Smartphones are either too smart, or not smart enough, apparently. It turns out there’s a number of interesting grievous security vulnerabilities in our cellphones lately.

The first to shiver your timbers is that Google’s Android is a lot less secure than – well, I can’t say anyone thought it was, because frankly, I don’t trust the security on any cellphone with a ten foot pole – but certainly less secure than most people could ever imagine their phone being. Research done at North Carolina State University by Michael Grace, Yajin Zhou, Zhi Wang, and Xuxian Jiang is pretty clear about “explicit capability leaks” in Android which allows Android app developers to actually bypass the key security defenses built into Android, allowing apps access to personal information such as your GPS coordinates, or to functions such as text messaging or audio recording (yes, that means tapping your texts and phone calls is included in the capabilities), regardless of your security settings, typically caused by manufacturer-supplied “enhancements” to the base Android install.

Using a diagnostic app they call “Woodpecker” that can diagnose which of your security settings are actually compromised, they found these vendor-created vulns in Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung brands. Other brands are certainly possible to be vulnerable as well, but were beyond the scope of their study.

Now, as if that weren’t enough, in highly related news and yet a completely different security hole, security researcher Trevor Eckhart has released some shocking evidence of just such a vendor-installed piece of software that completely and totally compromises the security of your smartphone. (Normally I would embed the video for you, but as requested in the video, I’m instead pointing you to the page itself.) This nasty bit of software, which I quite agree with his estimation that it counts as a rootkit, is called Carrier IQ.

Carrier IQ logs (nearly) every key press and button press that you make, meaning all your passwords are belong to … whoever is collecting that data. Carrier IQ also snoops on your text messages, snooping on them before the phone even manages to display them to you. It even bypasses the encryption meant to be in SSL / HTTPS.

Amongst other nasty things.

And Carrier IQ is not just an Android menace installed by the likes of HTC (on which Eckhart tested). In theory Carrier IQ software can be put onto any smartphone. There’s a version for them all. So is your smartphone affected? Here’s a quick breakdown of the scuttlebutt across various blogs:

Well if it’s Android, obviously there’s that possibility, since Eckhart used an Android phone and its debug tools to find Carrier IQ in the first place. So you’re probably infected.

BlackBerry? This one is a little confusing. It’s been alleged that Carrier IQ is on BlackBerries, and yet Research in Motion is adamant that it does not pre-install Carrier IQ, nor does it authorize its carriers to do so. Of course there’s nothing actually stopping its carriers from installing Carrier IQ anyway. So this would suggest that while RiM may be against using it, that doesn’t mean that your BB is in any way safe from it.

iPhone? Yep. It’s a definite possibility to be installed on your iPhone. Carrier IQ has been on the iPhone since iOS 3, and is still there. Though supposedly now with iOS5 you can disable Carrier IQ by turning off “Diagnostics and Usage” in your settings. (Settings->General->About->Diagnostics and Usage->Don’t Send.) And supposedly it’s a lightweight version of a violation, only reporting your phone number, your carrier, your country, your location, and your active phone calls. Oh … that’s not so bad then? Eh?  Now, Apple is claiming that iOS 5 does not use Carrier IQ.  However, evidence shows that it does, just that it can be turned off.  So believe what you will.  Just because it’s turned off doesn’t mean that it’s removed.

Symbian is a confusing one. There are a lot of reports saying it is so. And yet Nokia claims that Carrier IQ doesn’t even have any Symbian-based products, so it simply can’t be true. Carrier IQ doesn’t list OS compatibility on their website anywhere that I can find, so I really can’t verify this one way or the other.

webOS … This one has even less information on it. It’s claimed, a lot. But often in generalized sweeping statements. I haven’t seen anyone offer definitive proof positive. Nor refute it. Given that it’s kind of a dead OS anyway, sold from Palm off to HP who has now abandoned it, it’s not much of an issue. But if you have proof one way or the other, I’m sure everyone would love to know with certainty.

Windows Phone 7? Strangely enough, so far it seems as if this is the only smartphone OS to be absolutely safe from Carrier IQ. How weird is that?

