It's chilling to read the story of a mother who twittered before, after and throughout her child's drowning. Toddlers are lightning quick - and so is disaster. To make sense of this tragedy, we've taken the liberty of putting what happened into a little bit of context concerning the limits of a human's capacity for attention span.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a world authority on happiness derived from a state of "flow," notes in his TED talk:

... actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you.

While there are no studies that say how many bits of potentially hazardous information a toddler is putting out per second, I would dare say that they seem to be flirting with death or disaster in just about all of them. A toddler requires, from my own personal experience at least 80 to 90 bits for safety to be in play. From my own personal experience a text message requires at least 40 bits for a person like me. I can hear you, but can't respond while texting.


However, no matter how the math works out, generally there will be no personal screen time or cell phone use while a toddler is around. At best, a phone call or a quick reply will put safety in question, and while I'm not one to advocate a dictum or a hard-and-fast rule, I would say, at best, the screen better be playing Dora the Explorer or something like that.


This week, my 22-month-old got a semi-broken iPhone of her own. She knows how to work the thing better than most adults I know who own one. It's been set up with a Sponge Bob app, some Stevie Wonder in the iPod app, an Animal Sound Machine, and a flashcard app, and she's already fine with identifying the icon that suits her fancy. She gets bored, and a home button gets pressed, and the next episode of Dora is playing. She's a pro.


There is the temptation to check my phone's calendar or to do list or to shoot a quick twitter while she's absorbed in her own device. I thought that's what I would get if she had a smartphone of her own.


No dice.


She's too squirmy to be doing anything but watching with her. At best, I can pick kids programming and iTunes Store apps that are fun for both of us to play if I really have the urge to do a gesture or two.


At the end of the day, the learning curve for these amazing gadgets goes in reverse. Kids will intuitively excel at incorporating them into their daily affairs, but adults, new to these machines and what they can do have a steep climb before they "intuitively" know how it's supposed to fit into their lives.


At the very least, the recent news says pretty clearly: The Pretty Bird on Twitter should be stowed in favor of Big Bird when a toddler is around.

The buzz word is, what, if anything, could ever compete with Apple or produce the sought after "iPhone Killer"? The answer is: no one. But, will apple crumble under the weight of its own empire?

History and Nature run rampant with examples cultures and creatures who, as the undisputed top of the food chain, become their own worst enemies. The biggest threat to the Roman Empire was its own corruption. A human being's natural predator is other people. The Church during the middle ages found that one of its own priests, Martin Luther, was the one to tear it apart, and when new adult lions take over a pride, they often kill the young and thus eliminate the chance of any rivalry against offspring he later fathers.


The catch-word in the world of smart-phones is who or what could stand up to the marvels of the iPhone and shine brighter than it. Who or what could stand against its resplendent coolness and utility and garner the favor of the public. What, if anything, will be the "iPhone Killer." The answer is nothing will, I think.

After all, it is undeniably sleek, inexpensive (not counting service fees) and easy to use. Most Web ware is disigned specifically for its screen. It is the bench mark. It has no other natural predators - not even the Blackberry - or at least not in the same way.

But an ill wind is blowing through the social sphere for Apple. It would seem that the Mac world without any natural predators, and perhaps without the demanding vision of an ailing Steve Jobs, they've seemed to start showing little cracks and chicks in their armor, especially in their hallmark of out-thinking or defining design and ultra-no-brainer-usability.

When my wife had to call upon Apple Care to replace her 15" Mac Book Pro, her model had been discontinued and was sent the latest "upgrade." A stickler for form, she opted to haggle her way to whatever the warehouses still had in stock that resembled her older model. In the end, she fell in-line with the clamor and debate that said, "Why didn't Apple offer a matte screen when releasing the next version of their line of laptops?"

While we’ve come to accept that today’s LCD displays, particularly on notebooks, are mostly of the glossy variety, Apple took it a step further with a glass sheet on top of what already appears to be a glossy LCD screen. The affect is an unsettling double-reflection from a display that’s mirror-like.

