But this morning when I was walking through downtown San Francisco before Google’s I/O conference, I was crossing a street when I saw a particularly pretty scene of the sun rising between two buildings. Hoping I’d have enough time before the walk signal ended, I dug my iPhone out of my bag, swiped to open the camera, snapped a photo, and then jogged to the curb to avoid getting hit by cars. (Mom, I hope you’re not reading this.)

So a few hours later, when I tried on Google Glass for the first time and said the command “take photo,” instantly capturing a photo of my colleague Kevin Tofel standing in front of me without moving either my head or my hands, I started to see the appeal of Glass.

I’d read a decent amount about the technology since Sergey Brin dropped from a helicopter at last year’s Google I/O, and not only was I sort of confused by the specifics of how Glass works (A camera on your face? Facebook on top of everyday life? How do people see when they’re wearing them?), I was turned off by the severely dorky appearance and the idea of constantly monitoring the things around you. They seemed vaguely creepy and intrusive. I was not attracted to the idea of wearing them as a normal person walking around town.

But even though I only got a short spin with the technology on Wednesday, it only took a few seconds for me to understand why people are so jazzed about Glass.

I put them on my face and was immediately impressed with how lightweight they felt. Despite their futuristic, clunkly-on-one-side appearance, they didn’t feel very bulky or heavy on my face, and it was easy to see the room around me while wearing them. (Even though they weren’t fitted specifically for my face the way they would be if I purchased them.) The screen felt much smaller and unobtrusive than I’d imagined, and it wasn’t hard to swipe the side of the glasses to navigate the screen. But it was the voice commands, and the “take photo” command, that changed my perspective on the technology.

Would I spend $1,500 on them right now? Definitely not. If you need prescription glasses of any kind, it would be hard to combine those with Glass. While Google has launched them in some jazzy new colors, you still look absurd wearing them (whether you’re in the shower or not). This probably makes me somewhat vain, but I’d want them to look cooler and less futuristic before I wore them in everyday life (seriously, embed them in some Warby Parker frames, and I’d be way more down with the idea.)

And once apps start streaming into the glasses, I can’t imagine how seeing New York Times headlines and tweets wouldn’t be distracting while you’re doing things like walking or driving. Of course, none of this even gets into the new etiquette that would have to arise from the spread of Glass.

But despite all the drawbacks, speaking the words for the “take photo” command made me realize that even if wearable computing has a pretty dorky image right now, the potential practical applications for real-life people who don’t consider themselves nerds are endless — once the technology gets a little more refined, and we figure out how to use them in public.

I talked to one Google employee who said she sat in her sister’s graduation and streamed video through Glass to family members from afar, and another who said she uses it to take photos of her little kids when her hands are full. I would imagine it could be huge for people with disabilities, or people doing outdoor sports (Kevin mentioned you could take photos of mile markers while running a marathon.)

“Every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress,” Larry Page said on stage today. So does Google Glass seem a little nuts right now? Sure. But if a few years from now I can snap a photo of a sunrise without having a near-miss with traffic, I’m open to the possibilities.

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We’ve covered Pelican before. The startup has designed an “array camera” that is essentially composed of multiple smaller cameras, all organized in an array. Why do this? Because when you get to the tiny form factor required of handset cameras, the sensor is so small that you’re highly limited in terms of the number of megapixels you can squeeze out of it before image noise becomes unbearable. New approaches are needed, and this is one of them.

Of course, if using many tiny cameras was that easy, we’d see it done in smartphones already. The secret sauce lies in the software used to bring the multiple resulting images together, and it’s that part of Pelican’s work that seems to have attracted the interest of Nokia Growth Partners.

“It’s very complicated to do this algorithmically and Pelican is one of the companies that has mastered this technology,” partner Bo Ilsoe was quoted in the piece as saying.

Imaging is central to Nokia’s current handset strategy, from its top-end Lumia Windows Phone smartphones down to its cheap Asha phones — all these devices have clever photo-taking features of one kind or another. The standout model there, so far, is the Symbian-toting 808 PureView, which uses a technique called oversampling to get something usable out of a 41-megapixel image (the same technology is apparently coming to the Lumia line, too). However, that camera module is rather chunky — something which array cameras are designed to fix.

