(I’ve never understood why, when most of the rest of the world went GSM, two of the three carriers in Canada elected to go CDMA. We’re just contrarians, I guess.)

There’s more to consider, though. Moving to GSM would come at tremendous cost, and not just in infrastructure. What about all those customers with CDMA models? If Telus is to keep them, it means free or nearly free phones for everybody. And a customer changing phones is at a fork in the road — it’s an opportunity to consider switching providers.

Telus won’t just be taking on Rogers for market share. Yes, Rogers is the only GSM carrier in Canada. But there’s a spectrum auction coming up and a new player almost certain to be in the mix. The way the wind is blowing, an MTS Allstream or Videotron would likely want to play in the GSM pool as well.

When 4G technology hits the wireless scene, that’s another upgrade. (It’s also a disincentive to new entrants, but it won’t keep them out of the bidding.) Yes, CDMA has its drawbacks, but for time being, it’s hard to make the case that switching to GSM would be a good thing.

With both hulla and ballou last July, the chipmaker and OLPC announced Intel was joining the board of the project and would work with OLPC to develop cheap laptop technology. Never mind that OLPC was already pushing the XO, an AMD-based laptop, nor that Intel was offering a competing computer, though at twice the price, in the Classmate.

It’s ended in tears and recriminations, with Intel citing “irreconcilable differences” and OLPC chair Nicholas Negroponte rumbling that Intel never put anything into the relationship. They just couldn’t stay together, even for the children’s sake (cue sappy music).

In any relationship, to quote Frank Nitti in the short-lived TV ressurection of The Untouchables in the late ’80’s, there’s three sides to every story, Al: Yours, mine and the truth. Truth is both sides should have known from the start it was an arrangment unlikely to work out; while Negroponte wanted Intel to collaborate on the XO and ditch the Classmate, Intel’s prenup — okay, actually a fact sheet on its Web site, still available at the time of this writing — Intel insists it “(will maintain) its commitment to the Intel-powered classmate PC. The classmate PC is receiving strong support from governments, educators and students worldwide and will continue to evolve and benefit from the Intel-OLPC collaboration.”

The exchange of pleasantries is getting uglier by the minute, with Negroponte dancing around the “S” word (sabotage; sorry, it was a little obscure) but plainly contemptuous telling one outlet that “we view the children as a mission, Intel views them as a market.”

Ouch.

Anecdotally, it sounds like Intel may have the bigger footprint in the mis- — uh, sorry, market — but the XO’s getting the better reviews at half the price.

PC World ranked the XO third on its list of most innovative products of 2007, and though I’ve not got my hands on one, the feature list includes peer networking over Wi-Fi, which my $1,700 Toshiba can’t do.

Well, they’ve had at ‘er for three days now, disassembling it, poking and probing, and it seems to be watertight (though not literally, like the Survivor USB key). It seems the key draws power from a battery within, not from the USB port on a computer, and it’s soldered in. They’ve concluded they can’t get at it without destroying the key. So chalk one up for Corsair.

So Rogers Wireless’s announcement of a voice-mail-to-text-message service powered by SpinVox left me, shall we say, sceptical. If software that is actually trained to a voice is erratic, how can you expect a machine to recognize and transcribe any old stranger’s voice that leaves you a voice mail?

Well, quelle surprise … The service actually works. Well, I might add.

I threw a few challenges at it after opening with a rather banal “just calling to see if this works” message. It handled the message from an accented friend almost perfectly (though, to be fair, she speaks more clearly and intelligibly than most “unaccented” people I know), stumbling only over her e-mail address — who is this provider “Synthatical,” anyway? But it did recognize it as an e-mail address, and rendered it accordingly.

Another friend left a message full of “hmms,” “mmms” and “yums,” all of which were decoded perfectly. So I upped the ante, throwing a few nasty words at it (it apparently has a quite expansive dictionary) and an “a’ight?” which it correctly, though humourlessly, spelled “alright.” (It also turned my “I’m Audi” into “I’m out of here.”)

Then I threw some French at it, which it also managed well, considering my butchery of the language and accent. Quelle surprise, indeed. Still waiting for a phone call from a Spanish-speaking friend who rolls her Rs hysterically, but so far, it hasn’t been fazed by anything.

Considering the scope of the job, my criticism — that neither phone calls nor e-mail addresses come up as actionable links — seem picky, especially since the phone Rogers sent was refurbished and hardly high-end (and, in fact, can’t seem to keep the right time and date).

So, colour me impressed. The recognition engine has obviously got something going for it, something I’d like to see in a desktop program. It might make transcribing my interviews much less painful.

