Does it look like I’m trying to hide something?

Quicksilver was my favorite program on Mac OS X — which I’ve used since Public Beta 1. I’ve probably installed QS on over thirty of my friends’ computers. There would be no GNOME Do without it. But Quicksilver isn’t perfect, and there had never really been a Linux equivalent. So, I figured, why not spend my senior year of college exploring a program that fascinates me, and what better way to explore a program than to try to write it myself? I could release it as free software so everyone could use it and learn from it (Quicksilver was closed-source at the time), and best of all, my school will give me credit for it. So I wrote GNOME Do, and (1) got the Quicksilver functionality I longed for on Linux, (2) learned a lot about free and open source software, (3) met some incredible people, (4) got college credit, and (5) had a lot of fun.

I’m not sure what it is about this whole situation that has some Mac users foaming at the mouth, calling for my flesh to be branded with a “QS” so that everyone will know my crime. It’s really off-putting. On Linux, this kind of work, when done well, is considered a good thing for the community and society at large. My hope is that someday, a brave young student reads everything I’ve written about GNOME Do, “steals” everything I put into it, and makes something faster or smarter or different with it. It seems that the Mac community considers this a terrible, terrible thing to do — after all, WWSJD? By the way, a friend of mine got Do running on Leopard two months ago.

First off, the Open with… action has been re-enabled!

The biggest new feature in GNOME Do 0.5 is our new preferences window and plugin manager. You can now browse, download, install, and enable or disable all available plugins from right within Do thanks to Mono.Addins:

We’ve added a plugin category called “community plugins” that contains cutting-edge plugins written by many different contributors. If a developer were to write a great new GNOME Do plugin today, we could have it in the community plugins repository and available to Do users everywhere by tomorrow. That being said, community plugins are not rigorously screened or held to the same quality standards as official plugins, so users beware.

One of my favorite community plugins is the new Skype plugin, which allows you to make calls, initiate chats, change your status, and more. The Skype plugin is also fully integrated with Do’s contact system, so you can simply type a contact name, and then chose to send an instant message to that person with Pidgin, email them, or initiate a Skype chat or call:

There’s an awesome new plugin by Jason Smith called “WindowManager.” It lets you manipulate and rearrange windows on your desktop. You can focus, shade, minimize, maximize, tile, and cascade your windows. This plugin is so feature-packed, I don’t even know everything it does yet! Check out these screenshots, then try the plugin for yourself.

Minimize all Firefox windows.

Bring a GIMP window into focus by searching for its name.

Alex Launi has done some amazing plugin work, making great contributions to the Twitter, File and Folders, and Pidgin plugins to name a few. He also wrote new Flickr, Gmail contacts, and Google Calendar plugins. Here’s a preview of his work:

Twitter plugin now supports replying to Twitter friends.

Set Pidgin status (also searches saved statuses).

Upload images to Flickr

Search and create events on Google Calendar

These are only a few of the new features and improvements in GNOME Do 0.5. We’ve also fixed tons of bugs, and we’re going to have some intensive wiki-updating sessions over the next couple weeks to bring documentation up to speed. There are a few more changes that just barely missed the cut, so you can expect to see a 0.5.1 release within a few weeks. Special thanks to Alex Launi, Jason Smith, Chris Halse Rogers, Jorge Castro, Jason Imison, Jason Jones, Jacob Andreas, Guillaume Beland, Ken Simon, Mathieu Cadet, Rick Harding, and all the rest. Ubuntu users may get 0.5 packages from our Launchpad PPA, and you can find source packages on our downloads page.

Finally, GNOME Do is free software, and we work on Do because we love it. Do is free to use, but if you could spare a few hundred yen to help us cover hosting costs and other Do-related expenses, please click the ugly yellow donate button at the bottom of the page and we will be forever grateful. Thank you and enjoy!

Clark and Chalmers’s argument for the extended mind begins with the notion of an epistemic action. An epistemic action is an action that alters the world in way that is a cognitively beneficial for an agent (8). The authors suggest that the brain has evolved in “the reliable presence of a manipulable external environment” (11), and that humans have naturally adapted to manipulate their environment to reduce cognitive load. One of the most salient examples of epistemic action given is of the philosopher who thinks best by writing her thoughts down on paper (11). By writing down her thoughts, the philosopher manipulates her environment through epistemic action. In turn, the cognitive process of examining her thoughts is aided by an external entity—pen and paper.