"We’ve spent a considerable amount of time with the full range of Apple notebook displays, from the matte and glossy from the previous generation MacBook Pro to the “glassy” unibody MacBook. And we’ll be the first say that the aesthetic designs of the new unibody MacBooks are worthy of a museum, but in terms of usability, the glass-covered screen is a pain to work with even when indoors". - "MacBook Pro Glossy vs. Matte FIGHT!," February 26, 2009 by Marcus Yam http://www.tomshardware.com/

 At the end of the day, she "settled" on a 17" version that was selling in 2006, despite what she could have had with up-to-date hardware and processing power. She, the epitome of Apple's target audience that is characterized by an overarching attention to form over function, was happier with an older machine.

A month ago this popped up in my Facebook feed:

"I want to punch the dumbass at Apple who designed the latest shuffle. New shuffle is about as useful 40 lb sack of deflated footballs. Not only do I want a refund, but I now officially want Apple to get swallowed by an 8-track and Etch-a-sketch revival." - September 4, 2009 (Name withheld out of courtesy).

Presumably, the issue here was that the new shuffle has no buttons. Controlling its playback happens through controls on the headphones.

A few days later of Facebook:

"Adam P. officially hates his iphone." -September 16, 2009

A followup comment to someone considering buying an iPhone vs. continuing with a Blackberry, the same user said this:

"I'd stay stick with it. The iPhone offers the best user interface of any smartphone on the market. It's a joy to use, when it works. Unfortunately, it's tied to AT&T's decrepit network. 3G is frequently unusable, voice quality is poor, and I can seldom get through a call of more than ten minutes without having it drop. A fast car on poor roads makes little headway, while continuing to cost a lot."

This user makes a living as a computer professional, and granted he's quoting issues with his cellular carrier, but when there's only one option Apple has given for using its "fast car" then the utility of its gadget is united with the mobile carrier that supplies its pipeline. In short, it's no use pardoning the shortcomings of the iPhone because the affairs of AT&T is out of its hands. Presumably the folks who designed it dreamed, hoped and prayed that the success it has garnered is what we see today. They want to have everyone want one and own one without thinking that their options for service aught to be sufficient to accommodate infinite demand for their product.

Furthermore, it's a really swell idea and truly characteristic of Apple to have the iPhone's synchronize with iTunes. It's a really swell idea, in theory. But, anyone who has had to take their computer in for a service repair and had it returned empty and at factory condition knows that it's nearly impossible to restore iTunes back to the state you had it.

iTunes is a poor excuse for a synchronization software. Data is gold these days, and though Apple is known for removing as many buttons and extra screens as possible, having access to how and when and in which direction your data is being moved or stored is critical. It's not something to keep behind the closed doors of buttons, and certainly a task that should have more real estate than to mingle on the same patio as a juke box or a media shopping mall.

Ask anyone who has lost all their contacts when a reloaded iTunes automatically syncs and overwrites its empty library to your iPhone and you're looking at one miserable socialite.

Furthermore, if you, say, want to synchronize your contacts and calendar items with anything but iCal or MobileMe, you're in for quite a hacking adventure. Apple has yet to recognize (and it never did since that is its underlying ethos, and perhaps its beauty) that nowadays people are forming gadget ecologies. That is, when every gadget you own, touch and double click is made by Apple, there is harmony, style and perfection, but throw in a free radical like Microsoft Entourage and your whole Device's OS collapses.

Finally there are some strange hardware omissions to Apple's next generation of mainstay products. The new iPod Touch doesn't have a camera, while the iPod Nano does - but only for video. There's been a lot of speculation on why Apple, who has done the miraculous over the years with making the mouse a mainstay, creating (or at least making it commonplace) the Web app industry, for taking our mobile devices to the next level in the form of the first release of the iPhone, and in short, always being the pioneer, but now it would seem that they are becoming insincere with their fans.

Gizmodo.com has a full treatment on why their next generation of products has, not just fallen short of what we have all come to expect from Apple - miracles, but also some of their peculiar decisions on both form, their strongest suit, and function. Here's the concluding thoughts from Gizmodo's article, "Why There Is No Camera In the iPod Touch and Why That Sucks" by Jesus Diaz:

"• Feature Evolution: This, to me, is the most reasonable explanation. Apple is getting oh-so-lazy. Or, better said, greedy. They are the number one player in every single category. They own the market. And they know the competition is just catching on. So instead of releasing an iPhone that is way better than the previous model, they release the modest upgrade of the iPhone 3GS. And instead of releasing an iPod touch with a nice camera, they just slap some new software, slightly updated guts and more memory.

