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Mobile Computing Mania

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  I n October 2025, I reconnected with one of my mentors, Rich Wallace, former editor-in-chief of EE Times . On a long phone call, we discussed, among many other things, his animus against the Wintel juggernaut. I finally understood why he hated the PC industry, and why he didn’t share my passion for covering its rocket ride, my first big arc of a story in U.S. tech journalism. For Wallace, it was a sad denouement to the frothy energy he witnessed as a young reporter in the early 1980’s. He recalled his enthusiasm for the early days of Apple, the Homebrew Computer Club and the other innovators of the pre-PC days. He was working at Electronic News , a forerunner of EE Times . “That period was the most exciting I ever witnessed. No one knew what was going to happen. “I was a reporter in the suburbs, a young dad with a station wagon who got invited to a party upstate where a handful of geeky people in the kitchen talked into the night. “There were 20 processors and eight opera...
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Smoke, Mirrors and Great Coffee

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       I got to see up close one of the most high-profile mobile startups take a bellyflop. After I broke a story that General Magic was showing working systems, I got an invitation to visit the company ahead of its formal launch. It was my first trip to Silicon Valley as a reporter. Apple’s Newton was just a whisper then. By contrast, the General Magic device had panache thanks to its consortium of big-time founders—Apple, AT&T, Motorola, Philips and Sony. The team sported several software wizards, veterans of the original Macintosh, including Andy Hertzfeld, a sort of jolly John Belushi lookalike who designed the Mac’s user interface. I arrived with a swarm of butterflies fluttering in my belly. They flapped even harder once I discovered the meeting included Kevin Kelly, a top editor from Wired Magazine , and one of his colleagues. I recall the intoxicating aroma of excellent coffee, better in those pre-Starbucks days than anything I could get in Hong K...
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Trying to Track Down Tony

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       I followed Tony Fadell (below) as he moved to a handheld group under Philips, but once he rejoined Apple, after Jobs’ return, he came under its corporate cone of silence. Eventually, he stopped taking my calls. The last time we talked his baby, the iPod, was still a newborn. I asked him how he viewed his job. “It’s all about looking at all the ingredients out there and thinking deeply about what you can do with them, it’s like a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle where everybody is playing everybody else in real time,” he said.  Tony played a lead role in a story I commissioned from Richard Doherty, a former EE Times editor who had left journalism to become a consultant in a company he called Envisioneering run out of his home in Seaford, NY. We knew Richard, an electrical engineer by training, had longstanding ties to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, so I asked him if he’d write his own first-person account of the rise and fall of General Magic. He delivered an...
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Right device, wrong town

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     O ne day the mobile thing we were all waiting for arrived. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007, to an ecstatic crowd of faithful Macintosh mavens at Macworld in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I was with a handful of top EE Times reporters in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. For many reasons, the always probing and occasionally prescient group of tech journalists at EE Times didn’t send anyone to cover Macworld. It wasn’t our kind of show; the event was more of an end user gathering, not an engineering conference. In our eyes, it was a bit lightweight, a rock concert where Steve Jobs dominated the spotlight. And, not incidentally, we probably weren’t invited. By that time, Apple and EE Times were like oil and water. We lived to break stories about semiconductors. Apple kept its product’s ingredients top secret. We were all about skeptical analysis of people and products. Macworld was all about the worship of Apple products and Jobs. ...
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In the iPhone’s Wake

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       I t didn’t take long for the word to spread among the technorati that Jobs got it right. At another event, I was in a press mob around Andy Bechtolshiem, the smart but nerdy chief engineer and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, known for wearing socks and sandals even when giving a keynote address. Bechtolshiem pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and went on an extended rant about how great it was. “Finally,” Bechtolsheim proclaimed , “someone has delivered a cell phone with a compelling experience of the Web.” As was often the case, Bechtolsheim was right. I had owned three cell phones that offered Internet access, but after what felt like a dozen clicks to get to text feeds of CNN news on their tiny screens, I had given up on mobile surfing. In those days, every device linked to what we called a “walled garden” of services on a private network maintained by the carrier, and they all sucked. Jobs had insisted the iPhone would connect to the open int...
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Live in San Jose: Apple v. Samsung

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     A s Apple slowly rose to become one of the world’s top smartphone makers, rivals like Nokia and RIM faded away. Others, like Google and Samsung, emerged. They learned the lessons of the iPhone, and we tracked their progress. Stories about Google’s fledgling Android mobile operating system and its adopters were interesting, and I attended Samsung’s developer conferences that mainly focused on its handsets. Things really got exciting when Apple sued Samsung for copying the iPhone’s user interface. Steve Jobs famously declared he was going to “go thermonuclear” on the iPhone copycats, asking for $2.5 billion to make an example of the Korean giant, which by that time had become one of the world’s largest makers of everything from LCD displays and memory chips to TVs and home appliances. I hadn’t had much experience as a court reporter, but when the trial started in San Jose district court, I attended every session I could: It was a front row seat on some of the inner...
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Visiting My Mobile Graveyard

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     I don’t have to go far to get nostalgic about the old days of mobile computing. My desk drawer is full of dead devices that no longer hold a charge but still make me long for my yesterdays. My Blackberry (below, left), named for the seedy fruit that resembles its cluster of tiny keys arranged qwerty style, packed a full keyboard into a handheld perfect for people with tiny fingers. Next to it lies my Hewlett-Packard iPAQ Pocket PC (below, center), an example of the PC companion device Gates alluded to in my one interview with him. This souped-up organizer had a crude app that would let you view, but not modify, Windows documents and spreadsheets. The idea was you could take some of your PC stuff on the road, sorta, in those days when we called laptops luggables. My then-teenage son used to play a game on the iPAQ, the only real use any of us found for it. My first flip phone, a Samsung model (above, right), sits in the dark drawer, too, but not its predecessor,...
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