Don't forget to "take your medicine"→
Adrien Chen of Gawker conducted a fascinating interview with an IT guy who services a different kind of clientele: high net-worth individuals and criminals. One of his unique services is to provide members of drug rings with prepaid cell phones and a supply of SIM cards that are cleverly rotated using a pill box:
With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.
Of course, it would be hugely annoying for a crewmember to have to remember the others’ constantly changing numbers. But he doesn’t have to, thanks to the pill organizers. Martin preprograms each day’s SIM card with the phone numbers the other members have that day. As long they all swap out their cards every day, the contacts in the phones stay in sync. (They never call anyone but each other on the phones.) Crewmembers will remind each other to “take their medicine,” Martin said.
Like I said, pretty fascinating stuff. [Gawker via kottke.org and Daring Fireball]
The unintended effects of driverless cars→
I’m buried deep in Taxation of Corporate Transactions this weekend (I know you’re jelly), but I just had to escape for a second to share this post from Koushik Dutta on the potentially awesome side-effect of Google’s driverless car project.
Dutta compares cars, which are typically not in use most of the time, with airplanes, which are almost constantly in use. The implementation of driverless technology could make car usage much more analogous to airplane usage:
Cars will spend less time idle: why would a household buy 2 (or even 3) cars, when they only need 1? Ride to work, then send the car home to your spouse. Need to go grocery shopping, but your kid also needs a ride to a soccer game? No problem, a driverless car can handle that.
Awesome. Can it be the future already? [Koushik Dutta via Techmeme]
Whatever works for you→
Marco Arment recently touched on the topic of being an evangelist for his technological choices and how he’s become a lot less annoying about pushing his choices onto others. It’s an issue that I briefly mentioned while linking to a Gizmodo article on trying to convert your friends to your tech religion.
I couldn’t agree more with the following point by Marco:
You should use whatever works for you. And I no longer have the patience or hubris to convince you what that should be. All I can offer is one data point: what I use, and how it works for me.
By now I have a pretty good understanding of what products I like, why I like them, and why a particular setup works for me. I gradually made the switch to all Apple products starting in 2008, and I’m currently rocking a Hackintosh desktop, iPhone 4, iPad 2, and a MacBook Air for school. That setup works great for me, and I’d gladly share with you why it does. Like Marco said, though, I’m but a single data point.
I’m all for making informed decision. There are pros and cons to every setup, and some options are in fact better than others, but these days there are a lot of great alternatives to choose from. The whole iOS/Android “war” really just boils down to personal preference — both are really awesome (and both are better than BlackBerry OS). The same goes for MacOS vs. Windows or Canon vs. Nikon. Just pick whatever one works for you, and you’re good to go.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m now averse to sharing my own opinion (don’t be ridiculous), but I’m done trying to convert people to whatever it is I’ve chosen. Do you prefer Android/Windows/Nikon? That’s cool, bro. Whatever works for you. [Marco.org]
Don't try to convert friends to your tech religion→
Don’t set out to convert. It works about as well with phones as it does with religion. That is to say, poorly (see: all of world history).
I agree with Sam Biddle of Gizmodo when he says that you shouldn’t try to convert friends to your tech religion. It’s pretty clear that I’m an Apple fanboy — just look at my recent posts — but one thing that I try really hard not to do (with varying degrees of success) is attempt to convert all of my friends over to the Apple camp. Simply because that’s the decision that I made doesn’t mean it’s the right decision for everybody.
Microsoft's vision of the future→
Who knows if/when this will ever actually happen, but it sure is pretty to look at. [GeekWire]
Update: Here’s John Gruber’s take on this video:
This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today.
His point is valid, but I still enjoyed the video.
Why the iPhone 4S camera is amazing
A friend of mine recently claimed that the iPhone 4S’s camera wasn’t “amazing,” but merely “par for the course” while linking to a PC World article that showed the iPhone 4S being outperformed by an Android phone in both stills and video quality.
Image quality is obviously very important when it comes to cameras, but in my opinion, there are other factors that are equally — or perhaps even more — important. Those factors are low-light performance and shutter lag.
