Online romance and intrigue, Victorian style! Channel 4 has just launched what it calls an “enhanced comic”, “The Thrill Electric”, which was inspired in part by my book “The Victorian Internet”. I’m not sure about some of the language anachronisms (people only started having “issues” rather than “problems” relatively recently) but I love the way it spins a story around the life of a female telegraph operator. You need to download a plug-in to view it, but give it a try — the result is indeed an enhanced comic-strip, with the elements in each panel moving in that pseudo-3D effect which is also used to liven up old photos in documentaries.

Over the years Apple has blessed several technologies in this way and brought them to a mass audience: the graphical user interface with the Mac, the digital music player with the iPod, mobile internet-browsing and multi-touch screens with the iPhone, tablet computers with the iPad. In each case there were previous examples of the technology, but Apple showed how it should be done, and it then took off. There’s another such technology that has been around for several years and is ready for lift-off; it just needs the endorsement of a big company like Apple to make it happen. The technology in question is “near-field communication” (NFC) chips, which can be used to make contactless payments, among other things.

If you use a contactless card as your office pass or public-transport ticket (prominent examples are Octopus in Hong Kong and Oyster in London) then you’ll already be familiar with the basic idea: you hold the card near a reader (I keep my Oyster card inside my wallet) and the ticker barrier opens. There are also contactless credit cards in several markets (though not very many retailers accept them yet), and contactless key fobs, using the same technology, which let you pay for petrol with a swipe. This technology has been slowly spreading for years.

What an NFC chip does, however, is enable a mobile phone to emulate one of these contactless cards. The phone is then able to replace a wallet-full of such cards, and accompanying software on the phone lets you check the balance on your rail pass, for example. This is in fact commonplace in Japan, where thousands of people routinely use their mobile phones as their railway tickets, and renew their tickets right on their phones, using the phone’s mobile-internet connection. For a while this was easily the biggest mobile-commerce application on Earth.

All the nuts and bolts have been worked out, in other words. But the technology is still stuck in the starting blocks. The banks were pushing contactless credit cards quite hard in some parts of the world a couple of years ago, but the financial crisis has understandably distracted them. Handset-makers such as Nokia have also produced handsets with NFC support, but if only one or two phones in the line-up support NFC, that’s not enough phones to encourage retailers, railway companies and so on to adopt the technology.

If Apple announced that every iPhone would henceforth support NFC, however, then the picture would change overnight. There would be a flood of apps to support the emulation of various contactless cards. Within a few months there would be a critical mass of tech-savvy users willing to adopt the technology, giving retailers, banks and other companies the confidence to pile in. And iPhones are quite expensive handsets, with relatively price-insensitive buyers, so nobody would really notice the small added cost of an NFC chip.

Understandably, given that it makes perfect sense, there have been persistent rumours that Apple might be thinking of putting NFC chips into the next iPhone, which is due to be announced on June 7th. Tellingly, the company has filed a couple of NFC-related patents. But the next-generation iPhones that have escaped into the wild in recent weeks, and have then been taken apart, do not seem to include the technology. Moreover, Apple has approved an iPhone case, made by DeviceFidelity, that includes an NFC chip connected via the dock connector, and which then talks to an app on the phone. I doubt Apple would do that if it were about to announce direct support for the technology itself; but perhaps it’s a bluff to divert attention from plans to do just that. On balance, though, I don’t expect the new fourth-generation iPhone HD, or whatever it is called, to include NFC. But perhaps the fifth-generation one will?

UPDATE: So, Steve Jobs has spoken, and there is no NFC in the new iPhone 4. It does have a better camera, a better screen, a faster chip with better battery life, a clever new case design, HD video recording (uh-oh, Flip), iBooks support and so forth. But NFC will just have to wait until iPhone 5, it seems.

