Check out my new Pantech Breeze: Thin, smooth, sturdy and smartly designed. No goofy lights or music buttons or other tomfoolery. Did I mention this phone is marketed toward the elderly? I frankly don’t care if it’s for old timers, because it is one of the best-designed cell phones I’ve seen. It just looks and feels like a high-quality product, and AT&T offers it at a good price for a quad-band GSM phone with a decent camera. (I switched to AT&T from T-Mobile because my company offers me a corporate discount on AT&T service.) AT&T customer service was polite and efficient in setting up my account. Too soon to know if I love this phone a lot or just a little bit, but I already know it’s a hundred times better than my old Motorola lemon. I like this simple design much better than the tricked-out phones that get all the hype these days. The old folks are all right.

Just two complaints:

(more…)

These days, a mobile phone is a deeply personal item. I carry mine with me everywhere I go. It is part of my identity. True, as a superficial object it can never be a source of true happiness. But let’s face it, it’s nice to have a good phone. I’ve had four phones in my life, and the best one was a miniature Panasonic GD51 GD55 I got at some sketchy shop in the West Village that imports phones from Asia. Friends called it my Zoolander phone. Regrettably, it was stolen by some theiving punks. Now I use a Motorola PEBL, which is bad at everything it does and has an interface so bewildering it must have been designed either by idiots or rocket scientists. When I’m in a bad mood, my cell phone makes me feel worse.

My two-year contract with T-Mobile is up, so I can get a new phone at a steep discount from any service provider. The array of choices has left me bewildered. Here are my conditions:

• First, since I travel, I want a quad-band world phone. I think that rules out every provider except T-Mobile and AT&T.
• Second, no smart phone. I refuse to pay for a data plan. Sorry Apple, sorry Blackberry.
• Third, I swear to you I will never buy another Motorola product as long as I walk this Earth.
• Fourth, I like small, light phones that look sharp and are easy to use. I don’t really give a care about a camera or a music player.
• Fifth, I’m not gonna pay a lot for this muffler. That means the phone should be free or in the neighborhood of $50.

Right now I’m eyeing the Samsung Blast, but at this point in the buying process, I am highly succeptable susceptible to persuasion. Any suggestions?

I propose a game. Predict which of the following Web 2.0 sites will be out of business one year from now, on November 12, 2009:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Pandora
4. LinkedIn
5. Flickr (owned by Yahoo)
6. YouTube (owned by Google)
7. MySpace (owned by NewsCorp)
8. Hulu (owned NewsCorp/NBC Universal)

I picked these eight sites in part because they are all smart, successful, dynamic sites that most of us are pulling for. What concerns me is that they basically follow the same business plan: Let’s build something really cool, give it away for free, and figure out how to make money off it later. Difficulty: Recession. Later is sooner than we thought.

Consider how you would feel if you fired up your computer one day and found that one of these sites – say, Flickr or Facebook – had closed, and the data you shared with them was inaccessible and about to be erased. I got to thinking about this because of a story I wrote at work yesterday about a technology provider for photographers that suddenly shut down.

I sure don’t wish anyone out of a job, but realistically, I think some things are about to start crashing back down to Earth. My predictions are in the comments.

Earlier this year, motivated by a desire to post news faster from the field, I asked my company to switch me from a desktop to a laptop. A few days later an IT guy came to take away my iMac and replace it with an Apple MacBook. That’s the one with the shiny, white plastic case – an update to the indestructible iBook which I bought in 2001 and that I still use to get Internet in my kitchen and to watch DVDs on the Amtrak.

This new MacBook – I have no idea the model number or even the processor speed – just passed a big test. It survived three days of intensive use at my magazine’s annual trade show. During the show, I downloaded hundreds of photos off CD-ROMs and USB drives brought to me by several different people. I edited images in Photoshop. I typed and posted several stories. I used the computer to make two presentations that involved connecting it to unfamiliar video projectors. I connected it to a digital camcorder and edited 12 short videos, which I then uploaded to the Internet. I lugged the computer to and from the office, my apartment, and the convention center, using different Internet connections in each place.

At no point did this computer fail to do what I needed it to do. It never crashed, not once. I don’t usually sing the praises of computer hardware, but this is the first time in my career a laptop has enabled me do my job exactly the way I want to do it.

History Eraser Button: Bringing you the things everyone was blogging about several months ago — today!

1. Pandora Internet radio
2. Cooliris
3. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

This week Google Maps began providing mass transit directions for the New York City metro area. Woo hoo!

Other sites have tried to offer transit directions for the city, but not like this. Google stitched together all the various local transit services, including the ones operated by the MTA, the Port Authority and New Jersey Transit.

I decided to put it to the test with a hard problem: Getting from Newark Airport to my neighborhood. You’re dealing with two states that operate multiple rail and bus services, and there’s no obvious way to do it. But it’s an important route because anybody traveling from out of town via the airports will try to use this service.

I know from experience that the best way to get from EWR to 11215 is to ride the Airtrain monorail to the NJ Transit train, then pick up the subway at Penn Station: A to the F.

