Talking gadgets with Robert Scoble

“We started out talking about the Kindle, turned to gadgets, the iPhone, the MIT Tech Review slam of me and Clay Shirky, and on to opportunities for the Palm Pre to zig where Apple zags.”

Hey, Skobal.
Hey, how you doing, man? How you doing? Hey, Garrett.
I just saw you post something about the Kindle.
Yeah.
And I thought, you know, you have a Kindle, I have a Kindle, and everybody’s dissing the new Kindle.
I don’t get it.
I think it’s a good idea.
What do you think? That the bigger Kindle is a good idea? Yeah, the bigger Kindle is a good idea.
I sort of want one, but it still doesn’t have a color screen, right? It still has the EENC screen.
I don’t know.
Does it? Yeah.
I’m pretty sure it still has the black and white EENC screen , which makes it last forever on battery life and stuff like that.
I have a use case that I want something like that for hanging on the wall so I can put Twitter and Friend Feed and Sky Grid and all this new RealPen stuff up on the pool.
Oh, that would be cool.
That would be pretty cool.
I don’t know why, guys.
I mean, Ohm sort of pissed on it at M&G Seagler, at TechCr unch did, and I think these guys are jumping to the totally wrong conclusion.
I mean, it might be an example of the media, but I don’t know.
I use the Kindle and it’s a borderline thing for me.
I think the screen is too small , honestly.
It’s pretty tough to put together.
I think it’s a good idea.
I think it’s a good idea.
I think it’s a good idea.
I think it’s a good idea.
I think it’s a good idea.
I think it’s a good idea.
I think the screen is too small , honestly.
It’s pretty tough to envision having a satisfactory newspaper style experience on it.
I do, though.
You see, that’s the thing.
I absolutely do have a satisfactory news type experience on it.
It’s in many ways better than reading the paper or paper.
I could see that it might just totally tip the scale in the other direction.
All of a sudden, it might become really, really usable.
Yeah.
I certainly want to try the larger one.
I love the smaller one.
I bought it for – but I bought it for a use case where I can’t use computers.
I live right near the beach and I want to go down to the beach and read a book or something like that.
I can’t do that on my existing notebook.
I can just hear people saying, “Why don’t you take a paper back down there?” Well, some of the books I get now are – Well, that’s not what guys like you and me do, Scoble. We bring computers.
Yeah, I should, too.
I also buy it for when I’m on planes.
Right now, I’m going into a travel heavy schedule and I’m on planes a lot and I want to read a book or a magazine or something like that .
I could take a book along, but I like having a little variety.
I have five books on the Kindle right now that I haven’t even read.
And that way I can have those five books and go through them.
But think about this, though.
The Kindle can receive news instantaneously.
Your newspaper can’t do that.
So when you carry a tittle, you ’re getting a piece of electronic that communicates.
It’s a world of difference.
To people saying, “You should just carry a book with you. " I’ve been having people say shit like that to me since the mid-70s.
In fact, I was doing the things that everybody takes John Paul for me.
My former boss at Harvard wrote a book about the digital natives.
These kids are growing up doing the things that people used to give me shit about doing.
So you know what? That’s bullshit. We got to do these things.
I think they don’t understand that this expands the ability to use books in different places.
I’m not going to carry four heavy books on the corner. I’m just not going to do that.
One nice thing about the small Kindle versus the bigger Kindle is it fits in the back pocket of my backpack, and I don’t even notice it’s there.
So I just keep it there. If I had a bigger one, now it becomes more like a laptop- style thing.
I have to actually figure out how to fit it into a backpack or whatever.
So that will be interesting to see if it actually takes away anybody from using a laptop or a net book or something like that.
I don’t think it can. I think that’s the cool thing about Kindles, like this new Walkman I’ve got which is absolutely tiny. It costs nothing to carry it.
So devices like that, and net books are almost like that. They ’re almost at the point.
Certainly an iPhone costs nothing to carry. So it doesn’t add anything to your load.
I think the Kindle gets in the backpack. The only concern I have about it is, I’ll forget it’s there. In a way, I’m glad that Amazon is doing this.
I’m glad that the newspapers are doing it. What I would say to the tech analysts that write about this stuff is that there’s a process to the development of technology.
So even if this one doesn’t hit the sweet spot, we’re still going to learn a lot from it.
So it’s worth doing it only for that. I don’t like seeing people go negative.
So I’ve sort of got the idea for reading your posts on Friend Feed that you were thinking about this stuff the same way I was.
I didn’t want to write a blog post saying these guys are all too negative because they don’t listen to me . As we know, you’ve become sent ient though.
I heard that you have actually become sentient. So I figured out it’s like the goal.
