Category Archives: THOUGHTS

The story that broke yesterday concerning PCalc by TLA Systems and the patent threat from Lodsys was just one example of a company trying to threaten a small company, or one-man band, into paying up or doing exactly what they say. It seems that this kind of behaviour is rife in every industry and that it is only going to grow as time goes by.

It reminded me of the  phone calls I had to endure last week from an individual representing a company who were have problems with a review on PDA-247. The long and short of it is that their company website is top of the links on Google when you search for the product name, but one below is my review of their product. My somewhat negative review.

The comments went crazy with roughly three quarters of readers agreeing that the product was not very good. It was suggested to me that this was a targeted campaign by a rival company and that they would like the comments removed, and ideally the entire review. After some discussion, with some help from a very clever lawyer I know, the comments were removed, but the review remained. Legal action was mentioned, which was never feasible, but I have a family and do this on my own so I had little choice but to back down on the comments issue. I don’t want to run the risk of a hefty legal bill and, to be fair, could never prove where the comments were coming from so it could have be a long and protracted affair.

And this is the problem for one-man bands and small companies.

In the past 9 years running PDA-247 I have on more than 10 occasions had to amend or remove content from the site because of outside intervention. Last week’s problem was minuscule in comparison to some in the past which have come from ‘very’ large companies within the mobile industry. I remember a couple of occasions 2 years ago where I had to remove content for no good reason. I wrote reviews of crap products and they didn’t like it- simple as that. I told the truth, but they wanted their customers to continue to buy their products. Their crap products.

It annoys me intensely that large companies can use the threat of legal action against smaller companies and know that they won’t be able to risk the legal costs. That’s not justice and more importantly that gets us nowhere near the truth. Small developers have multiple barriers to contend with and small websites have no flexibility when it comes to speaking the truth. PDA-247 is small and last week was an example of a time when I thought, yet again, that it’s simply not worth the hassle.

Sometimes it feels like we live in a world dominated by marketing bullshit, the power of a few and the stupidity of the many. No one can get me to buy anything I don’t want to buy; Apple cannot make me feel I need an iPad, certain mobile networks cannot pass off their dire coverage as normal and I never buy anything I haven’t decided I need first. I don’t do sales and all of the one-liners that come with it, but if you are a large company that doesn’t like something that is written on 247 I am screwed, and ultimately so are you.

Back to the start, the good side of the action from Lodsys is that it is effectively trying to threaten Apple. Good luck with that.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself an Apple fan boy. Fan yes, fan boy no. Macs do hang every now and then and not everything about the iPhone or ipad is perfect. But Apple does know a thing or two about the user experience. And it’s something I tend to forget because it’s just there.

I received my iPad 2 on Friday, 4 days early. I give UPS credit because they estimated Tuesday. So Friday night I synced my old iPad and plugged the new one in. After the initial startup, it asked me if I wanted to restore from my old iPad’s backup. I said yes, of course, and off it went.

Funny when you work with Windows and other applications that aren’t user friendly or are counter intuitive or cause you to look for things to go wrong. You end up looking for trouble where there isn’t any. After my restore I looked at my Home Screen and thought, where are all my Apps? Of course I had forgotten what I did when I moved from my iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4. I figured something had gone wrong. So I restored everything to the original state and ran through it again. Of course the same thing happened.

Then I realized that I had to sync everything to get the Apps loaded. In my defence, it was late at night and I was operating on a work night’s sleep. Plus I had to deal with all those things at work that don’t work the simple and obvious way.

I let it load over night. Did I mention the sleep thing? In the morning, there were all my Apps in the same folders where they were on my old iPad and almost all of the settings were correct. I had to re-enable the multi-tasking gestures.

I started to try things out to make sure everything was there. At one point I got switched into Mail and of course it popped up and said I wasn’t on a network, would I like to join, and gave our home network name. I tapped OK and it prompted me for the password. Then it told me that it couldn’t read my mail account but it still sent my message. I popped into Settings and added my Mail password.

It occurred to me how easy all this was. I didn’t really have to look for much at all. If I tried to do something that wasn’t set up, I was asked or told what I had to do. I remember how relatively complicated networking was to set up on Windows. I also remember moving to a new PC or upgrading a version of Windows. There are rumours that the next Mac OS X version, Lion, will be available for download from the Mac App Store.

When Steve Jobs talks about delighting the user, the ease of use is a big part of it. The consumer just wants to do stuff. They don’t want to muck around with setup. How many people really read the manual that comes with the DVD player?

Oh yes, the “One More Thing”. After everything was up and running, I thought about what was missing. Obviously, a network of some sort is needed to connect to the Internet. But what Apple needs to do is to cut the cord between iDevice and iTunes on the Mac or PC. There’s a whole class of consumer that doesn’t have a computer but would love to have an iPad. It’s too obvious a thing for Apple to leave for long. I’ll bet we see cloud activation and syncing within a year, probably much sooner.

