Folks have been clambering over themselves to praise the new 7 inch Samsung Tab after its launch at IFA last week, but I have been playing with Dell’s 5 inch screen entry in the tablet game for a month already, so I thought I should get a few notes down for context.

Pros

1. Display – truly outstanding. I have an HTC Desire with its amazing AMOLED screen and the Streak is comparable.
2. Rugged- talking of screens – I had a portable hard drive and the Streak in the same pocket in my bag when I went on holiday. Somehow the drive got all bent to hell, but the Streak is fine. Funnily enough I dropped the Desire and cracked the screen on the same holiday. Seems the Streak was the only gizmo to come back whole. That said I know some UK users have had problems with the screen.
3. Performance – the specs of the Streak are such that even though its only running Android 1.6 it runs FAST. Very responsive, no sluggishness between a gesture and a function. Hardware does the trick.
4. Specs – 1GHz Snapdragon ARM-based mobile processor from Qualcomm (see 3. above)
5. Android – Dell has got hammered for making a machine based on an older Android version – but companies like Dell don’t sell beta technology, and they have to integrate all kinds of partner stuff. A Dell tablet that didn’t do a good job with Microsoft Exchange would always be a non starter, for example. Anyway – I understand that if I go to 3G today O2 is provisioning Android 2.1 to the Streak.
6. Design- the device is pretty yummy looking.

Cons

1. That said about design, The sharpness of the lines on the device are not ideal for holding and typing. It seems to me that the Dell designers could learn from the PSP with some bevelling and angling to make it more natural in the hand: rounded edges might seem “weird” on a tablet screen. But how you hold the device is just as important and rendering the Wide Screen Web. Just because the screen is a rectangle doesn’t mean the device have to be.
2. Unfortunately the device bricked during the OTA update, so I have some fun ahead fixing that. I actually don’t blame Dell or 02 for the problem. I will finish/rewrite this review when I fix it, and I will be more of an Android dork by the time I have worked it out. Android at Modaco here I come.

All in all I like the Dell Streak quite a bit so far. It makes a good TV companion. I like the form factor. But then I don’t wear skinny jeans (I thought this was a pretty good gag but it seems so did everybody else).

Considering this is one of Dell’s first such devices I am pretty impressed with the design and build. Disclosure: The streak is a loaner from Dell, which is a client.

We’re on the record as being fans of Jeffrey Snover, the architect and driving force behind Microsoft PowerShell- a scripting and automation technology that now sits behind the management front ends of all products in the Windows Server family. PowerShell is the command line for admins that Windows always lacked, the missing link that would have persuaded hardcore ops people that Microsoft was serious about management.

Jeffrey has been on RedMonkTV before. Indeed its about time we had him back.

The other day on twitter Dale Lane, an IBM employee, said something interesting.

heard nothing about my PowerShell library for WMQ in many months, then two people contact me about it in one day! strange

I decided to follow up, which led me to this IBM documentation and SupportPac, which allows you to manage WebSphereMQ events from PowerShell. So far so good.

But it was in reading Jeffrey on the subject of PowerShell to MQ that reminded me just how important this authentic voice of interoperability is to Microsoft. People like Jeffrey are why Microsoft Server products have come so far in the last couple of years.

Let me be quick to so that they did a very good job on their cmdlets in terms of using the naming guidelines.  I can’t tell you how thrilled I am at the great job they did.  That said, I’m not at all surprised.

A lot of people are quick to say how much PowerShell looked to Unix for inspiration.  That is true and we have a deep respect and admiration for that community and that body of work.  That said, for some reason people don’t pick up on my statements about how influential the AS400 CL and VMS DCL models where in the conceptual model for PowerShell.

Both AS400 CL and VMS/DCL were hardcore about consistent naming.  This is one of the reasons why operators love those systems.  You invest in learning the naming and then it is consistent and easy to remember.  Both system did parsing instead of the individual commands which ensures syntactic consistency. The UNIX model is one where the pipeline is an undifferentiated bytestream and commands in the pipeline consume individually determine when and how to consume that data.  PowerShell rejected that model and replaced it with a model much more in aligned with IBM’s traditional RECORD orientation (yup – think CARD DECKS!).  We say that PowerShell is “object based”.  That is more true than false and is about as accurate as you can get with 2 words but the reality is that the object in the pipeline and the arguments on the command line combine to create a RECORD.  The engine then determines how to bind that Record to the cmdlet parameters and then we call ProcessRecord() method.

The bottom line here is that this industry has a long line of superstar engineers and we all benefit from their excellent work.  Hats off the UNIX engineers!  Hats off the the VMS engineers!  Hats off the IBM engineers!

Very well said sir. Anyway, here is a script for restarting IBM’s DB2 database from PowerShell. Dale Lane also wrote something on the subject of DB2 and Powershell, but his blog appears to be down at the moment.

The point I am making is that improvement doesn’t come from thinking everyone else sucks, it often comes from realising that others knew what they were doing. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. True innovators of course acknowledge their sources. I have had my share of fights over the years with Microsoft on the the subject of interoperability, but its important to acknowledge the massive progress they have made in enterprise capabilities.

disclosure: Microsoft Servers and Tools Business is a client.

