If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area chances are you have to commute to work especially if you are like me and live in the "City" and work "down on the peninsula" in Sunnyvale about 50 miles away. Now, normally I travel the wide open I280 where you can pretty much go as fast as you want so the driving time to my work isn’t all that bad. I can usually make it in less than an hour.

The other day I had the occasion to go home from work using US101, the main street of Silicon Valley, which runs parallel to I280 but about five miles further inland. It was early afternoon so there wasn’t the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic which is usually why I don’t take it. For the past couple of years the California department for highways, Cal Trans, has been upgrading 101 and repaving it, among other improvements. It has been quite some time since I last traveled 101 from the Valley and was admiring the nice new smooth freeway surface. As I was making my way toward San Francisco I noticed something that was quite disturbing. This freshly resurfaced roadway was inundated with tire skid marks and scrapped paint marks on barriers. They were all over everywhere. The road looked like the landing point on the runway at SFO except here the skid marks were swerving in all different directions. You could just see where people suddenly realized they were going to hit someone in front of them and in a panic, slammed their foot on the brakes, cut the steering wheel sharply right or left. Almost always there was an abrupt stoppage of the tire marks; a definite smudge at impact. They either hit the center divider or whoever was ahead of them. I used to travel this road a lot and I never noticed such a multitude of skid and impact marks before so I was wondering what was going on when I got the familiar ping on my iPhone signifying an incoming email. I instinctively pickup up the phone and glanced down to see the message and like a lightning bolt striking, I knew why there were so many skid marks.

People, it will ruin your day and the day of the other person(s) ahead of you that you crash into for the instance it takes to look away at an email or, God forbid, send a text message while you are driving a vehicle. So STOP IT! No matter how important you think you are or how urgently someone needs to reach you, it can wait.

I love mobile devices particularly smartphones and have devoted the past several years my life driving Serial Port Memory Technology into this market to give these great gadgets ever more capabilities. But we simply have to be sane about where we use them. Behind the wheel of a 4000 pound moving mass of metal and plastic isn’t one of them. Enough said.

The SPMT Consortium reached another milestone today. We are pleased to welcome Marvell into the SPMT Promoter group. The promoter group makes up the governing body of the Consortium and is ultimately responsible for approving any specifications released to the members. According to Dr. Sehat Sutardja, chairman, president and CEO of Marvell, he has been investigating serial DRAM for quite some time and believes that Serial Port Memory Technology is the way of the future. I couldn’t agree with him more. When you take a look at the cadre of future memory interface architectures being bandied about in the industry today, nothing comes close to Serial Port Memory Technology in meeting the industry requirements in terms of high bandwidth, low power, low pin count, and low latency. Dr. Sutardja, who is recognized as one of the foremost experts on memory and is also an expert in analog design, says that the future for serial DRAM is now. He stated that the mission is to bring this technology to the industry as a standard. From the beginning, that has been the goal of the SPMT Consortium and we are glad that Marvell along with Samsung, Hynix, LG, ARM, and Silicon Image share the same belief. But, as they say on the 2:00 am infomercials (sometime I suffer from insomnia) " But wait, there’s more!":

We are also announcing a new and very exciting enhancement to the SPMT specification which is available to SPMT Consortium members as of today. We are introducing SerialSwitch technology. This is a game changer. It brings together the best of both worlds into a single memory interface. SerialSwitch enables systems to take advantage of the low power capabilities of parallel memory when low bandwidth is required and when the system demands high performance and high-bandwidth, SerialSwitch technology automatically switches the memory into high bandwidth mode, up to 6.4GB/s, while maintaining the low power benefit of SPMT. Additionally, the architecture allows for plug-in replacement of LPDDR2 memories so that the SoC developer doesn’t have to choose between parallel and serial at the time of the development. Because the SoC is designed for LPDDR2 and SPMT-enabled memory, this gives flexibility to the system designer as well to choose the appropriate memory device, either LPDDR2 or SPMT memory, based on price, availability, and system requirements but using the same SPMT-enabled SoC; as I said, the best of both worlds.

These are exciting times for the Consortium. The response from memory, SoC, and system designers has been incredibly positive. We have been reviewing this enhancement with industry leaders for several months and all say that the technology hits the nail on the head.

