We finally received our Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) Pro 2 that we ordered for our iPad. The idea was to relegate our Apple Wireless Keyboard to only those trips where we need extreme portability and still require a keyboard. The rest of the time, we’d use the HHKB because of its superior tactile feel. As the HHKB Pro 2 is wired, we spent a little time trying to determine the difference in power draw between it and the Apple Wireless Keyboard, to see just why reports suggest the HHKB Pro 2 doesn’t work with the iPad, and how our iPad’s battery life would change if we did get the HHKB Pro 2to work. It turns out, finding a good answer is difficult, because Apple doesn’t seem to make the power consumption specifications of its accessories easy to find, if it makes them available to the public at all.

There’s power draw at both ends.

When we’re talking Bluetooth, we’re talking power draw on both the device end (because of the Bluetooth antenna), as well as on the accessory end. The former is why most Bluetooth accessories have batteries. The power draw here is more measurable, and we can estimate it fairly.

For example, one third-party wireless keyboard manufacturer advertised their keyboard as drawing 6 mA of power, which serves as a reasonable estimate for what the Apple Wireless Keyboard draws.

Something to keep in mind is that the iPhone 4S and new iPad are using the latest Bluetooth revision (4.0), which, among other things, is designed for lower power consumption for accessories. Depending on the source, reports suggest Bluetooth 4.0 cuts power consumption by 30-50% compared to earlier Bluetooth revisions. A lot of this is dependant on how frequently a given accessory communicates with its host, as the low power consumption of Bluetooth 4.0 seems linked to an accessory’s sleep mode, wherein it leeches only tens of nA.

During peak transmission/reception, however, an accessory even under Bluetooth 4.0 is using a lot more power, at tens of mA. Of course, this all assumes the accessory is Bluetooth 4.0-compliant, which few yet are. Certainly, our Apple Wireless Keyboard is not, so we’ll continue to assume it uses roughly 6 mA of power when in use.

Back to the antenna itself, despite the fact most “This is what you can do to conserve iPhone/iPad battery power” guides claim you should turn Bluetooth off to maximize your iDevice’s power, the reality is the difference between keeping it on and turning it off is very small. This may be due to the Bluetooth antenna being part of a larger RF board which shares resources among different transmission protocols, but because Bluetooth is already very power efficient on the device end, the additional draw here is small. Several folks online have graphed power use between smart phones with Bluetooth on vs. Bluetooth off, and the difference really is really negligible. There’s no reason to assume the iPhone would operate much differently in this regard.

Even if there were a notable difference, it would only matter to you if don’t use Bluetooth with other accessories and only with a wireless keyboard; if you need to keep Bluetooth on regardless of what kind of keyboard you use, the power consumption here doesn’t matter, unless there’s a substantial change in consumption the more accessories are connected, or the more the keyboard is used.¹

In our case, we primarily use Bluetooth for our keyboard, and occassionally use it for our Jawbone Jambox. So technically, when we’re not jamming out to music, perhaps our current setup is burning more power than 6 mA after all, but even if we rounded up to 10 mA, it ultimately doesn’t matter when we consider the HHKB Pro 2.

Bad news for the HHKB.

Per the HHKB Pro 2 specs (which were conveniently a lot easier to find), the keyboard draws a max of 100 mA, and 30 mA during normal operation. The max draw is a lot higher because it assumes you’re using the built-in USB hub and have other devices connected to it. With no devices attached, the keyboard’s draw is 30 mA, which is about five times more power than what the Apple Wireless Keyboard draws on the keyboard side.

With iOS 4.2, Apple reduced the power consumption allowance through the camera connection kit (CCK) from 100 mA to 20 mA. This explains why the HHKB Pro 2 won’t power off the CCK anymore without auxiliary power, and why other USB keyboards get adequate power through the CCK to function. We can roughly estimate that a USB keyboard uses roughly three times the mA a Bluetooth keyboard uses.²

Our solution is to use auxiliary power, but of course this means we need to have an outlet handy, which typically limits us to buildings. We explored the idea of disabling the HHKB’s onboard USB hub, thereby disabling the additional power draw, but it seems this requires more serious hardware tinkering. As the HHKB is not a cheap keyboard, we decided not to risk damaging anything, so instead explored other routes.

Typically, a USB keyboard offers no need to worry about extra batteries, which is always a potential concern when traveling with a Bluetooth keyboard. For us, the determination as to whether we use the HHKB Pro 2 nearly exclusively with the iPad comes down to whether or not we can reduce the power consumption by at least 10 mA. Otherwise, we’ll still have to keep the Apple Wireless Keyboard around for when we don’t have an outlet handy.

Using a powered-hub.

When we first received the HHKB Pro 2, we of course had to verify that it wouldn’t work with the iPad as-is. That was quick, and while expected, still disappointing.

We had ordered several USB widgets to experiment with, but as we hadn’t received them yet when the HHKB arrived, we were limited to playing around with what we did have on hand: a USB hub.

The USB hub we pulled from our cable box is a small four-port powered hub made by IOGEAR. We bought it several years ago for use with, we believe, an Apple Powerbook or Macbook, and it’s collected dust ever since. It’s a 2.0 USB “microhub” with a USB cable, approximately 2″ in length, attached.

Our initial test was with the USB hub unpowered, power cable unattached. We plugged the HHKB into the hub, the hub into the CCK, and the CCK into the iPad. Unlike our attempt without the hub, we actually received feedback from the iPad this time, with the iPad complaining that there wasn’t enough power to use the attached accessory. We don’t know why we didn’t get a similar error when we didn’t use the hub, but at least we got some feedback. Unfortunately, the keyboard still didn’t work.

That was easily fixed when we plugged the power cord into the wall and hub, however. The HHKB sprung to life, and defaulted to the Japanese keyboard. We removed that setting on the iPad (leaving just English and Emoji keyboard profiles installed), and we were off.

While this was a great start, it offers marginal benefits, as plenty of tactile keyboards can power directly off the CCK. The reason the HHKB Pro 2 grabbed our attention is because of its size, and while this remains beneficial at home because setting our portable desk up anywhere is easier, the HHKB Pro 2′s small footprint can best be leveraged if we can turn this setup into one that’s more portable. Another problem with this setup is that the iPad cannot be charged when the keyboard is attached. Even though the USB hub is powered, it doesn’t supply the iPad itself with any power.

Streamling the setup.

There aren’t many keyboard aficionados trying to get power-hungry tactile keyboards working with the iPad, but there are a good number of audiophiles trying to get DACs working with the iPad. So when perusing for DAC solutions, we came across the suggestion of using a USB Y-cable.

The one we picked up had USB-A on one end, and on the other end USB-A and mini-USB-A. This type of cable is typically used to power USB hard-drives, using the extra USB-A end to obtain additional power from an unused USB port on a computer.

For our experiment, we plugged the end with only one cable into the CCK, and plugged the mini-USB-A cable into the HHKB. The other USB-A cable we plugged into the iPad power brick, which was plugged into an outlet. Strangley, this setup didn’t work.

We tried the same exact setup with a PC switchbox that also didn’t want to work with the HHKB. Our previous USB-hub solution worked with the switchbox also, but so did this Y-cable trick. Why it works with the switchbox and not the iPad is a mystery.

Back to DAC solutions, we read about Dr. Bott’s T3hub, which is a non-powered USB hub that supposedly “tells” the connected PC that it’s powered. This means that as long as there’s adequate power being pushed through a given USB port, the T3 “tricks” whatever mechanism is asking for extra power into thinking the power is there. We bought such a hub and connected it to the CCK, and connected the HHKB to the T3. We got an error that the device we connected needed more power, so we were again out-of-luck.

Just to see what would happen, we took our previous failed Y-cable setup but attached the T3 to the CCK, and plugged the one side of the Y-cable into the T3. With the power brick still plugged into an outlet, this setup worked, and actually makes for a more compact foorprint than the USB hub we used earlier, since we don’t need to carry around an extra power adapter. Unfortunately, this setup still doesn’t charge the iPad, and still requires an outlet.

Going portable.

