All I want for Christmas is an electric car

I love electric cars, I’d love to have one, but I can barely afford to keep the car I have on the road, never mind an electric one too and let’s be honest, range anxiety is still a very real thing (and the sort of electric car I could afford wouldn't have range as a selling point). For sure the situation will improve with time and the network of charging points is increasing, but who wants to have to stop every couple of hours on a long trip?

That there is why I love what +Tesla Motors are doing with their cars, they’re starting from scratch and really thinking the whole problem through. They’re slowly working their way towards mainstream, but of course they have to start somewhere. More power to them, at least they’re taking the risk at being at the cutting edge of this, which is risky.

There’s reasons for the high cost of the cars, of course there is, as +Elon Musk mentioned in his recent blog post, but at the same time this slows down the time it takes for the technology to get mainstream. The more people who have electric cars, the more charging stations; more infrastructure will then push up adoption figures. Plus the more people who own electric cars and the more they can provide useful feedback and usage figures which will help improve the technology.

The sort of media coverage they've been getting recently may not help, even with great responses by Elon (see the above linked blog post); they need users who will actively push the good news into the social media and traditional media.

As a software developer I see it all too often that the best way to understand whether you've developed something right is to test it and take notes of how it is used and how the users feel about it and I think the situation is the same here.

I'm never going to afford a brand new top-of-the-line Model S, frankly it’ll be years before I’ll be able to afford a decent used electric car. So I did what any sane person would do, I wrote to them and asked them to send me a free car in exchange for regular reviews, blog posts and articles. Unfortunately I haven’t had a reply, but that doesn't mean I'm giving up hope.

If they considered a lease type offering, that could work out similar to the costs of running an internal combustion vehicle. You see with tax, insurance, fuel and maintenance that can cost a fair amount each month; and whilst there would be a hike in my electricity bill, I’d imagine that I’d be able to work around that considerably.

We've had a new Sainsbury's supermarket open in Penzance and that, rather helpfully, includes an electric car charging point. We simply change from monthly shops to weekly, change where we normally do our shopping and have a meal there in their excellent cafe to extend charging times. Our food shop bill will go up a little, but against the savings being made on our car running costs it’ll probably be negligible. Whenever we’re planning a trip away we’ll have to do an overnight charge at home (on Economy 7) and plan around en route charging points.

No, I haven’t thought much about this…

I really want an electric car and I can’t wait until they become mainstream! I want to be involved in making them mainstream.

The tales of an electric car towing a caravan and being used successfully away from home for a week or doing fairly ordinary journeys like Cornwall to Bristol, Cornwall to London, Cornwall to North Wales would make people rethink about range anxiety. Having an electric car that is fast enough to compete in races is one thing, but what about an electric car that can be used by a family with minimal or even no inconvenience? Now that’s something that’s going to encourage uptake, and in turn encourage the infrastructure to improve.

What I’d like to see Tesla do now is some sort of subsidised lease programme, with all costs included (except electricity), in exchange for enhanced coverage of the vehicles. Like an extended test drive crossed with Peugeot's “just add fuel” scheme… I can see the branding now, “Tesla, just add leccy”. But seriously, this would be a way to get an advanced electric vehicle in the hands of an average car driver for a year and really accelerate the whole process. I’d like to nominate myself for the scheme; I’ll take a red model S with a towbar please or a charcoal Model X, if they’re coming soon...

Win an iPhone 5C

I'm pretty fortunate to be able to review a fair few bits of technology, thanks to my awesome writing skillz and some great contacts. OK, so mostly is the good contacts, but anyway, I digress.

This is a quick post, I'll be posting a humongous catch-up post soon, hopefully, but in the meantime I have some news to share with you. Following the announcement of the new iPhones, one of those aforementioned awesome contacts, the wonderful people at mobilefun.co.uk, have announced a competition to win an iPhone 5C.

I'm quite impressed with the concept of the 5C, to be honest, I like the fact that Apple are slowly widening their portfolio and introducing a cheaper (if not exactly cheap) iPhone with all the same attention to detail they are known for. I can't see them ever bringing out a truly budget phone, but this is a step in the right direction.

Back to the competition, it's incredibly easy to enter and it's one of those competitions where you get more entries the more you share etc. Of course the more you share, the more other people get a chance to win... make a wise choice! ;-)

If you win you will, of course, be needing some accessories for your iPhone 5C, and of course Mobile Fun just happen to cover everything you could possibly need.