Much like the megapixel myth, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns when it comes to image quality. Sure, there will always be room for improvement, but it’s no longer a pressing need. Most great cameras today — even those on smartphones — can take pictures that are acceptable to the average person provided there’s adequate lighting and good conditions. It’s when conditions are less than ideal, however, where things really start to fall apart, especially for compact/smartphone cameras.
Whether it’s from poor lighting conditions or startup/shutter lag, there’s nothing worse than missing a shot simply because your camera couldn’t take the picture. That’s why the two most important features that I look for in a camera are its low-light performance and speed. I already trust that the image quality will be sufficient given ideal conditions. I’m more interested in a camera that will allow me to take pictures in conditions where I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to with a different camera.
That’s where the iPhone 4S comes in. Aside from the meaningless bump up to 8 megapixels, the real advances in the iPhone 4S’s camera come in the form of its better handling of low-light conditions and reduced startup/shutter lag. The PC World article largely ignores these improvements. It makes absolutely no mention of the reduced startup/shutter lag, and it also only factors low-light performance for video, but not for stills.
PC World and my friend are both missing the point. What makes the iPhone 4S camera amazing isn’t its ability to take some great photos (but yes, it does that too). The iPhone 4S camera is amazing because it leads to less missed moments. And who doesn’t want that?
Edit: After rereading my post, I’d like to clarify what I’m saying — or rather, what I’m NOT saying. I’m NOT saying that the iPhone 4S is the best camera ever made or that it even revolutionized anything. It didn’t. It’s just a solid camera, plain and simple.
Better smartphone cameras will be released that will undoubtedly put the 4S to shame. The Galaxy Nexus, which was just announced last night, may even turn out to have a far superior camera. I thought it was interesting that they kept it at 5 megapixels — something I wish Apple had done with the 4S. More megapixels = more noise, and I’d rather have a clean 5MP image than a noisy 8MP one, but that’s just me.
It’s not always about the numbers
One of my good friends is a pretty big Android guy, and whenever we talk about phones, he’ll often get excited about the new dual- and quad-core processors that are “just around the corner.” I’m a geek, so I totally understand the appeal of faster processors, but I can’t help but wonder whether specs even matter anymore.
First of all, “normal” people (read; non-geeks) don’t care about specs. They couldn’t care less about which CPU is in their new phone so long as it works and it’s fast. Having said that, the iPhone 4 has been out for over a year now, and despite running a single-core processor, it has never once felt slow to me. Since the iPhone 4’s release, countless Android phones have come out featuring dual-core processors and much faster CPU speeds. But are these phones noticeably faster than the iPhone?
Well, it just so happens that Anandtech posted some benchmarks today. Actually, the benchmarks were meant to showcase the new iPhone 4S (spoiler alert: it’s really fast), but what really caught my eye was just how well the old iPhone 4 performed against the rest of the field. I’m sure iOS 5 had something to do with it, but the iPhone 4 held its own against the newer Android phones — at least when it comes to web browser performance.
And that’s the thing: what’s the point of these dual-core 1.5 GHz processors if the performance benefits are marginal at best? That’s why Apple has stayed out of the spec wars by refusing to list the CPU speeds and RAM of its devices. It’s not because they tend to have lower specs. Sure, that may play a small part, but more importantly, it simply doesn’t matter. The overall user experience is all that counts.
So while traditional geeks still harp about the specs on all the new Android phones, the bottom line is that they’re fighting the wrong fight: it simply doesn’t matter anymore.
Joshua Topolsky summed it up best in a post he wrote earlier this year on the Post-PC era:
It won’t be a debate about displays, memory, wireless options — it will be a debate about the quality of the experience. Apple is not just eschewing the spec conversation in favor of a different conversation — it’s rendering those former conversations useless. It would be like trying to compare a race car to a deeply satisfying book. In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.
The death of the phone number→
I hate phone numbers. They’re a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers. In fact, I can’t think of a single telecom service that is as restrictive as the phone number: email can be accessed from any device … [y]et the phone number remains stubbornly fixed with a single carrier and single device, even as consumers begin to move every other aspect of their lives to the cloud.