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The Asha 210, which will come in both single- and dual-SIM versions with retail prices starting at $72, has a physical QWERTY keyboard and is therefore well-suited to messaging and social networking services. The handset will come with a free subscription to WhatsApp, which usually costs $0.99 a year, and the service is also integrated with the 210′s phonebook.

“We are very excited about our partnership with Nokia Asha complementing our strategy of giving people around the world an easy experience when keeping in touch with their friends,” WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton said in a statement.

Like other Asha phones, the device runs the Series 40 operating system. Nokia started calling the touchscreen Asha phones (of which the 210 is not one) “smartphones” last year, much to the annoyance of some observers, but in some ways that was a fair move: after all, Series 40 handset owners also get to download apps from an app store that contains many of the offerings familiar from Android and iOS. The social experience that is the focus for many “proper” smartphone users can be found here too, albeit in a slightly cut-down fashion.

The Asha 210 comes preloaded with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (the recently-launched Asha 205 came with a dedicated Facebook button) and a 2MP camera with its own hard key. As with the 205, a feature called Slam makes it possible to share content with nearby Bluetooth phones without having to pair the devices. The phone’s battery lasts for up to 46 days on the single-SIM version, and up to 24 days on the dual-SIM version – you don’t see this kind of longevity on a typical touchscreen phone.

This is a great deal for WhatsApp, particularly as many of its key rivals – such as Tencent’s WeChat — are strongest in the emerging markets where Nokia’s low-end devices are sold. These alternatives can still be found in Nokia’s S40 app store, but users should be effectively steered in WhatsApp’s direction by the inclusion of the hard key. A reminder of the numbers here: WhatsApp may have 200 million users, making it “bigger than Twitter”, but WeChat has 300 million users.

And from the Nokia perspective, the Asha 210 is a reminder of what can be done with the now-aged S40 platform in certain markets. This device will be going up against very low-end Android phones, which offer a much wider range of apps but not necessarily better performance (and seriously, battery life is a major issue in many of these markets), and the soon-to-be-released Firefox OS phones, which are HTML5-only and as such an unknown quantity at this point. Given its social chops, the 210 will be a fairly impressive contender for many users.

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The project, called MoboSens, relies on a large sensor plugged into the audio jack on a smartphone. It looks like an ugly (and huge) Square dongle, but instead of taking payments it senses water quality using a microeletromechanical (MEMs) sensor inside the dongle. The goal is to eventually use the MEMs packed into the device to measure nitrate, heavy metal, carcinogens, and bacteria in water.

The data is shared with an app running on the smartphone and then sent to the cloud for detailed analysis and storage. People interested in participating can support the project on Indiegogo through May 11. The project also won second prize at the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project awards ceremony last week.

I like this project because it taps into what is awesome about the intersection between consumer technology and science. Companies such as RootMetrics and Waze, which use smartphones to crowdsource data about cell service and traffic, respectively, are more consumer friendly examples of this trend. This project adds more tailored sensors for the phone but taps into the same benefits of crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile on the back end, the data goes to people with the compute power and expertise to use it to focus on more than just the water at hand, making it possible to draw conclusions about overall water systems. In this sense, MoboSens is trying to do for the environment what doctors are doing through a combination of smartphones and sensors to offer a view of our collective health.

These projects take the notion of gathering personal data and empowers people to contribute it for the benefit of all. That’s the real promise of the internet of things.

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But Canon, for one, also sees the advantage of pairing up with the iPhone. It has an app called CameraWindow that allows devices to wirelessly access photos directly on the point-and-shoot camera. This year Canon started including the feature that enables similar apps to be used by its higher-end cameras; previously it was all low-end devices. I had a chance on a recent holiday to try out the CameraWindow app on the just-updated S110. Here’s what I was able to do with my iPhone 5.

Access camera photos on your phone

The way it works is simple: both the camera and your iPhone join the same Wi-Fi network. (If a Wi-Fi network is not available, the Canon PowerShot camera will create a local Wi-Fi network that can be used solely for the purpose of reviewing and transferring photos.) You start off by pairing the iPhone and the camera together. Upon the initial connection there are a few steps to complete, but the Camera will remember the nickname of the iPhone it paired with to make future connections fast and easy.

