Tom Yager

The first app made for Lion to hit the App Store is a real eye-opener: Mac OS X Lion Server, costing $49, a tiny fraction of Snow Leopard Server's $499 price tag. With that, Mac OS X Server as we knew it is no more. To sweeten the deal, Apple is throwing in Xsan, the SAN software Apple used to sell for $999. With Mac OS X Lion Server, a Mac Pro with a Fibre Channel card becomes a scary-fast, bulletproof distributed storage server for Mac networks.

Pundits have predicted the death of the desktop for years. I wish it could be so. No technology is more deserving of retirement than the sheet-metal black box and tangle of cables that is the standard PC.

Notebooks and tablets have undeniable appeal: There's only one item to buy, no pieces to plug together. They're silent and power-efficient. They emerge from the box ready to work. But portable devices have limitations that can make them inconvenient if portability isn't your primary consideration. Their displays are too small. The need to run on batteries, and the cramped confines of a compact chassis put a tight limit on memory, storage, and performance. When you reposition the display, the keyboard and pointing device (real or virtual) move, too. Making computers portable also makes them expensive. As long as portables have these strikes against them, the desktop will live on.

It's one thing to track the future of a mobile platform by projecting trends in unit sales, wireless operator contract wins, and so on. Based on traditional analysis, it looks like the iPhone and Android will be running neck and neck in 2012 in terms of global market share. I've always believed that the more reliable predictions are rooted in tracking investment not by consumers or investors, but developers. Software development dollars being budgeted and spent now are aimed at reaping the opportunities of markets two years away.

I live in a region so thick with telecommunications companies and the businesses that serve them that I can derive a decent forecast of the mobile and wireless sectors by standing on my roof with binoculars. Everything from freeway traffic to the For Sale signs in front yards are barometers for mobile's future. But I've found that the simplest indicator of all is a conversation with a few well-informed recruiters. Recruiters that deal in mobile and embedded application and system software developers have their finger on the pulse of R&D expenditures.

Apple's taken some heat for setting the bar too high for admission to its iPhone App Store, as well as for making the App Store the exclusive source for downloadable software. The fact that Apple is judging quality and safety at all, instead of just providing an online catalog, is being swung as a marketing hook for mobile platforms that fancy themselves more open, but a cynic would wonder whether they're really tearing down the empire that they simply didn't think to build first.

The App Store is transforming the way software is conceived, developed, sold, and supported, and this high-margin, low-effort, iTunes-inspired model that favors selling lots of cheap apps over a few costly ones will spread. But even when the day comes that the App Store is no longer unique in concept or penetration, the standards to which Apple holds its App Store contenders will set it, and the iPhone platform, apart. Apple signs off on everything the App Store sells for security and compatibility. The App Store isn't just 50,000 apps; it's 50,000 apps that work on your phone and don't ship your contacts to a .ru site. That continuous, voluminous vetting is heavier lifting than any of Apple's competitors is willing to commit to. That's why there's no genuine App Store rival yet.

You're lucky that you missed the review I had written of Palm's Pre after working with it for six weeks. I couldn't see the attraction. The $299 that Sprint charges to let you out of the store with the Pre isn't justified by the phone's out-of-the-box features, and the anemic App Catalog presents few opportunities to elevate the device to the capabilities of others in its lofty price range. The Pre isn't a bad phone, but it's simply not worth the $200 to $250 premium over the BlackBerry Curve, the T-Mobile G1, and the iPhone 3G.

I grabbed my Pre on June 6, but it wasn't until July 16 that I figured out where Pre, and Palm's WebOS platform, actually fit in the market for professional mobile devices. On July 16, Palm released the SDK for WebOS, a set of tools and documentation that Palm had, inexplicably, withheld. Why, I wondered, did Palm want to keep the SDK out of power users' and developers hands when the WebOS platform was all about the ease with which new applications could be created in JavaScript?

When I reviewed Apple's prior, "unibody" 15-inch MacBook Pro, I gave it high marks. For the money, there is no better-built notebook. With its rigid one-piece machined aluminum frame, glossy LED-backlit display, flat backlit keyboard, huge multitouch trackpad, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and 8X slot-loading, dual-layer DVD burner, the unibody MacBook Pro defined the state of the art in design, construction, and manufacturing. Now Apple is building on that peerless platform with higher performance, an upgraded display, longer battery life, and a lower price.

The latest 15-inch MacBook Pro, introduced in June 2009, costs less than the model that preceded it, and yet it puts competing commercial high-end notebooks back at the starting line. The new machine's specifications are more 64-bit-friendly in anticipation of the Snow Leopard OS, due in September, and they reflect updated offerings from Apple's component suppliers. Core 2 Duo CPU speed now tops out at 3.06GHz. Using 4GB DIMMs, the new MacBook accommodates 8GB of RAM. Recent introductions of larger and faster notebook hard drives are reflected in 15-inch MacBook Pro's configure-to-order options, which include 7,200-rpm drives that close the notebook/desktop performance gap.

Apple's iPhone is renowned for being the sole mobile platform that runs only one application at a time. If you want to write an instant messaging client for iPhone, knock yourself out, but recipients will be reachable only while your IM software has control of the screen. As soon as an iPhone user presses Home, the running application quits, voluntarily or otherwise. It's not allowed to leave so much as a thread behind to listen for connections from the network, do periodic GPS logging, or run anything else in the background. Its competitors, such as the Palm Pre and RIM BlackBerry, have no such limitation.

