Tag Archives: apple

Spinning Governor

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I’ve come up with ways to cope with the network connection throttle that I recently discovered was behind a lot of my network woes here at work. In my regularly scheduled workaday use of the Internet I usually find myself consuming at least 150 connections if not more because everything I use was built with the assumption that establishing multiple connections is free and easy. There is no parsimony when it comes to using the network, and you see this exemplified most of all in the design of browsers like Firefox. When you fetch a page, most modern browsers will attempt to also-fetch possible pages you may want so that they can appear faster. This is fine if you have an unlimited number of connections that you can make to the network. That isn’t the case here.

I can live with the throttle. I understand why it’s in place and knowing that it exists helps in that it keeps me from questioning my sanity when I didn’t know it existed and thought the problem was with me or my computer. It’s neither. So there are some ways to address my problem. Specifically the route to a better life is ironically through the same devices that are at the center of the entire ‘running out of IP space’ problem, iOS devices. My iPhone and iPad have apps that can bring me interfaces to Internet resources that I need to use, and they can free up my computer so that I can help avoid the connection quota throttle. For example, instead of opening up Toodledo in Safari I can open up the Toodledo app on my iPhone. Different device, different connection quota. My iPhone doesn’t make so many connections and if I did need that feature I could very easily drop wifi and use the 3G data circuit. I can do a lot of other things too, like manipulate Asana, run my eMail through my iPad, that sort of thing.

So, in a way, the connection throttle has shifted the load from one device to three. At first this was kind of a pain in the ass, but over time I’ve come to see that this could become more efficient. It frees my computer up for the heavier things, like Google Reader and such. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Multiple iOS Ringtone Surprise

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Apple’s provision for Ringtones and Alerts on their iOS devices leaves quite a lot to be desired. I bought a handful of alert tones from the iTunes store and thought I could place them on my iPhone and my iPad. Turns out that unless you have your devices synced completely to the iTunes Library, something I never do, you are pretty much out of luck. If you want to get ringtones or alert tones on your other devices, you have to buy them multiple times! This is very shortsighted of Apple and I won’t play that game. That being said, I have bought enough ringtones to make me happy for what I need on my iPhone, so it’s not like I’ll ever go back to the ringtones again for more.

For those out there with multiple iOS devices, watch out. Apple only sort of loves you, they also kind of hate you too.

iTunes Wish List!

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Apple is missing the Titanic of Cash as it sails on by them, seeking out that iceberg in the North Atlantic. It’s been weeks since I’ve looked at my iTunes Wish List and I just went back to add more tracks that I caught with Shazam, an app on the iPhone that you can use to listen to music and then tag it on your phone so you can remember the details later on.

So much is being missed! This whole thing hurts my head. I’ve got $300 in music that is languishing in my iTunes Wish List and there is no way for me to share it with anyone else. The list is a dead duck. What good is it that I can edit the list and buy things from it if I can’t hand a link out to family and friends? It seems so stupid that I can’t even wrap my mind around it. Apple has all the pieces arranged on the chess board to make a holiday killing but they are playing dead on the whole subject! iTunes, which handles music and it’s store quite deftly (I think), iCloud which enables every connected iOS device to get music all at the same time. It’s like a perfect moneymaking storm! Here’s how I imagine it could go:

  1. Someone (like me) uses iTunes or Shazam and starts to flesh out their iTunes Wish List. This information is stored at Apple, so there isn’t any reason why it can’t be used in other ways to help sell music. Just think of the shameless cross-functional promotion that Shazam could roll out in their iOS app! If you hear music you really love, set Shazam to listen to it, then add it to your iTunes wish list!
  2. On November 1st of the year (date pulled from thin air) Apple emails the primary account holders email address (which is what the Apple ID is formed on) a very friendly email that says something like “For the holidays, we thought you might like a link to your iTunes Wish List. Here’s the link: http://itunes.apple.com/wishlist/634323421232100” Happy Holidays from Apple! Unbidden you get a handy link you can then embed in a tweet, a Google Plus status, a Facebook status, a WordPress Blog Page, or even cross-promote using the Amazon Universal Wish List site. There are so many ways to share links it’s disgusting.
  3. People go to the site and put checkmarks next to the albums or the tracks that they’d like to buy for that person as a gift. Lets say you want to get someone $30 worth of music, but you don’t know what music they’d really love, why not just go to their iTunes wish list? It boggles my mind! As people make checkmarks the total builds and they can cash out using a credit card, paypal, or whatever. The next screen gives the purchaser a great option “Deliver Now” vs. “Deliver on a Date”. If they use the first option then Apple can send a gift receipt immediately, otherwise Apple defers the purchase until the date and time specified.
  4. Apple can then leverage iCloud and so the receiver of the gift watches on the date and time that the gift giver indicated when all their purchased music either becomes available for download or starts automatically downloading over iCloud! At least the person can get a gift receipt letting them know that they have music that they can download on iTunes after they login to their Apple ID.
  5. As people buy tracks and albums from this website Apple can arrange their site like Amazon does to give the recipient a choice to “spoil the surprise” by listing what has been purchased or “decline to spoil the surprise” by either locking the wish list down or hiding tracks that are “in play” for giving.
  6. This would be a great way to avoid collisions when it comes to gift giving. When someone buys an album through iTunes as a gift for someone else that line item is dropped from the wish list website link so that nobody else can buy the music and effectively buy-a-gift-twice.

This entire idea is great for everyone! Music labels love it, it’s selling music. Music artists love it, it’s selling music. Apple loves it, it’s selling music! Gift givers really love it because they can go to a one-stop-shop, plunk down exactly how much they want to get for their loved ones and it’s all taken care of! Gift recipients love it because they get a clear demonstration on how cool iCloud can be when they see a flurry of gift receipts coming from Apple over email and then iCloud chats up the iOS devices connected and all that music starts to load into the device!