Our latest little surprise came from the people at Corsair, who take USB memory keys and do things to the design that make you go, “I wish I’d thought of that.” A few weeks back, Corsair sent us the Survivor, a USB key housed in an aircraft-grade aluminium tube that gave us hours of entertainment trying to disprove its claims of indestructability.

The new package contained the Flash Padlock, an ingenious idea that protects your data with a PIN number. And if it’s half as secure as the FedEx package it came in, which took two strong men, a pair of scissors and about 15 minutes to open, then it’s, well, pretty secure.

The key comes in a rectangular plastic housing with a keypad on the front, featuring five numeric keys (0-1, 1-2, 3-4, etc.) and a set key. Flashing lights let you know what’s going on. Set up a PIN number, and your data remains inaccessible until you’ve entered the number. When you remove it from a USB port, it automatically locks. It’s really that simple.

It’s easy to set up a PIN, and the key can be used in an “always unlocked” mode. It’s a different way to protect yuor data as opposed to encryption; you can’t run a brute force crack on it, because someone has to physically enter the numbers. It’s only as secure as the PIN; it’ll take a combination of up to 10 digits. Because there are only numbers on the keypad, you can’t use words as a memory aid. You’re on your own if you forget the PIN. 

This is no Survivor, though. It’s got a plastic outer casing that doesn’t feel like it’d survive being trod on. And there’s a tiny screw on the back, which makes it look like it wouldn’t be difficult to disassemble. Would someone then be able to retrieve the data?

We’ll find out. I’ve passed it on to our tech team, to see if they can recover a file I’ve saved on it without using the PIN … and without completely destroying the key. We’ll let you know in a couple days.

Three categories on offer, here: First up, new MP3-oriented phones the Sony Ericsson W580i and the Samsung A516. Unremarkable, except that MicroSD memory card storage is on a forever upward trend; these phones are compatible with cards up to 8GB. The Samsung has a feature that allows you to shake the phone to change songs, and you needn’t flip it open to use the media player — there’s transport buttons on the surface. I got completely lost in the navigation, though, and that was only one mojito into the evening.

Rogers also launched HTC’s Touch iPhone wannabe, a couple weeks after Telus had done the same.

In Category 3, though, things got interesting: Two offerings with video-calling features. The clamshell MotoRAZR 2 is two millimetres thinner than previous incarnations. But the star, in terms of just drop-dead gorgeous looks, was LG’s Shine slider phone, a little stainless steel number whose screen, in dark mode, turns mirror-silver, turning the device into a sleek metal bar. It’s reflective enough for quick touch-ups — that stray eyebrow hair that’s always going awry and omigod is that a white hair in my goatee?

 As for the video calling … the demo station hooked me up with a colleague in another room by videophone. Or at least I think so — the room was loud. Visually, it was a Webcam-quality conversation with noticeable but not terrible lag. Your image appears in the lower right corner of the screen. And a warning’s in order, as old habits die hard: Since I couldn’t properly hear my interlocutor, at one point I reflexively brought the phone to the side of my head, giving her far too intimate an introduction to my ear canal.

It ain’t a unified communications suite by any stretch, but the lag is liveable. I’m hoping there’s the option of answering video calls as voice calls for those seven a.m. interuptions when you still have bleary eyes, toothpaste on your chin and hair that’s breaking new ground in terms of geometry. (No longer my problem, actually.) I am reaching a little for the applications, but give consumers a technology for a couple years, and they tend to find the application themselves.

Yes, we send too much time sitting on our assets in front of a computer. This can be a sedentary life (if not actually, glacially, sedimentary) and we can probably use a little more activity. So says Gamercize, a U.K. company that’s marketing the GZ PC-Sport & Power Stepper.

The unit, essentially a small step machine, fits under a workstation, but that’s not where it ends, according to the company Web site. The unit motivates more activity by, for example, disabling the mouse and keyboard after too much inactivity, forcing you to get going again to get your work done. It analyzes your physical performance and reports on how well you’re doing. A personal trainer program is available by subscription.

(I saw Woody Allen’s Bananas recently, which opens with Woody’s Fielding Mellish hard at work at his day job, demonstrating an exercise suite that allows busy executives to get a workout while at their desks. It’s a marvellous example of Allen’s seemingly lost talent for physical comedy; but since I couldn’t find the clip on YouTube, I’ve linked to the hysterical, though completely irrelevant, courtroom scene instead.)

By Joaquim P. Menezes -

There’s an entire slew of Instant Messaging tools out there, so what’s the big deal about an upgrade to an existing service – and a beta version at that.

The significance of Yahoo Social Messenger 9.0 beta – which launches today – isn’t just in its simpler and slicker user interface or cool new features.

