Disclaimer: The following is just my personal opinion on my personal blog, based on the experience I have with their products and strategies both as a user but also as a tech reviewer for the past few years.

As you know, today Motorola announced a split in two, while an insider’s email tells all about the terrible situation in the company that even lead to deaths/suicides. The insider cites the no-interest and no-knowledge of the execs to runs such a company as the reason for the failure.

I will have to clarify one point though, which I believe was a catalyst in Motorola’s current failure in the cellphone market. And that point is the way they treated their Linux phones. They missed a huge opportunity.

I was one of the first reviewers in US to try their EZX Qt-embedded Linux-based phones back in the day. These phones were mainly developed and manufactured in Asia, with minimum support from their US offices. MontaVista provided the (poorly supported afterwards) modified kernel. The first such phone was released in 2003 and it wasn’t half bad for the time.

Between 2004’s version of the OS, and the newest one’s released in 2007, the changes in the OS were MINIMUM. Having tried most of these EZX touchscreen models over the years, it was more that obvious that no real engineering went on behind the scenes, just some bug fixes and some small modifications here and there. It felt like “ok, we got a UI that works now, you are all fired, we only keep a few guys to maintain the thing”.

The problem was that Motorola-US didn’t care about these phones. They saw them as something that was done in Asia, for Asian markets only. They didn’t have the insight to think that “hey, we have a next-gen platform that works, why don’t we fully invest in it and go beyond Symbian v2 and v3, or UIQ, or Windows Mobile or Palm?”. Instead, they were short sighted, and they kept rehashing hardware designs running the old Moto OS, which looks like it was sprang out of the ’80s. Motorola’s basic phone UI (the one found on the non-Linux phones) was the worst I have ever encountered on mainstream phones.

What Motorola failed to realize was that the cellphone market changed their buying decisions from “hardware”, to a “software decision”. People want to run real, native, apps on their phones. End of story. After the initial boom of cellphone designs in the early ’00s, people don’t care anymore if the new RAZR is 1mm thinner than the previous model. Phone form factors and battery life have become good-enough in the last 4 years for almost all manufacturers, and so the interest and market differentiation has shifted towards software solutions instead.

Motorola would be alive and well today if they had actively maintained their EZX line, if they had innovated on it (their UI is still not as great you see), if they had open sourced everything after getting a QT license from Trolltech (no matter the cost) to allow free development of apps, release an SDK etc etc. I mean, think about it. Motorola had at least a TWO year head start in EZX development compared to Symbian v3, UIQ v3, and the iPhone. THEY could have been the big market players today after all these years maturing their touchscreen product.

Instead, they shunned their EZX phones, they completely missed the importance of an SDK (old readers of this blog will remember my rants about it), they started about 2-3 different Linux international mobile groups that have seen ZERO lines of code (this is equivalent to what we make fun here in the Silicon Valley, that is, someone wants to start writing an application and he first starts by creating the web site for it…). Then, they said something about joining the Android group, leaving all their partners of the other mobility Linux groups in peril.

Obviously, Motorola is a company that doesn’t know what it wants. That’s why they can never do anything right. I hope the company dies or bought and assimilated. They deserve nothing better. I just hope their employees find new jobs soon and get the hell out of there.

Atheist no-shit Pat Condell (who in my opinion kicks ass), talked in one of his recent videos about polygamy. I am personally against polygamy, as it’s a strip of self-dignity and a de-powering of women. It’s as bad as genital mutilation as far as I am concerned, it’s just that this is emotional mutilation. I would never, never, be able to be the No2, or the No3, or even the No1. I have to be the only one. Even if our time together is finite.

Having said that, I recognize that humans don’t necessarily mate for life. But this doesn’t give men the right to be married to 2+ women at the same time. No one can win out of such a “relationship”.

Polygamy can only be useful in the case where there would be many more women than men on the planet (like, 3x or more), in which case Darwin would have worked its magic and polygamy would make more (genetic) sense. Either that, or simply, the marriage institution would be collapsed in that case.

