstrably better than console games, and practically owned the concept of multiplayer gaming—a situation that's changed, or even reversed, since all the major consoles now live online. We even spotted a prominent PC magazine editor (and friend of Giz) copping on Twitter to buying an Xbox game because it has multiplayer features the PC version doesn't. Yes, things are different now.

NPD's Baker sees it too: "Go back two years ago and think about all the buzz that someone like Falcon or Alienware or Voodoo was generating, and how much buzz they generate now, that might be a little bit telling." He adds, "There's considerably less interest in high powered gaming machines." They're luxury items in every sense, from their limited utility to their ridiculous price to their extremely low sales.

A Form Factor on Life Support
But no matter how irrational a choice the desktop tower is for the regular consumer, sales won't hit zero anytime soon. As we've hinted, much of this can be explained by simple niche markets: Some businesses will always need powerful workstations; older folks will feel comfortable with a familiar form factor; some people will want a tower as a central file or media server; DIY types will insist on the economy and environmental benefit of desktop's upgradeability; and a core contingent of diehard PC gamers, despite their drastically thinning ranks, will keep on building their LED-riddled, liquid-cooled megatowers until the day they die.

Baker sees another factor—less organic, more cynical—that'll keep the numbers from bottoming too hard. "Desktops are a lot more profitable than notebooks for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that big shiny monitor, which has a nice margin attached to it. For the retailers, people tend to buy a lot more peripherals and accessories when they buy desktops than when they buy notebooks." Even if the volumes are ultra-low and concept is bankrupt, retailers are going to keep bloated, price-inflated desktops and desktop accessories out there on the sales floor until they've drained every last dollar out of them.

You'll see plenty of desktop towers for years to come, in megamarts if not in people's homes. You'll still hear news about the latest, greatest graphics cards, desktop processors and the like. Enthusiasts and fansites will stay as enthusiastic and fanatical as they've ever been. These, though, are lagging indicators, trailing behind a dead (or maybe more accurately, undead) computing ideal that the computer-using public has pretty much finished abandoning.

Think about it: Carriers like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T regularly charge between $8 and $10 per month for GPS apps. Gokivo is just a made-for-iPhone version of Verizon's not-so-great VZ Navigator. Why did you expect an updated and hopefully improved version of that would cost less?

TomTom, TeleNav and Navigon are all expected to be launching their own turn-by-turn navi apps for iPhone before the year is out, and it would be a shock to me if they went any less than $10-per-month.

The question is, are they worth it?

Because we're talking turn-by-turn navi apps, the numbers are easy to break down. Not only do we know what carriers charge already, but we know, for instance, that TomTom still lists its PDA software (supports Dell Axim, Sony Clie and Palm Zire, among other extinct devices) for $99.95—without free map updates. At the same time, we know that even the cheapest decent portable navigators, like the Garmin Nuvi 250, cost $128 on sale—also without free map updates.

These apps, by definition, don't come with maps loaded into the phone—they download the most recent ones from a server which the software maker pays for the right to use on an ongoing basis. So add to that the cost of licensing instantly up-to-date (Nokia-owned) Navteq or (TomTom-owned) Tele Atlas map databases, and you see why no navi can just be a $15 one-time app. As Gokivo's creators, Networks In Motion, say on their blog:

It takes a lot of work and money to deliver all these features and functionality that's included in a turn-by-turn navigation app; and unlike product with maps on the device, we are updating maps and search indexes constantly.

This is just one category, but there are many that will need higher pricing or persistent subscription fees to keep them going. This isn't about The Man—Apple or AT&T or "Macho Man" Randy Savage. It's about developers, and it's rough for them when they want to distribute flagship software over a platform that's used to distributing 99-cent iFarts. The transition must come. I hate to say it, but the iTunes App Store needs more advanced software, and if that means higher costs then, for the sake of the iPhone OS's continued growth and viability, I say we get behind it.