Apple's not likely to give ground on background apps, but it does realize the competitive and functional gap that its one-app-at-a-time policy creates. So the iPhone 3.0 OS offers the APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) to provide a workaround. Is it a limited workaround or enough of a bridge to overcome the multitasking advantage of its competitors?

A lot of telcos and cable companies talk about their triple play -- Internet, telephone, and entertainment -- but there are very few that can nail the combination for consumers, let alone professionals. The bandwidth required for perfectly executing all of the elements of triple play is enormous. The Internet service has to be competitive with DSL and cable in speed and reliability. The VoIP phone must have the sound quality and reliability of a land line, but with online features like voicemail via e-mail and Web-based management. And the entertainment has to rival the channel selection of satellite services, including a fast-growing range of HD channels.

I once sampled the cable triple play, the only option at the time, and discovered that piling IP services on an infrastructure with too little headroom made all three services unacceptable. It might have been OK for a home user who finds the frequent need to reset the cable box merely annoying. But in professional use, dropping a call or losing Internet access costs money. I quickly learned that the last place you want to call when you don't have dial tone is cable company tech support.

RIM has developed a knack for pulling customers into new BlackBerry devices. That's no mean feat. BlackBerry is the most mature, most imitated, and most-targeted brand in the mobile industry. RIM keeps new handsets rolling out, and it keeps racking up new exclusives with wireless operators by finding gaps in its own product line and filling them better than its competitors can. By teaming up with T-Mobile, RIM's latest product helps to fill your budget gaps by providing flat-rate unlimited IP telephony from your home, office, airport, or any locale that hosts a T-Mobile Hotspot.

BlackBerry Curve 8900, an EDGE/Wi-Fi/UMA handset currently exclusive to T-Mobile in the U.S., is a pocket-sized take on RIM's traditional QWERTY recipe. Its firmware, and therefore its GUI and functionality, is a near match for BlackBerry Bold, RIM's full-sized QWERTY handset, and Curve 8900's chassis is styled after the strikingly black-clad Bold, except for a generous strip of chrome-colored plastic around its perimeter. This easily scratched trim is an unfortunate design choice for a device that's meant to mix it up with your car keys all day long. But I found it to be a fair trade given Curve 8900's fast CPU, expandable flash memory, very sharp 360x480 display (not wide aspect), respectable 3.2 megapixel camera, and best of all, seamless Wi-Fi calling.

After working with Time Capsule for several months, I've concluded that every Wi-Fi access point should have a built-in hard drive. One compact, passive cooled, AC-powered device not only houses an 802.11n access point with traditional capabilities, but it also has wireless bridge mode for one-click range expansion of an existing wireless network, easy administration from Windows and OS X, and 500 GB or 1 TB of internal storage published as a standard Windows and/or Mac shared volume. For individual users, Time Capsule can be used as a cable-free external hard drive. In commercial settings, all kinds of creative infrastructure options can be crafted by stringing Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme units together through your wired or wireless LAN.

In a business, branch office, point of sale, or SOHO setting, it is Time Capsule's combination of shared storage, network printing and extended WLAN that make the device a must-buy. I set up Time Capsule to extend a WLAN served by my existing AirPort Extreme (802.11n) base station. I plugged Time Capsule in and set it up with credentials for AirPort Extreme. When Time Capsule rebooted, the extended WLAN and internal storage were both on-line. I enjoy letting non-Apple-savvy visitors try to figure out what the white box with no cables (except for AC) is.

The BlackBerry Bold, RIM's new executive QWERTY handset, enters the scene at a time when the utility of the fixed keyboard is under debate. This review overlapped with my longer-term evaluation of touchscreen and touch/keyboard devices, including the BlackBerry Storm, T-Mobile G1, AT&T Fuze (HTC Touch Pro), HTC Touch Diamond, and of course the iPhone 3G. I've had to ponder the question myself: Is the Bold worth its $299 price tag, much less worth a look at all?

I started out unimpressed, but after AT&T pushed out some substantial firmware fixes to the device, I resolved that the Bold has a real place in RIM's lineup and the enterprise mobile market. The Bold respects the enterprise formula, keeping sacred everything that makes the QWERTY BlackBerry a unique business and IT tool but enhancing it in well-selected places. The enhancements start with a platform modernization that exploits a fast CPU and accelerated graphics, enabling an updated GUI framework that makes high-res, widescreen QWERTY look like a million bucks.

It's fair to say that laptops have gotten boring. For years now, they've offered pretty much the same features and pretty much the same designs. Sure, there have been a few innovations such as Apple's multitouch trackpad, but mostly laptops have had just incremental improvements such as adding more media slots over time and replacing USB 1.0 with USB 2 or FireWire 400 with FireWire 800.

So InfoWorld decided to challenge PC makers to do better. We subjected our project to the limitations that any manufacturer faces when it starts whiteboarding a new notebook. Components must either be available now in sufficient quantity to support volume production or have component manufacturers contractual commitment to availability at a supportable price within the next 12 months.