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Then something needs to be done about the agonizingly slow speed of modern web sites and apps over today's mobile connections. Not to mention coverage.

Here is the coverage map for my provider:

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/check-cell-phone-coverage

Note that the vast majority of the land area of the U.S is not covered at all. Don't ever get more than a couple of miles from an Interstate highway. And don't that's no guarantee. From Salina KS to Denver there is a dead zone of about 300 miles.

I've been traveling a lot. And even in covered areas, the performace of the sites that I need are unusably slow. weather.com is not even worth trying to use. And let me relate my experiences the last two times I made motel reservations. Both times, I happened to be in a Denny's restaurant. After placing my order, I immediately whipped out my netbook and went to motel6.com. Takes a few minutes to bring up the main page. Click "Find a Motel 6". Takes a few minutes to bring up the search page. Type "Santa Rosa NM". Takes a few minutes to bring up the Motel6 in Santa Rosa. Click "Check Rates and Availability". Takes a few minutes to bring up the available room types. Click "Nonsmoking, 1 bed".

At this point my food arrives and I havent't even gotten to the part where I start reserving the room.

After the few minutes that it takes to bring up the page where is just says that the room has 1 bed and is not smoking, I click "Reserve Room".

After a few minutes, I have a form to fill in. So I go up to the top and log in, so that it can pull the information automatically. Takes a couple of minutes to log in, but it still saves time, overall.

Click "Make Reservation". After only about 30 seconds, it says it has reserved it and sent a confirmation email to my email address.

I suspend the laptop, close it, and start on my now half-cold meal. I'm not making this up.

I watch these commercials on TV where people on their smart phones just go tap, tap, tap and have reservations made, weather checked, driving directions map loaded, and then tap tap tap again to show it all to the person they are talking on the phone to, all in the under 30 seconds the commercial runs, and I wonder how they can get away with such blatantly deceptive advertising.

To me, the *less* dependent I am on "The Cloud", the better. I use the cloud when I *have* to, because it is the weakest link in my computing experience. I can't make the reservation from my netbook without depending upon the cloud, so I use it as a last resort, because I have to.

Somehow, Google and others have managed to trick some people into thinking that using the cloud is more desirable than using faster and more reliable methods. The cloud is a sometimes useful, necessary evil. Not some panacea to be sought out for exclusive use. Under current conditions, reasonable people should *minimize* their dependence on the slow and unreliable cloud. And note that I have not even addressed privacy concerns here. That would be another long post.

Edited 2009-11-30 16:54 UTC

I find it... immensely amusing that you've put this FOSS-fanatic in the position of defending his much-maligned iPhone.

Something doesn't have to function flawlessly to still add value. Your experience is one data point; I will provide another. When I went to Kentucky for MML4, I used my very-much-not-an-iPhone year-old-at-the-time no-brand flip-phone to google the address of our hotel and make the reservations that my friends had failed to make, while driving through North-East Tennessee. This was four years ago, I think, on a not-stellar network and cheap phone, with the limited, mobile-phone-targeted "internet light" of the day. As networks have improved, and now with my iPhone, it's only gotten better. At MML 7 the year before last, my iPhone was a better (certainly, more usable) GPS than my friend's actual, in-car GPS, whose interface was so awkward that we usually couldn't set up the route before we got were we where going.

It's also quite nice to be able to just summon up my email, RSS news, funny utubez, and whatever else wherever I happen to be (assuming I have coverage, which is definitely not all the time, but is also often enough to be useful and worth having and paying for).

Note also that poor (or desktop/broadband targeted) page design may be the really culprit there. There are plenty of sights that work quite well on the iPhone. I'll laugh if the rise of netbooks and smartphones makes conservative, bandwidth-conscious and resource-wise web design important again.

Edit: spelling and wording

Edited 2009-11-30 17:06 UTC