(Cross-posted from Babbage, The Economist‘s technology blog)

The use of multiple SIMs is widespread in the developing world, because it saves money. It’s usually cheaper to call someone on the same network than someone on a different network, and there are lots of special deals offering discounts at particular times of day, though these vary from operator to operator. To get the best available deal for a particular call, it makes sense to own lots of SIMs, and to swap the appropriate SIM into your handset when needed. The problem, of course, is that you then end up with lots of phone numbers, and you really only want to give out a single number to other people. So in practice you use one SIM most of the time, and occasionally swap in another one. This is also common practice among people who travel a lot, and among cost-conscious users, such as teenagers, in the developed world.

For people juggling multiple SIMs, a dual-SIM phone therefore has obvious appeal: it allows your phone to act, in effect, as two phones at once, sitting on two networks, and may even be able to switch between active calls on different networks. In the rich world, however, most handsets are sold by operators, and operators are not keen on dual-SIM handsets. They would rather not admit that rival operators exist, and they make it difficult to switch SIMs by, for example, locking handsets so that they only work on a particular network. In the poor world, however, handsets and SIMs are often sold separately, so dual-SIM handsets are more widely available.

So Nokia’s announcement today of two new dual-SIM handsets, the C1 and C2, is interesting. There’s clearly strong demand for this feature in the developing world, and at the moment much of it is being met by makers of knock-off handsets. That means Nokia is missing out on sales, but it can only compete with the knock-off handsets if it offers a dual-SIM feature too. (Samsung, for its part, has made dual-SIM handsets for some time.) The C1 handset, which will cost about 30 euros when it goes on sale in the third quarter of this year, has two SIM slots, only one of which is active at a time; but you can switch between them by holding down a single key. The phone also has a standby time of six weeks, a built-in FM radio and a torch. The C2 handset (pictured above, and due in the fourth quarter) supports two active SIMs at once: hence the dual signal-strength indicators. You can take a call on one network and put it on hold when a call on the other network comes through. There are, in other words, two lots of radio circuitry in the phone, which helps explain why it costs a bit more (45 euros).

Why is Nokia doing this now? In part, I think, it’s because it doesn’t want to be out-innovated by pirates. But it’s also because Chinese vendors that start out producing knock-offs quickly learn the ropes and then start to produce increasingly competitive products. We’ve seen this happen with network gear and cars in the past decade, and now it’s starting to happen with phones, as can be seen from Gartner’s latest figures for handset market share, released on May 19th. As usual Nokia is on top, followed by Samsung and LG; RIM and Apple are coming up the field fast, and Motorola and Sony Ericsson are imploding. That accounts for seven of the top ten handset-makers; but look at the other three. They are all Chinese. You’ve probably heard of Huawei and ZTE, but GFive? Who are they?

GFive, it turns out, is a handset-maker based in Hong Kong. It describes itself as “the most elegant mobile brand from China” and says it is backed by a syndicate of Chinese factories which have collectively produced over 100m handsets to date. GFive’s phones are based on chipsets made by MediaTek of Taiwan, and many of them support dual SIMs. As we pointed out in a piece last August:

MediaTek’s technology has revolutionised the manufacture of mobile phones in mainland China. A handset firm there used to need 20m yuan ($2.9m), 100 engineers and at least nine months to bring a product to market. Now 500,000 yuan, ten engineers and three months will do. As a result, Chinese handset-makers now number in the hundreds. Many churn out shanzhai (or “bandit”) phones: knock-offs of established brands, labelled “Nckia” or “Sumsung”. Others are true innovators, making handsets with big speakers or with two slots for SIM cards, so that one handset can be called on two different numbers.

According to Carolina Milanesi of Gartner, GFive is now the number three handset-maker in India, and it also sells its phones in South-East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Rather than selling through operators, GFive sells its handsets through very small retailers—the sort of corner shops where people commonly buy top-up vouchers for their phones. The firm’s website shows a wide range of handsets; and some of them, it must be said, look very similar to phones from established vendors. But as Chinese firms have demonstrated in other areas, and Japanese firms demonstrated before them, imitation can give way to innovation with surprising speed. And when it comes to dual-SIM handsets, the Chinese upstarts have blazed a trail that Nokia, the industry’s giant, is only now rather belatedly following.

