Captive Audience
Photo by Sunny in L.A.
A full month after the release of the iPhone 3G, I still see lines of people outside of Apple Stores around Seattle waiting to get their hands on one. Although the new, lengthy activation process is a waste of time for customers, it sure is good advertising for Apple. Having lines out front of your store tends to make passers by curious, and curiosity often leads to attraction.
After two weeks with my iPhone 3G, however, I must admit that I’m not as happy as I was with the original iPhone. In fact, if my original iPhone didn’t have an annoyingly quiet earpiece and speakerphone (should have gotten it replaced during the one year warranty period), I probably would have returned the 3G model or not even upgraded to it in the first place.
Now, granted the original iPhone set probably the highest bar for any electronic device I’ve ever owned, but here is what is maddening about the 3G version:
- Battery, battery, battery. When Steve Jobs mentioned a year ago that battery life was keeping Apple from releasing a 3G version, he wasn’t kidding. Unfortunately, they released one anyway, and now even people like me who use a measly 5-20 minutes of talk time a day can barely go sunup to sundown on a single charge. It’s crippling and it’s frankly embarrassing, in my opinion.
- In order to mitigate the battery life issue, I have now turned off Location Services, Push email, wifi, and Bluetooth, as well as dimming the screen. It’s kind of like buying a Porsche and replacing the engine with a Hyundai to get better gas mileage. Pretty ridiculous.
- The 3G AT&T plans are more expensive, which sucks, but at least one can rationalize the data part by remembering that you are getting faster speeds. However, what explains 1500 text messages going from $6 to $15 a month??? Text messages?
Ten cents a message as part of a plan is highway robbery. And considering most people won’t hit 1500 on the dot, it often times ends up being much more per message than that.Ok, it’s actually a penny a message. - The shape of the phone has changed ever so subtly such that I can’t even use my original iPhone dock with it. Apple doesn’t include a dock with the iPhone 3G and charges $30 for their new “compatible” dock. This is an especially low blow.
- In my mind, neither the white model nor the black model look as nice as the old silver model and I don’t consider plastic an upgrade over metal.
- Location Services takes quite a long time to triangulate your location and often doesn’t work. I guess since I was forced to turn it off, I shouldn’t really care anyway.
- I live near downtown Seattle and a good portion of the time, I’m still on Edge.
- There’s a $18 “upgrade” fee for no apparent reason to switch phones.
In the end, I’d be willing to overlook every item on that list if it weren’t for the battery life issue. I’m not opposed to charging my phone every single night but when you have to think about charging it even during the day, that’s just poor product planning. I’d gladly accept an extra few millimeters in thickness if it meant a 50% bigger battery.
So in closing, I would say that if you already have a first generation iPhone you’re happy with, by all means stick with it. When the iPhone 3G Rev B comes out in several months and sports an acceptable battery, you’ll be happy you’re not stuck with the “old” 3G model.
Don’t fall into the early adopter trap with this particular product release. Sometimes we Apple fanboys are such a captive audience that we ignore the flaws of the items we purchase. And by sometimes, I of course mean always.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
This strikes me as the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard out of the news industry. Protect a product on the decline by making a product on the rise intentionally worse?
Mmmmkay.
Why not just shut your website down entirely so that the only way to get Inquirer content is by paying for a paper to be produced and delivered to you?
Hi-Ball Caffeinated Mineral Water is Nice
A couple of weeks ago, I ditched coffee. I was generally a one-iced-mocha-in-the-morning guy with the occasional refresher towards the end of the day.
Bad.
Coffee as part of a routine is kind of like cigarettes as part of a routine. It’s not exactly good for you, and once you’re used to it, you need it just to feel “normal”.
Quitting coffee, however, doesn’t mean I never want an occasional dose of caffeine. There are all sorts of alternatives out there like Red Bull, Jolt, hot tea, or iced tea, but I think I found my favorite:
Hi-Ball Sparkling Energy Water
Hi-Ball tastes like San Pellegrino or Perrier, is available in plain or lightly flavored, and contains no sugar, sucralose, or other sweeteners. Its caffeine comes naturally from guarana berries and it also contains 120% of your daily B vitamins (whatever those do).
So if you’re looking for a reasonably harmless caffeinated drink to try, see if you can find Hi-Ball at your local store. Most places around Seattle don’t have it but I’ve found a few that do.
When Your Neighbor Builds a Jackass Home
While out on the lake this weekend, I came across this sign:
So nice. I love how the neighbors not only call out the homeowner but the architect as well. Wrecking a neighborhood is a team process.
Here’s a shot of the offending house. It’s tough to tell how overbearing the concrete wall is from a straight-on angle, but it’s pretty awful:
UPDATE: Below is a better (worse) shot of the prison wall —
The Growing Sucralose Infestation
Whatever happened to the good old days when you could glance quickly through the beverage aisle and tell the diet beverages from the good beverages? We’ve had such a great system for so long: if it says “diet” or “sugar free” it’s DIET, and if it doesn’t, it has some form of super tasty sugar derivative in it, whether it be cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, or something else awesome.
I used to be so good at telling the two drinks apart.
Lately, however, I’ve found myself repeatedly hoodwinked by the chemically synthesized impostor known as sucralose… or “Splenda”, its Christian name. The substance is 600 times sweeter than table sugar, and although it’s not as bad as saccharin, aspartame, or any other past cancer-powder, it’s still not sugar, and it still tastes like crap.
As such, I humbly request of beverage companies that you please quit trying to be sly about these DIET drinks and label them just as previous DIET drinks were labeled: with the letters D.I.E.T.
When I see those letters, I know that purchase of the beverage in question will result in palate-shriveling aftertaste and lack of drinking satisfaction. When I see those letters, I know to move right along.
Instead, however, these sucralose-tainted drinks often use small, subtle terms like “lower sugar”, “lower calorie”, and sometimes no marquee labeling at all. This is confusing as there are plenty of legitimate “lower sugar” drinks on the market that simply removed some of the sugar (see Paul Newman’s Lightly Sweetened Lemonade). Often times, you need to read the entire label to know the difference. And to make matters worse, a lot of these drinks contain sugar near the top of the ingredient list and sucralose near the end… so it’s not even sufficient to just “look for the sugar” anymore.
“Noni Berry” for metabolism and “Goji Punch” for immunity. Can you tell which one is the diet one?
To be clear, I have nothing against sucralose itself. It could very well be the best artificial sweetener ever invented. I just resent that marketers, by not clearly labeling it, have blurred the representation of what is and what isn’t a diet drink; and as a front-line soldier in the weekly quest to discover and sample new beverages, I’m just sick of getting hit by all this repackaged, remarketed diet shrapnel.
UPDATE: Literally the very nanosecond I pressed the Publish button just now, a Splenda television commercial came on. It’s everywhere.
Enterprise CMSes vs. Blog CMSes
True or false: Most major news organizations (e.g. The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ESPN, etc) would be better off running their entire online publishing operations through a modified blogging platform (e.g. WordPress, Movable Type, Newsvine, or a home-grown solution) than through an enterprise CMS.
In other words, in five years, will mainstream news sites essentially be collections of individual writer blogs tied together mainly with section indexes and cross-linking?
Marco Polo Makes your Laptop Smarter
I have this problem. When I bring my laptop from home to work or to any other location, my computing needs change. At home, I have an unrestrictive wireless connection that I can do anything I want on. At work, I have an 802.11x protected connection which runs through a proxy and doesn’t let me do things like download IMAP mail freely or run a multi-protocol IM client. Additionally, I have a different printer at home than at work. And on and on and on.
