I’ve made a couple of futile attempts at catching up with personal e-mail over the last week while cradling kid #2, a bottle (for him, of course) and my battered iPod Touch.

Despite everything, I still subscribe to a few mailing-lists (mostly fringe ones where some of the industry geeks let off some steam), and eventually stumbled across yet another long winded (and winding) argument about iPhone and Android, relative pros and cons of each, and how they are to become the modern equivalent of the Mac and Windows as OEMs steadily increase their production of Android devices.

Which, if you take away the tin foil hat and conspiracy theory bits, is a view I broadly espouse – my views on Android’s fragmentation and lack of a defining user experience are well-known, but I suppose those are just growing pains.

And my feelings towards mobile platforms are pretty much the same as the ones towards desktop ones – I’ll use whatever suits me, and find it rather wasteful to play partisan to any of them – there’s a difference between personal preference and evangelism, and some people never seem to get it.

After all, it isn’t as if there weren’t enough examples… The Linux “community” (or, rather, the “Unconsensus”, as one of my friends at Red Hat coined it once) damaged their own credibility by over-advocating and under-delivering across nearly two decades (yes, folks, it’s been that long), and some of the more outspoken Android advocates seem doomed to repeat that particular bit of the past.

Fortunately, delivery seems to be a non-issue as far as Android is concerned – it’s just that perceptions are too skewed, and advocacy of any kind becomes tiresome when overdone.

Still, some fun was had watching a couple of arguments unfold around the unspeakably warped piece comparing the Nexus One sales to iPhone and Droid sales, until I stepped in and pointed out that a) the Nexus One is not as much a retail product as it is a mail-order one and b) there are significant differences not just in terms of pricing, but also of operator subsidies and contract commitments.

Now you just try to explain that to people who only watch the commercials and don’t read the fine print…

Anyway, what I realized as I pored over the month old (but still raging) argument was that people weren’t as much worried about “choice”, app stores and usability as they were about the basics: battery life, SMS (and IM, which I have mentally put in the same bag for years now), e-mail and browsing.

And, of course, data plans – oh, what minefield of fun that is, especially when the discussions span national borders – but I won’t get into that. Suffice it to say that out of around 50 active folk on that list, the broad consensus was “it may sing and dance, but we want the basics to work really, really well”.

Then the Blackberry crowd chimed in and the argument pretty much petered out, since you can’t really argue about their phones hitting all the right buttons except browsing (for now, at least), even if they lack the glamour and newsworthiness of the other two platforms¹.

But Blackberry is hardly a household name (even if the new low-cost 8520 is gaining traction in the consumer segment pretty much everywhere), and the truth is that most people don’t know or care about what kind of phone they have provided the basics are covered and they know how much it costs for them to use data.

That is something I sorely wish more people realized – sometimes I think that we (as in, the industry, in general) keep losing sight of the basics, and that all the tech and thrills we keep harping on about have brought upon very little actual improvement in how average people use their phones and what for.

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¹ Before you ask, the Symbian advocates were mostly lurking and debating whether S60v5 still has a future. It’s a US-centric list, too, so most people on it have blinders on where it concerns anything on EMEA (and don’t you just love the bigotry implied in that acronym?) and don’t share my overall feeling of Nokia being the elephant in the room… ↩

I’ve been watching with bemused interest as US geeks (apparently 120.000 of them, although I’d take any initial figures with a large grain of salt if I were you) rushed to pre-order their iPads and, deprived of the thrill of actually using it until it arrives, gushed forth on the details of their purchase and reasons thereof as if they were boasting about the pedigree of a puppy that is yet to be weaned and handed to them in a little basket.

Me, I’ll wait until it reaches Portugal, and do just as I mentioned on my very first take on it (have a look and then decide whether I want the 3G model or not). I’m sure I won’t be stretching the budget too far, though – another thing about having two kids is that makes you think twice about buying anything, and I don’t need storage or any kind of frilly accessories.

What struck as most interesting there was the amount of people mentioning the MiFi specifically, since that little box has been very popular recently (it’s also sold here – full disclosure: I work at Vodafone, here’s my disclaimer, etc., etc.), and despite having a 3G module on just about anything but my MacBook, I’ve long preferred having a personal router of sorts for the plain and simple reason that I’d rather have gadgets that do one thing very well rather than replicate their functionality on (and render more expensive) other devices¹.

Embedded 3G is more convenient than a dongle, sure, but neither are very battery-friendly, and today’s laptops and netbooks aren’t exactly marathon runners – so even in some single user situations it makes a lot of sense to have something else bleeding out battery into the ether.

In fact, six years ago, long before Wi-Fi and mobile broadband were commonplace on phones, my colleagues and I did mostly the same with the Z1010 – it only supported a single serial Bluetooth connection, but one of us would carry it around in his bag and share the dial-up connection via Wi-Fi (often for a bit more than five folk).

And when staying somewhere while traveling, we just plugged it into the charger and hung it off the curtain rod, which became a running joke of sorts – but it was awfully convenient, because outside Portugal indoor coverage was pretty much non-existent, and even with Bluetooth’s limitations you could sit comfortably away from the nearest window.

