The Hub is a landline slayer launched in a wireless world, where the landline is almost dead. It's a fertile garden behind a red-painted wall—red 'cause it's Verizon, har har—found when most people are trying to break down those walls. It's a Verizon Wireless VoIP phone coming about at a time when AT&T is killing their VoIP service entirely. It's the phone we imagined before the iPhone, tethered to our home broadband connection for instant-pizza-ordering awesomeness. In other words, it's a lot of interesting things, appearing in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

That's not to say it's bad. It's just unfortunate. The Hub makes sense in a very specific context: If you're a lock, stock and barrel Verizon customer, from wireless to TV to internet to, obviously, landline phone service. That's where the "Hub" name comes in—it brings a bunch of different Verizon services together in one spot: You can monitor cellphone locations using Verizon's Chaperone, send maps and directions from the Hub to phones running VZ Navigator, and manage a central calendar that your entire family's phones sync to. Eventually, you'll be able to do more, like manage your Verizon FiOS TV DVR. While a minor point, in a sense it's a very sore point with the Hub, since you can already do that from many Verizon cellphones this very second. Why do I need a Hub again?

The garden walls reach their greatest heights when you try to text or picture message to a non-Verizon phone—you can't. The calendar isn't open, using a standard like CalDAV for easy export—it's squarely in Verizonland. A surprising amount of managing the Hub actually takes place on Verizon's website, like uploading contacts (via CSV files) and photos. Thankfully, the Hub's pages are better designed than the rest of Verizon's website—there's legit eye candy in the photo gallery, for instance. And nearly anything you can do on the Hub itself, you can do from the website remotely, like manage voicemail or check your call history. But it's odd you can't do something very simple like upload photos via the Hub's USB port.

It doesn't really matter if there are walls around the garden if you're never tempted to leave. Unfortunately, the Hub isn't enough of an attraction. Pretty much anything you can do on it—buy movie tickets, send text messages, check traffic or watch videos, you can do faster or better on your computer or cellphone. The virtually useless selection of VCAST videos make the average YouTube video feel like HD in comparison, and the "traffic report" isn't a map with live traffic info, but a canned audio briefing from Traffic.com that you have to sit through an ad to hear.

The Linux OS itself isn't particularly a joy. God knows, Verizon's committed some horrible user interface atrocities over the last few years, but at least the Hub's is alright—usable, not mind-blowing. I wish it moved faster. The keyboard is annoying to type on, but it'll get better in the next software update, which adjusts the spacing and adds pop-up letters. A persistent set of buttons on the left gives you constant, instant access to the two main menus: The phone and the uh, menu, where you get to your apps. In the top right corner is the home button, which takes you to the desktop, where your widgets, like for weather, time, voicemail, etc. hang out. Applications tend to have a two-pane layout that's framed by buttons on three sides, which doesn't sound like a problem, but it becomes one since the touchscreen is not so responsive around the edges. I've accidentally called two people at 3 in the morning while trying to press the menu button. Not cool.

Actually, that's one of my more concrete frustrations with this phone: The hardware feels cheap and shitty. The handset, which costs $80 a pop, is a plastic piece of garbage with a shoddy build quality and terrible screen. (It doesn't help that you can't do much from the handset either, like send text messages.) The touchscreen isn't as responsive as it should be, and it distorts with even the slightest bit of pressure, adding to the whole crappy feeling. A screen designed to be touched shouldn't freak out when you touch it. The speakers really harsh, crappy and tinny too. I couldn't stand using it for loudspeaker calls.

There are a few bright points. While the directory isn't as precise as say, MenuPages, it is fairly painless to find a nearby pizza place and call them in a single stroke. The synergistic—I know, that word provokes a gag reflex—stuff works well. Directions quickly went to the Samsung Sway test phone I got with it, which promptly fired up VZ Navigator and pointed to wherever I pointed it. (Too bad VZ Navigator is slow and sucky, but that's somewhat besides the point.) And the call quality itself is pretty good—or at least I sounded "loud and clear" to the people I called.

The brightest light may end up being the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel—the promise that developers will be able to create their own apps for this thing in the future. The included ones, for the most part, just aren't that hot, and some of the newer ones in the pipeline are definitely more head-turning. But it's hard to see how this product can sustain itself long enough to engender a solid third-party developer community. More likely, it'll get slightly better, then go extinct.

It's pretty ballsy to charge $200 for a landline phone with $35/month VoIP service right now, one that does the same thing you can do on an iPhone or G1, but is tied to your desk. Which is a lot of the reason I like it. But it's just as ridiculous to ask that much for a phone that's built with subpar hardware and doesn't live up to its full potential in a world where it's already horribly outmoded. Time was up two years ago. [Verizon]

Among the many online weather and emergency alert services, job listings, and the like, the Bush years also found a few more interesting new tools. The Library of Congress began posting photos of their incredible catalog on Flickr, for example, and the FBI created widgets for locating sexual predators and most wanted criminals. New tools for college students helped them find loans and compare schools, and finally we were able to pay taxes online. Diplomatic and Intelligence agencies jumped on the Wikipedia bandwagon with Diplopedia and Intellipedia, respectively.