The picture above was just too good not to use. It originally came from Tom’s Hardware. Sorry guys please let me know if you’d prefer me not to use it.

A while ago I put forward Asymmetric Follow as a name to describe one of the key phenomena driving Twitter adoption – the asymmetrical nature of the model, which suits the kind of scale-free networks we see on the internet, and the architectural pattern of publish and subscribe. The idea evidently has legs. When even a cynic like Dare Obasanjo uses the terminology, rather than leaving your guts in a puddle on the floor, you’re probably onto something.

But since I wrote the piece something has been bothering me-namely that the real power comes from Asymmetric Reply rather than Follow. If the root node never replies, then the phenomenon is far less interesting. Its fairly easy for me to track people that reach out to me with direct messages or @replies on twitter- after all, I only have five thousand followers. But what if I was @wossy (150k) or @stephenfry (301k) or Scobleizer (72k)?

The A in A-list probably stands for “administration”. Everyone wants a piece of you. Ping. Ping. Ping. I still believe that the whales can reply in order to build a rich conversational community. But its hard.

Scobleizer, for example, pushes as much traffic to FriendFeed as possible, because he strongly appreciates the filtering mechanisms there. Stephen Fry puts forward a tortuous lottery scheme for the chance to be included in his twitter stream.

ADD remains one way to keep abreast of stuff (that’s my strategy!). Lots of self-searching etc.

Well last week I had a chance to walk in the fan’s shoes, and of course I learned a lot, while trying to build buzz for our charitable efforts for Red Nose Day. I have to admit I hated it. I *really* wanted to get the attention of @wossy or @stephenfry. Could I? Of course not. These guys have day jobs…

But it was only on spending a lot of time surfing around user profiles to check for spambots that I discovered how profoundly depressing the celebrities on Twitter phenomenon can be. It was coming across profiles of Twitter users following ten or so celebrities on Twitter (and nobody else), wondering why their questions weren’t being answered. Why are they ignoring me, I keep asking them questions? After I saw a few of these profiles I felt a little depressed.

Just as we can’t expect celebrities to understand all the tools they can use with Twitter to build relationships with fans, so as Twitter hits the mainstream, and millions more users join the network they aren’t going to know the “tricks” of Twitter relationship building. Lets face it I know these tricks pretty well, and I couldn’t get attention when i needed it, even for a BBC charidee event.

It was sad to see people defining themselves by their disappointments. I can only hope that as more people use twitter they can discover that the real beauty of Twitter is that “ordinary” people are awesome, interesting and entertaining. (As if twitter could teach this lesson!). I follow around 700 folks, and the celebs would be the first to go if I had to cull my list.

I loved this post from solobasssteve today.

The celebrity bit of twitter is a fairly pointless sideshow within the grand scheme of things. That there are people who spend all day trying to get an answer from Jonathan Ross or Stephen Fry says more about them than it does about twitter. It’s the same people who hang round outside film premiers. And they don’t reflect badly on cinema as an art form.

Steve continues:

It’s an entirely permissions-based system. So if you want to get a comment out of Dave Gorman or Will Carling or Demi Moore, you’ll have to engage them the way you would anyone else. Celeb obsessives notwithstanding, Twitter is a great leveler.

What is my point? Not exactly sure. But publish is as important as subscribe, and reply is as important as follow. We’ll all learn a lot about this over the next couple of years.

Normally when I announce a new client I say a little bit about the company, but in the case of Dell what can I tell you that you don’t already know? One of the reasons I am so excited about the opportunity is that RedMonk works best with organisations that are open to change. We don’t really “do” conservative. We work best at clients that want fresh thinking, fresh perspectives, and cultural change.

When Dell was “just a PC company” we really had very little to say to the firm. When Dell became the industry leader in Wintel servers we still didn’t have much to say to the firm. In fact we really didn’t have much to say to Dell, ironically enough, until it had some tough quarters and so began to reinvent itself. The Soul of a New Dell. Now that’s interesting to us…

Dell is now doing a far better job of engaging in conversations with customers, twittering for example, going hardcore with a green agenda, listening more actively than talking, and so on. Its in that environment that we plan to play. And Stephen will be happy because Dell supports pre-installed Ubuntu…

RedMonk will be working with Dell in some key areas: notably sustainability. That’s right- Dell has signed up for advisory services based on our Greenmonk research agenda. One reason Dell is really exciting from a sustainability perspective (Well done Dell!) is that its an incredible supply chain innovator. Dell is a bit like Wal*Mart in this respect- it is in a position to do so much good in terms of creating lower carbon supply chains. In The World is Flat author Tom Friedman lauded Dell for sending components hither and thither around the world with low cost oil as the enabler. So what comes next? Hardware as a service, anyone? Reduced Bit Miles via Cloud.

We’re going to help Dell understand how the world is changing and respond accordingly. Unlike some of our smaller clients however, I don’t expect our help to lead to the company’s acquisition

Dell is our first vendor customer that clearly isn’t a software company, and its a marquee name in what are increasingly tough economic times. What’s not to like?