Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I’m a pretty big fan of convergence when it’s done well. Having fewer gadgets, cables, and power supplies to carry around is all good. This is especially true since we had our daughter and are looking to shed stuff that gets cumbersome to carry, pack and deal with.
The iPhone has turned out to be a pretty decent convergence device. Specifically it combined a smartphone with a music / video / podcast player that was just as good as a stand alone iPod. This was a huge selling point for me.
However, the original iPhone 3G had a pretty lousy camera and so it was never in the running to really replace a real camera. Furthermore the maps program while cool, was no replacement when you needed voice and turn by turn navigation. So for that I had a Garmin nuvi device that I used faithfully for the past 2 years. Otherwise the iPhone is an excellent “I am here, tell me what is near me device”.
Since getting the iPhone 3GS I’m frankly surprised at how many photos and videos I take with the thing (including close ups now that it can do Macro). The iPhone is actually “good enough” for many scenarios that my camera was previously required. For one thing, I carry my iPhone everywhere with me, so the likelihood that I will have it when I want to capture a video is extremely high… like when we were driving around in our car and our 2 year old said she wanted to listen to Lady Gaga and Madonna. Pretty funny, and no camera with us at the time, but we got it on video and were able to upload it to Facebook directly from the iPhone.
Now, with TomTom for the iPhone, another piece of technology that I would schlep around on vacations and around Seattle when I’m trying to navigate to Home Depot or Best Buy is no longer necessary.
So now we have a device that can do:
And you get the point. This thing can replace at least 3 or 4 independent device and do the same job 80% as good as dedicated gadget.
I call that progress.