Sure, it's not free broadband internet for all, but let's give credit where credit's due. That Flickr page is amazing! [Nick Thompson via Wired]

The description includes "Zoomable!"and "Designed for the size of iPhone's touch screen." Apple claims that Dashboard submissions are "subject to review" and reserves the right to "omit, edit or reject submissions," so my bet is that this has passed their filters unnoticed. Moreover, the app looks quite tacky and unpolished compared with the iPhone user interface, so I am going to see their shareware fee and raise a lucky publicity stunt. You be the judge after the jump.

–Jesus Diaz

Scenario Poker [Apple Dashboard via T3]

Dashboard Widget Proposal [via AppleWeblog]

Along with that, Callwave also sends you a text message and an email telling you you've missed a call. Not quite the Visual Voicemail of the iPhone, but cool for its desktop integration. When we tried it, the audio quality was decent enough to use as a full-time voicemail solution. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Callwave via Mobile Mag via Lifehacker]

Good work, Paul!

Download Page [Pixel Kid]

Mashups for the Masses: When Mom Meets Gadget

Everywhere I look recently, I see possibilities for personalizing or customizing products and services. I m not talking about choosing a nice skin for your media player or downloading ringtones for your Razr. I'm talking about a quantum leap that's occurring as consumers morph into creators. But as our creative will to shape the world around us grows stronger with each new device we use, will the technology encourage or hinder our efforts?

We're no longer content to passively use products and systems as they were designed for us; there's now an inherent belief that we can and should have exactly what we want, when we want it, our way. We don't watch live TV anymore, we TiVo our shows and watch them at our leisure, minus the annoying commercials. We don't listen to the radio, we create our own stations on Pandora that only play music perfectly attuned to our specific tastes. We read ReadyMade magazine to learn how to MacGyver a solar tower in our backyard. And there's a lifehack for just about every activity you can think of, from using your cell phone as a check register to getting down to one remote control.

I'm all for doing it my way, but it feels like things are about to get out of hand. For example, we recently had a debate in our office over Yahoo! s newly released Open Shortcuts. The idea is fantastic (using the search box to tell your computer where to go or what to do for you), but the implementation left some of us with a bad taste in our mouths. To operate an Open Shortcut, you have to type the Yahoo exclamation point "!" before your shortcut. So to go to Yahoo! Mail, you d have to type "!mail." Doesn t that feel a bit like old-school computer language to you? Creating an Open Shortcut is even more esoteric, requiring users to find the instructions page, go to the search box and type a command, the name of the shortcut, and then copy in the URL.

Fortunately, I'm a consumer who understands search technology, toolbars, shortcuts and scripting. But how is my technophobe mom going to understand how to use an Open Shortcut, much less create one? She doesn't have the same understanding that I do of the technical reasoning behind these shortcuts. But like anybody else, she'd like to be able to walk up to her computer and just say, "Computer, open my mail!" Why should she be frozen out of these kinds of personalized, powerful features?

Open Shortcuts made me wonder: have we reached the limits of "widgetization?" Have our interfaces become so crammed with personalized features, tools and icons that we ve literally run out of space? Is our desire to have things just our way and our imaginative power for creating new tools moving so fast that the applications for building these tools can t keep up? As designers and coders continue to build personal tools like Konfabulator widgets, Google Maps mashups, and Flickr hacks (like the one for the Kodak EasyShare-one wi-fi camera), a divide grows between those who can build the technology and reap its benefits, and those who are left behind.

It's time for designers to step back and take a collective breath, to take stock of what they're doing and who they're doing it for. Gone are the days of applications and devices with finite feature sets. Designers and their employers are no longer the sole arbiters of users' needs; at this point, every user's "need" is only limited by her imagination.

Designers have to think beyond typical product usage and capture the essence of consumers innermost goals and wishes, and then empower those desires. Today's designers and technologists are no longer simply building search boxes for web browsers or wi-fi connectivity within digital cameras. They're also creating the interactions that consumers will use to build their own processes and commands inside those browsers. They re developing the technical architecture consumers will use to make their camera talk to whatever and whomever they like.

The most intriguing and successful products will have to accommodate varying levels of technical skill in other words, my mom as well as myself. Google took a step in the right direction when it released the code for its maps. Letting loose what had always been proprietary information for the likes of Microsoft, Google encouraged scores of free coders to create new tools such as real estate listing maps (Housing Maps) and maps with real time locations of commuter trains (dartmaps). Ning.com has gone one step further by offering a web application that helps you build social networking internet applications, something previously reserved for those with deep coding knowledge. Now I want to see the product that lets my mom create a social networking site for her walking group, complete with her own Google maps walking routes and Flickr photo links of the latest gathering.

As companies look to develop more robust products that include democratized personalization tools, they'll have to serve consumers desire for creative control over their technology. Designers will have to rethink the limits currently imposed on those desires by size and scale, iconization, and "widgetry." The next great gadget producers must understand that they're creating products for a world in which the next mashup is always just around the corner.

Denise Gershbein is a senior design analyst with frog design.

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