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 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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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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The iPad home button may be an iconic piece of iPad history, but iconic doesn’t mean practical. People said the scroll wheel was emblematic too, but the iPod received a makeover with touch technology as soon as Apple realized the wheel was a point of failure. Dave Caolo thinks the home button is too important, and likely doesn’t equate it with the forgotten scroll wheel. After all, the wheel only changed form, and was no more complicated to use when it went touch-sensitive.

As Bill Williams was keen to point out, the whole mess isn’t a problem if a dynamic home button appeared based on the iPad’s orientation. We propose to take the idea one step further and provide illumination to the area of the bezel that’s active. This visual cue would remove any sense of confusion a user might have over how to get back to the springboard, and instead of a “push”, perhaps a swipe in a given direction would do the trick just as easily.

Apple stands for sleekness in design, and the home button is a remnant of the old.¹ As long as Apple can maintain the intuitive feel of their hardware interfaces, there’s no reason to stick with a home button that’s prone to failure; the home button may be robust for now, but as owners of some older iPhones will tell, the mechanism doesn’t stay perfect forever.

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We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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On Friday, we drove by two Targets, a Best Buy, and an AT&T store to see if anyone was selling the Jawbone UP early. None were. The reports we heard about UPs selling early must have been very isolated experiences, though it seems people had more success at Apple stores, who apparently are more likely to not play by the rules.¹ Both Target stores we visited had places set aside, complete with labels, for the three sizes of the UP initially available, yet employees at neither store could tell me whether they already sold out of their UP stock, or if they hadn’t received any yet. We decided to return to the AT&T store on Sunday morning.

We had sized our wrist using the printable template available at the UP site. This proved to be a waste of time, because not only did the AT&T store have demo units out to try on, but the packaging on each UP box has a plastic template included, so buyers can check for their size when in the store. It’s a nice touch, and shows Jawbone’s attention to detail. So we bought our UP, and set it up in the car on the way home.² We won’t bother to give a full review here, because we found Shawn Wall’s review to be plenty thorough for a product that’s only officially been on shelves for less than two days, but we will respond to some points he made for the sake of completeness.

The rubberized bracelet is bendable to a degree. It’s not the simplest task in the world getting it on or off your wrist, but thankfully you don’t really need to take it off given its waterproof nature.

Jawbone actually calls the bracelet water resistant, and only to a fairly shallow depth. The idea is that you can wash your hands, and even take it into the shower, without worrying about it getting damaged. We even saw a picture of someone wearing it in a shallow pool, so the idea that you can wear it most places is obviously something Jawbone wants customers to understand. But don’t think about taking the UP diving. In fact, the notion of taking this thing in the ocean makes us a bit uncomfortable, and we’d rather someone else tried it first.

When we took a shower this morning, our hesitation for getting the UP wet made us take it off. It’s not like you’ll be missing out on too much activity tracking in those few minutes of the morning anyway. Though, we did notice that the black rubberized band³ attracts dirt pretty quickly, so wearing it into the shower may not be a bad idea after all.

As far as bendability goes, the UP has to be somewhat bendable to get it on and off. But that’s only for the “ends” of the band, and the bendability is temporary. In other words, you can’t bend the UP into a different shape, or make it larger or smaller.

There’s really not much in the way of moving parts here; there is a button at one end that is used for switching modes (more on that later), and the opposite end has a cap that is pulled off to reveal the 3.5mm male jack that is used to sync the device with your mobile phone (currently iPhone-only, but Android “coming soon”).

The one thing we don’t like about the UP is that the button on one end, as well as the cap, is painted silver. We’d much rather have these match the main band colour, as we don’t expecially like the accent color. The cap is only silver on one side though, so if you put it on backwards, it appears black to all but the closest observer. A backwards cap also means you’re not proudly displaying “Jawbone” written on your jewelry; we don’t need to advertise for the company we already supported by buying their product. Depending on how much we dislike the button on the other end being an “off” colour, we may end up painting it black down the road.

