The Touch Book is a real netbook with a detachable touch screen, smaller keyboard, small price tag, but generally a miniature notebook. It comes with Touch Book OS, but claims to run Ubuntu, Android, and Windows CE.

The CPU is an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, the OMAP3530, running with 256MB RAM and 256MB of NAND memory. There is no hard drive — instead you get an 8GB SD card. You’ll also find Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 3D accelerometer and three USB ports. The display is held in place by magnets.

Price? $300 for the tablet screen, or $400 with the attachable keyboard. Would you buy a similar sized multi-touch Mac with an attachable screen that runs Mac OS X and iPhone OS? What would you pay?

In another sign of the dynamics of online life, Facebook tops Yahoo! From the L.A. Times:

Facebook attracted nearly 134 million unique visitors in January alone. Yahoo’s traffic declined in January to 132 million unique visitors. Google had over 147 million unique visitors in January.

The social networking site tops all sites except Google.

HTML 5. Coming soon to a browser near you. If only Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft could agree on the standards needed to bring HTML into the 21st century. Ryan Paul at Ars on what it is:

HTML 5 is the next generation of the hypertext markup language standard that is used to produce content on the Web. It originally emerged from the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and is presently undergoing editing through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The HTML 5 specification describes a number of important emerging Web features, including the Canvas and Video elements. Some aspects of HTML 5 are already widely implemented in modern browsers.

The de facto standard of what a web page looks like belongs to Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer browser has about 70-percent market share. What has been Microsoft’s involvement in this important web standard?

Microsoft originally declined an invitation to join WHATWG early in the process of defining HTML 5. Microsoft’s involvement has been minimal and the company has largely declined to comment on its intentions with regard to implementation.

So, if Microsoft isn’t involved, and Apple, Mozilla (Firefox), and Google can’t agree on the all important video and audio elements in HTML 5 (still a work in progress), what’s left except prayer and divine intervention?

Google’s Mark Pilgrim (a member of the HTML 5 standards group):

On August 7, 2009, Adrian Bateman (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Program Manager) did what no man or woman had ever done before: he gave substantive feedback on the current editor’s draft of HTML5 on behalf of Microsoft. His feedback was detailed and well-reasoned, and it spawned much discussion. As you might expect, much of the discussion [on the HTML 5 draft] since August 7 has been driven by Microsoft’s feedback. After five years of virtual silence, nobody wants to miss the opportunity to engage with a representative of the world’s still-dominant browser.

Is Microsoft having a change of heart? Or, is this merely another episode in Redmond’s EEE approach to standards? Embrace. Extend. Extinguish?

Why is all this important? Audio and video. Your browser plays the various audio and video formats through browser plugins. At best, performance is problematic. At worse, crash happy. Worse, there is no definitive standard code for presenting audio and video in HTML or XHTML that is supported by every major browser. HTML 5’s specification aims to change that. Microsoft’s Bateman:

We support the inclusion of the video and audio elements in the spec.

Whoa. What’s up with that? Change of heart? Writing on the wall? Is it all that important anyway? For now, Internet Explorer is the only major browser without support for the HTML 5 video element. Ryan Paul:

Microsoft’s increased involvement in the HTML 5 draft process reflects the growing importance of the emerging standard. The mainstream browser vendors appear to unanimously agree that it’s time for the Web to move forward and deliver a richer platform for users and developers. If Microsoft gets fully behind the HTML 5 video and audio elements, it would be a major step towards opening multimedia on the Web and undermining the dominance in this field of proprietary browser plugins.

Do miracles happen? Has Bill Gates become an angel of light? When will all the browser makers get on board with a specification that renders web pages, more or less, the same in every browser?

When pigs fly.

Are we witnessing the death of the Mac? Yes. At least, in the sense of what we know computers to be vs. what they are becoming. The future of computing belongs to powerful, handheld, closed devices that anyone can use. From Mac360:

Let’s face it. Computers as we know them, and have known them, for the past 30 years, are overly complex beasts; electronic behemoths which require too much effort for increasingly little gain. A Mac is not a toaster. It has become a bewildering array of digital devices, all of which demand learning curve time and maintenance, and like a closet, the Mac becomes a collecting place of everything from music to movies to email. All that capability comes at a price. Macs are no longer easy to use. They need to be replaced. Who else but Apple could replace the Mac. The bad news is that many won’t like what is happening to computing. The good news is that it’s already happened (or, rather, happening now).

If only Nixon could go to China, then only Apple could replace the Mac.

From AP:

The head of mobile phone operator O2 has apologized to customers in the British capital who were unable to make calls after the group’s network was swamped by people using smart phones such as Apple Inc.‘s iPhone.

What does AT&T do when smart phones clog the network? They tell customers to not use it so much. Ma Bell has had the iPhone in New York for about 30 months and I haven’t seen a single apology.