My latest Guardian column is a pretty unenthusiastic review of the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, hailed by many as the first serious Android-based iPad competitor. The Galaxy has all the right parts, but they’re assembled without much care or forethought. Something I missed mentioning in the review is that the device hides the low-profile power key next to the low-profile volume key, and they’re nearly indistinguishable to the touch, so every time I adjust the volume, I end up turning off the device. Try to imagine how that goes over with the three-year-old when I turn down the sound on a YouTube cartoon she’s enjoying and inadvertently switch the screen off.

But Samsung’s tablets – for no discernible reason – use a custom tip that isn’t any of the standard mini- or micro-USB ends. Instead, it’s a wide, flat connector, like the one Apple uses, but of course, it’s not compatible with Apple’s cables, either. I’ve already lost mine, run down the battery and now I can’t use the tablet again until I find another one. I passed through three airports recently, and none of them had a store that stocked them.

I have phone charger cables in my office, my travel bag, my backpack and beside the bed. The very last thing in the entire world that I need right now is to have to add another kind of USB cable to all those places. The decision to use a proprietary connector in a device whose major selling point is that it is non-proprietary is the stupidest thing about the Galaxy Tab 10.1 – even stupider than calling it the “Galaxy Tab 10.1.”

Likewise disappointing was the decision to omit the microSD card slot on the Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet. The 3G-equipped models come with a built-in microSD reader (handy to have, especially if you need to load some data onto the device and you’ve mislaid the stupid proprietary cable). This is integrated into the Sim assembly used by the 3G devices, and rather than leaving the empty Sim assembly in place and leaving the card-reader intact, Samsung removed the whole thing.

BTW, I did find a store that sold the Galaxy Tab proprietary cable, eventually, in the Miami airport. The wire cost $70, while standard USB cables were going for $3. What a rip-off.

Why Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is ‘meh’

The HowTheLightGetsIn festival has posted video from the two items I participated in last spring. The first, Technology and Anarchy, deals with regulation, democracy and technology. The second, The Return of Revolution, is a debate of sorts with Evgeny Morozov (whose book The Net Delusion I reviewed in depth), and Alex Callinicos, in which we discussed whether technology was a force for liberation or oppression.

My Open University talk on network and computer regulation is up on iTunes U for your downloading pleasure:

What is it about computers and computer networks that makes them so much more powerful and flexible than most other technologies? And why do these qualities seem to drive regulators and vested interest groups to demand illogical regulation? In this invited seminar, Open University Visiting Senior Lecturer Cory Doctorow discusses the consequence of overzealous technology regulation in a talk entitled: A little bit pregnant: Why it’s a bad idea to regulate computers the way we regulate radios, guns, uranium and other special-purpose tools.

Cory Doctorow: Computer and Internet Regulation – Audio

Josh Costello has adapted my novel Little Brother for stage in San Francisco (this is new adaptation, unrelated to the production that ran in Chicago a few years back). The show opens in January, 2012, and he’s just gone into production; he’s keeping running notes of his progress at a blog called LITTLE BROTHER LIVE.

My latest Locus column, “No Endorsement,” talks about how print-on-demand, 3D printers, and other technologies that make products available when people want them change the economics of fannish activity, fan art, and homemade merchandise. I propose a “”No Endorsement” badge that fans could use that indicates, “The creator of the work from which is this derived hasn’t reviewed or approved this; but s/he is still getting a piece of the action.”

Here’s how that could work: tens, hundreds or thousands of fans with interesting ideas for commercially adapting my works could create as many products as they could imagine and offer them for sale through i.Materialise or Shapeways. There’s no cost – apart from time – associated with this step. No one has to guess how many of these products the market will demand and produce and warehouse them in anticipation of demand. Each product bears the ‘‘no endorsement’’ mark, which tells you, the buyer, that I haven’t reviewed or approved of the product, and if it’s tasteless or stupid or ugly, it’s no reflection of my own ideas. This relieves me of the duty to bless or damn the enthusiastic creations of my fans.

But it also cuts me in for a piece of the action should a fan hit on a win. If your action figure hits the jackpot and generates lots of orders, I get paid, too. At any time, we have the option of renegotiating the deal: ‘‘You’re selling so many of these things, why don’t we knock my take back to ten percent and see if we can’t get more customers in the door?’’ Setting the initial royalty high creates an incentive to come to me for a better deal for really successful projects.

No Endorsement

My latest Publishers Weekly column, “Heuristics,” documents the success I’ve had with a pay-what-you-like donation model for my With a Little Help DIY short story collection, and looks at how it might be applied to other books:

But it’s the success of the donations program that has me thinking hardest—specifically, about the value proposition of the donations. Could donations form the basis of a new retail channel for e-books? Perhaps a widget that commercially published authors could embed in their own Web sites and social media pages based around this pitch: “Buy my e-book on a pay-what-you-like basis, and I’ll split the take 50–50 with my publisher, still a much better take than I’d get from your e-book purchases on Amazon, Nook, or iBooks.”

Why not? Commercial entertainment conglomerates understand that “pay creators, it’s the right thing to do” is a better pitch than “pay multinational entertainment conglomerates, they deserve your money.” This is why so many antipiracy ads focus on creators, not on corporate profits. Authors who collect directly from readers have a commercially valuable moral high ground, and figuring out how to incorporate the special relationship between creators and their audiences into a business model has the potential to rebalance the current relationship with the existing online retail channels.

It’s not unprecedented—pay-what-you-like programs like the Humble Indie Bundle (video games) and Radiohead’s In Rainbows and Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I–IV (music) have been runaway successes. The pitch from these projects, “pay the creator you love,” is a message that clearly resonates with my readers, some of whom have donated as much as $200. And this can help with the “pig-in-a-poke” problem. Without locked-in channels or DRM-laden works, authors and publishers can put together new titles in a single package to cross-promote their works—new writers could be bundled with established ones, for example. The Humble Indie Bundle has been very successful with this strategy. Readers could even nominate some of their payment for charity—say PEN, a library friends organization, a literacy trust, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or ACLU.

With A Little Help: Heuristics