Jimtac.com

Too much buzz goin’round these days… Last week we had the iPad in all it’s unibody fanciness. I [of course] will be getting one, though wether I spring for the 3G or just stick to the WiFi-only version really comes down to how much it’ll actually cost here in the land of the Canuck, and if we can get the same sweet “pay-as-you-go” 3G service as was shown off for the stateside crowd. At the moment I’m looking at the 32GB WiFi only, but if we get the 3G I’ll be rockin’ the 16 (or 32) w/ 3G…

This week it’s Google Buzz!!! All I’ll say is… Remember Google Wave??? Didn’t think so. If Twitter and Facebook weren’t so entrenched in the current collective internet consciousness this would be a bigger thing. I could see this become a widely used thing if it is completely open, and becomes fully interoperable with pretty much everything else out there. Which would drive people to use Google buzz as a single place to update their other social status updates, and I hope that eventually you can use “gBuzz” to update different social networks by checking off the networks that you want each status to go to. By having each status be selectable would allow for updates to be limited to 140 characters if you select Twitter (or other SMS rooted service), and if Twitter is deselected then it limits the length to the next shortest text limit.

The next buzz (or rather buzz-kill) is that even though it’s nice to have a job to keep me busy, I do find that it’s even more frustrating that I work for a company that’s an ISP, a Telco, and a Cable TV provider, which means that there are so many things that I just can’t discuss in a public forum, lest I be accused from within or without the company that I am acting as a mouthpiece of the company, and speaking on their behalf. BTW… I would never speak on behalf of my company [unless they decided to pay me tons of cash to do it, of course]. Throughout the 5 1/2 years that I was with TELUS I never spoke about the company, it’s business or anything related to the industry both for ethical, and for job-security [a.k.a legal] reasons. Why does this particularly frustrate me now, when it was simply par for the course before? Well to be honest, it’s because I see a company that preaches it’s open-ness with customers, but in the same breath attempts to force as closed an environment for it’s employees as possible.

On an aside… I think I may start posting about one of my favorite [non-tech] subjects: management faux-pas. It’s something that I avoided while working at TELUS because I was a manager there… But now I’m not a manager, so I feel like it’s less preachy, and just a bit whiny… we’ll see.

Until then,

Tim

The thing that I’ve been hearing recently from quite a few Apple haters and fanboys alike, which is the trend of getting on board with complaining about the iPod/iPhone and it’s closed system. It’s been extended to Apple’s corporate philosophy as well.

One thing that has been lobbied is that the iPod has destroyed innovation by using it’s market dominance to crush “smaller” alternatives. The biggest argument that I hear for this is that the DRM kept users locked into the iTunes/iPod integration, and because of which you COULDN’T go to any other device. To this I simply ask users to look at their music library, and determine what percentage of music is DRM’d and which is not. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of music is not, since most consumers will simply rip the CD’s that they have been collecting over the years, or as many younger consumers have been discovering, that there are multitudes of ways to find non-drm sources [of  sometimes questionable origin] for obtaining music on the internet.

My first foray into the whole MP3 player market was squarely in opposition to “caving” to Apple’s iPod, since I naturally have a distrust of all things popular/mainstream, and I instead chose the Toshiba GigaBeat for my first portable MP3 player, to which I found amazing sound quality, good battery life, and excellent display which showed the album art, and stored photographs in crisp detail, in fact I just gave it to my brother last year and it works to this day. I added to that with the Creative Zen Mini, a nice little flash player which also had great sound and had a fancy touch controls. Ultimately i broke down, and finally bought an iPod. Why, you may ask, since i already had two great players already? The answer is easy; it was the interface and the ecosystem that has grown around the iPod itself.