Nilay Patel from This Is My Next wrote an interesting article calling for the end of phone numbers in favor of a universal way of contacting someone that isn’t tied down to phone carriers. He then goes on to detail what the major tech players — Google, Microsoft, Apple — are doing to help forward the cause. I doubt that phone numbers are going away anytime soon, but I’m on board with idea.
Based on my early experiences with iMessage, the system actually works much better when tied to your email address than your phone number. One of the best features of iMessage is that it syncs your messages across all your iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) so that you can resume any previous conversation from any device. The problem comes when someone sends you an iMessage to your phone number (instead of your email address). That message can only be accessed from your iPhone since your iPad/iPod aren’t associated with that phone number. That totally kills the experience in my opinion, and it’s something that Apple may want to look at before it actually releases iMessage. The problem is compounded by the fact that most people have been trained to message people via their phone number, not their email address, and iMessage is seamlessly built into the default SMS application. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple can come up with an elegant solution to help free the world from phone numbers once and for all. Perhaps Apple can link Apple IDs to a specific phone number so that all messages sent to that phone number will automatically be forwarded to the user’s Apple ID as well. Regardless, I’m pretty excited for iMessage to launch, if only so that I won’t have to worry as much about going over my text message plan. [This Is My Next]
How gadgets are redefining quality time→
One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically. While it may look like some domestic version of “The Matrix” — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon. Call it what you will, it is a wholly different form of quality time.I really enjoyed this NYT piece on the way modern technology is changing the way we spend quality time with our loved ones because I thought I knew where it was headed — that gadgets are pretty much ruining everything — but instead it arrived at a much more positive conclusion. So texting during dinner is all good now, right? [NYT]
Rather than a sign of a dysfunctional relationship, such behavior can actually be interpreted as the sign of health, said Ronald Levant, a professor of psychology at the University of Akron. “People who think every minute we’re together we have to connect are going to drive each other crazy, because we all need some alone time, no matter how compatible a couple might be,” Dr. Levant said. “At a certain point in your relationship,” he added, “your task to keeping the relationship vital and refreshed is managed togetherness and separateness. Technology could be used as a tool to assist that.”
Android and “open”
I want to like Android. I really do. But one of my biggest gripes actually comes from the fact that it’s “open.” Google loves to tout how Android is “open” and how this provides users with many benefits. And they’re absolutely right; Android allows users to modify the OS with third party applications, such as Swype, which is actually pretty neat. What Google fails to mention, however, is that users often suffer as a result of this same “openness” in the form of skins and pre-installed apps.
Joshua Topolsky of Engadget goes on a pretty good rant on the downsides of Android’s “openness” on the latest Engadget podcast (skip to about 32:30 in or just download the clip here). Here are his main points:
- Aside from the HTC Sense UI, other “skinned” versions of Android actually result in a worse user experience, and they’re merely a ploy by phone manufacturers to attempt to differentiate their products. Sidenote: users with “skinned” Android phones also have to wait — sometimes up to several months — to upgrade to the latest version of Android OS since manufacturers need to wait on Google to release the code before they can reapply their skin. Furthermore, since the Nexus One and Nexus S are the only two phones that run stock Android, it’s safe to say that the large majority of all Android phones out there are using skins.
- Topolsky wants phone manufacturers to offer two versions of their Android phones — one “skinned” and one “stock” — even if they have to charge more for the “stock” version. Sidenote: YES! This is exactly what I want.
- Nilay Patel recently received an over-the-air update for his Motorola Droid X and one of the listed “features” was that it automatically installed a demo of Madden NFL. It also gave him a notification saying that he should purchase Quickoffice. Sidenote: He has Verizon to thank for selling out its customers and cutting a deal with the software companies to help push their products.
- Topolsky wonders where the “openness” is when Android phones get pre-loaded with unwanted apps and demos that users are not permitted to uninstall. “Where’s the openness there? See, there isn’t openness there. It’s only openness for OEMs and carriers because OEMs and carriers have money … and you know who pays? End-users.”
