Russell Beattie

The iPhone was highly, highly anticipated. For years, people were conjecturing about it. In 2006, Dan Lyons, under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs", joked coincidentally that the iPhone would have only one button: "Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less. One."[1]

One of the reasons for all this speculation is that smartphones totally sucked back then.

Russell Beattie, one of the main mobile/smartphone bloggers at the time, wrote a great piece in 2004:
"Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows he could do it better. He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world."[2]

It's hard to understand how bad the situation was without actually using the mobile computing technology that existed at the time. In the late 90's, I had owned a couple generations of Palm PDAs, which were pretty good, but I stopped carrying a PDA around because I didn't want to fill my pockets with both a Palm and a…

I thought I'd spend a few lines in irb and implement two.io for you right here in a comment ;-) Here are the available two letter io names from /usr/share/dict/words, /usr/bin commands, and bash builtins:

ah.io, ay.io, di.io, ea.io, ey.io, fa.io, fc.io, fe.io, fg.io, ha.io, he.io, ju.io, ka.io, oe.io, or.io, ow.io, pu.io, ra.io, te.io, ti.io, tu.io, ut.io, wa.io, wi.io, wu.io, wy.io, ya.io, ym.io, yn.io, yr.io, du.io, ld.io, lp.io, m4.io, nm.io, wc.io

UPDATE: It just struck me that two letter domains might be rather hard to register. I'm looking at the T&Cs now. It is notable how many are marked as being registered in the WHOIS though.

UPDATE 2: Neither of the third party registrars I tried allowed two letter .io domains but the central nic.io does.

UPDATE 3: I visited rb.io (which I wanted ;-)) and found this blog post of just a cpl weeks ago on the same topic: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/two-letter-io-domains-available

I'm baffled that the support of single file, offline HTML is still so bad today :

https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/the-decades-long-html-bundle-quagmire.html

(I'm suspecting because this goes against the wants of some of the biggest players who have the incentive of making us leave as many online footprints as possible ?)

Even here, Mozilla recommends converting to PDF for easier (?!?) human readability. Except PDF is a very bad format for digital documents, with no support for reflow and very bad support of multimedia. (PDF is perhaps good for archival of offline documents, even despite its other issues).

I managed the tech/product aspect of Opera Mini and its direction for most of its first decade (we started in late 2004). There's 250+ million monthly active users of it now (most in places like SEA, Russia, India, Africa, South America). Reading stuff like this is quite rewarding.

This post somehow made me think of the first English language blog post from early 2006 that really appreciated what we (me and my team) accomplished:

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008770

"Opera Mini: Best Mobile Web Browser Bar None

Posted Tuesday, January 24, 2006 12:41 pm"

It's become a standard name for IT products (more so than .it!) due to input/output connnotations, and as the other commenter said, it's especially appropriate for a Google product launched at IO.

Also a lot of names sound cool as .io, e.g. cloud.io can be read as "Cloudio". And due to the relatively high cost, a lot of .io names are still available. Just 18 months ago, a ton of 2-letter domains were still going (http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/two-letter-io-domains-available).