Clark and Chalmers call a process in which an agent utilizes an external entity a coupled process, and state that “this sort of coupled process counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head” (8). In the case of the writing philosopher, the human and the pen and paper are a coupled process because they “jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does” (8). If the pen and paper are removed, the philosopher will suffer the same decrease in “behavioral competence…as [she] would if we removed part of [her] brain” (8), so we are urged to agree that cognitive processes involving external entities are on the same footing as wholly internal cognitive processes occurring in the agent’s brain.

Next, the authors wish to show that not only does some cognitive processing occur in the environment, but that “beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment,” (12) and if this is the case, then “mind extends into the world” (12). Clark and Chalmers give the example of Otto, an Alzheimer’s sufferer who must use a notebook to remember (among other things) that a particular museum is located on 53^rd street (12). Otto wants to go to the museum, so he consults his notebook to “remember” the address and goes to 53^rd street. The authors claim that even before Otto consults his notebook, Otto has the belief that the museum is on 53^rd street because the notebook plays the same role for Otto that memory plays for other people, except in poor Otto’s case, the information “lies beyond the skin” (13). The authors also claim that we ought to say that Otto has the belief before consulting his notebook because any alternate explanation involving intermediate beliefs about the contents of the notebook introduces “one step too many, [adding pointless complexity]” (13) to our descriptions of Otto’s mental life. Clark and Chalmers conclude that “the notion of belief ought to be used so that Otto qualifies as having the belief in question. In all important respects, Otto’s case is similar to a standard case…of belief” (14); therefore, Otto’s beliefs and thus his mind are extended to his environment.

I offer three objections to the argument that Otto’s belief that the museum is on 53^rd street before consulting his notebook is cognitively “on par” with belief as traditionally conceived. First, simply ask Otto if he believes the museum is located on 53^rd street and he will likely respond that he has no belief about where the museum is; he will not say that his notebook believes the museum is on 53^rd street, because then he would not need the notebook! How can we convince Otto that he has a belief that he believes he does not have? And if Otto is not convinced that he has the belief, why should we be convinced that he has it? To go further and say that Otto plus the notebook form a “coupled system” that has a belief reminds us of the systems objection to Searle’s Chinese Room argument and the absurdities that it entailed.

My second objection is that complex explanations of Otto’s beliefs involving intermediate beliefs about the notebook do not introduce unnecessary steps because Otto is not a properly functioning human being. As an Alzheimer’s sufferer, it is reasonable that explanations of the nature of his beliefs require extra steps, so we should not change our collective notion of belief just to simplify Otto’s case.

My third objection is that Clark and Chalmers’s notions of extended minds have some consequences that we would not want to admit into our philosophies of mind and epistemology. The authors offer three central criteria for ascriptions of extended belief in Otto’s case: the notebook is a constant in Otto’s life, the information in the notebook is directly available without obstacle, and upon retrieving the information, Otto automatically endorses it (17). The authors mention a fourth criterion—that the notebook’s information is a consequence of an earlier conscious endorsement by Otto—but they de-emphasize this criterion because Clark and Chalmers are focused on “active coupling” (11). Suppose we replace Otto’s notebook with a telephone book. A telephone book could easily satisfy the criteria of constancy, accessibility, and authority, yet we would not want to say that for every person listed in the book, Otto knows that person’s phone number.

To the first objection, Clark and Chalmers would likely respond that Otto would report his beliefs differently if he were allowed to consult his notebook, and that Otto should be allowed to consult his notebook just as normal people are allowed to consult their memories. This still places abnormal constraints on Otto’s beliefs that make the Otto-notebook system appreciably deficient. Clark and Chalmers would respond to my second objection by offering other examples of coupled systems that do not involve corner cases, such as neural implants of the future. My third objection stands as a general problem for the authors—I think extended mind semantics may be useful in some situations, but it allows us to say too many things about minds and persons that we do not want to allow.

Clark and Chalmers offer some interesting thoughts on the emergence of language as a sort of mental glue used to construct extended cognitive systems. These ideas have great import for the Language of Thought hypothesis and the brand of computationalism offered by Jerry Fodor in Why There Still Has to Be a Language of Thought. It seems that Clark, Chalmers, and Fodor have compatible explanations for the semantic structure of language. Clark and Chalmers suggest that,

Language…appears to be a central means by which cognitive processes are extended into the world. Think of a group of people brainstorming around a table, or a philosopher who thinks best by writing, developing her ideas as she goes. It may be that language evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources within actively coupled systems. (11)

In addition to the evolutionary view of language, Clark and Chalmers also suggest that language serves as a “computational artifact” (12) that allows an individual brain to develop “in a way that complements the external structures [in the world]” (12). Compare these statements to the Language of Thought hypothesis, which holds that mental representations have a constituent structure that mirrors the structure and complexity of entities in the world (Fodor 136). Fodor suggests that mental representations are, for lack of a better analogy, to be thought of as abstract syntax trees or “parse trees” (114), and that we transition between mental states by performing operations on these representations (145). This notion of thinking as performing operations on mental structures is, in essence, computationalism.