Why now would this need sent ience is all that? You know, I don’t know about that. One thing I like about the Kindle is it’s so thin and it’s really an attractive package that it could really go on your wall.
It’s just too expensive for normal people to do that.
But I’m building a TV studio and I’m thinking of ways to make it look cooler and have news or something going on the background.
If you go to the Washington Press Club, have you ever been there by the way? No.
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. That’s where a lot of the Washington Press events happen.
And they have a bunch of old newspapers on the wall around it.
They’re famous front pages of newspapers.
Man walks on the moon, Kennedy would shot VE days.
They have a whole bunch. So I want to have the front pages of the newspapers on my wall behind my little TV station.
And the Kindle is getting to the size now where you probably would even be able to tell that it’s bad.
I don’t know. I like the bigger size for doing more of a traditional newspaper layout.
Who is doing Cosmex who has a custom newspaper layout system on screen that could be really useful for the new Kindle.
It’s funny because in journalism school, I was in journalism school in ‘92 and ' 93, we used to have discussions about how the newspaper was going to someday be replaced by an electronic thing that you hold in your hands.
That challenge is still out there.
I don’t doubt that in the future, if we still have a civilization after all this is done, that when I’m writing on the subway, I won’t be reading something with paper.
I already have the replacement now. You don’t get the stairs.
On an airplane, I had a Kindle flying from San Francisco to New York.
And nobody stared at it. It was a pretty common place. People were seeing the Kindles.
It’s not like an oddity or anything. It’s sort of starting to become, but it hasn’t taken off. It’s not like Twitter or anything.
For a device though, they’ve sold a few hundred thousand of them, I suppose.
I’m seeing them all over the place too. I see a lot more Kindles lately.
A lot of geeks have them because it’s a cool status thing to have in your office.
So what are you traveling to? Well, this week I’m going to Y ossi Vardy’s Internet in Washington, D. C.
So that will be this weekend.
We’ll be a lot of fun.
Oh, that’s cool. What does that look like if he doesn’t have it before? Was that his camp actually in Internet Israel? And now he’s doing one with Jeff Pulver in D. C.
And I thought I’d go see that and see some friends and you see this weekend.
And then the U. S. Navy is bringing me on an aircraft carrier later this month.
That’s going to be interesting.
Oh, that’s right. That’s this month. I opted out of that one.
I just didn’t see myself sleeping on an aircraft carrier .
Well, I’ll let you know how long it can take.
It’s totally a noble thing for sure.
It’s definitely. I’ll enjoy it curiously through your experience.
You bring Patrick with you? No, they only let me bring me and nobody else.
How do you even tell them that Dave cancels so Patrick can go in my place? Patrick doesn’t like flying.
Oh, that’s right.
That probably wouldn’t be really his idea of a fun vacation.
No.
Hey, this is great. I call these bite-sized podcasts.
I like to do them from time to time.
Absolutely.
I love my Kindle. They fixed all the things I complained about the first one.
So I’m happy.
Great idea. Now it’s a great device and I want to get my hands on the large one.
I complained about the first one so they never invited me to the press event for the second.
I just got trashed in the MIT Technology Review by a guy – what? I heard. I was just about – You heard already? You heard already about this? Oh, yes. It’s on French feed.
It’s on French feed. I won’t read it because I get the little vanity.
I have the Google alert.
Whenever my name shows up, that one sends me right away.
I saw that he calls me grumpy and I go, “Oh, jeez, here we go again. " It’s like because there’s nothing I can say. If I say, " Well, give him all. " I mean, I’ve never even met this guy. I’ve offered to talk to him on the phone a dozen times.
He doesn’t ever want to do it.
He has no basis for having a personal opinion like that.
It’s all the more frustrating for me because this is the MIT Technology Review and he’s never reviewed my technology. This is their idea of a joke.
This is MIT. It’s an engineering school. You’d think that first they would take a look and see what I had done from an engineering standpoint.
Just a few things, you know? Well, I mean, I don’t know. I’m moving to be judged on that basis.
Maybe some other publications could like Psychology Today, for example, but I doubt if they would offer an opinion without actually talking to me.
Anyway, I would like somebody to say I’m gregarious.
I’m just a hell of a nice guy, you know, whatever.
The most hated guy on the Internet.
Yeah, well, that one was top two.
Because when you go over the top like that, it gets a little bit of a laugh a little bit, which is a good thing, you know ? It all doesn’t matter.
So were they writing about you just personally? No.
They were writing about newspapers.
Yeah, and the death of newspapers, and they needed a scapegoat, and they chose me and Clay Shur key, which is actually a pretty good company to be in, you know? You have to be blamed.