Once the connection is established, you can either review the photos from your camera or from the iPhone. When you see a photo you like, you can transfer it from the camera to the Photo Library on the iPhone. As soon as the photos are on your iPhone, you can then use any number of applications to modify and share. I was able to use iPhoto on my iPhone 5 to create a great gallery that documented our trip, and was also able to share the images in my iCloud Photo Stream.

Update location information remotely

Another interesting feature of CameraWindow is its ability to record your GPS location when taking pictures. You set up the app to record your location information to a log while you take photos with your Canon PowerShot camera. When you are finished, you pair up your camera with your iPhone and elect to add the location information to the photos you just took. The photos on the camera are then updated with the latitude and longitude information. No need to transfer the photo to your iPhone first in order to perform this operation. The photos stay on the camera making the whole process quick and easy.

Canon’s CameraWindow works with iPads and Android devices as well.  The functionality provided in an app like CameraWindow is a great way to extend the capabilities of my point-and-shoot  camera.  It’s a handy way to get photos off of the camera when in the field and quickly edit and share them with family and friends, as well as update the information of each photo while it is still on the camera.

While some have already written off the era of the compact point-and-shoot camera entirely, I still feel that there is a need for a better optics and saving the original RAW image file when it comes to taking truly great photos. Looking beyond the compact market, Canon has also been introducing this smart app strategy into their DSLR lineup.  So it all just depends on how much you are willing to spend on the ability to take better photos.   With Canon pairing with smartphones like the iPhone 5 using their CameraWindow app, it’s a good way to have the best of both worlds.

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The Patent Office approved the new “invention” this week and the news was first reported on Twitter by Professor Sarah Burstein:

First, rounded rectangles; now, rounded octagons. D678,232, issued to @Motorola for a “Communication Device.” http://t.co/jLkfsTM3lp—
Sarah Burstein (@design_law) March 21, 2013

Burstein, who is a design patent expert at the University of Oklahoma, explained that her “rounded octagon” comment was tongue-in-cheek but confirmed that the patent had been granted and that it covers the displayed shape of a smartphone.

She added that the scope of Motorola’s design patent is more narrow than Apple’s infamous rounded rectangles patent. Here is a picture from Apple’s patent:

To successfully invoke its new patent against an infringer, Burstein said Motorola would have to show that a consumer would find the supposedly infringing product has the same design as Motorola’s design.

The “rounded octagon” patent is likely to add more grist for critics who question the wisdom of granting monopoly protection over basic shapes and concepts (14 years for design patents, 20 for regular ones). This year, a new law in the U.S. has made it easier to obtain design patents, which are cheaper and faster to get than regular patents. Meanwhile, companies like Apple continue to use a variety of other intellectual property measures like trademark, trade dress and copyright to wrap legal force fields around their products.

The new patent may provide new ammunition to Google, which owns Motorola, in its ceaseless rounds of patent litigation with Apple and other rivals in courtrooms around the world.

The patent can be seen at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Unfortunately, the USPTO’s website only permits images to be viewed with Internet Explorer, Netscape or Opera browsers. If you’re using another browser, here’s a PDF link.

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The group is called the Article 29 Working Party and, while it doesn’t make laws, it does have a great deal of influence over those who do, and over the way in which privacy laws are interpreted. Its opinion (PDF warning) on mobile apps will be unwelcome in many quarters because it states that just about everyone in the mobile industry — app developers, app store proprietors and even OS and device vendors — has a range of legal obligations around protecting and properly collecting and processing user data.

Compliance with E.U. data protection law means sticking to several principles. First and foremost, the user needs to give full and unambiguous consent to having their data processed. Data processing has to be for a legitimate purpose — like the app’s stated use case — and everyone has a responsibility to keep personal data secure.