This isn't to say Networks In Motion unveiled the pricing strategy in the most graceful way. But what they did to was make the first move. I think everybody in the navigation category was hoping someone else would go first, and Gokivo drew the short straw.

Now come the next questions, like how many devices you can load the software onto. After all, if the download is $100, and you put it on two iPhones, isn't it more like $50 each?

By specialty content apps, we mean iPhone or iPod Touch apps that are either portals to online content or self-contained readers and music players. Writers who can't find distribution elsewhere are publishing at the App Store, and even musicians are now finding the App Store to be an avenue for their content. We don't like it.

Yes, we admire the pluck of the struggling artist, but damn if that won't end up being super confusing fast. There are currently 89 pages of book apps at the iTunes store. How about one good multiformat reader that can take all kinds of books?

Can you imagine having an icon for every book you read, and every album you want to hear? Soon, one imagines, filmmakers will release video apps with just one video—better to drop that sheeit on YouTube and have it accessible via a channel that already exists.

Besides distribution, the reason some of these people are doing it is revenue: You can sell apps at any price you want without a raised eyebrow (though cheaper is better), and in some cases, like that bootlegged South Park app we checked out—not recommended, btw—ads can be inserted for bonus cash flow.

There are, however, cases where a content app is a totally brilliant way to go, and that's where the fanbase is already built up, and the content is already overflowing. Newspaper apps from the NY Times and USA Today make sense, and the South Park app does too—there are so many episodes and clips that an app dedicated to keeping track of your favorites and grabbing them when you want them is "almost perfect," as we said.

Here are some other content apps we'd love to see:
• The Simpsons
• Futurama (You're welcome, Chen!)
• The Daily Show
• Colbert Report
• Star Wars universe
• Star Trek universe
• DC comics
• Marvel comics

Are there any portals you'd wish for? Hell, anything with more than four seasons on DVD would kinda make sense, though it helps when there's an exceptionally enthusiastic fanbase.

These specialty apps aren't going to replace iTunes, nor will they edge out a Netflix app, an Amazon VOD app and all those other streaming delivery programs that we desperately want to see which are making their way to bigger connected devices, like Blu-ray players and TVs. How much of this will Apple (and, let's face it, AT&T) allow through the front door of the App Store? Hopefully, soon, at least as far as South Park is concerned, we'll hear some answers.

It's not the plastic. I like plastic fine. And although I prefer solid molded colors, painting plastic with other colors is ok, too. It's just that the overriding reason for painting a plastic device silver is to make it look like metal. Which is stupid. This needs to stop as surely as wooden panels on station wagons needed to stop 30 years ago and why tofurky is a totally unacceptable replacement for either turkey or tofu.

Silver painted gadgets started rising in prominence in the cellphone world, and 8 years ago were thought of as a premium finish to those in design circles. "Blame Motorola or Casio," say some designers I talked to about the trend. Now the "tin man" treatment is reserved for the cheapest devices while the best get done up in real metal. I'm still confused as to why this was a good idea in the first place, and why companies, even some high-end brands, still maintain the facade. (I'm totally looking at you, Pentax, Canon, Dell and Sony.)

First off, it's insulting to buyer intelligence. Are makers trying to fool us into thinking a device is aluminum or magnesium or stainless steel when its actually a light piece of bent polymer? Maybe from 10 feet away, they'd think that we couldn't tell the difference, and they'd be right. Visually. Allan Chochinov from Core77, says:

Painting plastic objects so that they appear metallic is a fudge of course—and often convincingly so. But the lie becomes apparent soon enough; at the corners or wherever there's any kind of friction, the paint wears away to reveal the true plastic.

Industrial designers talk about the virtues of an "honesty of materials" in design practice, and when that honesty is expressed in the final product it's really great—but rare. With the almost-suffocating cost constraints and real pressure to pump things out quickly, the artifice is just too irresistible.