One really great feature in regards to sleep is that the bracelet can be used as an alarm clock using vibration. Even better, it supposedly will wake you up out of a light sleep instead of a deep sleep by getting you up a little earlier if it can (by looking at your deep vs. light sleep somehow).

This feature worked well for us this morning, though to be fair, we didn’t sleep all that great last night anyway, and noticeably tumbled around a bunch. In this case, we were quick to feel the pulsing vibration of the alarm, but we wonder if it will wake us on days that we have a deeper sleep. Today, it woke us up 15 minutes early. We’re considering doing a side-by-side test of the UP and Sleep Cycle iPhone app to see how consistent the two are, or if one tends to go off before the other. For now, though, we expect the UP to handle our alarms equally well, if not better, with the only concern being whether the vibration is strong enough to rouse us from a deep sleep.

One of my favorite feature of the device is found in this area. You can set your bracelet to remind you to be active if you are sedentary for too long. The time range is user defined. This is great as it can remind us programmers to get out of our chairs once an hour

We’re rather fond of this feature also. We have it enabled during business hours, and its a great reminder to get up and do something, even if it’s just to pee or get some fresh water.

I do not own another pedometor, Fitbit or anything else along those lines so I cannot speak for the accuracy of the UP. It feels like the numbers are too high though.

Whether they’re too high or not, all we can say is that the “lightly active” category is cake during an average weekend, and that’s not even with workout scheduled. From noon until night yesterday, we scored over 8k steps taken, which means we can easily up our steps goal to the next level. We’ll have to see how our weekend activity compares to the average workday to see whether it’s worth adjusting our goals at this time, though.

The food diary portion of the application is well… a little underwhelming in my opinion.

We haven’t played with this feature too much yet, and honestly, we’re not too tempted considering there’s no way to count calories. We’ve used other apps to compare our caloric intake to our ideal goal (at least 3k calories a day), and the fact that such a simple feature is missing makes us feel like we’d gain little from the UP app’s inclusion of a food log. Maybe once this feature becomes more robust, we’ll be more likely to keep up with it.

Game mechanics are a huge portion to an offering such as the UP, and I feel they currently fall a little short.

We agree with Shawn here, and don’t like how simply accepting a challenge means others who accepted the challenge can suddenly see your progress. We’d prefer “private” challenges that don’t involved any reporting, or at the very least, allow users to select a username instead of their registered (true) name. Sure, the public feed only uses first names, but we’d still prefer a nickname.

The problem of the food log and the game mechanics points at the one flaw the UP currently has, and that’s a very simplistic piece of software. If Jawbone maintains a regular release schedule of updates and bug fixes, however, we can truly see the pair being a useful lifestyle assistant for some time to come.

More thoughts to follow as we spend more time with our new bracelet.

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The talk of late is Apple’s further foray into the television industry, pushing beyond the Apple TV into a full-fledged televisions. And the question, of course, is how Apple will do it, and the only certain thing everyone agrees on is that Apple will revolutionize television by completely revamping it, instead of iterative improvement ala DVRs. Logically, this means that live streaming of television may be off the table, and we consider that a good thing, because as this post’s title suggests, flicking through channels in search of something good is dumb.

Chris Martucci sides with those who like channel surfing:

Being in direct control is not always desirable. It’s why we still use services such as StumbleUpon and Pandora. I don’t want to always choose the song I want to listen to. Sometimes, I want to be at the mercy of chance. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But channel surfing isn’t just leaving things up to chance, because the next station you’re about to tune into is the one right next to the one you’re already on in numerical order. If you scroll up in the channel list, you’re always seeing the same sequence of channels flash by. If you scroll down it’s still the same sequence, only in reverse. And chances are, you may very well miss out on something good because you stop on something good enough only a few channels away. And half the time, you’re just bypassing commercials anyway, so you’re wasting an enormous amount of time scrolling through crap because you apparently have nothing better to do.

Making the television a device where you watch what you demand is far more efficient. It’s the “every channel is an app” philosophy wherein you request exactly the show you want, only to have it stream accordingly. Ideally, there wouldn’t be any commercials, and you won’t get sidetracked with mediocre shows unless you specifically request them. And that model doesn’t remove the concept of “chance”, because discovery of shows you don’t request is still possible: either you can discover new shows with a recommendation engine ala Pandora¹, else you can select a “true” random function that will start playing anything from the Apple television library. Either option serves Martucci’s need to stumble across new programming, but it removes much of the inefficiency of how channel surfers do it today.