Even those mobile players who are trying to stick to the rules may find the task more complex than they first imagine. Here’s an example given by the regulators (with bold type reflecting my emphasis):

“An app provides information about nearby restaurants. To be installed the app developer must seek consent. To access the geolocation data, the app developer must separately ask for consent, e.g. during installation or prior to accessing the geolocation. Specific means that the consent must be limited to the specific purpose of advising the user about nearby restaurants. The location data from the device may therefore only be accessed when the user is using the app for that purpose. The user’s consent to process geolocation data does not allow the app to continuously collect location data from the device. This further processing would require additional information and separate consent.

Similarly, for a communication app to access the contact list, the user must be able to select contacts that the user wishes to communicate with, instead of having to grant access to the entire address book (including contact details of non-users of that service that cannot have consented to the processing of data relating to them).”

How about app stores? Here, the working party recommends that apps “should not just be rated by users for how ‘cool’ they are, but also on the basis of their functionalities, with specific reference to privacy and security mechanisms”.

These kinds of recommendations may seem a tall order, but they are doable. However, the working party seems under no illusion about the challenge it faces. Here’s the whole problem with ensuring the rules get stuck to, distilled into a single passage:

“A high risk to data protection comes from the degree of fragmentation between the many players in the app development landscape. A single data item can, in real time, be transmitted from the device to be processed across the globe or be copied between chains of third-parties. Some of the best known apps are developed by major technology companies but many others are designed by small start-ups. A single programmer with an idea and little or no prior programming skills can reach a global audience in a short space of time. App developers unaware of the data protection requirements may create significant risks to the private life and reputation of users of smart devices. Simultaneously, third-party services such as advertising are developing rapidly, which, if integrated by an app developer without due regard, may disclose significant amounts of personal data.”

There’s the rub. The creation and distribution of apps can involve many, many parties, with services interlinked in a way that’s hard to keep track of — especially since one of the fundamentals of EU data protection law is that the user is kept fully informed of what’s happening with their data, the likelihood of proper compliance breaks down on that point alone. That’s before we even get to the thorny issue of who is situated where and whether sending data to that location means breaking the rules, or how many opportunities for a security breach get opened up by having so many links in the chain.

It’s one thing imposing these rules on a big cloud provider, but what about the one or two-person team that comes up with some app that taps into multiple APIs linking to services around the world? Are they supposed to have a designated data controller within their organization, keeping an eye on compliance? That’s hardly going to be top of their agenda when their app may have been created and set live practically on a whim.

What the Article 29 Working Party is doing here is noble — and I don’t mean that dismissively. We should all be thinking about this stuff. Low barriers to entry shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring a cumulative effect of privacy erosion.

The question is, are these guidelines going to stay a wishlist, or are we going to see Europe’s regulators enforce them? That’s what these opinions often presage, so we may soon find out what privacy regulation really means in the mobile age.

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Yes, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux has run on tablets before, but the upcoming version is the first to be engineered specifically with touch in mind. The idea is to have one code base running across all screens (more on that later), and a developer preview will come out on Thursday that can be installed not only on Google’s Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, but also on the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus handsets.

We’ve already seen what the mobile version will look like, and now we know how it will look on tablets. In that form factor, it’s got several features worth mentioning, including voice-control for the heads-up display (HUD), multiple user accounts with full encryption, and the ability to multitask tablet and phone apps at the same time and on the same screen. The tablet can also be used as a thin client in the same way as an Ubuntu desktop can.

Here’s what Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth had to say in a statement, and a video too:

“Multi-tasking productivity meets elegance and rigorous security in our tablet experience… Our family of interfaces now scales across all screens, so your phone can provide tablet, PC and TV experiences when you dock it. That’s unique to Ubuntu and it’s the future of personal computing.”

Unified code

Now, about that single code base. Over the weekend, KDE developer Aaron Seigo launched what was by open-source standards a broadside against Canonical, accusing the London-based firm of “duping” developers by claiming to be using the same code for all versions, but not doing so in practice.

Canonical responded yesterday by insisting the code really would be one-size-fits-all when it’s complete. It went on to say this would hopefully happen by the end of this year, and that the first public release of “the full unified code base” would be in Ubuntu 14.04, in April 2014.

In other words, what you can install on your Nexus this week is far away from being being the finished product.