Two things became exceedingly clear to me when I was using my GigaBeat F20: One that I was amazed that I had gone that long without an MP3 player; and two, that It seemed as if no one at Toshiba [or pretty much any other company] had bothered to put the devices into the hands of a consumer to see if they could work the damn things. The design of the F20 was beautiful, and though light, it felt quite solid to hold, unfortunately the way you interact with it looked as if it was made by mentally challenged monkey. It had a cross-shaped soft-touch rubber control pad on the face which, while stupid in the fact that it was actually 5 buttons [left, right, up down, and center] was functional enough if you could figure out what the buttons had changed to based on the context of the screen that you were on. Then there were the side buttons… “Wait a tick. I thought you said that the buttons were on the face?” Actually I did, and on the side there were also the power button, select button, volume rocker, and the “A” button, [which I only NOW, while writing this, realized that it probably stood for "assignable", which was never explained in the voluminous documentation]. In the top of the unit there was the headphone jack, the Hold switch, and the a/c adaptor jack for charging. The bottom had the dock connector, the mini USB jack, and the battery hard reset switch. And then there’s the completely useless software in the form of Gigabeat Room, which could be used to manage music, and photos… If it worked half way decently. Oh, and it had it’s own similarly sized manual to the hardware [NOT a good sign]. And lastly, the support, I loved all of the Toshiba products that I’ve owned, I’ve been good to them, and they’ve been good to me, Until this one. I called up Toshiba Canada, and 3 different reps had no clue what it was, and one asked me if I imported it from Japan, because they don’t support Japanese products in Canada. When I got a call back from a “supervisor” I was told that the problems that I was having were solved with the next revision of the firmware, unfortunately, there were no immediate plans to make that firmware available to Canadian devices.

Now why did I go on for so long about that player, especially after saying how much I liked it? Because, as with all mobile phones that I’ve owned, it’s been degrees of frustration and hatred, where I just hated some less than others, so I went there. Not because I was satisfied with any of them. That is… Until I got my iPod w/ Photo (4G). Finally I got a device, where the design was clean, the interface was intuitive, AND consistent, and came with a decent program to manage my media. Power on the bottom, controls on the face, and a headphone jack, and hold switch on the top. Scroll right for down, left for up, and clearly defined buttons on the face, that always worked as expected. Instead of requiring two different media library managers like the F20, iTunes handled it all. At the time it was a bit more unwieldy than it is now, but it was still simple, and user friendly… Almost as if they had let people try it out before letting it loose on the world.

Finally in an incredibly long round-a-bout way, is my point. Why should Apple be REQUIRED to make their software interoperable with any [let alone all], other manufacturer’s devices, which all have their own proprietary methods of file management? Why should those companies not be held to the same standard as apple in UI/design/functionality? Windows Media Player, has made enormous strides [IMHO], but it’s still a poor substitute for a program that is designed to manage a device, as well as the media that you want to put on it. The most notable one that comes to mind, is the public spat over the Palm Pre syncing to iTunes masquerading as an actual iPod. While clever, there is no guarantee that it would work correctly forever, and god forbid that somehow Palm’s implementation of this hack inadvertently changes a system file on the Pre and renders it crippled, or “bricked”. The blame would at least initially, and during the most public phase of finger pointing, be squarely aimed at Apple for messing up Palm Pre phones. There are already companies that have excellent solutions to this problem. Mark/space’s Missing Sync for years has allowed me to use my Treo on my Mac, because Palm’s desktop software for the mac sucked [IMHO], and it even sync’ed my iTunes playlists to my Treo, [a functionality which is still there]. Then there’s DoubleTwist which sync’s pretty much everything, and has an iTunes style interface if that’s your kind of thing.

Part Two:
iPhones take away choice! Grrrrr!

The argument that I had my mobile phone & carrier choice decided for me because I’m a mac user, is frankly laughable. I had several Treos for years while I used macs, and they worked great with it [using Missing Sync], and I wouldn’t have changed to the iPhone, if it were not for the HUGE leap forward in usability in the iPhone. Previously I carried my iPod Touch, AND my Treo at all times, because the two complemented each other beautifully. The sound was fine, but the music and multimedia viewers were ridiculous, and was a great phone; while the iPod Touch was an amazing music player, WiFi browser, and picture viewer. Unfortunately this meant that I still had to carry around two [very pricey and relatively fragile] devices at all times, I even made decisions about which style of jacket to buy based on whether or not it had the requisite number of inside pockets.

So when the iPhone came out, I was in line for 8.5 hours to get the bloody thing!! And I really was working the whole time using my work assigned BlackBerry, kinda sad really. The moment that I finished syncing my iPhone with my computer, was not the moment that I realized that I was done with other phones, and anyone who knew me at the time remembered that I carried around THREE cellphones at the same time for almost a month, waiting for the one thing that I couldn’t live with to crop up and have me march the phone back, and cancel my new number, and contract. When it didn’t happen, I breathed a sigh of relief, and handed my 755p to my mother to use for the remainder of my contract.

Just because every smartphone on the market can’t sync and be managed by iTunes directly, doe not mean that the choice is gone.