I find a couple of potential difficulties in reconciling Clark and Chalmers’s extended mind with Fodor’s ideas of mental representation and computationalism: if the mind is extended, are our mental representations extended as well? How do we account for our structured mental representations and the operations we perform on them being extended into the world? Returning to the example of the philosopher who writes down her thoughts, do we suppose that her mental representations are somehow partially contained in the pen and paper? If this is the case, where is the locus of her thought—in her brain or somewhere outside her skull? Only the philosopher’s brain has the “hardware” upon which her thoughts are realized, while the pen has only ink and plastic, and the paper only wood fibers, so active thinking does not seem to be extended. The pen and paper contain representations, but not mental representations. Under Fodor’s computationalism, our minds operate on only mental representations—not representations in ink—to produce thought, so the representations of the pen and paper must be translated into mental representations before our minds can do anything with them.

It is obvious that pen and paper are cognitive aids, and in many cases, speaking of these aids as extensions of our minds is helpful and sounds natural; however, when we scratch the surface and wonder how thoughts are structured and evaluated if the mind is extended to external entities, we quickly find that the notion of the extended mind is no longer helpful. Furthermore, even if we doubt the Language of Thought hypothesis or computationalism, the notion that our thoughts occur, persist, or are active in features of our environment seems like much more than we need to explain the use of cognitive aids like pen and paper.

Despite these difficulties, there is no reason to believe that Clark and Chalmers would not agree with Fodor about the computational aspects of the “non-extended” mind, but we still need a convincing story about how metal representations and computationalist thought occur in an extended mind. I offer a story that I hope Clark, Chalmers, and Fodor will agree is plausible. Fodor wants mental representations to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the semantic structure of language (Fodor 135), and Clark and Chalmers want language to facilitate the extension of the mind to the environment. In an extended, computational mind, we might suppose that the mind keeps reference tokens that delegate cognition to external entities; this is not to say that the external entities cognize, but just that the mind cognizes less by relying on the environment more. The philosopher who writes down her thoughts is taking immensely large and unwieldy mental representations and committing more manageable sub-representations to paper, thus making it easier to think about the problem at hand. We could say that the philosopher adds reference tokens to her mental representations, which are evaluated by consulting the paper and reconstructing mental representations from the ideas recorded there. This way, Clark and Chalmers can posit coupled cognitive systems while remaining compatible with Fodor’s mental representations and computationalism.

Although extended mind semantics is sometimes useful, we can easily think of examples where the notion of extended minds gets us into trouble by allowing us to make claims about minds that we do not want to be able to make. Due to the lines that are crossed by positing extended minds, it is fair to say that the notion of extended minds is sufficient but not necessary for describing the phenomenology of cognitive aids. Even highly sophisticated cognitive aids such as neural implants are best described not as parts of mind, but as useful entities which interact with the (distinct) mind; the tight, cognitive coupling noted by Clark and Chalmers should be seen as a demonstration of the plasticity of the brain, not as the extension of the mind into the world. With Otto’s notebook or the philosopher’s pen and paper, there are cases in which explanations of cognition in terms of extended minds may be useful, but there are many more cases in which such explanations generate absurdities.

Lifehacker is having a best-of-the-best poll for people’s favorite application launcher programs. In the lead are Launchy (Windows), Quicksilver (Mac), Find and Run Robot (Windows), GNOME Do (Linux), and RocketDock (Windows). The Windows apps have many, many more users so they’re accumulating many more votes. Please vote for Do to show your love and demonstrate the strength of our community!

The typical computer user interacts with a number of different resources on her computer. These resources are accessed via many interfaces, including menus, location bars, icons, file browsers, and shortcut keys. We plan to consolidate these interfaces by creating an application that indexes items found in the user’s desktop environment (e.g. documents, contacts, applications, multimedia) and lets the user search for these items, and perform common actions on these items (e.g. open, run, email, play). Our goal is to optimize our search using, among other techniques, information about items considered as members of type “ontologies” and as individual entities.