We scrounged through our cable box one more time and dug out a portable battery charged via mini-USB. It was part of a kit to use an iPhone with a motorcycle, and basically provides additional power to the iPhone so you don’t deplete the iPhone internal battery as quickly when using GPS. Specs from the bottom of the battery are:

Capacity: 3200 mAh
In: 5V . 1A
Out: 5.5V

We charged the battery to capacity and then plugged our Y-cable into it. So on the one end of the Y-cable we had this battery and HHKB plugged in, and on the other end the Dr. Bott. The Dr. Bott was then plugged into the CCK, which was plugged into the iPad. The setup worked! This gives us a portable solution for the HHKB, and a simple USB extension cord gives us some room to move the HHKB further away from the iPad. The only downide to this setup other than the cable clutter is the lack of ability to charge the iPad with the CCK attached.

Our battery isn’t anything special, and we assume that any portable power source would work here. Just to verify, we again went through our cable box and dug out the requisite female USB-A adapter for our Solio rechargable battery.³ This worked just as well, with the added advantage of a solar recharging solution in exchange for a bigger footprint. Given the number of solar charging and battery solutions on the market nowadays, there are plenty of options here.

If you want to run the HHKB off two AA batteries, there are solutions available, or you could even build a MintyBoost if you want to go the DIY route. Our battery has five blue LED lights indicating battery charge, and with the keyboard hooked up in this configuration for a full work day, not a single light went out.⁴ Despite this, the actual power draw seems more than we expected, and may explain why Apple didn’t leave the allowable power draw through the CCK at 100 mAh.

Ultimately, our portable solution works, and keyboard battery life is about on par with the iPad itself. That’s not bad as long as you can deal with the hassle of charging a second device whenever you plug the iPad into a power source as well.

Alternatives?

The HHKB Pro 2 with a portable power source is the most compact Topre-based keyboard you’ll find to use with the iPad. The Realforce 87U is a larger alternative that may not require a power source, but the added keyboard size makes it less useful on-the-road. If you’re willing to forego Topre switches for mechanical switches like the Cherry MX series, a reasonable option is the KBT Poker, whose footprint is about on par with the HHKB Pro 2, and whose price is about 66% less. The downside is that the Poker’s build quality doesn’t meet that of the HHKB Pro 2, and the layout isn’t as ideal either, seeing as it doesn’t target the same keyboard-maestro audience the HHKB’s developers did.⁵ Fortunately, the Poker does come in various Cherry MX configurations, so you can get it in the very clicky blue configuration, the quieter tactile brown configuration, as well as the linear black and red configurations.[^5] This at least gives mechanical keyboard lovers several options, whereas the HHKB Pro 2 only comes in one Topre switch configuration with an actuation force of 45g.

For those willing to wait, you can occasionally find an HHKB Pro sold second-hand. These were produced prior to the HHKB Pro 2, and are basically the same keyboard, though lacking the integrated USB hub. Presumably, this means it would work with the iPad without any of the previously-mentioned accessory-hacking, though we can’t comment for sure since we haven’t tried one yet.⁶

For now, we’re quite happy with our workaround for getting the HHKB Pro 2 to work with our computing device of choice. The overall accessory breakdown, roughly, follows:

That comes down to roughly $107 on top of the cost of the HHKB Pro 2, so it’s not cheap if you don’t have some of this stuff already laying around. In our case, we only had to purchase the T3hub and Y-cable, so our costs weren’t that much as far as the equipment that ultimately made it into the setup goes.

Then again, if you love tactile keyboards, especially those utilizing Topre switches, you’re no stranger to paying more for quality. From our perspective, it’s worth it.

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The idea of a smartwatch appears to have the same level of appeal to those of Generation X as the jetpack does. Both devices come from science fiction, and while technology has touched upon both, neither device has really entered consumer reality yet, though both have often been promised.

The Pebble e-paper watch comes closest to realizing the smartwatch as we’ve yet seen. If you haven’t already heard of the Pebble, it’s a Kickstarter project whose funding has already surpassed eight million dollars, so it’s pretty clear the project is popular, and is currently Kickstarter’s most-funded project ever.

The good.

The Pebble is designed to work with iOS and Android devices, using Bluetooth to speak with a smartphone. Chiefly, the Pebble aims to serve as a remote notification center, so you don’t need to look at your phone whenever a notification comes in. The Pebble provides notification for the following:

• Incoming Caller ID
• Email (Gmail or any IMAP email account)
• Calendar Alerts
• Facebook Messages
• Twitter
• Weather Alerts
• Silent vibrating alarm and timer

The Pebble also touts interoperability with certain smartphone apps, so it can control your smartphone’s music, access GPS data for cycling/running, etc. Out-of-box, the Pebble will presumably work with a couple key apps, but will primarily serve as a notification center until you grab third-party apps from the Pebble online store.

The bad.

Your notifications sent to your watch may be cool, but we see this as more of a novelty than a truly useful feature; the Pebble simply doesn’t offer any features that a smartphone by itself doesn’t. Yes, it puts notifications on your wrist, but for how many niche cases is that truly an improvement over just looking at your phone? Given the short range of Bluetooth, you have to have your phone near the Pebble anyway, so is saving you from pulling your phone from your pocket really worth $115? If a notification is important enough to respond to, you’ll have to pull your phone out anyway. If you’re not expecting an important notification, you can probably go without checking your wrist until you’re in a place you can use your phone.¹

It’s not that we can’t think of ways to use the Pebble, it’s simply that we’re not convinced the Pebble is going to make anyone’s mobile computing life better. Sure, that’s subjective, but in terms of efficiency, all the Pebble is doing is adding another layer of technology between you and your smartphone, and when is that a good thing? Again, outside of extremely specific use cases, the Pebble is a great novelty item, but little more.

The ugly.

Outside of the Pebble being a neat gadget, there’s the form factor to consider. Some people wear the iPod Nano as a watch because they love the digital watch-faces but the Nano is a really big watch. For those with smaller wrists, the Nano just looks silly, and the Pebble is similarly big. Pebble’s main Kickstarter page doesn’t include dimensions,² but looking into it further, we found that the Pebble’s body is roughly 5cm x 3cm. Compare this to the iPod Nano’s 3.75cm x 4.09cm dimension body, and you can see that the Pebble is no small beast. We wonder how many backers didn’t even consider this when pledging.

The size is also a concern because it means the Pebble pretty much needs to replace a watch. Whereas other wrist gadgets can sit alongside a watch, the Pebble really can’t, and wearing it on the wrist opposite your watch just looks like you’re wearing two watches. That may not be a concern for everyone, but we wonder how more versatile the Pebble would be if it had a thinner display that wrapped around more of the wrist, and scrolled notifications accordingly.

Another design concern we have is the plastic screen (as opposed to the crystal many watches sport), as plastic scratches much easier than glass. Yet, the biggest problem with the Pebble is that it’s limited to existing APIs, as well as the hardware it doesn’t have. There’s no line-out for plugging headphones in, for example, so you can’t entirely stash your phone for when you plan to take the Pebble on a run.³ In many cases, you’ll still be using an armband to exercise with the iPhone, because the Pebble doesn’t offer a way around this.

On the iPhone, the Pebble also can’t read text messages, which limits what it can do with notifications.

Hope is in the SDK.

While the core functionality of the Pebble puts a purchase to question, the device’s saving grace may very well be its intended third-party support. The Pebble will have an SDK available before release, so third-party developers could have iPhone apps working with the Pebble as soon as the watch is released. The most high-profile iPhone app to have announced Pebble support thus far is RunKeeper, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see others take the plunge. A companion app for Zombies, Run!, for example, would be quite cool.

One area we’re looking forward to is activity-monitoring. The Pebble includes a gyroscope and vibration motor, so it has all the hardware necessary to compete against the Jawbone UP and Nike FuelBand. While no activity-and-sleep-monitoring apps have yet been announced for the Pebble, the potential is there, and we hope to see someone tackle this. At present, the Jawbone UP is the only wrist-wearable gadget that does full-on sleep and motion tracking, and there are still concerns over Jawbone’s quality control with the UP. As the Nike Fuelband doesn’t track sleep or provide activity alarms, the market is ripe for the Pebble to fill this void.

Our recommendation?