Of course, those were the days before the Internet turned into a Flash banner festival, and that’s something else I’ve also been looking at. There seems to be a (well-deserved) backlash against both Flash and banner ads and reciprocal support for both², with fascinatingly passionate (and often quite detailed) arguments on either side.

There’s even been an escalation of sorts in technical terms. I’ve noticed that Mark Pilgrim came up with a way to detect Flash blockers and Ars Technica did a very public (and, in my opinion, flawed and utterly predictable) experiment by temporarily shutting out people with ad blockers³.

Which was when I realized I hadn’t seen a Flash advertisement in months (I use ClickToFlash, of course) and that I don’t miss it for anything – not even video (and if I did, there are now literally sublime alternatives). Nor do I see the overwhelming majority of banner ads except Google’s contextual text-only advertising (because it’s actually relevant in several cases), or even portions of the new Facebook UI that I despise.

That, of course, is not the norm (few people would bother to customize their browsing experience that way, regardless of the payoffs), but either discussion has made more people aware that yes, you can do video (and more accessible and professional web sites) without Flash and that you can block advertisements altogether.

I’m curious as to where these will lead (mostly for the sake of the mobile browsing experience), but not really worried – a long while back people would shout blue murder over the use of the blink tag, so I guess these are just a sign of the Web’s later teen⁴ years.

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¹ In case you have a 2200 and are annoyed at being unable to just charge it over a USB port, the routeroverusb tweak may well be what you’re looking for. ↩

² Truth be told, more in favor of banner ads than Flash. ↩

³ Which, ironically, failed in my case due to the way I use custom CSS to block ads – and have for years now. ↩

⁴ Mosaic came about in 1993, so the Web’s 17 right now, and I think it’s finally showing enough sense for us to let it borrow the car keys, start looking for its own flat, and maybe in three years or so (once it gets over its current phase of dating every cloud computing model it meets) finally get married to HTML5, provided it invites auntie Microsoft to the wedding. ↩

I have a vague recollection of having had four major periods of sleep deprivation in my lifetime:

1. a good part of my graduation year, amidst working, studying, and pulling all-nighters for various reasons
2. a while back in Engineering, amidst working on 3G, backhaul and DPI plus around fifteen other things all at once
3. around the time my first kid was born
4. now

One thing about “now” is that I’m pretty much at the peak of the initial three to four months’ worth of 2-hour feeding cycles, which entails stumbling blearily into the kitchen at any random time between 2 and 4am to paw at the cupboard for formula and a pre-assembled sterilized bottle (remember, kids, logistics and preparation are key to success in delivering any physical product, be it a phone or a bottle of warm milk), avoiding falling asleep while the little Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal suckles on it, persuading the tiny critter to burp afterwards and, of course, re-wrapping the little bundle of joy in a fresh diaper and getting it to settle down.

All of this done on tiptoe in an attempt to avoid waking up his (now jealous and tantrum-prone) sibling – which ordinarily sleeps regular hours, but is showing the sort of endearing mood that people have come to associate with me (ah, the joys of genetics) – and having to get up in the morning to an uncertain match between my thus hampered intellectual abilities and the entropy pit that are office hours.

And I’m only doing a part of it – getting through entire days with both of them is, I’m told, an experience on par with trying to manage the cargo manifest of an airplane carrier while bungee jumping, so I would (ordinarily) be glad to be away at the office during working hours.

There is, of course, a catch – my sense of humor is now impaired to the extent where Gregory House and Sheldon Cooper seem like paragons of congeniality and merriment, which isn’t exactly good when your primary (unacknowledged) job is, to a large extent, dealing with people (and politics) to get things done and when such things are to be done in at a frantic pace with enough organization to cater for procedural backups when things go wrong (my outlying paranoia to guard against trouble in projects has been escalating to the point where it now calls for the equivalent of belt, suspenders and duct tape).

Plus I’m (as usual) the default gateway for stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere, and am interrupted around five times an hour on good days.

My answer to the organization bit and the marked decrease on effective attention span is simple – copious one-sentence notes and checklists in Evernote, as well as liberal use of flags on the veritable firehose of e-mails I have to contend with (now clocking in at tens of thousands and 4–5GB each three months, of which I usually archive a quarter).

The interruptions are best addressed by leveraging the great bits about working in a mobile company – picking a floor at random and camping out on the common areas, where there are low tables and chairs with great views to the outside (and hence enough sunlight to keep me readily awake), working “remotely”. Since we have no landlines I’m just as reachable as on my desk, but this arrangement neatly cuts down on all the impulsive, matter-of-fact questioning, petitioning, and sometimes outright passing the buck that daily re-asserts Dilbert as the best possible insight into the inner workings of large corporations.

Sadly, I can’t always do that – people have weird reactions to the notion that one might actually want to spend an entire morning working on a document without interruptions instead of my listening to their every little quibble, and the ingrained European view towards office work (regardless of posturing and outspoken support of remote working) is still mostly “where is he?” rather than “where are the results?” (the one thing I miss from working with US folk and companies), so peace of mind is somewhat uneven.

Thankfully, most of my colleagues have as much initiative and self-drive as intelligence, so there’s very little cat-herding involved (or, more cynically, at least the cats here are smarter).