Update: Read the comments for more explanation on my position. But to make it clear: As long the women are educated (see: not intellectually retarded), know where they are putting themselves into when they agree to a polygamous marriage, and they are NOT forced to enter such a marriage, I am fine with it. Otherwise, I see the whole thing as a male power play that USES and makes women UNHAPPY. But as long nothing like that goes on, I am ok with it.

It is such a shame having to leave behind the two true American heroes of the ’00s because of budget cuts: Spirit and Opportunity. These rovers survived the front battle for years now, while the Generals didn’t expect them to live more than 3 months. They sent back useful reckon information to the architects of the war. And yet, they will be left behind, casualties of another war back at home, instead of their own war, a war that they were winning.

On other news, the war in Iraq costs the public $5000 per second.

Update: NASA now plays the PR game: he said, she said…

Just came back from the doctor. I have this back of the neck problem for a while now, where my neck will do crackling noises when turning left and right in the area where it attaches to the head, while sometimes I will literally hear the blood going upstream with difficulty (like trying to drink a soda with a bad straw). He suggested an MRI. Not sure if I will do so yet, but I might have to. And all that because of the way I sit in front of my PCs in the past 10 years.

After having a romantic Indian dinner out last night, and a romantic sushi lunch out today (God, I am expensive), we went for a walk in the park with my JBQ. We charged our digicams and off we went. We saw a wild rabbit there, such a beautiful animal. Here’s my JBQ using his Canon 5D to shoot his car, the Camaro Z28.

The following two pictures are from my cheap Kodak V1233, did well for an $160 camera.

On my walk yesterday I grabbed some random shots with the Kodak V1233 HD digicam. Because the camera is not really that worthwhile, I color graded the shots aggressively using four different commercial Vegas plugins: NewBlue Metallic MSP, Magic Bullet Look Suite, Pixelan CE BlurPro, Pixelan CE Posterwise, and Vegas’ own “Brightness & Contrast” and “Color Corrector”. Took 4 hours to render these 2 minutes of video. HD version here.

I went to a walk yesterday close to my home, shot some video and pictures. Here’s a pic:

Oh, goodie, goodie… Comcast now squeezes some of their HD channels so much that quality is really low. Check the screenshots.

And they still haven’t brought Sci-Fi Channel to the Bay Area. Let me get this straight. Silicon Valley is comprised mostly by geeks. Most geeks love sci-fi and they are very likely to watch “Battlestar Galactica”. “Battlestar Galactica” is on Sci-Fi Channel and its last season starts April 4th. So where’s my HD version of Sci-Fi Channel?!? I certainly want it in the Bay Area before April 4th. Not realizing the market over here, is a huge marketing weakness for Comcast in my opinion.

Elsewhere, Comcast wants to sue FCC for intervening to their P2P net neutrality mess up, while I did mention the other day that they want to spy in your own house.

While Comcast is not a monopoly yet, it surely acts like one. Microsoft was a sheep in front of them. That’s not to say that AT&T was/is better of course.

From TechConsumer: I picked up the Samsung, took it home, and within thirty minutes of setting it up, I realized that, in the words of Gob Bluth, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” […] Suffice it to say that the Samsung was back in its box within an hour, and peace was restored to the Shumway home as the Plasma reclaimed its rightful place as the clear, superior technology.”

After 17 days with our Pioneer plasma TV we are happy campers. The only, only, gripe we have is that it doesn’t feature Sharp’s “smart stretch” algorithm to stretch 4:3 to 16:9 (and they could have easily licensed that from Sharp, as Sharp owns part of Pioneer). Other than that, this is a NEAR-PERFECT TV. We love the smooth movie look, and JBQ surely enjoys the dot-by-dot mode where makes video games look pixel-perfect.

Update: We are selling our old TV.

The Nokia N810 arrived yesterday, and I will be writing a review for it at OSNews soon. It’s a nice device, but my hands are too small to comfortably write on its hardware keyboard (the device is still too wide for me). Also, I didn’t like that they changed the mini-USB to a micro-USB port. Everything else is good. Update: Review here.

Oh, and its webcam makes me look fatter than I am. Ho-ho…