Of special note, our project will be free and open source, which means that all specifications, source code, documentation, and other project resources will be publicly available on the Internet for anyone to scrutinize at any stage in our development process. We will publicize our project and encourage others to participate by contributing bug reports, code, documentation, etc.

Read the rest of the GNOME Do white paper. It contains pretty diagrams like this one:

Starting with the small changes, we’ve added an “Open plugins folder” menu item to Do’s main menu to make it even easier to install new plugins. Someday we’ll have superb plugin management via Mono.Addins, but until then this will make it much easier for you to manage your plugins.

A few weeks ago an EeePC user told me that Do was too large on his screen and asked if we could make a smaller interface for low-resolution screens. I created a scaled-down version of the classic Do interface, but Jason Smith’s UI work allowed us to create a completely new interface optimized for smaller displays:

To use this interface, start Do with gnome-do –mini.

We’ve also created a new interface for KDE users. It should blend very will with KDE’s Oxygen theme. I can’t wait to see how this looks on a KDE4 desktop.

To use this interface, start Do with gnome-do –glassframe. You can also see that we’ve added Copy to… and Move to… actions for working with files. We also added Move to Trash and Delete actions, but these had to be disabled at the last minute (so did the Open with… action) due to changes in GNOME. You should see these actions soon. Speaking of KDE, our Amarok plugin could really use some love, so if there are any Amarok users out there who would like to maintain the official Do Amarok plugin, please let me know.

We’ve done away with our dependency on Tomboy so you no longer need to have Tomboy installed for the Do keybinding to work. Also, some exciting new plugins have emerged recently, including Xesam and Tracker search plugins, an APTUrl plugin for installing software packages via apt, a Twitter plugin, and DR is working on an RSS plugin for Liferea/Firefox/Google Reader. Finally, we’ve added some preliminary learning features to Do so your most frequently used items and actions now bubble up to the top of your search results.

Big thanks to Rick, Jorge, Mathieu, and all the usual suspects. Special thanks to Jason Smith who did an amazing job creating the new interfaces; Jason had to do the painstaking view-controller separation I had been putting off in order to get these interfaces to work so well. Also, special thanks to Chris Halse Rogers; Chris has been extremely professional, doing whatever it takes to get the next release out the door without compromising the quality of his work. Great work all around. Enjoy!

Turing introduces Lady Lovelace’s objection by quoting her critique of Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” an early computer that was fully mechanical: “the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do [only what] we know how to order it to perform” (450). Lovelace argues that, in the case of Babbage’s engine, we (humans) supply the input, the instructions, and the machine itself, and the role of the machine is to simply run the program on the input, without error, until the program terminates. There is no point in this sequence at which the computer may exercise creativity—it is just blindly running the program. To use Turing’s terms, Lovelace is saying that the total behavior of a discrete state machine is strictly a function of its input¹. It is the absolute predictability of this behavior and the apparent lack of agency on behalf of the computer that Lovelace means to draw our attention to with her objection. In order for the computer to be creative in Lovelace’s sense of the term, it would have to produce some output that is not wholly determined by its input. I would add, and Turing intimates (459), that this output would have to be meaningful to us so that it does not appear to be mere randomness or error. Lovelace’s objection holds because Turing’s idealized computer—the Turing machine—by definition cannot produce the creative output that Lovelace is looking for. Turing admits that, “it is an essential property of…[discrete state machines] that this phenomenon does not occur… Reasonably accurate knowledge of the state at one moment yields reasonable accurate knowledge any number of steps later” (440).

Turing takes Lovelace’s objection to be either that computers cannot learn; that computers cannot produce original works; or that computers cannot surprise us with results that we could not have predicted (450). He responds to each of these interpretations in turn, but I believe he must respond differently to Lovelace’s objection as I present it. Turing proposes the Turing test to avoid the problems presented by our tenuous understanding of the nature of thought (433), so it is reasonable to think that Turing would propose a similar “imitation game” in response to Lovelace: a computer may be considered creative if it can convince a human judge that it is so. Babbage’s Analytical Engine failed to convince Lovelace that it was creative, but more advanced computers might be able to pass a “Turing test” for creativity. Lovelace has not shown that human creativity is not determined strictly by our “inputs,” so she would have a reason to accept this imitation game as a test for machine creativity.

