So I picked up a friend’s iPhone the other day to play with it and saw the YouTube application that’s pre-installed. Interesting, I remember thinking at the time, but didn’t think much more about it. Until last week.

My wife and I don’t watch a lot of television. We don’t even have the basic cable package, opting instead for the clear-reception-only package that gives us the local channels and a handful of cable ones coupled with a NetFlix subscription. Even the TV that we watch tends to be things like the Simpson’s and MASH reruns on Fox and Hallmark, and our all-time favorites MythBusters and Dirty Jobs on Discover Channel. So it took us both by surprise when the TV show Pushing Daisies caught our attention.

The problem, though, is the commercials.

Man, are we spoiled by Netflix. I remember 10 minutes of show and 3 minutes of commercial growing up. This show pushes the limit, though, giving us 5 minute of show and 5 minutes of commercial. I turned to my wife last week and said, “Forget it. I like the show, but I’ll wait for Season 1 at NetFlix instead.”

Well, this got me thinking about mobile video and broken business models. I believe strongly that tigers don’t change their stripes and, in the TV world, this means revenues via commercials. The problem is I will never sit and watch TV on my phone because on my phone I want instant gratification and no commercials. Commercials take too long, they eat up too much battery life, and they are, well, annoying.

So the question becomes how does this stuff move to mobile devices? Is it really that people won’t watch TV on these devices, as some have said? Can companies like YouTube add commercials to the front end of their videos without alienating the viewing public? Or is it, in my opinion, that none of us are willing to put up with the garbage that goes along with watching this stuff?

Someone will figure out a better model — just like Google did for online advertising. And when they do, they will be the masters of mobile video distribution. Because if I know anything about Americans, we love our television.

There has been a lot of talk lately about tablets and sub-notebooks. The Foleo, which I have discussed in this space before, is just one example. Nokia, Samsung and Sony have small computers (called ultra-mobile PCs or UMPCs). Now Apple is rumored to be developing a “tablet” as well.

There is and has always been a lot of discussion and questions about whether these kinds of devices can be successful. In the late 90s, someone released a pen/computer system that allowed you to write on a piece of paper and then have that digital image sent to a computer. Complete failure. Even my friend Michael Mace has an article on why these devices are not successful.

The discussion around these devices reminds me, though, of the discussion revolving around mobile computing in ’95 and ’96. The Newton was a market failure (but technical marvel), companies like GRiD were going nowhere, and this little company called Palm Computing couldn’t get funding. Well, it turned out the problem wasn’t “handheld computing” but the devices being made.

Palm focused on solving one problem in those days: how do I gain quick and easy access to my personal information? I contend that the problem with tablets or UMPCs or whatever you want to call them is that they don’t have similar focus and emphasis. I want my tablet to solve one problem: how do I review information and take notes on the go? If the handheld computer replaced my day planner, then my tablet should replace my briefcase.

What goes in my briefcase? My notebook for note taking, print outs of documents and reports. If this was 1997, that would be good enough. But this is 2007 so I would expect a solid browser experience as well and some level of connectivity.

So here is my requirements list for the “Info Pad”:

1. Long enough battery life that I can attend a few meetings without needing to re-charge. I better get at least 5 hours of “on time” from the thing.
2. Instant on.
3. It needs to be really thin and light with a screen size like a pad of paper: 5×7 or 8×10.
4. For that matter, it needs to lay flat like a pad of paper if I need it to (such as in face-to-face meetings).
5. It should have wi-fi and a good browser so I can look up information on the web.
6. I need to take notes on it somehow, so either a fold out keyboard, handwriting recognition or some method that allows me to enter notes at the same speed I would write in my notebook. Oh, and these notes should be search-able.
7. Be able to review the basic documents: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc.
8. Some level of connectivity to my main computer system so I can access files and move them back and forth.
9. Price point is critical: I think it needs to run about $500-600.

The good news is the software is there in one form or another. What we need is the device. Someone will make this happen. I just hope it is soon.

I opened the business section of the local newspaper this morning to find something quite interesting. It seems that Hewlett-Packard announced laptops with flash memory instead of hard drives. This announcement, along with Palm’s Foleo announcement, is very interesting. It is the opening salvo in the battle for the next generation of mobile computers.

I am going to take a crack at explaining this whole memory thing to you. Memory is your desk and bookshelf. You can keep lots of books on your bookshelf but in order to use one, you have to take it off the shelf and open it on your desk. This is exactly how your hard drive and RAM work on your computer. The hard drive is the number of books (i.e., applications, files, pictures, videos, etc.) you can store at any one time, the same as your bookshelf. RAM is the number of books you can have open on the desk at any one time. Run out of space on your desktop and things move slow — you have to move books around to see them. Same on your computer. Close a book to put it back on the shelf, gaining desktop space, and you lose your place. Same as closing a running application on your computer.

The closest analogy I can make for flash memory is bookmarks. When you use a bookmark, you can close the book and then quickly and easily open to the same place you were before, whether it is on your desk or on the shelf. Flash memory does this also, keeping markers for which applications are running and where you were in them, whether the computer is on or off. You may already use flash memory. Those little cards you stick in your handheld computer, smartphone, and camera are all flash memory.

So why is flash memory in mobile computers important? Four adjectives sum it up: faster, smaller, lighter and rugged.

• Its faster: it takes no time to start using it so you don’t have the lag time between hitting the on button and seeing the screen. It also doesn’t close down your applications but suspends them instead. Its like turning off the screen instead of shutting down the machine.
• It smaller: flash memory is smaller than a postage stamp and barely thicker meaning that computers can be as small or as big as we need them to be without restriction.
• Its lighter: a big chunk of the laptops weight is the screen and hard drive. With the hard drive gone and screens about to get really light, we could be looking at laptops that weigh as little as your cell phone.
• Its rugged: hard drives have moving parts that damage easy; flash memory doesn’t.

Why should you care? Because your next-generation laptop could have the best qualities of your cell phone combined with the best qualities of your laptop: instant on, fast response, rugged enough to take a beating, large enough to do real work, and light enough to carry without needing a chiropractor.