Part Three:
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

Apple’s appstore, is variable in it’s standards, opaque in it’s rejection/acceptance policy, and some may say suspiciously set up to where one needs to be quite the fortune teller to determine what Apple is planning in order to not “duplicate upcoming functionality of the iPhone”, a.k.a “That’s a good idea, we should put that in the next release. Deny that app, since it’s too good an idea for us not to have come up with it first!”

In this… I agree. I don’t think that they should allow ALL apps into the store, since when your phone doesn’t work right, you don’t go to the website for the application, you assume it’s the phone not working right, plus if a piece of software isn’t working right, you go back to the store, not call the publisher. But… There should be CLEAR and OPEN guidelines as to what is, and is not allowable, and the same goes for the reasons for rejections.

Conclusion:
The least of all evils.

If there is a better phone FOR ME, and what I want to do with it, rather than just to make a statement, I will switch in a heartbeat. I did it from my Treo, and I’ll do it again with the iPhone. I’m always looking.

As far as the “Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched” issue… Yes it is the single biggest annoyance that I have experienced in my time playing WoW, but I ask this: How many additional instances were launched today? None, THAT’S how many!

We’ve all become used to the “regular maintenance” windows, despite knowing that virtually no other game has a weekly gameplay outage, let alone one that happens for as long as ours does. How many other services do people let get away with saying “expect to have a MINIMUM of 24 hours of downtime per month”? With any system, especially one as complex as Blizzards virtual world, maintenance is required and expected.

Today people are complaining about Gmail being down, and it’s FREE, whereas we WoW players fork over money each month to play a game when we WANT to, not just when we are ALLOWED to, based on “maintenance”. But in our case we mostly forgive it, because of a longstanding convention of “Tuesday downtime”.

The big difference I see here is that Google admitted there was a problem right away, and since it’s such a rare occurance, we trust them when we are assured that they were scrambling to get Gmail back up ASAP. Transparency makes a world of difference to a community, and Blizzard is making Apple look like a crystal vase.

So today’s the big day for Palm, and for everyone who wants an iPhone, but not an “Apple phone”. Frankly speaking, this is one day that I’ve been looking forward to as well, (even as I’m writing this on by iPhone). Today is the day when a “true competitor” to the iPhone is released to the public.

Now some of you may be saying, “But wait… There are already a bunch of competitors out there now.” and to that, I say… Weeeeeeeell not reeeeeeally. When you take a good hard look at the phones on the market today, many have similar functions, and many have large touch screens, however they are all very different classes of devices.

RIM’s BlackBerry Storm is their response to the iPhone, but it’s still primarily a corporate device with consumer frills added on to an email device. In my experience, the Curve and the bold do better as consumer devices, mainly because RIM stuck to the format that their are good at, and made the tools better all around, instead of trying to make something different for that sake of being different, not to mention the gimmicky click screen that has garnered oh so many complaints.

Samsung’s offerings are kind of in the same boat, except that they tried to keep the interface relatively similar to the previous itterations and just add features which seem to be tacked on as afterthoughs… Including the touchscreen inteface. LG is right up there with them, but at least most of their touchscreen phones, have some kind of flip up keyboards, though they rarely make use of the great big screen.

Nokia is perhaps the best of the “major” manufacturers. I personally want an N97, but don’t want to pay €500 (~CDN$800) for one.

There are others like the G1, but this is supposed to be about the Palm Pre, and many of the points are the same.

I’m hearing a lot of buzz about how great the phone can/should/would/will be, and about how some are overlooking bugs because it’s a “1.0″ device, and that it’s not really fair to compare it to the iPhone, or other such Gen 2+ devices. To me that’s all crap… Of course it’s fair to compare them, it would be ridiculous NOT to. If a brand new company was to release an 8 bit console (a la the original NES) today and sold it along side the PS3 and Xbox 360 for the same price; would it be excluded from comparison BECAUSE it’s a 1.0 device? If a new car from a major manufacturer comes out that only gets half of the gas mileage of the competitors in it’s class, should it be forgiven because it’s a new model? Of course not. Nor should the Palm Pre (or the G1 for that matter) get the same pass in this arena.

It is to be noted that I have yet to get my anxious little paws on the Pre, which is why I’m not reviewing it. That being said, journalists should not be “forgiving” of any products faults, because it’s a new model. It’s simply reality that when you release a product it will be competing with the other “top of the line” models for all of your competitors, and fashionable it is to bag on the iPhone for it’s faults, I remember back to when it was first released, and even with the faults being pointed out, it still performed as advertised and didn’t rely on the “v.1.0″ excuse.