(Cross-posted from Babbage, The Economist‘s technology blog)

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

This is part of Mr Carr’s broader argument, detailed in his new book “The Shallows”, about how the internet is changing the way people think. The hyperlink, he says, is “just one element among many—including multimedia, interruptions, multitasking, jerky eye movements, divided attention, extraneous decision making, even social anxiety—that tend to promote hurried, distracted, and superficial thinking online.” Laura Miller, who reviewed the book at Salon, took Mr Carr’s words to heart and put hyperlinks at the bottom, inspiring Mr Carr to do the same. And in a similar vein, he notes, a blog published by the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia is carrying out an experiment in which hyperlinks will be excluded from the text blog posts, and listed at the end instead. The bloggers in question have for their part been inspired by the writing of Olivia Judson, formerly of this parish, at the New York Times; she also lists her hyperlinks at the end, rather like the references in a scientific paper.

Mr Carr’s suggestion that this is not a bad idea has prompted responses from several web gurus: Jay Rosen at NYU has accused him of wanting to “unbuild the web”; Jeff Jarvis claims that Mr Carr’s post is, ironically, linkbait (insert joke about pots, kettles and the colour black here); and Mathew Ingram gives a robust defence of the link:

I think not including links (which a surprising number of web writers still don’t) is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance — a sign that the writer believes these ideas sprang fully formed from his or her brain, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, and have no link to anything that another person might have thought or written. Either way, getting rid of links is a failure on the writer’s part.

Fair enough. But I have to confess that I have some sympathy for Mr Carr’s view. I don’t mind piles of links in sidebars, but I find links in text can be irritating if there are too many of them. Of course, it makes sense to link to sources, but links also invite the reader to go away and read something else, and they can imply that the item you are reading can only be understood by reading all the references. At The Economist we do our best to write articles that are self-contained and make sense without the need to refer to other sources, which leads to some characteristic Economist style quirks, such as saying “Ford, a carmaker”. (See? We saved you the trouble of having to ask Google what the company does.) When those articles are published online, there are very rarely hyperlinks in the body of the text.

Admittedly, the advent of browsers with tabs means a link is less of an invitation to go elsewhere than it used to be, because you can open up lots of background tabs while you read without interruption. But I wonder what proportion of the web population actually does this. Anyway, having chortled (via Twitter) at Ms Miller’s idea of a list of links, footnote-like, at the end of the article, I feel the least I can do is give it a try. So here are the links. What do you think? Is this approach less distracting? Should we include more links in the text of our articles? Are we being arrogant, or cowardly, by not doing so?

Nick Carr’s post on “delinkification”
Laura Miller’s review of “The Shallows”
Mathew Ingram defends linking

(Cross-posted from Babbage, The Economist‘s technology blog)

Of course, you’d expect him to say that: he has to defend his turf. But he may have a point. Some people will want an all-singing, all-dancing iPad; others may prefer a simpler, cheaper device dedicated to reading. Sony’s plan, according to Mr Haber, is to focus on such dedicated (he prefers the term “immersive”) reading devices. “Companies will do different things,” he says. “Our focus is immersive reading, so that you forget you have a device in your hand.”

Mr Haber does not want to attack the iPad by name, but there are implied criticisms of it in his defence of the merits of dedicated, E Ink devices. The fact that you can’t watch movies or check Twitter on a Sony Reader becomes a feature, not a bug, because it means you won’t be distracted. Mr Haber says Sony’s readers are “designed to be lightweight, to fit into your hand, compared with a device that may be heavier or larger”. We all know which device he means: many people’s first reaction to the iPad is surprise at how heavy it is. Not everyone likes backlit LCD displays; to some users it feels like “a flashlight in the eye”, says Mr Haber, and they may well prefer an E Ink display. (He didn’t mention it, but a recent study suggests that staring at the glowing screens of computers and other devices late at night can interfere with circadian rhythms and disrupt sleep patterns.) And Sony’s model when it comes to selling e-books is not “one store to one device, but access in general”, unlike Apple’s more integrated (ie, closed) approach — though, it must be said, the availability of multiple e-reader applications on the iPad means it is arguably the most versatile e-reader around. Overall, Mr Haber concludes, the fundamental difference between dedicated e-readers and “multifunctional backlit LCD devices” (ie, iPads) is what he calls “cosiness” — and a larger, heavier device is “not cosy”.