The key thing to remember with Carrier IQ is that this is not software designed to be pre-installed with the phone’s operating system. It is third-party software. Maybe it is installed by the manufacturer. Maybe it is installed by the carrier.  (As the name suggests.) There are a number of points where Carrier IQ can be installed on your phone. So just because one company refutes that they use Carrier IQ doesn’t mean that your phone hasn’t had it installed by another hand involved.

HP TouchSmart tm2t

I know, as reviews go this review of the HP TouchSmart tm2t is pretty far behind the times. (I don’t even think Hewlett-Packard actually sells the TouchSmart tm2t anymore.) But I’ve been using one of these little buggers at work now for 6 months (actually, two of them by this point), and I’ve definitely formed some opinions.

First off, the concept: The HP TouchSmart is a laptop, notebook, whatever you want to call it. Except it has one very important twist, the monitor can be rotated to switch it into a tablet form factor. Sort of. As obviously the little multitasking gizmo is going to be thicker than an actual tablet-by-design because it puts casing fully around the display and around the laptop case, and because it has a keyboard and touchpad-mouse. These things take up space and add weight that a real tablet doesn’t have to bother with. And let me just say that in practice, it matters.

Not only is the HP TouchSmart tm2t thicker than a tablet because of its extra bits, but there’s a weird hump for the battery on the far edge of the case that extends the bottom out by quite a bit. This makes it rather awkward to hold, and to balance on anything that isn’t a very flat hard surface. So while it sits quite well on a desk or a table, it is definitely not a pleasure to hold, and it tends to topple over on your lap. Especially if you want to actually touch the touchscreen, which rather is half the point of the HP TouchSmart tm2t. Hence the name and all.

And here’s where my usage of it comes in. At work I’m developing some touchscreen-based software. So a laptop to bring to meetings, that can be converted into a tablet form factor for doing testing on, is a very handy concept. That’s why the company ordered the first one, for me to prototype the software with.

Let me just say that the second one the company ordered was against my recommendation.

Here’s why:

It’s a twitchy flaky little son of a laptop.

While the touchscreen does indeed perform multitouch, and in its own right do so fairly well, that’s only when the touchscreen actually works. Which is most of the time … but not all of the time. No, every so often the touchscreen goes into La La Land and ignores you completely for a handful of seconds. During which time you could beat on it and it’d do absolutely nothing. Frankly, I don’t know if this is a hardware issue or some kind of sleep state built into the drivers or what, but whatever the culprit is, it’s annoying.

That aside, how is the touchscreen itself? Meh. It’s okay. No more, no less. Certainly I’ve used worse. But frankly, I’ve also used much much better. The accuracy is only so-so, as is the responsiveness. It’s enough to generally work, but if you’ve ever had the pleasure of a well-designed touchscreen you’ll find using it quite … frustrating.

Now, the touchscreen also has a pen input, and the HP TouchSmart tm2t does come with a stylus. Actually, here’s one of the really annoying things about the HP TouchSmart tm2t – the lanyard holding the stylus. This thin but stiff string just sticks out of the side. It catches on everything. It gets in the way all the time. It’s a real pain in the asterisk and obviously an afterthought at best. You’ll be very tempted to just remove it. (Which I’ve done.) But the stylus pen bay does not hold that pen in very solidly. In fact, even though it has a click-lock-eject type mechanism to keep the stylus docked when you don’t need it, and to make it easy to grab when you do, the stylus in fact is exposed on the bottom and can easily catch on things. And presumably by design, while it kind-of locks in place, it’s not a very firm hold and will let you yank it right out. Meaning that should you remove the lanyard from your HP TouchSmart tm2t, you’re probably going to lose that stylus at some point.

Which, frankly, is no loss.

Okay, so yes, the HP TouchSmart tm2t does become much more responsive and accurate when you use a stylus instead of a finger. In fact it’s practically psychic in that you can hold the stylus a good distance from the touchscreen. You really don’t need to “touch” the screen with the stylus at all. And the right-click feature of the stylus is a lot faster than holding your finger in place for a few seconds while Windows decides that you’re right-clicking instead of left-clicking. So you’d think the stylus would be all sunshine and lollipops compared to actual touching with a finger.