We see buying a Pebble as an investment in potential functionality. Today, the developers announced a production cap of 75,000 Pebble watches for the initial Kickstarter drive, so there are roughly 10,000 watches left for reserve. We decided to back the project, figuring the worst case scenario is that we don’t see an activity/sleep-moniting app in the Pebble’s future, or the watch is simply too big for our wrists, and we sell the watch online. Given the demand for it, backers shouldn’t have a problem reselling their wares if they need to, and may even be able to make a couple dollars on it; if you’re on the fence, you probably won’t lose money on the Pebble.

Best case scenario for us is a proper activity/sleep-monitor app being released shortly after the Pebble store goes live. In this case, our worst decision will be deciding to forego a nice watch and instead wear the Pebble nearly full-time.

At the very least, the Pebble is a cool experiment in whether this market is capable of flourishing, let alone existing. There’s also the potential we’ll see a really killer app for the Pebble that no one’s thought of yet, so lurking Pebble’s developer forum should prove interesting in the days ahead. The Pebble’s estimated ship date is September, so there’s plenty of time for new app ideas to be thrown around and worked on. So while the Pebble’s basic functions don’t excite us, we’re looking forward to what developers come up with in the days ahead.

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After weeks of use, our fourth Jawbone UP replacement band, and fifth UP overall, has finally died. We only reported on the death of our last UP band a little over a month ago, so the trend of late seems to be about one month of life per band.

Battery life on our fifth band seemed reasonable, with no real indication anything bad was about to happen. It was a week at least since our last full charge, and when the band was at around 10%, we forgot to top it off and instead let the battery expire. At this point, we plugged the band into a power source, waited until the LED went from red to white, and tried to sync the UP with our iPhone. It wouldn’t.

We tried both a soft reset as well as a hard reset. Rebooting our iPhone, per the instructions at the UP support site, didn’t help either. Instead of writing in about our problem as we had in the past, instead we called Jawbone yesterday, and were greeted by a very cheerful support representative. She suggested we plug the UP into our iPhone after we launched the voice memos app, as an UP capable of syncing should move the volume needle because it’s transmitting data using audio. We tried this, yet the needle didn’t move. That confirmed our UP was toast.

A sixth band should be on its way soon. As we had a support representative on the phone already, we took the opportunity to ask about the status of a revised UP without these problems. We had wondered several times before whether the bands Jawbone was sending out as replacements were known to have problems, or if this was effectively an ongoing “beta” period where Jawbone was trying to it right by sending out bands with small changes. The support representative confirmed that the former was true: Jawbone’s replacement bands are all original bands with known problems, and in all likelihood, would also fail.

Basically, replacing dead bands with those prone to failure is a stop-gap measure. Eventually, Jawbone will “relaunch” the UP in a revised, working state. But the representative didn’t know when that relaunch would happen. In short, if the relaunch happens before November, and we have a dead band at that time, we can request a proper replacement. In the meantime, we either keep trading dead bands in about once-per-month, or give up until the relaunch.

The representative reminded us of Jawbone’s no-questions-asked-refund policy regarding the UP, which we’ve already taken advantage of. At this point, having received a refund for the UP, we’re basically paying to use the UP with whatever time we spend dealing with the replacement process once per month. Considering we do like the functionality of the UP, and haven’t found a suitable alternative, we’ll continue playing this replacement game for the forseeable future, hoping that the relaunch will put an end to this cycle soon.

It’s a frustrating experience, but we have no doubt that Jawbone is legitimately embarassed by their lack of testing before the UP was sold last year. That’s why they continue to replace these bands at what must be considerable cost, particularly when they’ve already refunded many of the original purchases. Jawbone could have simply provided refunds and not continued sending replacement bands to the respective customers, but they’ve instead taken the high road.¹ If they can manage to relaunch the UP within the warranty period, they’ll manage to keep many of their customers, but if they don’t relaunch in time, we expect considerable outcry from their users.

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After receiving our fifth Jawbone UP, we decided to seriously look into the newest competitor in the self-monitoring gadget race: the Nike+ FuelBand. Unfortunately, as very new accessory on the market with a fair degree of demand, it wasn’t immediately available, so we had to wait several weeks before stock was replenished.

In the meantime, we looked up Nike’s sizing guide for the FuelBand, which came up short. It simply wasn’t clear from any of Nike’s documentation what size we should aim for. We printed out Nike’s sizing band, wrapped it around our wrist, and found that we literally fell on-the-line between two sizes. Per Nike’s Twitter feed, we were told that customers should opt to size up if this happens, so that’s what we did.

When we heard that stock was available, we made our purchase at the Nike online store. We received our FuelBand about a week later. It was packaged nicely, vaguely like you’d expect an Apple device to be boxed, but perhaps with a bit more box than necessary. In addition to the band, the box included a charging cable, a link removal tool, an 8mm extension link, a 16mm extension link, and a stand.¹

One link was already in the band when it arrived, and because we fell between sizes, we knew we’d have to remove it in order to get a good fit. This was an easy task, but unfortunately the sizing still seemed off – the band proved very loose even with neither of the additional links installed. If we were to wear the band over a sweatshirt, the fit would be great, but as it was, the band slid up and down our wrist a bit too much. It felt a bit awkward when it slid up our forearm, and when it slid down to our wrist, it hindered our full range of movement.

That’s a design issue.

When we bought the Jawbone UP last year, we questioned why the band didn’t link at both ends, and wished that one end could plug into the other in order to close the band securely. This is how the FuelBand works, and while we like it in theory, it’s problematic. If the Jawbone UP slides down to the base of our hand, it doesn’t restrict wrist movement because the band’s two ends can flex away from one another when pressure is applied.

Practically speaking, let’s take a power clean as an example. Your hands are pointed down at the ground when you start, so whatever fitness band you’re wearing is likely to slip towards the ground. If it slips enough to cover the joint of your hand and wrist, you have a problem as you continue your movement. By the time you jerk the bar from the ground and manipulate it to fall on your shoulders, your wrists should be bent backwards. If you’re wearing the FuelBand in this example, one hand won’t be able to bend back as far as the other because the band is in the way. At best, this causes some discomfort in your wrist. At worst, it throws your exercise off entirely.

If you’re doing the same exercise with the Jawbone UP, as soon as you bend your wrist, the two ends of the UP push away and the band slightly increases in size because of its elasticity. No harm, no foul.

It wasn’t until after we exercised with the FuelBand that we truly appreciated Jawbone’s design. In fact, before this, we cursed the design every time we accidentally tore the UP from our wrist when pulling off a sweater. Yet, it’s the very fact that the UP isn’t securely latched to your wrist that makes it such a great accessory for the weight room.

Back to sizing, we later found out that Nike claims the small FuelBand to be 171mm around with both links in, and the mediam FuelBand to be 172mm around with no links in. Yet, for some reason, Nike doesn’t recommend both links to be used at one time, which seems a little odd. This means that if we do drop down a size, we’ll have to make due with a band that’s 9mm shorter than the one we tried out. We can probably make due, even if the fit will be snug, but this likely wouldn’t correct the issue with the band restricting wrist movement, unless the band is so snug that it won’t slide over our wrist’s joint bones. Unfortunately, that means the band would have to be almost exactly the circumference of our wrists, and we seriously question the liklihood of that scenario.

Otherwise, it’s pretty good.

Beyond that one issue, the FuelBand’s design is pretty nice. The display is pretty much invisible until you press the one button on the surface of the device, giving the band a very plain, but sporty look. The FuelBand should really come in several colours, but they’d likely have to be dark for the LEDs to look nice and crisp, as they do on the black band. We found the addition of a time-keeping function a nice touch, as the FuelBand can easily replace a watch in the workplace. As the band is extremely plain looking, it wouldn’t even look out-of-place wearing a suit-and-tie. In contrast, the Jawbone UP’s slimmer profile, patterned surface, and unconventional parallel ends, make it stick out a lot more in a conservative workplace.

As far as getting the FuelBand working, there’s an additional step or two over the Jawbone UP. As we prefer to sync with the iPhone, we were disappointed that the FuelBand doesn’t work with the iPhone out-of-box. First, the FuelBand didn’t come charged, whereas the Jawbone UP ships with some level of power, even if low. Second, you have to first connect the FuelBand to a PC, after downloading the respective software application. Only once the FuelBand is set up on the PC can you set up the FuelBand app on your iPhone.