Whether you regard an iPad as cosier than a Sony Reader, or vice versa, is a matter of taste. (The iPad is a great couch-surfing machine, which counts as cosy in my book.) But it is entirely possible that as in other product categories, such as cars and mobile phones, different buyers will want different things. There has been no convergence on a single “best” design for cars or mobile phones; instead there are lots of products aimed at particular types of users with different needs and budgets. In addition to dedicated e-readers with black-and-white screens on the one hand, and general-purpose tablet computers on the other, there may be room for products aimed specifically at business people (Plastic Logic is trying this), students, children or old people. (It will be interesting to see what Amazon does next with the Kindle; the fact that it is encouraging people to write apps for it suggests that the firm plans to compete more directly with the iPad and the forthcoming tablets based on Google’s Android operating system. The next Kindle is rumoured to have a colour screen, perhaps using Pixel Qi or Mirasol technology, though Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, played down such talk yesterday.)

The demographics of e-readers are unusual. Anecdotally, I’ve been struck by the apparent popularity of the Kindle among the over-50s, who are not usually early adopters. But they are often avid readers. Mr Haber says buyers of Sony’s e-readers are disproportionately likely to be over 40 and female. “This was the age-group that was leading the shift,” he says. “It’s great because it’s new technology, and it goes to show that you don’t have to be an 18-year-old male to like technology.” But the signs are that e-readers are now appealling to more traditional (ie, younger and male) buyers. No doubt that is due, in part, to the iPad effect. But it is still unclear whether the iPad will boost sales of e-readers more broadly and, if it does, whether buyers will favour dedicated devices as the “cosier” option, as Mr Haber contends.

(Cross-posted from Babbage, The Economist‘s technology blog)

IT HAS SHARPENED MY MEMORY
The internet has not changed the way I think. The old stone-age mental software still seems to be working surprisingly well in the 21st century, despite claims to the contrary. What the internet has done, however, is sharpen my memory.

A quick search with a few well chosen keywords is usually enough to turn a decaying memory of a half-forgotten article, scientific paper or news item into perfect recall of the information in question. Previously, these things at the penumbra of recollection could only be recovered with a great deal of effort or luck. The internet has, in effect, upgraded my memory of such marginal items from haphazard and partial to reliable and total.

This means I can swim freely through the internet’s vast oceans of information, safe in the knowledge that any connections between items that subsequently occur to me can still be made. (My own work as a journalist and author is based on making connections in this way, but the same is true for many other information workers, a category that encompasses a growing fraction of the workforce.)

This is useful now, but I expect it to become much more useful as I get older and my memory starts to become less reliable — moving more of the information that passes through my mind into that penumbral region. Indeed, I am reminded of the impact that eyeglasses had after their development in the late 13th century (though my recollection of the details was sketchy until I, ahem, asked the internet). As Giordano of Pisa noted in 1306, “It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles that help one see well, an art that is one of the best and most necessary in the world.”

Eyeglasses doubled the useful working life of scribes and skilled craftsmen who were otherwise liable to suffer from farsightedness (presbyopia) from the age of around 40. The historian David Landes has suggested that this use of technology to overcome what had previously been regarded as an unavoidable human limitation then spurred further innovations of a similar nature, such as the development of fine optical instruments and precision machine tools. Perhaps the same will be true of the way the internet enhances our mental faculties in the years to come.

Of course, this question is really a response to Nick Carr‘s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. He has since expanded this into a book, “The Shallows”, which is now sitting on my desk, asking to be reviewed. I’m going to have to read it.