Except the stylus is utter crap. It’s cheap. It feels flimsy. And honestly, who wants to whip out a pen every time they try to use the touchscreen? Maybe on a little phone or PDA with a tiny screen size and ham-hands, but not on this 12.1 inch screen. HP really flubbed on this one. With such a nice artistic case with an etched design on the HP TouchSmart tm2t, you’d think that HP had paid attention to detail. But once you pull out the stylus you’ll be convinced that in fact they cut some serious corners.

And while we’re on bad designs of the touchscreen, let’s talk about the rotate-to-tablet feature itself. This is essentially the lynchpin of the hardware design, that with a twist you can convert the HP TouchSmart tm2t from a notebook into a tablet. And ignoring the not-very-solid feel of this mechanic itself (because even though it doesn’t feel very secure, it has yet to actually break, so maybe it is engineer more solidly than it gives the impression of), the software lets you down here. Because when you rotate your screen 180 degrees, you’d expect that it automatically detects this and rotates it in Windows so that you’re not suddenly using an upside-down screen. It fails badly here. Maybe half of the time (at best) it actually does detect this and do it for you. The rest of the time, it does detect it, goes into thinking-about-rotate-mode, but then fails to rotate the screen. And if you ever update the drivers, this failure rate goes into 100% failure, where it never rotates the screen for you. So make sure to put your graphics driver controls in a handy place, because you’re going to have to rotate the screen manually a lot.

Of course using the touchscreen isn’t the HP TouchSmart tm2t’s only source of flaky performance. The touchpad (that little mouse replacement device) is just as bad. It quite often just completely ignores your attempts to left-click by tapping the pad component itself. So if you don’t want to drive yourself crazy, you’ll have to go back in time to when you actually had to use the left and right buttons. Which means stretching your thumb down while you navigate with your finger. Which might be fine for some folks, but honestly induced cramps in my less-than-stretchy hand. And let’s face it, is a huge step backwards in notebook usability.

So basically, if you have an HP TouchSmart tm2t, in spite of it having a touchpad and being designed around a rotatable touch screen, if you use it regularly you might as well get yourself a freaking mouse for all of the flubs in HP’s hardware. It’s that bad. And it completely defeats the purpose of the device, which is to be finger-friendly. What is the point of a TouchSmart that you don’t want to touch?

Of course it has other nuisances as well. The HP-installed software meant to enhance your computing experience I found to be rather annoying, gimmicky, and quickly went to remove. And I do mean all of it. From their TouchSmart software, to their support assistant nagware (Is HP not aware that Windows 7 already nags you enough about these things?), there wasn’t a thing that HP added that I found actually helped me in any way. Maybe some computing novices or young artistic types might find some of it useful or entertaining, but as a professional user, I found it all cumbersome and anti-productive. What’s even worse, even after trying to disable it, I found some of it would still revive itself at inconvenient times. Which necessitated complete removal.

Which was a Bad Thing.

For example, the webcam seemed to only be usable through the TouchSmart interface. No standard Windows drivers? Say what? Yeah. HP’s software development is just that bad.

Which should come as no surprise really, as what company could possibly buy WebOS from Palm and then completely fail to make it marketable in the phone/tablet market by keeping it so out of date / out of touch with reality?

HP + software development = Bad Things.

And honestly, I’ve yet to own and/or use an HP laptop of any kind from any era that has ever won me over. They seem to always be cutting corners somewhere, or just flat out failing to impress. At least with Dell you have a 50/50 shot of it being a good device. But HP is a 0% win in my experience. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck, but I doubt it. One such laptop years back had the hard drive fail so many times that I was getting to a first-name basis with the folks they hired in India to do support. And amazingly, once I swapped that HD out for one of my own purchasing, miraculously the crashes and failures stopped. HP has always cut corners, and likely will always cut corners, in my opinion. I don’t trust their hardware as far as I can throw it and almost never recommend it in any professional setting unless I’m really up against a wall.

And frankly, in this, the HP TouchSmart tm2t is very much a Hewlett-Packard product. It fails in everything it was meant to be good at. Because of its flaky touchpad and poor ergonomics It fails as a notebook. Because of its flaky touch screen and poor ergonomics it fails as a tablet. It feels cheap. The stylus is shoddy and a pleasure to loose once you remove the annoying lanyard tethering it in place. The software components let you down. The drivers/firmware are lacking. The speakers produce weak sound of poor quality. The cooling fans spin up to annoying sound levels at minimal provocation. And basically, the HP TouchSmart tm2t is a product to avoid when at all possible.