Enterprise focus

This is partly a consumer play, hence the TV iteration. However, the features Canonical mentioned today should appeal to enterprises, some of which are running Ubuntu on the server and, in the case of a few, on the desktop too.

In general, businesses currently use Microsoft on the desktop, with Apple’s iPad serving as the tablet of choice. If — and it’s a big if — Canonical can find manufacturers to actually make Ubuntu phones and tablets, the idea of developing once across all these form factors will be extremely attractive, particularly with a big question mark hanging over Windows 8′s place in the enterprise.

Of course, by spring 2014 there’s a good chance that Microsoft will have released an obligatory service pack (or ‘Blue’ release, or whatever it will be called) that clears up the OS’s various quirks, effectively giving corporate customers the all-clear to dive in. And it’s quite possible that Windows 8 will also prove to be the consumer success that Microsoft hopes it will be.

But if Windows 8′s enterprise appeal turns out to be more Vista than XP, business customers won’t have many familiar options to fall back on, leaving Canonical in a good position.

A lot can happen in a year.

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The Tegra 4i could support delivery of 1080p video playback on a 5-inch screen, according to the reference design Nvidia showed off with the launch (see above). The Nvidia spokesman expects features like the HD playback to become mainstream by the time these chips hit the market at the end of 2013.

Nvidia, which entered the smartphone market in 2008 with its Tegra application processor that combined its graphics processors with an ARM-based core, has high hopes for the mobile market. But its first iterations were hampered by a lack of integrated modem on the chips like Qualcomm offered. An integrated modem lowers the number of parts inside the phone as well as the overall cost.

In 2011 Nvidia purchased Icera, which makes a software defined radio that will tune into a variety of frequencies. The Tegra 4i is its first chip that integrates the Icera chip on the same die as the Tegra application processor. Thus, the chip with support LTE as well as versions of HSPA in use by U.S. carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile.

The integration will deliver a smaller chip (made at the 28 nanometer process node) that will presumably consume less power. However, in a conference call ahead of the launch, Nvidia’s spokesman didn’t have specifics on the processor’s affect on battery life — a criticism that has dogged the Nvidia chips in the past.

From a spec side, the 4i will deliver up to 2.3 GHz and compares with Qualcomm’s chips using its Krait processor. The chip uses the ARM Cortex-A9 as opposed to the ARM A15 chip the Tegra 4 will use, and it has 60 CPU cores. While not designed for tablets, it’s conceivable that the smaller, cheaper tablets might well use the Tegra 4i design according to the Nvidia spokesman.

As we head into the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we’re likely to see several chip and handset design announcements as well as a peek into the smartphones we’ll be using next year.

This story was corrected at 11 a.m. on Feb. 19 to reflect that Nvidia purchased Icera in 2011 not in 2009.

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The sticker arrived while I was traveling these past 10 days. It came in a new Volt owner’s kit that included a nice hardcover book that tells the story of the Volt, from concept to today. Also included are 10 small cards to hand-out when people invariably ask about the Volt. And they do, believe me.

Although I like the idea of the cards, the QR code sticker is a smart move on GM’s part to address misconceptions about the car with its large battery and gas generator.

Instead of scanning the QR code and simply being taken to the Volt’s website, the code points to a phone-friendly YouTube video showing how the Volt works. The video quality is only 360p resolution so it’s not going to eat up gobs of mobile broadband data. And at the lower resolution, it should look fine on a low-end phone. I’d rather see higher quality video on my Galaxy Note 2, since the screen is  capable of viewing high-definition video, but I understand why GM presents the video for the lowest common denominator displays.

Here’s a look at the video if you don’t have a QR code scanner:

What I like about it the most is that it does exactly what I do when asked about the Volt: The video explains how it works and what the capabilities are. This way, people understand if it’s the right vehicle for them.

I’ve had someone who drives 30,000 miles a year ask me about the car, for example, and I explained that while the Volt is innovative, it wouldn’t likely fit his driving usage patters. Folks in Philadelphia, however, get the same story from me and can see that with mostly city driving, the car is one of several great options. They’d get much the same impression from the linked video simply by using their smartphone near my Volt now.

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