Yes, the methods of turning a hunk of plastic into a shiny thing is getting better, so these piece-o-craps look better than ever close up. But contextually, they're not fooling anyone with half a brain. Everyone, everyone, EVERYONE knows that when they see a huge silver TV, even from 30 feet away, it's probably not made of metal but rather coated with Pantone 877c. And that overly curvy designs are likely plastic sprayed with paint. And mainstream gadgets, like PSPs and DVD players made in China, well, those things are too chintzy to ever get the full metal treatment. They're not worth their weight in metal.

Which brings us to cost. Yes, like most commercial compromises made in the world, plastic made to look like metal for the most part comes down to saving dollars in manufacturing. Cormac Eubanks, a principal engineer from Frog design told me:

As a raw material metal (aluminum or zinc alloy) is many times more expensive than the same volume of material in plastic. In processing metal, parts need to be die cast, stamped, or (if money is no object) machined. Then one needs to finish them with brushing, tumbling and/or bead blasting. Lastly metal parts need to go through a plating or anodize process to prevent corrosion and oxidation over time. All these finishing steps add considerable additional cost. Painting plastic on the other hand can be inexpensively injection molded and painted silver in large volumes in a repeatable way.

Secondly, painting polymers to look metallic is insulting to plastic, which isn't hard and cold like metal, but has its own wonderful qualities and implications. Like translucency, as shown in Zune's cornershot multilayered finish and Samsung's red-tinted LCD TV bezels. And resiliency, flexibility, strength and lightness of weight. Or if you like, some plastics can be heavy and stiff, since there are so many ways to make it. Plastic can also insulate from heat and electricity, and when it's really cold, plastic won't stick to your hand like a piece of metal does. It can also be easily shaped into radical forms without having to be moved through an extensive finishing and forming process. Those qualities are totally undersold when a machine's plastic casing is passed off as being made from metal.

Leaving material qualities behind, I'm sure there's an aesthetic appeal here, too. At least in the minds of tacky Vegas-brained marketers. And maybe at first, the appeal works on those too stupid to catch the drift that they are being had. But as anyone who's owned a silver painted device knows, within months, if not weeks of heavy use, the thin veneer soon gives way to the gray/white/black plastic underneath. Which would have been fine and beautiful in the first place, had it not been covered up. Worn out silver colored plastic is uglier than the late Tammy Faye Bakker's make-up job after a tearful sermon. The Wii in white looks just as nice as it would in aluminum, to me. And because the color is solid, it'll look good no matter how often it gets scratched.

Eubanks says that companies should be "true to the material. That means making plastic look like plastic, metal like metal and rubber like rubber. Honesty with materials means you are being honest with your customers.”

I can agree with that. And look forward to the day silver-painted gadgets are no longer made.

I prefer the old one by far, because it is shaped with both impressive lines and curves, like any nice modern automobile, but more importantly, it feels both smooth and slightly "edgy" in the hand. The modern Nano leaves with the impression that its shape is a result of a very simple manufacturing system, not really designed to fit a person's hand first and foremost. I picture it being made by taking a long piece of aluminum, extruding/cutting out the middle to form an oval, and cutting off the proper lengths. The corners end up being very sharp, and putting it in my pocket, I can feel my pants wearing down, and while holding it in my hands, its definitely poking into my palms in a not nice way. And you never get over the jarring feeling when holding it in your hands. The curved screen is neat, but it picks up glare. And not just regular glare but glare like that in a funhouse mirror, which is slightly more distracting than regular glare. I'm sure its cheaper to make the case, but I prefer the case of the old one better. I even like holding the fat Nano in portrait better to watch videos. So why not buy an older one? Because the new one has a far superior menu system and you can shuffle to the next song by shaking it. Design goes beyond just the form factor. [iPod Nano Review]

I guess we are coming to the end of the early iPhone era. But Coupland, the author of Microserfs and Generation X, moves onto another, more disturbing theory: that gadgets make morons of us all.

I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we're all assholes. We're assholes at the supermarket's meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we're assholes driving in traffic; and we're assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy.