More iPhone bashing

Wow..this is really a phenomenon. Check out the following video review. This ZDnet editor says he "would love to have" an iPhone...and then goes ahead and bashes this wonderful product because of the minor issues he thinks are important that it does not fare well on. Must be great to have all that power of the press.

Here are the main points of the ZDNet commentary in a nutshell:

1. There is "much less excitement" with this year's iPhone launch than in year's past. By who's standard? This year Apple sold 1 Million iPhone 3GS models in the first three days of the launch. Last year they sold...you guessed it...1 Million iPhone 3G models in the first three days. Exactly the same number! So it seems, from a monetary standpoint at least, this launch was just as exciting. But then again, some techies might not get excited about making money.

2. "The Palm Pre sold out at launch". Well, what a wonderful marketing statement. The thing you have to realize, however, is that it is easy to sell out when you have no product. Palm only sold 150,000 units in the same timeframe that Apple sold 1 Million. Palm Pre sales amount to nothing more than a rounding error in Apple's books.

3. "AT&T is the problem" because of the following three things: 1) lack of MMS support, 2) lack of tethering support, and 3) locking customers into a 2 year contract. PLEASE. Are you kidding? IMHO, MMS support is a legitamate gripe, albeit a minor one. But tethering support? Only geeks give a rip about this. Most "normal" people couldn't tell you what tethering support is if their life depended upon it. And as for the "2 year contract" lock-in, where have you been living for the past 15 years, on Mars? Every phone carrier in the US utilizes this HW subsidy model, and everybody [including the commenter] knows it! The trite caveat "people expect something different" does not wash with me. What people? Fellow Martians?

Just supports by previous blog that techies don't like the dominant player in any one arena, no matter how good the product. Futher, all the commenters and writers are early adopters who could care less about reliabiility and cost, since they change electronics like they change their socks. To the rest of us...their opinions are becoming less and less useful, and could actually make life a lot worse financially.

Palm Pre's best hope...vanity

"I'm bored of the iPhone" - This is a direct quote from a review of the Palm Pre. And it really sums up what Palm's "best hope" for success is --> VANITY. Just like this post, all those techies, early-adopters, and people with more money than brains who absolutely must have something that they can whip out [legally] and show off to their possy to prove they are the coolest dude in the group, they are all bashing the iPhone as "old" and "boring". But the Pre is "different" and "cool". That is why people buy the Palm Pre today. That is the only reason they buy it today.

Let's review the facts. To date, Palm has sold approx 150,000 Pres. To date, Apple has sold approx 25 million iPhones. The one thing you learn in manufacturing consumer electronics is that, the more you make, the better they get. The first few thousand of anything is junk from a robustness standpoint. You simply have to make a lot of anything to work out the kinks. Now, perhaps Palm crushed all those junky Pres. But perhaps not. Only time will tell.

From a feature standpoint, here is what you need to know regarding the salient differences between the Apple iPhone and the Palm Pre:

Key features Palm Pre has that iPhone does not have include:

1. Multitasking. That means you can run one app, leave it and run another app, and the first app will remain running in the "background". This is cool for some apps that need to monitor things on an ongoing basis, and is a definite advantage over the iPhone for those applications. Apps like SKYPE, Loopt, and Tweetdeck would benefit from this legit advantage.

2. Form factor. The Pre is decidedly smaller than the iPhone, so folks with small hands may like how it feels. The screen, however, is also slightly smaller, so you give something up in that tradeoff. IMHO, not enough reason to buy an unproven device.

3. Physical keyboard. The iPhone uses a "virtual" keyboard that some folks find hard to type on, whereas the Pre has an actual physical keyboard. The concept is cool, and I personally like physical keyboards like the one on my Treo 650. Unfortunately, I've heard that the Pre's keyboard is a little too small to be easily used [at least by the average man]. Again, this is a personal, ascetic reason to get a device.

4. WebOS. This term is used here to describe the entire User Experience [UX] of the Pre, which is definitely slick and cool. Again, if you buy on slick and cool, instead of on how to get things done, this could be a big factor in your decision. My problem with making a decision based upon who has the coolest UX is that, next week or next month, something "cooler" will come along, and you can literally go broke chasing these technology fashion trends. You better bring a lot of money if you like to do this sort of thing.