This wouldn’t be half bad if the FuelBand didn’t occasionally require reconnecting it to your PC. We love the convenience of syncing the FuelBand with our iPhone over Bluetooth, but after one particular sync cycle, we were told that there was inconsistent information on the device, and that we should sync with our PC to fix this.

The Bluetooth syncing really is nice, though. The best part is that it can sync in real time when the app is running. So as you run, the app updates with the activity you’re doing. You don’t need this functionality because you can just as easily look down at your wrist after pressing the button on the FuelBand, but presumably there are instances where looking at your iPhone is more convenient than looking at your wrist. Maybe you’re on a treadmill, for example, and your phone is propped up already.

The FuelBand’s accuracy is about on par with the Jawbone UP.² We don’t know how Nike’s tracking algorithm incorporates information on which wrist you wear the FuelBand on, but because you specify this, presumably there’s some accuracy correction for certain movements. Yet, we don’t recall ever entering into the app any information on whether we’re left or right-handed, so it’s not clear what the FuelBand is factoring in here. Otherwise, we could see it not counting certain movements we do throughout the day, like pushing our PC’s mouse around with our dominant hand.

As we mentioned in a previous post, the very fact the FuelBand has Bluetooth may make wearing it situationally dependent. While you can turn Bluetooth  on the FuelBand off, the very fact that the device has Bluetooth means certain individuals may not be able to wear it to the office.³

A lot of people have discussed Nike Fuel, the unit the FuelBand tracks. This seems mostly marketing hype, however. While the FuelBand does provide a Nike Fuel reading, it also tracks and reports steps and estimated calories burned. Presumably, the app computes Fuel based on a function of steps taken over time; the more steps taken in a shorter amount of time, the higher the Fuel calculation. We hoped to play with this theory some more, but stopped using the FuelBand because of its loose fit before we could experiment enough.

What it doesn’t have.

After thinking about our band’s sizing, our first instinct was to just exchange the band for a smaller one. But as we went back to rely on the Jawbone UP exclusively again, we realized that the UP’s killer feature isn’t in tracking steps taken, it’s in the sleep alarm and night-time sleep tracker.

That is to say, as much as the FuelBand competes with the UP, the UP is really a different product, aimed at more general lifestyle tracking. In our case, we place a more emphasis on the sleep-related features than we do the day-time step tracking, so we realized the FuelBand will never entirely replace the UP unless it improves its software options.⁴

For us, then, as long as we have an UP band that works, it will likely trump the FuelBand as our daily tracking accessory.⁵

Should you get it?

The FuelBand is $50 more expensive than the UP, yet unlike with the UP, there’s no record of defective devices. If you’re big on cardio and that’s the type of movement you want to track, the FuelBand is a better option, as it tracks both steps taken and Nike Fuel, the latter which may be a better assessment of the fitness you’re getting day-by-day. If you’re already using Nike+ to track runs, then the FuelBand will fit into your workflow nicely.

If you plan to track your workouts in the weightroom, or where you’re otherwise manipulating your wrists (like in certain Crossfit movements), the UP may be a better option for you. And if your goal is to track more than just exercise, the FuelBand will obviously fall short.

Finally, if you’re considering the FuelBand, make sure you get your sizing right. The sizing does not match up with the UP (i.e. a medium in the UP is not a medium in the FuelBand), and the UP provides more flexibility despite not having removable links. If you can wait, delay a purchase until you can find the FueldBand in a local store, so you can ensure the sizing is proper. Otherwise, you may have to deal with shipping returns, which are always a hassle.

If it weren’t for the issues Jawbone’s had with the UP, we’d recommend it immediately. Since it’s still unclear where the UP stands regarding these problems, however, the FuelBand is a good alternative, and arguably a much better option if you’re primarily looking to track runs. If that’s not the case, you might want to hold off and see if Jawbone’s UP manufacturing is back on track, as we think more thought went into the design of the UP than the FuelBand.⁶

Either way, for general movement tracking, the FuelBand and UP are both good devices. It’s just too bad we can’t have the best parts of each in one band.

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While people love to talk about how intuitive touch is as an interface method, the cold reality is that for certain applications, legacy input formats still reign supreme. For example, for writing, there is no unseating the keyboard in one format or another, as writing by hand is slow and cumbersome for longform input. ¹

Keyboards themselves are a rather interesting animal, which can be analyzed from several perspectives. There’s DVORAK vs QWERTY, for example, and strong arguments for practicality either way. But perhaps a less niche argument is design implementation, where we have mechanical keyboards in one corner, and cheapo rubber dome and scissor keyboards in another.

Shawn Blanc just wrote a good piece on this very topic, and if you’re at all interested in how mechanical keyboards are becoming the new in thing among the blogging elite, be sure to read his piece on clicky keyboards.

We won’t go into detail here about why a mechanical keyboard is better than most mass-produced keyboards today, save for mentioning that the tactile nature of the former is what gives them a place in our hearts. Some people go all googly over the sound, but we consider that secondary to the feel. It may be a matter of min-maxing, but as Shawn can attest to, a good keyboard does make a difference in typing speed and accuracy, and over the long-term, the investment in a more expensive mechanical keyboard may be worth it.

Shawn rounded up three different mechanical keyboards in his review. One was a legacy Apple Extended II, while the others were modern mechanicals: the Das Keyboard and the Tactile Pro 3. To the casual observer, those are perhaps the big three options², but there are actually a lot more possibilities based around different types of switches. Of the keyboards Shawn tested, two use Alps mechanisms and one uses Cherry blue switches. Don’t worry about the differences, just know that both are considered very good for typing and not much else.

Not just for typing.

The other big area that keyboards excel at is gaming, and other than the PC gaming industry’s propensity to push the edge of the graphics race (which nerds love), superior controls are the other reason why PC gaming remains so full of vigor; no matter how convenient a handheld controller is, the mouse and keyboard combination maximizes human reflexes for the most intense gaming experience possible. For this reason, some savvy gamers have pushed the envelope by acquiring mechanical keyboards to further maximize their game.

Without going into too much detail here, the crux of the issue is the activation point for a given key; gamers want to know exactly when a given action is registered, and they want it to be quickly repeatable as well as predictable. As such, they prefer keyboards that allow them to ride the activation point, whereby they float their fingers on the keys at the point where a given action is registered. However, they also don’t want the keys to be too soft, offering enough resistance such that unintentional pressure doesn’t cause a key to register unexpectedly.³

For gaming purposes, none of the keyboards Shawn reviewed are great. In fact, the blue Cherry MX switches are not prefered for gaming at all, and while some claim the more linear Cherry black switches are ideal, most of the research we conducted pointed at the Cherry brown switches as more preferable, as they still provide appropriate tactile feedback. Another option many pro gamers opt for are Topre switches, usually with an actuation force of 55g.⁴ Topre switches are actually capacitive in nature, and are a sort of hybrid mechanical switch, which offers great tactile feedback and the smoothest force gradient available. They’re also the most expensive switch out there.

What about for the iPad?

We started looking into all of this ourselves some months back when we realized that we missed our old IBM Model M. We played around with many a keyboard during our past gaming days, but most were rubber dome keyboards and therefore equally bad. We kept a Model M around for casual use and loved it, despite it being a loud clacker. When we left desktops behind and started using Powerbooks/Macbooks, we didn’t revisit keyboards until we made the iPad our main computer. To this end, we picked up an Apple bluetooth keyboard, which is conveniently sized for travel, but uses the same scissoring mechanism that laptop keyboards do. We’ve said before that we consider a physical keyboard a necessity for longform writing on the iPad, and to this end, wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a better keyboard companion?

The first problem is, obviously, the wireless connectivity. Mechanical keyboards don’t typically come with bluetooth connectivity, so we have to connect the keyboard to our iPad using the camera connection kit. That’s not sexy, but it works.⁵

The second problem is form factor. If you only write longform on your iPad at home, maybe this isn’t a problem for you, but a typical 103-key keyboard is a massive beast, and most people can do without the numpad. If you’re to take your mechanical keyboard on travel with you, having a smaller physical footprint is always beneficial.