That's what you get when a company owns an empire, and the other tiny people are trying to catch up with an already phenomenal device. The company gets slow and complacent, and does the minimum to keep its products ahead."

 And so, it would seem that Apple has a finally found its match: iTself. It's hard to imagine those years when Apple was a lame and crippled company; when there was no hope that it would ever survive, much like the word around town is shouting the end of Palm. It's hard to remember that Microsoft was hot and not an "Evil Empire," but behold! They passed the baton back over to Apple.

It may very well be that Apple continues to hold its dominance for many years to come, but, it's hard to conceive of that happening. See, Apple, at its core, loathes diversity. It thrives when all of the apples in the barrel are freshly provided by their orchard. Stick anything not grown by them and their bushels rot with from that one bad apple.

It's competition - particularly next generations of Android and WebOS - will have on its side, not only a coalition of mobile providers and Goolge's army of free products to draw from in the case of Android, but also an army of pasty faced youths who have a small learning curve ahead of them in designing for WebOS. In short Apple has fallen, already, way behind in what is the zeitgeist of Web 2.0: namely, open sourcing and open platforms.

They're miserly with their products and shun any incursion into their territory.

Frankly, that will be their undoing, and their time in the sun as the undisputed top of the food chain will fade.

A remarkable problem in today's age is that our gadgets and favorite Web sites can do much much more than we're aware of. Google's Digital Liberation Front takes a step to break the issue of either not reading manuals or that they're not written with a full feature list.

Simply put, the most daunting problem of today's wired world is a that it swept through so fast that no one in the late 70s and early 80s solved a vexing human problem: most people don't read the instruction manuals. And, even if you were gutsy enough to flip beyond the quick-start poster and read your manual cover-to-upside-down-Spanish, then you STILL wouldn't be able to capitalize on some of the nifty things these gizmos (and Web tools like Gmail and Google Maps) can do.

For example, my one and a half year old daughter, hungry to be old and digitized like daddy, has managed to show me a few short cuts on both my Palm Centro and my iPod. Her deft little monkey-at-the-typewriter fingers managed to reveal to me that tapping my phone's space bar on the quick-dial screen reveals a list for jog dial navigation of ALL the numbers associated with that contact. I've not missed this feature in all the five or so years I've owned a Treo of some sort. I never knew. But if ignorance is bliss, then ohh, the near car collisions I would have avoided on the freeway with those lightning quick space bar strokes which would have spared me a few seconds, attentive to my cell phone screen.

Again my daughter came to the rescue for my iPod. Her thumb presses on the center button of the click wheel revealed a toggle for that feature. I had been scratching my head on how to repeat songs or albums on my iPod; scratching it probably as many times as those design interns over at Apple's packaging plant scratched their head saying to each other, "You think it needs a manual in the box?"

"Naaaa. No one reads them anyway."


Well, the sad and lamentable folly in all of this is that while everyone has at their home's desk or in pockets or at the local cafe a full arsenal of military-grade communication devices and strategic planning mainframes a la WPOR in War Games, they're truly under deployed.

The war of attrition in remaining friends with the folks you thought of calling last month and that you really, really would love to hear from but probably won't is bloddy carnage when a thorough set-up of one's device or e-mail client or reminders would be like having smart bombs in the Peloponnesian War.

Thankfully, at least on the Webware side, the folks over at Google are out to train the regiments by launching their site: The Data Liberation Front. There, direct and indexed, is a step-by-step tutorial on every feature their armory could equip you with - Matrix-style - for FREE.

Five minutes on the site has already made me go "Wow, you can do that too? Neat-o!" And, I thought I was a Google OS aficionado. I'm tempted to let my daughter bang on my laptop's trackpad to see what else I might have missed.

Folks, lest we go down like the Atlanteans in muted technological folly, then read the manual and join a message board or two; like if you were on the Starship Enterprise seek out new features and new interconnections, and by all means, enlist a hundred monkeys to help you figure it out.