Google Maps can’t make up its mind. It offers all kinds of directions depending on the time of day, claiming it can save you a minute or two by sending you on a bus to the PATH train at Newark Penn Station. One scenario involves connecting with two New Jersey buses from the airport to Port Authority. The Google computers are programmed with the exact scheduled departure times of the buses and subways, which is a little goofy since things tend to run off schedule. There’s also information missing. Sure, you can take a C train to Jay Street Borough Hall, but if an A comes first, take the A! And if you’ve just arrived at the New Jersey airport, do you need to buy a fare card? Can you pay in cash on the bus? How much? Do you need exact change? In coins?

A computer might be able to beat a human in chess. But it still can’t beat a well-informed transit rider in navigating New York.

Sorry for the lack of activity. This blog and all of daryllang.com site was offline for most of Tuesday and this morning. My service provider blamed the outage on a hardware failure.

This got me thinking about how companies handle problems. A few months ago, United Airlines lost my suitcase. Every airline employee I spoke to, either at the airport or over the phone, seemed to be reading from a script carefully engineered to deliver no actual information. “We’re sorry and we’re looking into it.” The only source of real information was a computerized phone prompt. In the end, my bag was delivered to my hotel in a reasonable amount of time, problem solved. I still felt annoyed.

Compare this to OLM, the hosting company I have been using for this site since 2001. Whenever there’s a problem, I can reach a tech support person by phone right away. And whoever answers ALWAYS knows exactly what’s up and gives me a clear, professional answer to my question. Even when the problem is OLM’s fault, I have never felt annoyed at this company.

The lesson? Like most people, I’m much more willing to forgive the occasional mistake (like a service outage) when I hear an empathetic, expert-level human tell me exactly what caused the problem and how they’re going to fix it. It’s so simple, but it’s amazing how many companies get this wrong.

I’ve been watching the new cameras come out. The HD video revolution that we’ve been predicting is almost here.

What am I talking about? The experience of sitting in front of a computer screen, putting on headphones, and watching a crystal-clear high-def video is dazzling. It is not just an incremental upgrade, it is a whole new way of communicating. A news report, an entertainment clip, a video blog or a family movie becomes a rich, immersive experience when presented in a super-sharp motion picture. It’s also (and this is key) fun and satisfying to shoot and share videos. But until recently, the technology to create good videos was prohibitively expensive. No more. The next good camera you buy will probably be capable of shooting digital video as good as or better than the programs you watch on TV. No tapes, no DVDs, just a chip. Computer hardware is catching up fast to process and store all this video. And broadband speeds are nearly fast enough to deliver HD video in real time over the Internet.

What are the last pieces to fall into place?

First, file formats are a mess. You camera, your video editing software, and your Web browser all speak in different formats, and each time you convert from on to the other, you waste time and suffer a loss in quality. Somebody has to fix this. Also, audio is still too hard.

Second, there’s no easy way to store and share HD video online. If you have server space, you’re halfway there. But since most consumers don’t, we’re going to need an HD YouTube, or a Flickr with a serious video capability, or some new service out there in The Cloud.

Third, will our Internet have the capacity to handle all this extra traffic? Probably. All previous predictions that new demands would slow down or crash the Internet have been wrong. Of greater concern is that people are taking a jump backwards in speed, accessing the Internet through 3G cell phones or WiFi access when they travel. Wireless speeds are still too slow to deliver high-quality video. And Web sites are being designed accordingly. We may see everything split neatly into two content streams - one for broadband, one for wireless.

I think we’ll have solved all these problems in about four years. Then things will start to get amazing. Get ready. If I ran a media company, I would start building a super-awesome platform for delivering video reports, and training every journalist to shoot and edit HD video. (Hint: You’re going to want a tripod.)

(If you’re interested in the gears that power the Internet, including this blog, you’ll find this post interesting. If not, skip it.)

A few months ago I wrote that Twitter was over. Okay, I was wrong. Yesterday I decided to dust off my Twitter account and actually start using it.

That little tagline you see under the logo on this blog? It used to be something I had to input through a web browser using Wordpress. Starting yesterday, it’s now displaying the most recent post from my Twitter feed. You can click on it to go directly to my Twitter page. Bam! Twitter just went from useless to useful.

I hadn’t done this before because it would have taken many hours of work for me to figure out how to get Twitter’s quirky RSS feeds to play nice with my customized blog template. (Basically, a lot of PHP, and none of it using the helpful new CURL command, since the version of PHP on my server is too old to have it.) Happily, Yahoo Pipes came along and made this much easier. I reused the same code I use to pull the temperature from the National Weather Service JFK observation feed.

And just because everybody else is doing it, I set up my Twitter posts to feed directly into my Facebook status update.

I’ve also set up a separate Twitter account for work, which I might play around with on my upcoming work trip to France.

Of course, I backed up all my code from the pre-Twitter site. I need to be ready to swap it in quickly when Twitter inevitably goes out of business.

We just redesigned the PDNOnline.com site. Check it out here. I did an interview about the site with my friend Rachel at Photoshelter’s Shoot the Blog.