And if you think maybe I just got a faulty product, let me remind you again that I’ve been using two of them now, the second definitely of a later production than the first, and in their faults they are really quite consistent. So these failures are not accidental things in manufacturing, but by design and across the product line.

HP could have done better.

A blind chipmunk could have done better.

The only really positive things to say about the HP TouchSmart tm2t are that the keyboard felt nice, and that the cover design was artistic.

In that the HP TouchSmart tm2t at least generally worked, I give it a score of 2 flaky touch devices out of five. If you can find any other hybrid notebook/tablet PC to meet your needs, by all means go with that instead.

Well that was interesting! Just a breath after HP announced the end of webOS-based devices such as the HP TouchPad, Hewlett-Packard offered the world a chance at the slops by reducing the price of the OuchPad to one quarter of its price. Yes, that’s right, the $399 16GB HP TouchPad tablet was dropped to a mere $99, and holy cow did it sell!

In spite of the fact that it was well known this was an abandoned product web stock of the TouchPad still managed to vanish at a record-breaking rate! And retailers like Best Buy, Staples, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc. started getting in on the fun too, offering the same deal (or close to it) as HP. And near as anyone could tell, by Monday morning the Weekend OuchPad Fire Sale was all sold out.

(I’d be fascinated to know just how many units actually moved!)

Well, at least everywhere that was paying attention and lowering their OuchPad prices. Even amidst the very fire sale, often times web-pricing would list the $99 price tag, while in store the same device was still listed at full price. And as a result, anyone who didn’t pay attention was left with all of their OuchPad stock still unsold. Which you can kind of understand as this was a rather spontaneous and unannounced event over the course of a single weekend.

So to reiterate, the tablet that couldn’t even manage to move 10% of its stock, that has been officially abandoned by HP, is now completely sold out everywhere in just two days after a major price drop. (Or at least everywhere that joined in on the sale pricing.)

Which reminds me of an old ribald joke we all know, which ends, “Madam, we’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

And while the punchline in the OuchPad joke may be inverted, it’s still an apt punchline all the same.

When an Apple iOS tablet (AKA the iPad) is priced so ridiculously high, people will gladly pay that price for their JoBsIaN FoNdLeSlAb. Even if it still can’t do internet properly because Apple refuses to support Flash. But when a tablet carries the stigma of having been manufactured by Someone Other Than Apple (SOTA) that tablet just doesn’t interest consumers other than the most fringe of geeks and technophiles.

…Until you drop the price significantly.

So I guess that means the world really is interested in purchasing non-Apple tablets after all, and that we’ve established just what non-Apple tablets are. All that’s left to do then for them to succeed in the Apple-dominated tablet market is to haggle over their price.

Features, it would seem, don’t even matter. An operating system that’s sluggish and slow? Who cares? Lack of support? Who cares? Flash or no Flash? Who cares? Camera quality? Who cares? Apps? Who cares? An App Store that will still be there in a couple of months? Who cares? Storage capacity? Who cares? Battery life? Who cares? In the end there’s just one true determining factor: The Almighty Dollar. Win that war and you can cut corners on everything else, apparently, if HP’s TouchPad is any indication.

Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad was meant to revolutionize the tablet market with its stunning new webOS, at least according to HP. Well, it’s certainly something…

But according to reports, what the TouchPad is, is a pile of unsellable crap.

Besides the fact that people are starting to call it the OuchPad instead of the TouchPad (Ha ha! So clever to remove the first letter! Someone must have worked for weeks on that one.) the scuttlebutt is that supposedly Best Buy’s staff are literally tripping over the unsold stock and are begging HP to take some of their unsold TouchPad inventory back. Allegedly only 25,000 of Best Buy’s inventory of 270,000 HP TouchPads have sold, and worse, that 25,000 might even be awfully “charitable”, as it may not be accounting for customer-returned units. So at 9.26% that’s a single-digit percentage of units moved then. OuchPad indeed!