Fortunately, for the Cherry switch lovers, Leopold makes tenkeyless boards with whatever switch you prefer. If you’re willing to spend another $200 for Topre switches, Realforce makes tenkeyless models also (model 87u), with their traditional model offering variable-weight keys, and other models offering specific actuation forces across all keys.⁶ Finally, there’s the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) Pro 2, which has the smallest footprint of the bunch, but with the added problem of a built-in USB hub. This means the iPad won’t power the HHKB Pro 2 without some sort of auxiliary power source.⁷

Because mechanical switches take up more physical space than the scissor switches used in laptop-style keyboards, there’s no way you’ll ever match the footprint of the Apple bluetooth keyboard, but the HHKB Pro 2 is reasonably close.⁸

Of course, if you go this route, the last consideration is finding a suitable iPad stand; we’ve relied on both the WINGStand and Incase Origami in the past, but both are designed to work with Apple’s keyboard, so neither will work with the HHKB Pro 2. It took us awhile to discover the Origami and WINGStand, which are the top two solutions for typing on one’s lap with an iPad and physical keyboard, so we might have to hack something together from scratch in order to make the HHKB work even half as well.

We just put an order in for the HHKB in gray/black⁹, as well as for some USB accessories so we can experiment with powering the board properly. If all goes well, it will mean we can charge the iPad while we’re using the keyboard, which was always a concern of ours in the past when we mused about using a wired keyboard instead of a bluetooth one.

Once we have all the parts in hand, we’ll be sure to report on our findings.

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We recently talked about the monetization aspect of the Paleo movement, a trend that will only continue growing in parallel with the Paleo community itself. It should be expected, after all, that people will seek to make money where they can, and so riding the coat-tails of a popular movement is a typical strategy. No surprise, then, when we recently started seeing advertisements for podcasts and eBooks in an effort to cash in on the drive to be better at Paleo. While some Paleo gurus published books that act as the foundation for their presence in the paleosphere, they have typically not witheld information from the Paleo masses by erecting paywalls. Robb Wolf, known for his book The Paleo Solution, is one such guru, who runs a blog and a rather excellent podcast, where he gives out a ton of useful information for free. Others, meanwhile, dispense information through monthly and yearly memberships, presumably relying on this type of information as their primary source of income.¹ We were rather surprised when we saw Wolf advertising his recent The Paleo Diet Budget Shopping Guide as a paid eBook

Our first reaction was something between a sigh and a cringe, and had anyone other than Wolf advertised the book, we would have cried foul immediately. That’s not because the concept of the book is bad, but because it’s hard to see how one could distill enough useful information into an eBook to justify a $19.99 price tag.² Coming in at 67 pages front-to-back, this budget shopping guide effectively runs 30 cents/page. Compare that to a copy of Paleo Magazine (68 pages), at $5.99³, and you can see why we’d be skeptical. Still, we’re a fan of Wolf and know he isn’t a shill, so we picked up a copy of the guide to see what secrets it would divulge.

More breakdown.

There are seven sections to the guide: six chapters and a final section entitled “Resources”. The Chapters are titled accordingly:

1. All the excuses
2. Learn to cook
3. Meal Planning 101
4. Money Saving Tricks
5. Budget Shopping Priorities
6. In the kitchen

We left off the [sic] tag above, but those are verbatim titles, complete with inconsistent capitalization. We don’t mean to gripe unecessarily here, because the content is most important in a guide like this, but since we paid for the eBook, it’s fair to assume the publishing quality is up-to-par with other eBooks we buy. In this case, the editing seems poor from the get-go, and makes a very poor impression when we haven’t even come to the meat of the book. We’ll focus on the meat in a moment,⁴ but it’s worth mentioning that the guide reads like a self-published eBook (that’s what it is, after all) and not a professionally published one; it doesn’t read like a finished book. That’s rather unfortunate, because we believe it’s fair to assume a 67-page book regularly priced at $19.99 bearing Wolf’s name would be a pretty high-quality affair.

Page three of the guide includes a sidebar explaining the eBook, a PDF, is actually “a multimedia guide”. If that sounds misleading, it’s because the eBook contains hyperlinks to web content, making it less of a static document than your average PDF. It’s quite possible that some PDF readers have inline browsers to make accessing this content more convenient, but in iBooks, it means touching a link opens a dialogue box asking whether you want to open the link in Mobile Safari. We would sooner define a multimedia guide as an eBook designed for embedded multimedia, such as one can create using various eBook authoring tools like iBooks Author.⁵

That said, there are plenty of links to follow, even if they blend in with non-linked content. The sidebar we mentioned earlier points out how the links are orange in colour, but they’re not the only orange text in the book, which can lead to trying to follow links that simply aren’t there. For example, section headers are orange, and more than once we assumed a header might link to a blog post explaining the topic in more depth.⁶

The meat.

The first chapter is focused on debunking the excuses for why someone can’t buy food according to the Paleo template. We’ve actually seen some of this information before via Wolf’s other outlets, so it became pretty clear early on that if you follow Wolf’s blog and podcast, some of the information in this guide is recycled and may not be that valuable. Wolf openly states in the guide that some of the information discussed is borrowed from previous blog posts, but it’s not clear to the potential buyer that most of the guide isn’t new information that can’t be found on Wolf’s blog and podcasts. In other words, this should be more clear before you buy the guide, not after.

About 20% into the book, the excuses are behind you and you’re into chapter two, which focuses on cooking. For those who don’t know the first thing about cooking, the very first page of the chapter has linked videos on pressure cooking and slow cooking. The chapter continues with other cooking techniques like making soups, cooking veggies, and common cooking techniques. Unfortunately, it’s a rather short chapter that ends after five pages of content, trailing off with 10 recipe links. The chapter does contain links to a handful of other online recipe resources, including popular Paleo cookbooks.⁷ Yet, we wished the chapter were more fleshed out and included more basic cooking tips, like how to best combine certain ingredients, the basis for utilizing acids and marinades, what spices should be on-hand at all times, and basic recipes the reader can build on to developer more complex meals. As it is, the chapter feels very under-developed, pointing to a variety of online resources like Wolf’s blog and social networking accounts, which may very well contain useful information, but aren’t content-specific enough compared to what we expected.⁸

Almost a third of the way into the guide, Wolf talks about meal planning. This chapter has a lot more useful content than the first two chapters, complete with resources that a lot of families could use. It’s pretty clear at this point in the guide that the target audience is people very new to eating Paleo, as most everything is something Paleo veterans have figured out ages ago. We were hoping for a greater emphasis on where to buy select products online for cheaper than in local stores, and while the chapter does have a link to a page in the Resources section listing several online sites, it’s not clear from the guide itself what products one should seek out at these destinanations. For example, we hoped the guide would address good places to buy very specific products, be it coconut oil, pemmican, or some other Paleo food/product. Arguably the best section in this chapter is entitled “What do I do with that?” The section lists several Paleo ingredients and explains how to best utilize them in recipes.

Chapter four is seven pages of content and could arguably have been merged with chapter five, which is only four pages of content in length. Again, the advice is nothing we haven’t heard before, but it may be one of the most useful sections for those new to Paleo eating. Chapter six has more kitchen tips, and feels like an addendum to the second chapter on cooking; it’s six pages long and includes reader tips on food preparation.

Finally, the Resources section includes links to Wolf’s other products, including his first eBook, Robb Wolf’s 30 Day Total Transformation which retails for $25.⁹ A lot of the links in this section can also be found elsewhere in the guide, but it’s nice to have them consolidated for easy reference. We expect a lot of people who buy this guide to read it once and then just use the Resources section as a reference in the future, perusing the 38 blog links at the end when they need recipe ideas. The guide’s index takes up the last two pages of the guide, but it’s almost unecessary considering how short the guide is, and because the table of contents breaks the guide down nicely enough.

To buy or not to buy?