It’s really not that big of a deal to manually “change locations” via the Apple Menu, but I’ve always wanted a way for my laptop to just sense where I’m at and do the right thing automatically. A few days ago, a colleague at work, Paul Oremland, told me about a utility called Marco Polo which does just that. It’s really great. Now when I walk into the office and open my laptop, my location is switched automatically, certain applications are magically launched, and my printer is set to the correct device.
The application is great in that you can have it trigger off a whole host of conditions, such as wireless networks in the area, USB devices that may be attached, and even ambient light! You can even use fuzzy logic to combine these conditions and take action when they are all present.
The folks that developed Marco Polo call it “context aware computing”. I like it.
You can download Marco Polo for free here (oh and it’s open source). Happy location switching!
Russ.
I was standing in the NBC Nightly News studio on a cold Thursday night last January when Brian Williams’ on-air guest sat down for a quick chat with Brian, and the rest of the country. It was Tim Russert, talking with his trademark animation about how the fate of country depended on the results of the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries.
I positioned myself by the swinging glass door such that I could intercept Russert as he left the set during the commercial break. Sure enough, a minute later, he came bounding towards me, smiling like a kid who’d just aced his final exam.
“Hi Mr. Russert. My name’s Mike. I run Newsvine.”, I said, stepping in front of him to shake his hand.
He scanned my face against the hundreds of thousands he’d seen before in his life, trying to decide if he should recognize me, and then raised his hand to meet mine.
“What an election!” he shouted with a big smile, and then continued through the studio at full speed.
That is one of my many lasting memories — and my only personal one — of Tim Russert, who died of a heart attack yesterday at age 58. He was a man who made politics an interesting subject to follow, even for someone like me who is generally put off by the subject. He was known as the most prepared, incisive interviewer in the business, and he will be missed. Best wishes to the Russert family, his closest friends, and everyone else affected by his passing.
In Case Anybody Was Wondering What The Best Flavor Of Ice Cream In The World Is…
… the answer is: Haagen Dazs Caramel Cone.
As you were…
Apple Just Killed The Market for Phones
We’ll never see another Steve Jobs event like MacWorld 2007, when the original iPhone was unveiled, but boy did today’s announcements turn up the heat in the mobile space.
$199 for a better version of what has been almost unanimously hailed as the greatest mobile phone ever built.
$199.
And a year from now, it’ll be $99. That’s like an iPod Shuffle.
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy of the highest order, how on *earth* could the average customer justify purchasing any other mobile device at this point? If you can still get a free phone somewhere and that suits you, then great. But for the person thinking of spending between $99 and $799 on a Nokia, Motorola, Palm, or Sony, how can you even think about those alternatives given where the iPhone just went? The quality/feature/usability gap is so large that even a hatred for AT&T can’t keep people away now.
This sounds overly simplistic, but I really do think Apple just split the mobile world into two choices: settle for a free phone or buy an iPhone. There just aren’t many reasons to do anything else.
Even our Director of Technology and our CTO (both PC people) are both getting iPhones on July 11th… both having previously harangued the rest of the Newsvine staff for our incessant iPhone claqueury. When Apple critics turn that quickly, and without any prodding, you know a very important inflection point has been hit.
As for MobileMe, I was six months early in my call here, but most of the details are on target. Concurrent Exchange/Non-Exchange workflows, over-the-air syncing of everything that’s important to you, and finally a legitimate reason to pay a $99 subscription fee. I’m ecstatic to begin using this. It looks fantastic. Although the one thing I’m still not clear on is whether or not Apple Mail on my laptop will also be an Exchange client.
As a developer and designer, I’ve always hated “the mobile space” because I just viewed it as a really uninteresting transitional phase between regular cell phones and full-immersion goggles; but seeing how the form factor, UI, and engineering of the iPhone has transformed and freed the mobile experience is nothing short of astounding. Even more unbelievable is that Apple did it on their very first model.
Thousands of Nokias. Thousands of Motorolas. Hundreds of Sonys. And a single Apple buries them all.