9.0, it seems, represents Yahoo’s strenuous efforts to find its groove in social networking, something the company hasn’t been able to do very successfully so far.

Will Yahoo Messenger 9.0 provide a decisive answer to the likes of MySpace and Facebook.

Yahoo certainly hopes that will be the case, and in redesigning the application has focused on beefing up its social networking features.

For instance, Messenger 9.0 makes it very easy to initiate contact with friends and associates via various channels: just place your cursor on a contact on your list, and options for contacting them are displayed.

A single click then allows you to send a text message to IM and more. Clicking on the area next to the name displays the person’s entire contact card.

The service also adds a new group to the list – all of the Yahoo address book contacts. From this list, one is able to launch a call, email or text message a contact – or click Edit to view their full listing.

For those who have a lot of contacts, the Search bar on top helps one locate a contact by typing a contact’s name and phone number in the bar to quickly locate them.

The updated photo feature in Yahoo Messenger 9.0 offers better integration with Flickr.com – Yahoo’s photo sharing Web site.

One 9.0 feature being heavily promoted by Yahoo is the “inline media player.”

If you paste a link from a popular video site – such as YouTube or Yahoo Video – in the IM window allows you to watch the video within your IM window, instead of visiting a separate Web site (you would need to have copied the link first,  so chances are you will visit the video Web site anyway).

The new “Forward” feature is another cool capability. It allows you to stay connected with contacts even when you’re offline. Before signing out, you can click a Forward button to get IMs forwarded to your mobile phone as text messages.

Also, if you have a Yahoo Messenger phone in number, you can have your incoming calls forwarded to another number – like your mobile or home phone.

Some of these features are likely to increase the use Yahoo Messenger in an enterprise context.

Of course, scores of the 94 million Yahoo Messenger users already use the tool at work – something they’ve been able to do more securely since both IBM Lotus and Microsoft introduced a federation between their EIM systems and some of the public IM networks – including Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

What turned up was, while tiny, certainly not like the machines I’ve test-driven before. While Fujitsu calls the U810 a notebook computer, you could argue it’s a convertible tablet UMPC. It’s smaller than a paperback, with a compressed keyboard, 5.6-inch touchscreen, built-in Web cam and fingerprint reader, and runs on Windows Vista Basic. You can get full specs here.

I drafted this post on the subway, alternating between the surprisingly accurate, but far from perfect, handwriting recognition and the tiny keyboard. Of the latter: You’ll have to resort to four-finger hunt-and-peck keying, partly because of the size of the keys — the alpha keys are a half-inch across — and partly because the symbols and function keys are crammed onto the alpha keys, accessible through a function key.

 Look at it as a tiny laptop, and it’s frustrating. Typos abound unless you’ve got aristocratically thin fingers (mine aren’t exactly sausages). The square pad to control the cursor is located on the right side of the screen mount, with left and right mouse buttons on the left side. It’s an interesting implementation, but it’s largely useless because of the speed at which the cursor crosses the screen and its tiny icons. This leads to a hybrid keyboard-stylus mode of operation that takes some getting used to.

Running standard Windows apps is frustrating — text and icons can be so small as to be practically unusable. But it’s not meant to be a laptop replacement. It works well as a slate. It makes practically no dent in the space in my courier bag (no, it’s not a man purse) and only weighs a pound and a half. It boasts a five-plus-hour battery life, and would be perfect for hauling around presentations and gathering contact information on the road. And, hey, I finished this draft in a phone booth — how cool is that?

It’s not explicitly positioned as an iPhone competitor, but it’s implicit. David Neale, chatting after the launch, referred to the iPhone as “opening the floodgates” for similar devices.

The Touch, at first blush, is very much a Windows experience on an iPhone footprint — all touchscreen, no buttons — and it seems a little inelegant in comparison (though I’ve spent very little time with an iPhone, hint, hint). It comes with a stylus, after all …

I haven’t put it through all its paces yes, so I won’t pass judgment on the device yet. The experience of surfing the Web on it wasn’t great, but I don’t think that’s entirely the device’s fault. On the 2.8-inch screen, links were often tiny enough to elude my fingers, which aren’t exactly sausage-sized but felt big and clumsy today. Yes, that’s what the stylus is for, but the iPhone has changed expectations about the smart phone experience.

Web design will have to evolve as these devices proliferate. Tiny button links will become big square icons; navigation will become a flip-through or fly-through experience like choosing media on an iPhone. Structure will become flatter rather than deeper, since people will prefer to flip through lots of options in landscape mode to drilling down through layers for a more focused selection.

One day, and it’s not far off, the majority of Web traffic will be mobile. If Web design doesn’t change, surfing will be a frustrating experience.