Reports of other retailers being less than impressed with the sales of HP TouchPads abound as well, though none with such numbers to back up those claims.

Of course this could have to do with so many reviews of the HP Touchpad pointing out that performance on the tablet is laggy, slow, underwhelming, etc. when compared to either an Apple iOS or a Google Android OSed tablet.

Worse, because the OuchPad has hardware that is basically comparable to other tablets, it’s easy to make the clear judgment that HP’s problem is not the hardware itself, but that not-so-revolutionary webOS hogging the tablet down.

Oops.

Maybe not such a smart buy after all then.  Or more likely, just not enough effort to keep it up-to-date.  Not like Google and Apple have put into theirs.

But while it might be fun to poke a stick at HP’s dead horse, one has to wonder how much of this is really HP’s failing, and how much of it is simply the inability to move any tablet that isn’t a JoBsIaN FoNdLeSlAb. While Google Android is certainly catching on in the phone market and displacing Apple as the largest growing faction, it seems to be a much harder sell to consumers of tablets, where the iPad is still king of the roost. Which might seem a little odd, until you break down what, exactly, a tablet is.  (Or at least what these tablets are.)

Because at the end of the day, all most of these tablets really are, are just oversized phones … without the phone. They’re effectively just glorified internet browsers with minimal gaming capacity, games which, one could argue, could actually be run entirely on the internet.  If you can even get to the internet on them, as a good number of them don’t even come with 3G modems, so you’re stuck completely on Wi-Fi.

Of course some people try to pretend that tablets are also business devices able to run apps, but let’s face reality here, these tablets seriously lack processing power and have pretty poor usability compared to a desktop PC with a keyboard and a mouse. Their “apps” are hardly stunning or revolutionary by any means.  Most of them are just games or wrappers to a specific web site because the tablet can’t even browse the internet well.  (Heck, Apple’s iPads still don’t even support something as basic to the internet as Flash, and probably never will!) And the only reason that people might even bother trying to use a tablet for business is because their laptop is simply too heavy and/or expensive by comparison, which is a pretty lame excuse because that just indicates poor shopping skills.

The reality is, most people don’t really know how to justify their tablets other than purely for entertainment, which is a hard pill to admit to.  To put tablets in the category of the MP3 player, or worse, the Nintendo Gameboy, is just a jagged little pill. Many people only bought them because they’re the Next Big Thing and because Apple is so leet, and because all of their friends are doing it.  Though they may not be able to admit this to themselves. After all, when you break it down, if you have a modern smartphone, what do you even need a tablet for? A second device to run the same apps, just on a bigger screen? Yippee? If it at least offered more with its larger size… But alas, it doesn’t. And because the phone bits have been lopped, it actually offers less.

At the end of the day, technically speaking, an iPad is really just a really big Gameboy, or an iPod Touch. We know Apple is great at selling mindless entertainment devices like iPods. (But when it comes to computers, Apple isn’t exactly shocking the world, especially now that their hardware is just a PC and their OS is just Unix with a pretty face.) So it’s no surprise that competing tablets (AKA oversized media players / web browsers) just aren’t selling as well.

So then is HP’s failure to sell their TouchPad really a webOS failing? Or an it’s-not-an-iPad failing? Or is HP’s OuchPad so unimpressive simply because HP tried to make it all about being a marvel of portable computing seriousness instead of just a darn good toy?

Well, either way, it’s still an OuchPad that just don’t dance.

And HP agrees.  They’ve just announced that because they suck at selling webOS-based devices like the OuchPad that they’re just getting out of that market entirely.  It was an Epic Fail on their part and cost them lots and lots of money.