Bob

Today’s comment of the day comes from Neil on the subject of vertically-integrated platform environments- “It’s interesting to see the continued rise of vertically-integrated platform environments, and to see how their actions differ to those of more traditional networks. In the early days of mobile, for example, there was no interconnection; one could only call those who were on the same network. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine a world where I could only email people with accounts on the same server, or send SMS to people on the same network.

We’ve yet to see that kind of interworking in the IP space – although Skype can break out to the PSTN, for example, a Skype user cannot call a Windows Live user. Similarly, I cannot use BBM to contact a user of an XMPP server.

I wonder for how much longer this will continue – both from a commercial point of view (when does the cost/risk of platform lock-in from non-interconnected solutions outweigh the benefits?), and from an anti-trust point of view, with obligations of interconnection imposed on platform providers? (From a “significant market power” point of view, which is the general test for the imposition of such obligations, the EU framework on communications regulation would need to ensnare platform services, which is not clearly the case at the moment – but I wonder for how much longer this will be the case.)”

The news that the HTC Salsa will be exclusive to O2 brought back some uncomfortable memories for me of a time when it looked like most of the high-end handsets would be exclusive to network providers.

Don’t get me wrong. The Salsa looks like the most average of Android handsets and holds no interest for me whatsoever, but the exclusivity part alludes me entirely. Lots of people jumped on AT&T and O2 when the original iPhone started the trend, but lots of those people have learned a valuable lesson from the experience; never move network just because of a phone.

If you are lucky enough to find a network that works well, it is a risk to move just because senior managers from a network and a manufacturer came up with a plan to drag you in. Prices stay higher, customers feel more trapped and the phone ends up on multiple networks anyway. Don’t do it, or buy it SIM free if it is available.

I have been considering moving away from the iPhone for a couple of weeks now and have carefully thought the process through. The reasons are many, but the main one is that there is better hardware available now of which the Arc and Galaxy S 2 are examples. There is a bit of simply wanting a change thrown in which I hadn’t expected to feel for a long time, but that is where I found myself and so I decided to see if I could replicate my iOS experience on Android, but with superior hardware.

Here is my checklist-

PIM: no problem here because the Android standards are roughly equivalent to the iOS standard PIM solutions.

Notes: slightly more difficult because it means losing Awesome Note, but Evernote is available and a quick search brought up some potential replacements.

Navigation: there is currently no Android TomTom solution although I understand that there will be in the near future (more on that soon) and so Co-Pilot will have to suffice. It is excellent for navigation, but I have some reservations concerning the traffic monitoring performance. Of course there is the free Google Navigation as well so there are some benefits to Android in this area.

Music: not a problem because I use Amazon for all of my digital music now anyway.

Podcasts: too many solutions on both platforms so this will always be covered.

Apps: the debate rages on concerning app numbers and quality and I must concede that in my view iOS apps tend to be slightly easier to use that their Android equivalents. However, there are so many solutions on both platforms that it soon evens out and I firmly believe that there is little difference between the two these days.

Films: oops! This is where it goes wrong for me. I often rent movies for my children or buy a TV series (the ones that are not priced at ridiculous prices on iTunes) and watch them on my iPhone connected to the TV, but in the UK the choices are limited concerning films and TV series on Android. Effectively I have no choices in this area and so it is currently a fail for Android. Until Amazon or someone else (LoveFilm?) gets their act together, iTunes reigns supreme in this area. I guess we could use Blockbuster again, but the thought of renting a movie at a higher cost than on iTunes and then having to return it the next day seems ludicrous now. This is one major reason why Blockbuster is struggling.

As it stands, there is very little difference now between iOS and Android, but Apple continues to lock customers in by offering services that others do not. If this changes I will likely make the move, but as it stands iOS will remain with me for the next few weeks at least.

This brings me on to my main thought. The iPhone 4 does everything I need yet I have fallen foul of seeing something I perceive to be better and I am considering the move. It’s pathetic really…

Today’s comment of the day comes from Neil on the subject of smartphone specifications- “I’m sure that some are swayed by figures, but I think most buy products based on overall experience – I have no idea how fast the processor is in my phone, for example, and I doubt many smartphone owners do. All I care about is that it does what I want. If I find that it’s too slow to run a particular application, then I can either upgrade the phone, or not use the application, and that’s the same in the computer market for me, too – I’m not worried about specs., as long as it does what I need.”

Over at TiPb a discussion is raging over what Google is trying to sell in the advert posted below. Rene Ritchie says the following about it- “Google’s latest ad wants you to store personal details about your child’s life, from birth, on their servers. Google wants your data so they can sell it (aggregated and anonymized, of course) to others to make money.

Taken in that context, Apple’s ad might be obnoxious and highly commercial, but Google’s is downright creepy.“

Watch the advert and decide for yourself, but I only wish I had done something like this year’s ago for my children. I think it is lovely.