Martin Cooper, lead developer of the Motorola team that built the first mobile phone in 1973, says today’s models are far too complicated.

“Whenever you create a universal device that does all things for all people, it does not do any things well,” former Motorola researcher Martin Cooper said at a privacy conference in Madrid.

While I probably utilise 20 per cent of my phone’s features, I still wonder how bad a hand held device, reputed to be more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo Moon program, can really be.

A number of browser manufactures apparently look to the Opera browser when seeking inspiration for their products writes Dustin Wilson.

Throughout the years Opera’s competition has released versions of their browsers with “new” features which are typically touted as innovations they did themselves, especially by Apple. Mozilla to its defense rarely (if ever to my knowledge) has done this, but Firefox fanboys typically flame others about features Firefox supposedly invented such as tabs when both Opera and Safari’s usage predates Firefox’s implementation of them.

The “evolution” of the iPhone could follow a path similar to that of the iPod according to John Gruber, who says new functionality will be added over time.

A simple trade-off between two things is like a seesaw: move one up and the other goes down. Think, say, of buying a new external hard drive – the trade-off there is between higher storage capacity and lower price. Or, say, how big to make a push button – bigger buttons are easier to hit, but there’s only so much space on a screen. Multivariate trade-offs are more complicated, but the basic gist is the same: you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Cities and Icons.

Sydney certainly fits the bill in this regard:

Unless a city has some sort of icon – be it a building, the physical setting, whatever – it will be nondescript, especially to people not familiar with it.

While I haven’t travelled as much as I would like to, I can’t think of one major city, or town, I have visited that hasn’t had an “icon”, landmark, or natural feature of some sort.