In our case, we were a bit disppointed with the guide, but that’s only because we’ve read several Paleo books and remain somewhat involved in the online Paleo community. That we listen to Wolf’s podcast and follow his blog’s RSS feed means a lot of the information in this guide is old news to us. That’s really the major complaint we have about the guide other than its price: it’s not clear that all the guide does is consolidate Wolf’s previous information in a paid eBook. This means that those who do have the time to scour the web and listen to old podcasts will find this guide rather redundant, but those new to Paleo, or those who don’t have the time to find all this information, may very well find the guide a useful purchase. In fact, for the average household who is just now being introduced to Paleo concepts, this guide makes a nice gift, though as we remarked earlier, a different eBook format would make more sense (i.e. native Kindle or iBooks versions).¹⁰

For those focusing on the cost, we admit it’s hard not to think about the monetization shift in the paleosphere, as this guide is a very different beast from Wolf’s The Paleo Solution. The latter is chock full of useful information and at $9.99, is a significantly better buy than this guide. For those who already understand the basic Paleo concepts and are truly wondering how to afford real foods, this guide may be something to look into, but we’re frankly surprised it’s a big enough conundrum to warrant a $19.99 purchase, especially when a lot of the information in the first chapter is basic common sense.¹¹ For $5, this guide would be a much better buy, and almost a no-brainer for anyone getting Wolf’s other material for free.¹² Though, for those on the fence, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

There are useful tidbits in the guide, and if you’re not at least actively lurking the paleosphere and the price doesn’t put you off, pick up a copy at the current sale price of $14.99.¹³

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When we attended a talk about social networks a few months back, we knew younger users were more prominent on networks like Facebook, but just how much they relied on these networks didn’t occur to us. For example, when it came to internet communication, Generation X built their social contacts around e-mail, while today’s internet youth have effectively replaced e-mail with Facebook. That alone is an interesting discussion topic, for while social networks are often used by older users to retain contact with certain acquaintances, younger users have a much lower threshold for friending someone online. In other words, anyone who is worth even e-mailing is added as a friend, whether or not that person is connected to one of your existing real-world networks.

While the generational shift is noteworthy, we decided to look into how our own forms of online communication have changed.

Ten years ago.

Looking back at how we used the internet 10 years ago, we see a reliance on very different communication networks than today. These are the networks we used on a daily basis a decade ago:

• E-Mail
• ICQ
• AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
• IRC
• Fora

As we said earlier, e-mail was the great mainstay of our generation’s online communications center. Pretty much all intimate conversation with family was done via e-mail, and yet it also served for simple exchanges with people we didn’t have an intimate relationship with. Subscriptions to various mailing lists also served for prolonged discussions between many individuals, making e-mail the ultimate tool for talking to people we discovered elsewhere. In retrospect, perhaps that was e-mail’s greatest weakness: no way to discover new people to correspond with.

The trinity of real-time communication for us was ICQ/AIM/IRC. ICQ came first, and we kept it around for years if only because there were a few luddites we corresponded with who refused to pick up AIM. And as for AIM, well, everyone else had it because everyone else had America Online (AOL). In a lot of ways, AIM was yesteryears’s Facebook, in that it was a cluttered mess of contacts and ad hoc status updates via away messages. Whereas we were more likely to simply set ourself as “Away” in ICQ, AIM was our creative outlet for silly haiku status messages, quotes, and emo rants. We kept AIM around for longer than we should have because it was easier to integrate with iChat and iSight than to start a contact list from scratch, but it was also the most convenient form of communication. In college, for instance, we’d regularly check our AIM messages after getting out of bed, much as we imagine kids do today with their Facebook walls.

The third point of our chat-utility trinity was IRC, and pretty typically, we had it running alongside ICQ and AIM all the time. While we were able to group AIM contacts into categories, a good chunk of our online contacts were more readily available via IRC, and it was easier to contact them there than further clog up our AIM contacts list. More importantly, IRC is a more natural discovery tool, because whoever enters a chat is now within contact distance.¹ AIM was like e-mail in that you had to get someone’s username beforehand, as searching by true name didn’t work. So confusing were people’s usernames that guessing didn’t work either, as like domain names, every good one was taken.

With a dedicated, hacked iOpener running Windows 98 and Trillian, it was easy to keep our comms system up and out of the way, in much the manner an iPhone or iPad works today. If someone needed to reach us and we were home, either of these three methods worked. For deeper discussion, we other tools.

We’ll mention Usenet even though our use of it had already waned ten years ago. Prior to that, we spent a lot more time on various newsgroups, which were ultimately ruined by spam and inactivity. Web-based fora would replace Usenet for most purposes, and we ended up maintaining a presence on several online fora just as we previous inhabited a handful of newsgroups before. By “mainted a presence” we mean that we were active participants and regularly scanned for new threads and discussion topics. In a way, an online forum was more than just a place to seek specific information, but a place to regularly hangout. It was time-consuming to say the least, and the return-on-investment was probably a lot less than the other networks we used. But it worked.

A different picture today.

There’s only one network we heavily relied on 10 years ago that we still use on a daily basis today. These are the networks that, on a daily basis, we use today:

• E-Mail
• SMS / Messages
• Twitter

There’s no way to shirk e-mail. We might argue that it’s become more of a backup communication system for us, but in reality, a lot of our communication is still reliant on this utterly insecure protocol. Looking back, we’re surprised that e-mail encryption never really took off, and that the protocol has remained so simple.

When we got our first smartphone, we played around with an AIM client, but it never maintained our attention. If we sign on to AIM today, it’s a fluke, and IRC is just a fond memory now.² If it weren’t for a very different computer schedule today, we might still use IRC, but it’s a time investment we can no longer regularly afford. The closest thing we have to our old comms trinity is SMS/Messages and Twitter, which serve as reasonable real-time ways to get ahold of us. Arguably, we could get rid of SMS/Messages and use Twitter excusively, but because we have several contacts who don’t maintain a Twitter account, we still field text messages from our less computer-savvy acquaintances.³ In reality, SMS/Messages isn’t exactly a feature we use every single day, but since we technically check for SMS notifications on our mobile devices daily, we’re “using” the protocol.

Since we started our Twitter account, we’ve only used it more and more, and have in many ways reduced the need for e-mail because of it. For example, we’ve found more success in tweeting a company Twitter account with a quick question than waiting for an e-mail response, and messaging a friend is just as simple. The 140-character limit can be annoying, but it also serves to make our messages more concise. The fact that Twitter has direct messaging makes the service very flexible, and the only thing that could make the service substantially better is being able to direct messages to specific lists in addition to publically.

We’re not active on any given web forum anymore, and we rarely lurk on a regular basis even. That said, the online forum is still a go-go place for niche topics, which is somewhat unfortunate as we feel it’s an outdated way to communicate and share ideas.⁴

What’s funny is that with the deluge of social networks available today, we find ourselves torn between what to use, and wishing we could go back to simpler times. But as the above illustrates, our online social life was no less complex back then, but rather more consistent; we’d hunker down on a social network for a lot longer than today, without the concern for privacy that networks like Facebook give us.⁵ And, while we had several networks ringing us in the past, tools like Trillian consolidated them nicely, so it felt like a simpler system. Tools like ifttt help consolidate the networks we use today, but the best form of consolidation in a lot of cases is simply abstinence from unecessary network proliferation in our lives.

Why don’t we use ________?

There was a brief period of time where we’d check Facebook and G+ on a daily basis, but we’ve found our use of these networks has waned. The reasons for this are several, but a major culprit is inconsistent depth to discussions. We may find a very interesting discussion thread one day, but it may not be for another week or two until we find another, and what’s in-between is a bunch of useless text walls that we could care little about. It’s not that the same thing doesn’t happen on Twitter, but at least with a 140-character limit, it’s easier to sift through the chafe, and more often than not, we find something on Twitter worth sending over to Readability for deeper consideration at a later time. Facebook is all about keeping you on Facebook, which only comes across as desperate, and Google’s social app seems very underdeveloped on the iOS side.

While we try to cull our Facebook friends list every couple months, we haven’t yet pulled the trigger on dropping the account entirely. That’s something we’ll hopefully do soon, as we feel it’s the biggest timesink with the least return of the networks we occasionally check in on. While Facebook has a way to restrict messages to only certain groups of friends, we find their mobile implementation is lacking, and the company philosophy not in tune to our own. Facebook is still where a lot of family acquaintances lurk, but the funny thing about Facebook is that people want to be your friend but yet spend no real time actually pursuing conversation with you. We’d sooner replace Facebook entirely with Path for family contacts, assuming others are willing to make the switch; Path’s only downside is that no one is using it, even though the app looks great, works great, and is perfect for communicating with family.

We still believe G+ has a lot of potential, because the Circles implementation feels more natural than Facebook’s lists. The problem with G+ for us is entirely their mobile apps, and the inability to consistently view the desktop version of G+ on the iPad. If Google improves the product in the coming months, we might see our use of this network grow again, but in the meantime it continues to decline.