...There you have it. If you want these things, and these things ONLY, i.e. "to be the coolest kid on the block", go for it and buy a Pre. Let me know how it goes. I'll stick with my iPhone 3GS. Because I'm busy and I need to get something done. If you disagree, or even if you agree, let me know by writing a comment. Cheers.

What not to do - photography

Yep, there are a lot of tech blogs/articles out there... just a quick note to all those folks who need to use photography in their jobs, but don't really know [or care enough] how to do things properly.

Here is a hint...don't do what this guy did:

uh....fixing this one is pretty simple - Just angle the screen such that it is *not* perpendicular to the optical axis of your camera. In english, that means either up or down, but not pointing right at you! The would-be reviewer here probably wanted the screen to be as bright as possible, and since most LCDs apparent brightness drops off exponentially as you tilt the screen away from you, he just slammed it straight on. But really...what [or who] is the real subject of this photo?

Apple knows the whole recipe

You know what's so great about Apple? They have the entire recipe down pat. The come up with a concept, and create a drop-dead simple way to do the top 10% of user-requested features. They create that 10%, however, with 100% reliability. They really do very little from a feature standpoint, but they do it very, very well. They make sure the HW and SW play together flawlessly, and not just in the demo, but for every customer. 

I agree. 

I'll take a product that delivers 10% of the featureset 100% of the time, over a product that delivers 100% only 10% of the time. Companies fail because they cannot focus on the critical few elements of success, and simply nail them.

We know that demos can be compelling. But if you buy on the demo without knowing anything about real-world performance, you are taking a big risk. Don't be a lemming, and unless you have a ton on money to waste or are an early adopter [aka "a ton of money to waste"] or a reviewer [aka "willing to waste a ton of other people's money" - boy I want that job!] you absolutely MUST know something about the robustness of the product you are going to buy.

You either trust others or look at the data yourself. Problem with simply reading reviews, most reviewers don't give a rip about robustness. They are only into what is cool and new and can get copy read and get page views. Robustness is boring. But boy does it cost. Not necessarily today, or tomorrow. But believe me it will cost YOU eventually if you don't do your homework.

Is a product worth buying? Check it out. Simple math is your friend. Divide the total cost [buyin plus maintenance] over the lifetime, minus the buyout[if you sell it] by the total time you used the product. That will give you your cost per unit time. IF most people did this calculation for their cell phones, including contract, they would be appalled to see they are spending over $150-200 a MONTH so they can tweet, surf, and chat. Thats a lot of cash to do little more than waste theirs and other people's time.

Do the math, think, and by all means don't buy into the fanboy excitement. Unless you can really afford it.

What do you think? Is reliability important? Or would you rather just have something cool? Comment and let me know....

Google Wave - a new era for communication

Just watched the Google I/O 2009 Keynote Google Wave demo, and it was pretty impressive. In short, Google Wave is a new platform that allows developers to rapidly create a dynamic communication system, fully integrated between web and desktop. Google provides the open-source platform which seamlessly integrates all the common features of email, IM/chat, and document collaboration/processing into one communication thread that they call a "wave". Each wave is dynamic, that is it's state is constantly monitored by the wave server, which syncs all changes made by any client immediately. It tracks the complete history of the wave, and allows each client to "play back" the history, change by change, to review all activities of each wave.

Waves can contain plain text, rich text, audio, video and pictures. They are all treated similarly. Comments and changes are accommodated in a very intuitive fashion. In this way, collaborative edits/comments/changes can be managed very simply, allowing multiple wave participants to create a document/note/etc. which can then be distributed in "final form" via a new wave to others for final viewing, all the while retaining the rich history of each wave's pedigree.

The Wave platform provides APIs for client and server-side extensions. Server-side extensions, called robots, can participate in waves just like their human counterparts, mining each wave for data which can be used to make the wave even more valuable and productive to both the participants as well as the owner of the service. Several robots were demoed, including Spellee [semantic spell checker], Linkee [automatic weblink generator], and Rosy [way cool 40 language, real-time auto translator]. These things were real and live on stage.

The platform supports federation between servers, so you can set up your own Wave server for your community, and federate with all [or none] of the other Wave servers [including the ones Google owns and runs]. This way you can extend your reach dramatically!

For more info, check out wave.google.com for the demo of the video keynote. You should also look at www.code.google.com/apis/wave to get into the wave api effort. Another key link is www.waveprotocol.org to participate in the open wave protocol.

This is very interesting stuff. Wave-based properties should start becoming real later this year!