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Back from Barcelona where I attended the GSMA Mobile World Congress -- the annual confab for everything cell-phone related. What a great place to have a conference and exhibition. Barcelona is my second most favorite city in the world, second only to Paris. In a lot of ways it is much like Paris; great culture, unique architecture, fabulous food and wonderful people. Ok, maybe that last one I’ll give to Barcelona.

As expected, everyone was present and accounted for at GSMA. Well, everyone except Apple and Nokia. I didn’t expect Apple to be there, but Nokia? What’s up with that?

But, everyone else was certainly there. Here’s some of the coolest phones I saw: Sony Ericsson showed their Xperia™ X10 smartphone. It was really nice and certainly rivals the iPhone in look and feel. The user interface was extremely slick with floating images and pictures, definitely a cut above the current Apple offering. Samsung showed a new AMOLED touch screen that is awesome. It was very bright and easy to see in all lighting conditions; something that is a bit lacking with the iPhone. Samsung’s Bada platform for application development was, indeed, bad – as in very cool! There were a number of independent application developers there all showing their products on the new Samsung Wave smartphone. Transitioning between apps was extremely smooth and seamless. While the applications themselves may be unique, the usability and user interface was consistent across all of them. There’s also on-the-fly editing of widgets which was pretty neat.

HTC had a huge presence. This is the company that used to make phones for others to brand. Now, they are branding their own phones. When you look across their lineup, you can recognize who they may have designed phones for in the past. For years, they have focused on hardware because that’s what they were paid to do. Now they need to catch up on the software side and the user experience, if they want to be a player.

Motorola was all about their Blur environment. They had some good phones, but they were really pushing their Blur technology, i.e. cloud computing. Blur is an environment that organizes all the social media sites you may belong to: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. as well as all the contacts from across all your various email and contact programs. Let me stress -- ALL. It seems that when you buy a Motorola phone like the Cliq and start it up, it prompts you to open a Blur account. When you do, it will search everything and create contact info for anyone you know, whether you like it or not. Apparently, there’s no way to be selective about who you want be in contact with. Again, this is across all social sites as well as your email accounts. (Sounds like an oops to me.) All of this information is stored on their servers at their sites (in the "Cloud"). Not that I have anything to hide or that I’m paranoid, but this just seems a little exposed to me. However, I got the distinct feeling that they were really targeting a different demographic to which I don’t belong, one which doesn’t really think about things like privacy or government "oversight." Like the sub-30 crowd?

One notable bright spot and I can’t believe I’m saying this, was Microsoft and their Windows Phone 7 OS demonstration. WOW! Very impressive. With this OS, you can actually turn your smartphone into a virtual laptop, including full-throttle Windows Office applications. They definitely upped the ante with this one. Windows Mobile is now just a bad memory.

For me, the biggest takeaway from this year’s GSMA was that the hardware is becoming homogenized. Most handset manufacturers have moved toward the iPhone style form factor. Sure, some might have square corners verses rounded corners but when you do a little measuring they are all mostly the same: about the same physical dimensions, a button at the center on the bottom, a touch screen, swooshing to navigate. Really, it would be very difficult to tell which phone came from which company. The differentiation is going to be ultimately in the software; the kind of apps offered and how intuitive the user interface is. I think Google may have figured this out before anyone else did. And by the way, Android-based phones were everywhere.

The PC industry went down this very same path. Early on, you could tell an IBM PC from a Compaq PC pretty easily. But after a few years, ok maybe a decade, all PCs looked pretty much the same (not talking about Apple). It was very difficult for the PC manufacturers to differentiate themselves based on the hardware. I see the same thing happening to the cell phone market. It will basically come down to what kind of processing power you have, battery life and the user experience the service providers want to sell you. Form factor will be less of an issue. Smartphones will all have touch screens and they are all moving to the largest LCD form factor that fits in your pocket. Granted, the feature phone and low-end phones have a little more variations in form factor than the smartphone, but smartphones are the fastest growing segment. And based on what I heard from industry executives at GSMA, I’m pretty sure that the smartphone feature set as we see it today will certainly migrate to the midrange and will eventually become standard at the lower end of the market. This will leave the upper end to innovate with cool new features mostly based on application innovation.

So we’re back to, "It’s the software, stupid!"