We’d be interested in hearing how your own online communications have changed over the last decade. Is our experience typical, or have your channels increased in number rather than decreased? Tweet us and let us know.

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The Twitterverse was full of disgust yesterday over the announcement that popular image-sharing service Instagram was purchased by Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Despite both companies offering assurances that Instagram will continue to be developed independently, there’s still potential cause for concern.

Let’s look at where Instagram stood before the buy-out: a popular service among the hipster elite that was, until recently, an iOS exclusive. Instagram was a distant competitor to Facebook as far as online picture sharing goes, but it was nonetheless one with a decent growth curve. The hasty adoption of the recently released Android client illustrated Instagram’s demand perfectly. But, Instagram had no monetization strategy outside of acquisition, and that’s a torch Facebook must now bare.

Facebook has nothing to gain from leaving Instagram as-is, because it leaves them with the same monetization problem Instagram had before the acquisition. With Facebook’s IPO looming ahead, their job is to make money, not buy cool startups because they pose as abstract threat years down the road. Surely, part of Facebook’s acquisition strategy was to mitigate attention loss from the Facebook app to Instagram, but that same strategy needs to account for driving users back to Facebook. That is to say, the value in Instagram isn’t in keeping the service separate from Facebook’s existing services, nor is it purely in absorbing the small fraction of online picture-sharing that Instagram has claim to. Rather, it’s driving as much traffic back to Facebook’s existing portfolio to as possible, and to enrich the overall Facebook experience.

Reading into the recent Facebook and Instagram company statements after the acquisition announcement, we can’t help but think that by “improving” Instagram, Facebook will do whatever it can to inject more Facebook functionality into the Instagram app, be that in the form of check-ins or targeted advertisement. Ultimately, Facebook’s goal will be to add Instagram’s functionality into the Facebook app proper, thereby minimizing a user’s need to use both apps.¹ We wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook’s goal is to require Instagram users to have a Facebook account for logging into Instagram in the future, thus solidifying the integration between apps. Either way, Facebook’s emphasis will be on their core product, not in leaving Instagram as-is; Facebook bought Instagram for the data, and will undoubtedly use that data outside of the Instagram app. How they’ll leverage user photos in other areas should become evident in the coming months, but rest assured Facebook already has a monetization strategy for their Instagram acquisition, and that strategy will neatly tie in to their existing products.

Some critics are doubting Zuckerberg’s clear-headedness with the acquisition, and that he over-estimated Instagram’s worth. That’s partially true, considering Instagram was assessed at $500 million only a short time prior to the acquisition. But Facebook clearly saw not only Instagram’s growth potential, but also a successful mobile app built around sharing. You can argue that Facebook should have been able to build a reasonable competitor, but we all know how utterly crappy Facebook’s mobile apps have been to date. And, perhaps more importantly, there’s unseen value in the mindshare of Instagram. Despite all the kids swearing Instagram off because of the acquisition, how many will truly stop using their beloved social networking client? Even if Instagram loses a chunk of users due to the acquisition, those who remain loyal to Instagram will at minimum remain neutral to their new Facebook overlords, and in some ways, that’s a positive thing for a company that’s been ridiculed by the geek savvy for constantly shitting on user privacy.

Instagram is also a social network of a sort different from Facebook’s core offering, in that Facebook was built around reconnecting with old acquaintances and those in your real-world networks. Instagram’s photo sharing mechanism means users follow random individuals based purely on the aesthetic value of what they share, and that’s a very different beast from how Facebook has operated to date. Yet, it’s clearly a space Facebook wants to continue moving in, as it captures a networking angle that simply following friends, companies, and celebrities doesn’t.

The clear takeaway however is that Instagram will compliment Facebook, not the other way around. It may be too soon to jump from Instagram’s ship since we don’t know exactly how things will play out, but you’re fooling yourself to think the Instagram experience, sandboxed as it currently is, will remain intact.² Fortunately, there are several options to replace Instagram, both in contained apps like PicPlz, as well as combination tools like Twitter and Hipstamatic;³ whatever disappointment we have in giving up Instagram doesn’t create a void we can’t fill.

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Some have made the case, admittedly admirably, that if Apple were to make a tablet smaller than the iPad, it would come in at 7.85″. Technically this makes sense, but it’s only looking at the issue from a hardware perspective, not from a functional one.

Take the iPhone and iPad for instance.¹ The two devices are extremely similar on a technical level, with neither really beating the other out insofar as general use goes. That is to say, the iPhone can do more or less what the iPad can, and vice versa. The only major caveat here is that the iPhone is a phone, and the iPad is larger.² And it’s the latter point we’ll focus on, because size in this regard is important.

The iPhone and iPad are so similar that Apple-haters have called the iPad nothing more than an oversized iPhone. And while that’s somewhat true from a thousand-foot perspective, it’s tough to argue that iPad and iPhone sales are cannibalizing one another, especially when so many owners of one also own the other.

Why is that?

It’s a matter of use, and environment is only one factor. For example, we use TweetBot on both our iPhone and our iPad, but how we use TweetBot on the two devices is somewhat different. For example, we have both apps hooked up to our Readability account, but when we come across a link to an article in our Twitter feed when we’re using TweetBot for the iPhone, we’ll typically send it to Readability to read later without even peeking at it first. On the iPad, we’ll generally click the link to the article, and either read it right then, else save it to Readability to reference at a later time. The point is, while TweetBot on both apps offers the same functionality, we’ll favor a particular workflow on one device over another, because a given device is better for some tasks depending on the form the device takes.

That’s the reason mobile versions of web sites make more sense on the iPhone. At first, we were incredibly annoyed that most mobile web site versions lacked the same features as the “full” site, but from a use scenario, most people don’t need access to the full site when they’re using a mobile device.³ That’s because most people aren’t using the iPhone as their primary browser, but rather a backup browser used on the road.

The iPad, however, is another story. A lot of people are using the iPad as their primary computing device, and so expect web sites to load with all the functionality in a desktop version. That’s why it’s so important for developers to ensure that web site versions designed for viewing on phones aren’t the design that show up for tablet users: the user expectation is different.

There are also some apps that simply wouldn’t work on a given device, even though there’s no technical reason an app couldn’t be written for it. We’ve recently enjoyed sketching out some design ideas in Papers, an app made for iPad. There’s no reason the developers couldn’t make Papers into a universal app and offer an iPhone version, but it would detract from the experience; part of the joy of using Papers on an iPad is the amount of drawing real-estate available to the user, and decreasing this real-estate would make for a less-enjoyable experience. In fact, this the reason we don’t see the type of drawing apps on iPhones as we do on the iPad: the iPhone’s screen is too small to be of any real use to artists.

What does this have to do with a smaller iPad?

Whether or not Apple can release a 7.85″ tablet without annoying developers, there’s nothing a 7.85″ tablet would do that the iPhone and iPad can’t, on both a technical level and a task-specific one. Whereas we’ve illustrated how workflows can change depending on whether you’re using an app on an iPhone or iPad, and how some apps simply make more sense on one form factor, what makes best sense on a 7.85″ tablet? Nothing.

A 7.85″ tablet would be too small for gaining the major benefits of apps like Papers, and too big to be an always-available backup device for checking mail, Twitter, etc. Our use of TweetBot on this imaginary 7.85″ device would either mimic our use of TweetBot on the iPhone or iPad, but not differ the way it does between version now. No matter what kind of an app you can think of, the app will always suit an iPhone or iPad better.

A 7.85″ device simply makes no sense in this market, and we don’t even need to argue costs to make that case.

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We can probably go ahead and blame Dr. Loren Cordain for sticking us with “the Paleo Diet”, who published a book by the same name. It’s a good book, don’t get us wrong, but it’s also not the definitive guide to “paleo”-eating, though likely many of us discovered the general tenets of our diet from Cordain’s work. The problem with the label are many, not the least of which is when people say they “eat paleo”, they’re not necessarily refering to Cordian’s Paleo Diet. Cordain is known in the paleosphere as being somewhat less supportive of saturated fat as other paleo gurus, and tends to distance himself from other foods, like dairy, that many of us still consume. We don’t know just how many people eat according to Cordain versus those who eat a paleo diet modeled more after Robb Wolf’s The Paleo Solution, or a “Primal” diet ala Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint, or after the many other works out there that are based on or very similar to The Paleo Diet. Yet when we look at the loudest or most outspoken voices in the paleosphere, it sure does seem like Cordain’s camp is among the minority.