What isn’t there? There’s no camera, but that’s not really a surprise; taking pictures with a device this big would be unwieldy. Instead, there’s an optional adapter to allow photos from digital cameras to be uploaded into it. Very handy if you want to post to Facebook while on holiday. Nor is there a forward-facing camera to enable videoconferencing. There’s no phone function. But there is a built-in mic, and I expect the iPad will work with the iPhone’s headphones, which also have a mic. It would then be possible to make calls using a VoIP app over either Wi-Fi or 3G. (Apple has just said that it will approve apps that do VoIP over 3G, something it would not allow before.) The ability to run multiple apps at once, which had been expected, is also absent. I think that will be added in due course, and to the iPhone too, much as copy and paste were last year. (A four-finger swipe might allow switching between full-screen apps, for example, like on the old Mac MultiFinder.) Some people were a bit disappointed by all this, but future software updates and hardware versions may fill in many of these holes, just as 3G was added to the iPhone a year after launch. And any disappointment ought to be tempered by the iPad’s price: it starts at $499, much less than anticipated. I expected it to cost $699 when I originally wrote my leader, based on my best guesses, on Monday afternoon.

The iBooks app looks gorgeous, and it uses the open ePub format. That’s a big deal, because it means Apple is blessing that format; I think it also means that the iPad, which can run Amazon’s Kindle app, will be the only e-reader to support both Kindle and ePub formats. This may prompt Amazon to rethink its opposition to ePub. Amazon has already adjusted its royalty rates to mirror Apple’s, in anticipation of the iPad, and has opened up the Kindle to allow third parties to develop apps for it, to make it a more general purpose computer. But it has a monochrome screen that is slow to update, and very little processing power, so you won’t ever see “Grand Theft Auto” on the Kindle. I expect Amazon to launch a more powerful colour version of the Kindle, possibly with screen technology from Pixel Qi, later this year.

Anyway, back to the iPad. E-books look great on it, but Apple isn’t supporting magazines or newspapers directly. The New York Times showed a lovely app at the launch, but it’s an app. So Apple isn’t defining a new standard for periodicals — or, at least, not yet. Again, this is an obvious move for the firm in the coming months. And perhaps implementing periodicals as apps isn’t such a bad idea; it would allow lots of interactivity, if that’s what publishers (and readers) want.

Argh! New technology is going to kill newspapers! In this week’s Christmas issue of The Economist I explain why people were worried about this — in 1845 — and what actually happened. The new technology in question was the telegraph, and newspapers co-opted it, rather than being destroyed by it. Will that also happen with the internet? As I have argued here previously, the internet is different because it does challenge the last-mile delivery of newspapers. (The telegraph was not a threat to papers in the end because although it delivered news faster, it could not distribute it to subscribers. The internet can do both.) So the internet may well kill newspapers; but newspapers are merely one business model for the delivery of news, and there is no reason why they should survive. The death of newspapers is not the same as the death of news. Already we are seeing new models emerge that do not depend on paper. Some publications will make the leap; many will not. If I was setting up a newspaper today I’d want it to look a lot like Bloomberg: global network of reporters, cash-cow terminals/financial information business to pay the bills, and (now) a consumer brand in the form of BusinessWeek. As this article argues, Bloomberg has a lot going for it, and it may prove to be the greatest competitor to The Economist in the medium term. Something for the next editor-in-chief to worry about, perhaps.

This is me at the BBC, talking about ”An Edible History of Humanity” on The Forum, an excellent BBC World Service show which puts together three guests from entirely different fields to see what happens: in this case an Australian expert on fire, a Romanian Dadaist poet, and me. (You can hear the show here.) One of the guests is also invited to present a slightly silly “60 second idea” to improve the world, so I proposed making everyone over the age of 40 play video games. (You can hear that bit here.) After the show had been recorded, but before it aired, Charlie Brooker in The Guardian published a very good list of games that everyone should try, which is very much in the same vein; his choices were bang on. Anyway, back to the food. I recently contributed to the Spiked debate on the future of food and did a Q&A on the book for Mother Nature Network. I’m also taking part in an event in New York in January linked to the Silk Road exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ll be talking about the connections between food, trade and cultural exchange, along with a history professor and a chef. I’m the glue, I guess. I love the AMNH because of the planetarium, the whale, the dinosaur exhibits laid out in evolutionary order (take that, creationists), and because it does amazing things like this.