You might as well be blamed along with somebody like Clay Shurkey, you know? All right, so.
I didn’t realize how exact powerful, but apparently so.
That you can kill the whole newspaper industry just by yourself? Actually, I think I dealt them a I put it out for them on a silver platter.
I said, “Let’s gradually, you know, go into this thing one step at a time. " You know, that’s what RSS, leveled the playing field, said everybody plays in the same space.
And so if you’re better, it’s going to be obvious, you know? And there are lots of ways they ’re better.
Yeah, so whatever.
Yep.
No, they have a journalist.
Yeah, and like the LA Times had a wonderful piece of, you know, they figured out why there’s under-60 character limit on, you know, SMS messages.
I mean, that’s the kind of reporting that, you know I mean, that went right to the top on my chart.
I have this 40 ranking on top 40 tweets, right? That has been at the top since like an hour after it came out.
I mean, everybody goes apeshit.
It’s been so heavily passed around.
So, you know, that’s not that’s great.
You know, find out what people like and then do that, you know ? And it’s not really all that complicated, I don’t think, you know? Yeah.
By the way, today I had a fun conversation with the guys who are doing 3D memory chips.
They’re stacking eight little memory chips on top of each other, so they can get us eight times more flash memory on our little iPhones.
Pretty cool stuff.
It’s amazing how small this stuff is getting and how they ’re interconnecting the chips that are stacked on top of each other.
They’re building little cities now.
They’re going up, you know, because if you’re going to keep more alive, you can’t put more transistors on in an inch anymore, so now you’ve got to go Oh, you go vertical.
I see.
That’s interesting.
That’s sort of obvious, isn’t it? It’s very obvious, and it’s so small and so thin, you know, that the new kindles that will come out in a year or whatever will have a lot more memory.
Yeah.
Talk to Dave Jacobs, you know, Dave Jacobs, until he’s finally Dave’s birthday.
And he’s like gadget freak, and he follows all this stuff.
And he says that in the next six months, before the end of the year, you’re going to see a lot of new products coming out in handheld devices.
Yep.
You know, so I mean, just in cell phones, we have the new iPhone coming that we haven’t seen yet.
They squirted me at the AT&T store.
You know I bought a new iPhone on Saturday.
Yeah.
Here’s the other one.
They squirted me.
There’s no new hardware coming.
I said no, no, no, no, no hardware.
But you know different.
You think there’s new hardware, huh? Yeah.
Yeah.
(laughs) Maybe we should just decode that.
(laughs) I mean, if you’re a salesman at retail level, why would you even talk about No.
You know there’s new hardware coming because I just bought old hardware.
(laughs) Exactly.
It’s a perfect cell signal.
And of course, what did I do? I bought it, you know.
Yeah.
Just because Steve Jobs or whoever’s running Apple now hasn’t gotten on stage and said there’s new hardware coming.
(laughs) I mean, we know there’s new hardware coming.
It’s just when is new hardware coming? Yeah.
That’s the question.
(laughs) Well, this is rapidly turning into a 40-minute podcast, you see.
All right.
Yeah.
Well, so tell me about the hardware then.
What’s new Apple? What’s new iPhone hardware can be like? I don’t know.
Oh, you don’t know.
You just don’t know.
I know what’s been rumored or whatever.
You know, that it’ll have video and it’ll be thinner.
A better camera, right? Much better camera.
Better camera.
You know, and I wonder if this is all wishful thinking.
But over at Quick, QIK. com, they have a Nokia N95 doing streaming almost HD-style video , widescreen video at much better resolution than anything I’ve seen before on a cell phone.
Wow.
And so, I keep wondering, when is the market going to realize that non-iPhone’s have some really good advantages to doing video and pictures and stuff like that? I’ll tell you, I had to spend 20 minutes in the store at the AT&T store waiting because they were so busy.
Everybody in that store was buying iPhones.
And I had seriously thought about not buying an iPhone.
So, I had 15, 20 minutes to look around the store and look at all the different choices that were there.
I never wavered for an instant.
Never got her to me that I should get anything but an iPhone.
Yeah, the first one that got me to waver is the Palm Pre.
And we still haven’t really been able to test it out.
We’ve just seen, you know, 20 minutes of demo, which doesn’t always – I talked to somebody who’s seen one today.
Who was it? Oh, Roger McNamee has one.
Yeah.
If you want to see a Palm Pre, just go find Roger McNamee.
He’ll show it to you.
Okay.
Yeah.
And does he like it? I heard about it secondhand.
So, you know, of course – Ah, okay.
I thought you already talked to him.
No, no, no, no.