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Following up our post on handwriting apps for the iPad, we recently revisited some of the apps we tried, and replaced, with Notes Plus. We’ve been waiting for the new version of Notes Plus to hit the AppStore, but it’s likely still some weeks off, and in the meantime, the competition has released point releases offering more functionality. Maybe Notes Plus will retake the crown when 3.0 hits later this autumn, but for now, it’s not the clear winner in this genre anymore.

Penultimate has a paper store now, where you can download additional backgrounds to write on. It also allows importing of pictures to mock up, and as always, it offers arguably the best “ink” feel of any of the apps in this category. While a zoom feature is planned, the current lack of this feature keeps it from being a serious note-taking tool for more than quick sketches and notes.¹

We also took another look at Noteshelf, which now sports a zoom window that’s configurable and auto-advances. We’ve actually grown to like the non-auto-advance zoom window that Notes Plus has, if only because the auto-advance feature tends to introduce momentary lag; the Notes Plus zoom box is simply quicker to write on. That said, since the zoom window can be customized, it’s easy to write at exactly the size you want, regardless of paper style used. (And Noteshelf has a paper store too, now.)

Noteshelf has better notebook organization now, too, as notebooks can be grouped, which somewhat emulates folders. The design of the app is overall more aesthetically pleasing, too, and the inking is nearly on par with Penultimate. Between the design and ink quality, this makes using Noteshelf a far more pleasing experience than Notes Plus. Another new feature is importing photos, and while they can’t be resized once placed on a page, this is a top feature we want in this type of app, and the fact that it remains lacking in Notes Plus is unfortunate. What we’d prefer is if our scribbles over an imported photo remain independent from the photo, but this and the lack of image resizing isn’t a deal-breaker.²

Notes Plus still offers audio recording, which is an awesome feature, but one we don’t really use. It’s nice to know that the feature is there, but since we don’t rely on it most of the time, Notes Plus has fallen off our main screen and was replaced by Noteself. It’s interesting how close these apps are to one another in terms of quality, however, and we can easily see Notes Plus regaining the throne in short order, or even Penultimate launching itself to the top with the inclusion of zoom functionality.

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Talking about stands for the iPad that would work just as well regardless of iPad orientation, and regardless of whether your work surface is a tabletop or your lap, we proposed a unique design back in May:

…a more convenient accessory for the iPad would be a well-designed “clip” that attaches to Apple’s bluetooth keyboard with a stand for the iPad in either orientation. This would be a fairly small gadget, would complement existing iPad accessories, and allow one to use the iPad in a lap environment without forcing the user into a given orientation. There are several accessories that exist to incorporate a physical keyboard into an iPad user’s workflow, but nothing yet that’s this versatile which maintains the iPad’s flexibility for supreme mobility when a physical keyboard isn’t needed.

Shortly after we wrote that, we placed an order for the InCase Origami Workstation, which we’ve used ever since. Our only complaint with the InCase solution is that because the Origami Workstation wraps around Apple’s bluetooth keyboard, there’s wasted space in our briefcase when we travel. Before, the bluetooth keyboard could be slid between papers, or sit battery-side down against the briefcase wall, but with the Origami Workstation wrapped around it, the keyboard is a larger “wedge” that takes up more room. It’s not a huge deal, but when space in the briefcase is at a premium, we’d prefer a smaller footprint.¹

Fortunately, there’s a solution on the horizon that’s a much closer match to what we described back in May. Before funding ended, we managed to support Kickstarter project WINGStand, which is a two-part clip system that attaches to an Apple bluetooth keyboard, allowing you to rest an iOS device on the resulting stand. As soon as our WINGStand arrives, we’ll be sure to comment on real-world use. But, if you missed the Kickstarter campaign and can’t wait to pick one up now, there’s a web site set up to take orders.

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