I hope the Palm Pre is a huge success, competition breeds innovation. The current smartphone space most certainly needs innovation. Just look at Apple’s announced features for iPhone OS 3.0, on the heels of the Palm Pre, even going so far as to say that they will be matching the Pre feature for feature upon 3.0′s release. I just hope that Palm’s history with the Treo (I still love mine) gives them the edge they need to be the number 2 player in the smartphone market, and force the hand of the other manufacturers in order to get them to make true smartphones, and not just phones that play mp3′s, take pictures, and sell them as smartphones.

Here’s hoping… GO PALM!!!

So my little sister’s iBook decided to go ahead and crack it’s screen at the first sign of resistance as she was opening the lid… Lame!!!

When it was bought late last year it was an apple refurb that was $400, which would do well for a 16yo who pretty much needed a word processor for school, and since the house is full of mac’s it worked out well enough. Since it was a refurb model, it definitely showed signs of use, including an ill-fitting lid, which was a bit of a concern, but since it worked… Whatever. We also got the extended warranty from best buy which was nearly the same cost as the computer itself, but if anything happened, we’d probably get a new MacBook in it’s place.

Now that it’s finally happened, and something has gone horribly wrong. Apple, and at the very least Best Buy had better come through on the promise that the hinge being loose would not be a problem and they would take care if any related problems… They had better fix/ replace it. If not I’ll be seriously pissed.

Here’s hoping!

Tim

There are a few things that we all do as geeks, and even simply as consumers. Firstly we find what looks good to us… Sure we all want to believe that we all [especially geeks] simply go for the most practical, and the looks are simply what comes along with the “numbers”. Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that looks are just as important as anything.

The big problem that I have is that there is no standard to compare products effectively. What I would love to see is a standard labeling system to help figure out what is “better” for our own needs. Now I’m not asking that manufacturers give up any trade secrets, but I would love to see an information system similar to that which has been implemented for food here in Canada over the last few years. The biggest thing is that there are standards for how the information is displayed, and it is required to be displayed on the packaging for all food products sold in Canada.

Food Label Example

This isn’t something that is only limited to the marketing documents from manufacturers; it’s also even an issue when you visit websites for retailers, and even review sites, which I find even worse since it’s inconsistent even within their own sites. If we were to have a standard label to refer to, then we as consumers would be able to make more informed decisions about the purchases we need [or want] to make. Normally I’m a person who loathes increases in governmental interference, especially in industry, but sometimes it takes legislation to drive changes that will directly benefit consumers.

I recently experienced this when I was looking to buy my new netbook [the Dell Mini 9 b.t.w.]. Now I already knew that I wanted either the Dell Mini 9, or the MSI Wind, I knew that I wanted to get one of these because of the relative ease reported in installing OS X on them, and since I wanted to pick it up locally, my choice was made for me. Since I’m always looking for the best deal, I was still open to the option of purchasing an alternate, since OS X on a netbook would be cool to try, but it’s not something that I am likely to leave on it after I got it to work; In fact since installing Windows 7 on it, I don’t think I’ll do it at all.

The biggest challenge that I found was trying to compare the technical spec’s on the competing models available, when trying to there was no way to truly compare “apples to apples”. Most retailer, and review websites have a comparison feature for just such a problem, unfortunately more often than not there are blank spaces, or “not available” sections when comparing similar units, leaving research to be done, and more of it than most are willing to do. Because of this many consumers get a product that doesn’t satisfy all of the needs that they bought it to meet, which undoubtedly forces people to become less and less confident when buying these high tech devices. Even I don’t like dealing with the confusion. Maybe it’s one reason that I prefer Apple devices… I can compare them directly side by side, and can easily make an informed decision, while it’s not the only reason, it’s certainly one that I can’t deny being quite attractive.

While I doubt that this will happen anytime soon, I do hope that it will eventually happen. Informed consumers are confident consumers who buy better, and buy more with less hesitation. While I’m not exactly advocating that people should simply buy more, or keep up on every little bit of tech news just to be able to know what to buy. Since it hasn’t become an onerus burden on the food manufacturers to add these standardized labels, it should be placed on the manufacturers of electronic devices to do the same.

One of the side benefits of the food labels are that the bad parts of the foods we eat are brought to the forefront, and the same can be applied to the electronics industry. Many manufacturers of printed circuit boards still use brominated fire retardants, a known carcinogen, these type of things could be made mandatory, just as the listing of trans-fats for food, and with that knowledge consumers can also effect the industry by also buying with their conscience, and not just their wallets.