Print edition: 
SHAWNEE — Donning a safety helmet for a ride of less than 20 yards, coffee cup in hand, the computer pioneer wheeled a Segway into the conference room of Perceptive Software to thrilled applause.
This geek is still chic.
Steve Wozniak, the Wilbur to Steve Jobs’ Orville, brought the aura of Apple to a giddy audience of software engineers and computer scientists Friday morning in Shawnee.
And yet few seem as turned on with the way the world has evolved than Wozniak, who as the engineering talent behind the early days of Apple played no small role in the evolution. Technology still excites him, and the way computers, tablets and phones increasingly understand what we want gives him a palpable joy.
“My phone understands me as a person,” he told 500-plus employees at Perceptive. “It’s my best friend.”
And that, he said, was the goal with Apple all along. He and Jobs, the much-heralded technology guru who died last year, had always aimed for not just technology that did amazing things. They also strived for technology that was simple to use.
Today, the many Internet-channeling gadgets on the market increasingly make answers ever easier to pinpoint. Growing up, Wozniak told his audience, when somebody had a question at a dinner table — say, how high is Mount Everest? — it prompted a walk to the encyclopedia collection. Now, Wozniak said, all you need do is talk to some electronic device.
He came to Kansas on Friday on a visit to his wife’s family in Baldwin City. He married the former Janet Hill in 2008 at a Segway polo tournament in Indianapolis after having met on technology-oriented cruises. Janet is an old friend of Marge Adair, Perceptive’s executive vice president of finance.
So on Friday, the fast-growing enterprise software company brought the Wozniaks to company headquarters to pump up the troops before their annual dodgeball tournament.
In about 15 minutes talking to the Perceptive staff and a brief interview later, he shared a range of observations on the state of technology today:
• Google’s plan to bring ultra-fast Internet to homes in the Kansas City market looks to him like “just an experiment. … It’s not going to flood the country.” He complained that he still can’t get a conventional broadband landline at his home in Los Gatos, Calif., even though he lives in the country’s heart of technology. So he uses a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot that draws its service from Verizon Wireless’ 4G network.
• He doesn’t use Overland Park-based Sprint Nextel services because too many of his friends who do find the wireless carrier’s coverage to be spotty. Yet he likes the way Sprint provides unlimited data services and spoke nostalgically about how the old Nextel brand delivered reliable push-to-talk connections.
• Wozniak adores both the iPhone and Android smartphone operating systems. He said he always carries at least three smartphones. To get over limited battery life on his iPhone, he carries two of the Apple gadgets at a time. And he spoke glowingly about the Verizon Droid Razr he had with him on Friday.
• There’s no such thing as too many gadgets. Wozniak said that at times he’s had the dashboard of his car outfitted with multiple navigation devices, just so he could compare. “I’m always getting more.”
• He downloads multiple brands of similar apps to see which does the job best. His favorites include Google Goggles for identifying a wide range of products, RedLaser for reading bar codes, and an app that tells him tipping etiquette in different countries (“I’m traveling all the time”).
• His wife said she doesn’t tell him to put down the gadgets. “He’s an engineer,” she said in grinning defeat. But Steve Wozniak said that at dinners he likes it when everyone puts their phones face down on the table and the person who first gives into the temptation to pick up their device pays for the meal.