If you win, please thank me in the form of £50 notes... Or chocolate will do...

In terms of getting back to general blogging, watch this space, the last month and a half have been jam-packed, so there's plenty to tell you!

As they say down these parts, cheers and gone!

WebOS is dead. Long live WebOS.

So HP are pulling the plug on WebOS hardware development.

It's sad news, but apparently the OS might hang around a bit longer.

I love WebOS, I think it's fantastic. There's some things about the Palm Pre2 that I love, but it's sometime not quite powerful enough and the camera just sucks.

The TouchPad should've been brilliant, but they went all cheap on the hardware again. You'd think HP would know what they doing with hardware, but they let themselves down. They needed to build market share, so they should've built something incredible to match the software and practically given it away! Looks like they might be doing that now, so I'll keep my eyes open for a bargain.

I need to update my website

I'm not sure if anybody really uses it these days, but my personal website at http://david.twinklebob.co.uk seriously needs overhauling, particularly in view of my recent web design manifesto.

Plus I want to do some new stuff:

• integrate Google Buzz feeds into my update stream,
• use another profile to update the one there (so I don't have to update so many profiles all the time)
• have a hidden section of the site with my contact details on - to add to my email signature
• actually show (and have linkable) full blog entries
• have some kind of CV on there

I'm just putting this on here to remind myself and keep myself accountable!

Rethinking the Desktop

WARNING: This post is extremely geeky and most like boring. I've only written it here because it's the best place I could think to show it! Don't read if operating heavy machinery...

Recently I've been reading a lot of (geeky) stuff about the state of our operating systems. In the first (http://kellabyte.com/2010/10/23/the-desktop-os-starting-to-bore-me-how-do-we-get-the-lustre-back/) KellaByte (not her real name... at least I don't think so) talks about how boring the Desktop OS is these days and how incompatible it is with touch. The second (http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/10/31/apple%E2%80%99s-next-macintosh-os/), a response to the Apple "Back to the Mac" event, speaking about the pains of backward compatibility.

The problem is, we're still using the interface paradigm set out by PARC back in the early seventies. We're still using the basic hardware ideas as set out in the 70s/80s. What happens when you ignore everything that went before and start all over again?

GPUs can perform some calculations considerably faster and better than an x86 processor - people are just starting to get to grips with using them for non-graphic processing. What happens if you build a processor with 4 gpu cores and 4 ARM-based cores, for instance.... what could that machine do?

Could we redesign the bus on a motherboard, could we do it better? What about memory? Could we use mixed memory types to squeeze effectively 32GB of RAM into the space taken by a single stick of 2GB? If we were to speed up the bus and the primary storage, would we still need as much RAM at all?

So, brand new hardware... what about the OS? These days, it needs to be able to fit on everything from a tablet/netbook all the way up to a 24" widescreen monitor. It needs to be built for touch, but still be mouse/keyboard compatible. It needs to be clean, simple and light (on resources). It needs to be able to be simple to use for the average user and for tablets/netbooks, but it needs to be able to knuckle down for high-end stuff (developing, multimedia etc).

The way to go is probably the Linux route - 1 underbelly with a slightly different Desktop Manager for each of the form factors. You have SomeOS Lite for the tablet/netbook/novice user, SomeOS Mobile for the upper-end of the Laptop market and SomeOS Max for the high-end desktop user.

In terms of user experience, you have an App Store - including third party pay-for apps, community developed free apps and OS updates (like an overlap of a mobile app store and the ubuntu package repositories). That way you can fairly quickly have a large collection of applications available for your new OS, despite the fact that nothing ever created before will work without some kind of emulation.

I wish I had the money to put together a team of experts and create something totally brand new. I think we'd give Apple a run for their money...

Google Wave

Sorry to those who follow my blog and are relatively normal... this is another geek post!

So I've discovered Google Wave and managed to get myself an invite (just like when Gmail started, this is still invite only). To sum it up really simply, this is a combination of E-mail, IM, Wiki and social networking. Basically you start a conversation (a wave) with other people and the content of that conversation changes - every member of the conversation can edit every part of that conversation!

It's pretty exciting, useful for communication and collaboration (provided, of course, that it takes off).

The thing is, I have 18 invites remaining and it's a bit boring (and pointless) if I have no one to talk to, so I'm looking to get some of my friends on board - especially people who are likely to use it to communicate a lot. If you want an invite, just let me know!