It is difficult to appreciate just how much more powerful modern computers are than Babbage’s Engine or the early digital computers that Turing designed. Tom Mueller’s article, How computer chess programs are changing the game, features some of today’s most powerful computers running cutting-edge chess-playing software. These systems are so sophisticated that their programmers are usually unable to explain why the programs make the moves that they do; the article begins, “Chrilly Donniger prefers to watch from a distance when Hydra, his computer chess program, competes… because he rarely understands what Hydra is doing” (1). Mueller’s article presents an argument that Donniger’s Hydra and other chess-playing computers are creative machines.

The first form this argument takes is that the best human chess players do not calculate their next move as amateurs do; instead, the most experienced players use “intuition” (2) to exclude weak moves from consideration. Mueller states that “to produce world-class chess of the sort that Hydra [plays]… programmers must somehow teach their machines intuition” (2), and he suggests that chess-playing machines have been taught intuition by their programmers. If these machines use intuition, and intuition is not mere calculation, then the behavior of these machines cannot be described solely in terms of discrete state machines and their input; therefore, these machines are creative in the sense that Lovelace had in mind. Unfortunately, it is overwhelmingly likely that Hydra and the other chess computers are Turing-equivalent discrete state machines; therefore, either the premise that intuition is not mere calculation is false, or the premise that the machines use intuition to make their moves is false. In either case, the argument is unsound.

The second form of the argument is much more interesting, and it deals with the inability of programmers to predict or explain the hyper-sophisticated moves that chess programs make. “Moves and tactics seem to arise spontaneously from intricacies of the computer code, which the programmer himself often cannot explain” (3), describes Mueller. “Hydra, like all other chess software, has hundreds of heuristics woven into the code… How the heuristics interact, reinforcing and overriding one another, is mysterious; even a slight adjustment…can produce side effects that the programmer could not predict” (5). The results of these mysterious interactions are moves that even grandmasters call “outrageously creative” (7). If we agree that chess is a good “Turing test” for machine creativity, and that grandmasters are competent judges of creative chess-playing, it is obvious that these programs pass such tests and should be considered creative machines.

In response to this argument, consider how Mueller’s intuitions about Hydra as a creative machine would change if Hydra were implemented in a similar fashion as Babbage’s Engine, with electricity, semiconductors, and silicon replaced by cranks, cards, and wood. This is certainly possible, since both Babbage’s Engine and Hydra are universal computers capable (with great effort) of simulating each other. Hydra would not seem very creative if it took years of cranking and metric tons of paper cards to calculate the next move. Mueller might respond that expedience is a necessary component of creative responses, but it is not only the slow speed of a fully mechanical Hydra that causes us to doubt its creativity; the crude mechanisms of the transformed Hydra would make its operation completely transparent to us, and the previously inexplicable interactions among heuristics would reveal themselves as trivial tabulations that we could roughly follow with our minds. The creativity would be completely absent because we would be incapable of understanding Hydra as anything more than a giant, antiquated calculator.

The modern Hydra takes as its input a set of heuristics for static evaluation of game states, and new moves as the opponent makes them. These heuristics are applied rapidly and simultaneously to each state, and they enable Hydra to calculate the utility of possible future states to many decimal places. Human minds are incapable of consciously following this complexity as it happens, so we resort to more familiar terms like “creative,” “daring,” “deceptive,” etc. to describe Hydra’s behavior. We intuit personality, genius, and creativity into Hydra’s moves in order to compensate for our inability to make sense of the gross computations behind them. Furthermore, the human subjects in Mueller’s article are biased towards believing that Hydra is creative. In the original Turing test, the interlocutor is not interested in the outcome of the experiment. When computers are programmed to play chess, it is reasonable to assume that many programmers want to believe that their programs are so spectacular that they exhibit “emergent phenomena” (7). Also, towards the end of Mueller’s article, a grandmaster discusses believing that a computer opponent who beat him anonymously was really chess genius Bobby Fischer—clearly, the grandmaster would rather it be true that he played and was beaten by Fischer than by a chess program.

I have shown that the stakeholders in computer chess may be too biased for their games to constitute adequate tests of machine creativity, and that their beliefs about machine creativity could change tremendously under different but Turing-equivalent circumstances. Turing states that “intelligent behavior presumably consists in a departure from the completely disciplined behavior involved in computation,” (459) so a machine that behaves intelligently enough to pass the Turing test must depart from computation and exhibit the kind of creative behavior that Lady Lovelace is looking for. This does not, however, imply that where there is creative behavior, there is also intelligent behavior. After these considerations, it is clear that chess is a much weaker test for computer intelligence than a properly-administered Turing test. On the other hand, a “Turing test” for creativity seems like a useful thing to have in light of our nebulous understanding of human creativity. I still hesitate to equate the apparent creativity of a computer with that of a human, though, due to computer creativity’s reducibility to computation.