Unfortunately, the media hasn’t bothered to look into this paleo brouhaha with any investigative sense, because it likely doesn’t pay to do so. It’s easier to lump all of these dietary variations into “the caveman diet” and call it a day. If the media needs a specific fact on the diet, they just go to any paleo-like diet book and pick a fact that helps make their point. In many cases, it’s Cordain’s book.

We can’t blame Cordain, though. He never claimed to have have invented the diet, he merely researched and marketed it well. It’s rather unfortunate because in order to sell a book providing dietary advice, you have to cater to fat people and market the book as a weight-loss guide. And though the name “Paleo Diet” is catchy, it’s also misleading, because it pushes the idea of dietary reenactment a little too far. While those within the paleosphere know that re-enactment is not the diet’s goals, the media doesn’t, and in turn, people who rely on the media for facts instead get fed a lot of bullshit.

The confusion doesn’t end there, though. Over at Paleo Hacks, Kamal tried to put together a “Master List of Paleo Diet Variations“, and while arguably a valid effort, the list and responses read more like a parody than anything else.

So change the name, Sherlock.

We’re not the first person to suggest we stop calling it the “Paleo Diet”, but guys like Robb Wolf are quick to chime in that we kids never had it so good. In their day, they would have been happy to have the kind of support and awareness that paleo eating has today, and renaming the diet would set the whole movement back. Wolf has a point, but it doesn’t do the paleosphere any favors when there’s a growing misconception about the diet, and little movement among Paleo gurus to “formalize” a common link. Our modest suggestion at Paleo Hacks was to do just that and call these variations sub-diets of the “Paleo Template”. That way, people can still keep saying they “eat paleo” even though they’re not all eating the same stuff. It also distinguishes the greater movement from Cordain’s work, and seems a reasonable solution. No one took the bait.

Instead, everyone seems content in their own paleo camps, at best calling the greater movement “ancestral” or “evolutionary”. At worst, there’s somewhat of a growing dischord between camps, as Richard Nikolay recently remarked:

But it seems to me that the whole thing has really gone tribal, with virtually all the trappings of tribalism, including which faction of the meta-tribe one belongs to, identified by which t-shirt and style of Vibrams they wear. 

Richard goes on to express thoughts we’ve mulled about for some time now, and that’s the distance a lot of the more prominent paleo gurus have placed between themselves and the “paleo” label:¹

…those I find myself most in line with while not feeling a need to agree with everything, don’t really wear a paleo badge, nor extend the secret handshake. Paul Jaminet. Martin Berkhan. Stephan Guyenet. Kurt Harris. Even Lyle McDonald. While none of these guys call themselves paleo, they all care about good nutrition, quality food, and a fat loss approach that doesn’t amount to the equivalent of: eat as much fat as you can and magic will happen…with the caveat that there’s no such thing as too much bacon; and oh, by the way, have you tried the “paleo” brownies, pancakes & cookies?

There’s something to be said for the approaches these folks have, and even more for the fact that they don’t all make money off their research. It’s a logical fallacy to say someone’s advice is invalid because they make money off it, but there’s also a degree of natural skepticism that accompanies someone recommending “whole foods” who is also trying to sell you a dietary supplement, another eBook promising better health, and advice contrary to conventional wisdom. Fortunately, that kind of behavior isn’t too common in the paleosphere, but we’ve seen it as a growing trend.

It’s not just about eating, right?

Things don’t get simpler when we start thinking there’s a difference between eating paleo and being paleo. Russ Crandall at Highbrow Paleo makes a case that people shouldn’t say they are paleo because it makes them self-identify with a group, creating the dreaded us vs. them mentality. Instead, we should focus more on the benefits we seek from foods, and less on aspects of the diet that may alienate ourselves from others. Crandall has a point too, but in reality, we’re not convinced most people care whether we use “eat” or “are” to qualify our paleo-ness. Most people who say they are paleo simply mean they eat according to paleo principles, not that they’re somehow engrossed in a lifestyle transcending diet. The choice of words preceding “paleo” is insignificant, because most any other aspect of a paleo lifestyle not having to do with food is done by people who don’t eat paleo, too.

There are Vegans who wear Vibram FiveFingers and go “no ‘poo”. There are Crossiftters and MovNat’ers who eat the SAD². And there are plenty of “paleo” folks who don’t do any of this stuff.

There are also plenty of “paleo” folks who supplement with creatine, protein shakes, and synthetic vitamins and minerals, even though these things aren’t whole foods and therefore “aren’t paleo”. Labels schmabels.

We say it doesn’t matter whether you call yourself paleo or simply say you eat paleo because to an outsider, it all pretty much means the same thing. They don’t eat what I eat is the message people receive, and everything else is details.

Though, the details matter, because they identify you as either being honest, or a hypocrit. We found it rather surprising when we started our paleo journey over a year ago that the paleosphere talked about sustainable food, but so little on sustainability in general. Being close with nature is great when you’re working out and need to relieve stress, but once that’s over, time to get right back to our 21st century ways and buy plastic shit made in China and throw away those paper cups, right?

So even if you hear someone say they are paleo, you should know it’s probably a big lie anyway, and all the more reason to assume they just mean they eat paleo. Anyone who’s fully vested in paleo ideals beyond just the dietary would place a little more value on green ethics, after all.³

It’s about the money, stupid.

We honestly believe there are people in the movement who want to help, but the monetary aspect is inescapable. So much of the paleosphere is built around weight loss that a lot of otherwise good information gets lost under how do I shed these last five pounds? Cordain once said that in order to get The Paleo Diet published, his publisher required that the book present itself in a way that appeals to people wanting to lose weight. Yet in the recently published The Paleo Answer, which Cordain claims to have had more control over, the subtitle is “7 Days to Lose Weight, Feel Great, Stay Young”. So much for getting away from the weight-loss emphasis.

Can we blame Cordain if this is what it takes to fund the research? Some will argue that by catering to the weight-loss crowd, it’s easier to get the word out, but the content will inherently shift according to the target audience. For example, it took the paleosphere some time to adapt to the idea that low-carb was primarily beneficial to those seeking to lose weight, while those who were already lean could reintroduce carbs without issue. One has to wonder if many paleo books didn’t focus on weight loss, would their messages have been different from the get-go, or would the research have been steered slightly differently.

Then again, being all about the money doesn’t make paleo unique. After all, a primary reason the SAD is such a problem is because corporate greed got in the way of real food. But it does mean the paleosphere needs to retain a degree of skepticism about itself, questioning both new and old theories when confronted with evidence to the contrary. More importantly, it means calling out people within the paleosphere when their actions and ideas are based on bad science, or simple pseudoscience. To do otherwise is to do the movement a disservice, especially when there are individuals modifying their stances to fit evolving facts.

All’s not lost.

Of course, one of the merits of the paleo movement is that unlike other dietary programs, the former is adaptable. Even Cordain has loosened his stance on saturated fat since The Paleo Diet was published. Evolving with new facts and research is a major strength of the paleosphere, and we need to remember not to lose sight of that.

Perhaps what we call our style of eating isn’t as important as understanding why we choose to eat that way. Getting caught up in a label is a poor way to make a decision, especially if we forget the fundamental tenets of why we opted to go paleo in the first place. And we need to remember that a lot of these tenets are praised by those who don’t share all of our opinions. For example, before we embarked on our paleo journey, we found a lot of great ideas in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and still do today. Yet Pollan is easily dismissed among paleo circles, despite the fact that he’s endorsed whole, real foods for years, and declared nutrient breakdowns to be inconsequential compared to the synergies various native diets provide. It’s taken the paleosphere how long now to admit low carb or high fat is not the definitive answer?

Since the last Ancestral Health Symposium, there’s been a degree of infighting in the paleosphere, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it’s science we’re arguing over. There’s a need to question the established paradigm, and just as great a need to ensure that we’re getting the new one right. And if what comes out of that questioning isn’t a more qualified definition for a Paleo Template, then at least let’s get the underlying facts sorted sans label.

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