The ironic part is, Google is looking to take a royal beating in patent litigation over Android, and they’re pissing on their partners and developers by not protecting them, and Google just bought Motorola Mobility, making them an actual hardware player now and not just a software offering.  So Android’s tremendous growth in the mobile phone market may be taking a massive nose-dive in the future.  (And their tablet growth would … if Apple weren’t still stomping them into the ground in that sector.)  Nokia has already announced that Symbian is dead to them.  (Long live their new partner, Microsoft and Windows Phone 7!)  And speaking of Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 … that flatlined out of the gate and has only pissed off customers with each (attempt at an) update.  Meego is going nowhere and reported to be already dead.  Moblin never even was as far as I can tell.  And Maemo, their twisted offspring, will likely never even see the light of day because no one seems to want to actually make it happen.  Google’s Chrome is frankly just a failboat waiting to sink as it’s based on all the wrong ideas.  So it’s basically Epic Fails all around, and the only clear winner is … Apple and iOS.  Gee, if only someone could have taken an OS already based on mobility, like something from Palm, and have kept it modern so that it could compete…

(Hint, that’s exactly what HP just failed to do.)

Of course the same could actually be said of Nokia and Symbian as well, so let’s not pass up that egg-on-face opportunity either.

So unless someone out there actually bothers to try, and I mean like Apple and Google try, there’s really going to be no one else to dance with.  It’s a market with lots of opportunity and no players.  And if Google stumbles like well it should, that’ll just leave … Apple and their overpriced products.  It’s hard to imagine a future where the King of Disinnovation is the only player, but that’s what the future may shape up to be if something doesn’t change for the better soon.  HP could have turned webOS into that answer, but they dropped the ball, and so now they’re washing their hands of the whole mess as if that dirt weren’t of their own making.

It seems that in today’s “mobile computing” world, no one really knows how to do anything right.

But then considering that 4G isn’t even technically speaking actually 4G yet, is this really a surprise?

It almost makes one pine for the days when phones were just phones, “mobile computing” was a laptop, and everything worked.  It seems the more everyone tries to blur the lines, the more they just get it all horribly wrong.  But at least when Apple gets it horribly wrong, they can still sell you on it, because they’re Apple, and that’s how they roll.  A lesson that HP failed to learn.

Microsoft has a long history of abandoning projects after it fails to accomplish anything with them.  Well … accomplish  anything other than muddy the market at any rate.  In that much, I suppose, even some of Microsoft’s abandoned stepchildren have actually proved successful … to Microsoft.  In their failing.  But to anyone else they might rather be seen as a flop.

My first such experience with this was (and here’s some Way-Back Machine for you) Microsoft Fortran.  Yes, sold along-side Microsoft C++, it was the wave of the future.  Except for that little division-by-zero floating-point bug that they just could never work out.  So they sold it to Digital.  Who fixed it.  And who brought it into the Visual era as Visual Fortran to match Microsoft’s Visual C++.  Of course Digital got eaten by Compaq, who themselves then got consumed by Hewlett Packard.  So now you’ll find that it’s HP Visual Fortran.  Except that HP abandoned it, and is now helping folks migrate to Intel’s own Visual Fortran.  Boy it’s a fascinating industry sometimes!

But that long ramble has a point: things get abandoned.  And Microsoft is usually somewhere at the front of the line when it comes to that.  So this then is no surprise whatsoever, but Microsoft is letting go of it’s Iron scripting line. Yes, that’s right.  The Microsoftian flavors of IronPython and IronRuby are being released back into the community, where they’ll finish dying.  Because, remember folks, these aren’t normal versions of Python or Ruby; these are Microsoft-flavored .NET wannabe mutations of long-standing and highly useful scripting languages that have long existed without Microsoft’s influence.  Python is actually one of my favorite programming languages.  And while it theoretically might be nice to have a .NET version, I’m sure the Python community didn’t really choose Python for use on .NET and compatibility with Microsoft.  So I’m sure without .NET, Python will continue along fine with Qt, wxWidgets, Tk (of Tcl/Tk), etc. for a GUI.  (And Win32 libraries for when needs must.)  There are always options other than Microsoft, and not just Mono.  Options that Python and Ruby were using and doing quite well with before Microsoft Ironed them out.  Options that will continue to work just fine for the real deal.

Really, it’s only the rare development team lured into Microsoft’s web with Iron dreams that will suffer from Microsoft’s abandonment.  The true Python and Ruby language users will do just fine.  The real Python and Ruby languages are completely unaffected.  Except perhaps in that they’re soon to no longer being watered down with Microsoft-flavored versions.

Likely, in no time at all, if you mention IronPython or IronRuby, people will look at you with the same blank stare as if you’d just mentioned J++.