Do now automatically adjusts its color to match your desktop theme. Props to Jason Smith.

• The interface could be more finger-friendly. Sometimes you can use your fingers, but you’ll find yourself needing to pull out the stylus more often than you’d like.
• The screen has a plastic digitizer, making it feel mushy.
• It’s awkward to use single-handedly.
• Flash video playback feels like watching a slideshow. One of the main selling points of the device is that it puts the entire web in your hands, with YouTube and other Flash content often explicitly included in this claim. It simply doesn’t provide adequate Flash video playback.
• It seems like a lot of thought was put into the hardware, but the software feels like an afterthought. Maybe Nokia is hoping that Linux developers will step up to the plate, but a compelling suite of basic applications (email, media player, GTD) would go a long way in convincing users and developers to invest in the platform. Also, because Nokia set the bar pretty low, you’re going to see mostly poor to mediocre apps from third parties.
• GPS should be left out. The device could be slimmer without it, and Google has shown us that you can determine your location with wifi and a dash of cleverness.
• For a device built on Linux and still targeted at early adopters, many of whom are Linux users, documentation and utilities cater to Windows users, while Linux users are left to fend for themselves as usual. Please, Nokia, I paid hundreds of dollars for this device, can I have better instructions and tools for flashing the device?
• PRICE. Nokia, isn’t it overwhelmingly likely that people will choose to SAVE $80 and buy an iPod Touch with 16GB of storage space (the n810 comes with a puny 2GB, and can only be expanded to 8GB by purchasing memory cards), great syncing software, and a rich experience with polished apps that make the n810 look like a paperweight, all in a slim, sexy package? Did I mention that the iPod Touch uses Google Maps to provide rich, updated maps of the entire world, while the n810 is pre-loaded with 1.5GB of map files leaving you with 400MB internal memory for your stuff, not the advertised 2GB? Nokia would argue that the n810 has an advantage because it lets you make voice and video calls. This would be an amazing feature if implemented correctly, but the small, grainy, miscolored picture taken by the webcam just doesn’t do it for me.
• Bloatware. The n810’s main menu contains entries for Rhapsody, Skype, and Gizmo. They all ask you to sign up for trials for this or that, and there’s no straightforward way to remove them from the menu.
• Keyboard and other physical buttons. The buttons on the device are really spongy, feeling very FischerPrice-esque. The keyboard is actually pretty nice, but it would be nicer if it occupied the width of the entire device to allow for some separation between the keys.
• The web browser is painfully slow. Nokia, are you drawing off-screen web content? Is that why it’s so slow to scroll large web pages? Tisk tisk. Also, when typing in gmail, the text entry lags about 10 seconds behind what I’ve typed. Unacceptable.

Despite these faults, I really like the n810! Seriously! I love that it uses mostly free software, runs Debian, has cool package management, and I’m surprised by how much I like using the hardware keyboard. I typed this up on the device while listening to Radiohead and signed into GTalk. It’s really liberating to be able to leave my laptop at home.

When I use the n810, I feel like I’m only a little ahead of a trend that will soon revolutionize personal computing. Someday, what we now call the iPhone will be called the iMac. The n810 will cease to be an internet tablet, and will become the PC. Nokia actually hit the nail on the head with this little piece of crap! It’s still very much for geeks and forgiving business users, but the hardware has a lot of promise; with the right software, the n810 could allow you to be much more productive than you could be on an iPhone or even your laptop. My main advice to Nokia and others developing software for palmtops is that you first need to throw out all of your old assumptions about UI and start fresh… Aww, hell, that’s too hard. Just copy Apple.

A question on the minds of many people interested in the n810 is “so, how does the n810 stack up against ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer?” For starters, I can hold the n810 in one hand. In the picture, a relatively small piece of ENIAC sits behind me:

Obviously, the n810 beats ENIAC on weight and thinness. Also, ENIAC does not come with Flash or any media codecs, and when you run ENIAC the lights dim in downtown Philly, whereas the n810 can run on battery power all day. Finally, ENIAC required nearly $5 million to create, so price might be a dealbreaker.

All things considered, the n810 is pretty neat. Maybe if the price were $250 less, I would recommend that others buy one too. Nokia has been consistently improving products in this form factor, so there’s hope that they’ll learn from their mistakes and deliver something great.