I heard about it from somebody who had talked to him, who had actually seen it.
That was Dave.
My friend Dave Jenkins.
Yeah.
He saw – ran into Roger somewhere, I don’t know where.
And he showed it to him.
Dave used to do the fetish calm at Wired.
So, he really gets this stuff.
Yeah.
Well, that’s the other way around.
He had the fetish calm because he really gets this stuff.
Yeah.
I was at the launch event in January, but you know, it’s one thing to see it for 20 minutes on a little demo kind of thing.
Yeah.
It’s a whole other thing to use it for lunch.
That’s like this Wolfram search engine thing, you know.
It’s like every demo that they give, you know, anybody sit down and use it.
So, you know, you can’t really tell if it does anything.
The question for Palm, Apple is so far ahead with developers who are building cool little apps that are really – Oh, but they could – couldn’t they zig to Apple’s ad? Couldn’t they say like, okay, well, we’ll let 9-inch nails get on here.
And, you know, basically anything goes here.
Absolutely.
There’s a lot of techniques they could use to get developers to build it for their platform as well.
And a lot of – the guy who rents software on Palm Pre was a guy who worked at Apple.
So, they know the iPhone very intimately.
That’s a big question, is can they get enough developers to build enough apps in the first, you know, three months so that it feels cool like the iPhone? Because, you know, if the iPhone has 50,000 apps and the Palm Pre only has 50, it just won’t feel – you know , nobody else – people will stop talking about it.
And I – But I think there’s a bit of backlash coming about the apps.
You know, it’s like Rick Hamlet wrote a thing the other day where he’s talking about, do they have an app to get rid of all the apps that I never use? That’s true.
Yeah.
I have that app.
It’s called a new iPhone.
It doesn’t work, unfortunately, because everything’s all backed up.
This iPhone is a total clone of the other one.
Yeah.
Actually, he said it the right way.
Do they have – is there an app for that? You know how they say in the ads, oh, will you want to do this? Well, there’s an app for that.
They are so good at programming your mind.
I mean, those guys get that stuff.
Yeah.
That’s why I never wavered for a second.
You know, I think I love it on my iPhone, and it really is basically one thing.
It’s a camera that communicates .
To me, that’s everything.
You know, and the fact that I have it wired up to link that into my Twitter flow, and of course, obviously, to everything else, it sort of latches into Twitter.
To me, that is the cool thing about my iPhone is that it’s just connected up, you know, visually connected to everything that I’m connected to.
It’s not incredibly good at any of it, you know.
The camera isn’t that great.
The user interface for uploading a picture isn’t that great.
The keyboard sucks.
It’s always correcting me by making me wrong, you know.
But it’s better than it works.
I love it.
Well, it’s interesting that when I fly now, I watch what people are using, and most people have black berries.
Yeah.
It’s because everybody uses it.
You don’t fly in Virgin America then.
Well, there’s still quite a few iPhones, right? Yeah.
You know, in terms of the numbers, I would say 30% iPhones and the rest are black berries.
It seems like most business people have to be on email.
And then, you know, so they need to do… Well, that’s why I carry the netbook.
Yeah.
See, for me, the netbook is the – you know, that’s my black berry.
That’s the equivalent of that for me.
I could carry a blackberry, but I just carry the netbook, and that does everything.
Plus, it runs my software.
That’s the most important thing to me, is because I want to customize my workflow always.
I need to be able to do that.
And I’m always tinkering with the way I work, right? Yeah.
And, you know, to me, the iPhone would be a billion times more useful if they would just let me put the opml on there and let me run my apps, you know? My apps, not their – not their bots, you know? Because I would never develop for the iPhone.
To me, that is too much like a lot.
It is a lot of trucks.
I mean, basically, they control the oxygen supply, and if they don’t like what you’re doing, nothing happens.
And I’m sure they wouldn’t like what I’m doing.
Yeah, as my nails found out, right? You know, what about porn? You know? I mean, that’s legal.
Yeah.
You know? I mean, think about all the opportunities there.
None of them are getting alert.
You know, maybe the Palm Creek can have that entire market, because Steve Jobs is kind of like, you know, not into it.
Yeah.
Whatever.
That’s a really good note to end on.
You know, that’s what we’ll find out if anybody actually listened to it.
Well, I’m going to Twitter that .
Our podcast ended on a porn note.
Okay.
Cool.
It will be up in less than a minute, so that’s the way this works.
What are you using to do that? Blog talk radio? You know, I’ll comment – that ’s correct.
I’m using blog talk radio.
I’ll comment underneath the post that this thing generates.
It really literally will be up in less than a minute.
Okay.
Okay.
See you later.

• See you later. - Bye.