Marketing? Jesus Christ on a pogostick! This stuff writes itself! You could put a little animated iCloud character in a Santa outfit! Apple could try to market itself as one of Santa’s favorite elf! If the iCloud symbol is too abstract you could put a animated musical symbol in a box with a bow and show it off that way! The television spots encouraging people to flesh out their iTunes Wish List would be an utter gold mine for Apple, for the Labels, the Artists, to say nothing of making life easier for the rest of us!

And just to state the obvious if Apple ever reads any of this, I want you to have all of this blog post to use as your own. This entire post is copylefted, I don’t give a damn what anyone does with anything I write. Want to make money? Please bring this to life!

All that music is just languishing on my dead-end iTunes Wish List. Duh Apple, DUH!

Nook vs. Kindle vs. iPad

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I’ve been watching a lot of the press surrounding the brewing three-party war between Apple, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, and Amazon over the tablet space for the past few months. I was one of the first people to be in line two Aprils ago when the first generation iPad was released by Apple. I bought it without hesitation, knowing that it was exactly what I had wanted and dreamed of all this time – a much larger version of my beloved iPod Touch. As I’ve had some opportunity to use different devices I’ve discovered that at least for me, each device that I own serves a particular purpose. Here’s a handy list of the device and what I use it for:

  • 24” iMac – General computing, work and writing.
  • 13” MacBook Laptop – General computing, work and writing.
  • First-Generation iPad – Convenience browsing, game playing, reading comic books, cookbooks
  • iPhone 4 carried by Verizon – Telephone and 3G data access with the HotSpot feature. I use it for mobile data access, taking pictures, scanning prices and comparing retailers and writing down notes and ideas for my writing. Sometimes inspiration strikes when you least expect it. Also enables me to play Foursquare, as well as many other location-aware games and activities that my family has come to enjoy.
  • iPod Nano 6th Generation – Contains my entire music library and is the device I use when I want to play music. Also has a very useful pedometer that I use to track my steps and calories burned while I work.
  • Nook SImple Touch – Contains a giant book library and is the device I use when I want to read.

I have to be very clear here, I am an Apple fanboy. If Apple makes it, I’ll use it. Over the years all the Apple devices have worked exceptionally well and over time they have gotten better. I still love using my iPad and my iPhone. There are four devices that I simply cannot go without whenever I travel, my iPad, my iPhone, my iPod, and my Nook. The iMac is a work-only machine and I leave it at work all the time. My MacBook I use from time to time, but I actually prefer to work on my iPad to my MacBook unless I’m writing something very long. The iPod Nano fits in my pocket so easily, or clips to my shirt so well that carrying it everywhere I go is a non-issue. My phone keeps me in touch, mostly over SMS and iMessage, and secondarily by the voice service itself. The majority of this post isn’t about these other items that I find indispensable, but rather about the tablets.

I can speak for the iPad and the Nook Simple Touch. I was absolutely sold over the iPad, especially when it comes to reading comic books. As for reading “regular” books, the glossy display and backlit nature of the iPad does start to wear down the eyes plus the native book app in the iPad, which is iBooks, doesn’t support the font I like the most, which is Helvetica Neue. I was a little dubious about the Nook Simple Touch at first, but the device won me over with it’s eInk display and it’s expandability via a microSD card port on the upper right corner of the device. The Nook Simple Touch has a lot of really compelling features going for it which made it’s purchase a sure thing. Here’s a list of what I like about my Nook Simple Touch:

  • Size – It’s perfectly sized. It feels a lot like a paperback book, this size really is a sweet-spot for me because this device can fit in my front and rear pants pockets when I want to carry it without having it in my hands and it can be easily stowed anyplace a book can go.
  • Weight – It’s surprisingly lightweight. Even with the microSD card, which only adds maybe a gram or two to it’s total weight, the whole package is very light.
  • Textured and Contoured Back – The rear of the Nook Simple Touch is contoured to fit my hands and rubberized so that I can keep a nice grip on it without having to strain.
  • Interface – Ever since the 1.1.0 Nook Firmware upgrade the device has been surprisingly quick on display updates and the touch sensitivity has also been tuned and I notice it. You can either use the side navigation buttons or a tap or swipe on the display to advance pages. It has a built in dictionary and wifi, with some social features but so far I haven’t explored those enough to report on them.
  • Compatibility – The Nook Simple Touch (as well as the iPad) both can open and display ePub format books. There is a special place in my heart for the ePub format. it’s open, it’s well understood, and there are tools like Calibre which I can use to convert PDF or DOC or MOBI format (actually there are a huge number of formats that Calibre understands) and convert them all to ePub. I bought a 4GB microSD card and was able to store thousands of free eBooks on my Nook without even a second glance. I know the books will work, I know they are configurable, it’s perfect for me.

So now I’m witnessing this war brewing between Apple, B&N and Amazon. I’ve never really used a Kindle, but I assume it’s most like the Nook devices. The latest device to be released, and is shipping now is the Amazon Fire. I’ve heard a lot of people going on about how the Fire may be Amazon’s answer to Barnes & Nobles Nook Tablet and may compete with the iPad. Out of curiosity I went to Amazon’s site where they describe the new Kindle Fire and as I was reading along several alarm bells went off in my head all at the same time. Here’s a list of issues I have with the Kindle Fire, even before laying my hands on it:

  • Eight hours of battery life – Even my iPad can beat this rating. I will hand it to the Kindle Fire that they were able to squeeze such a battery lifetime out of a device that was smaller than the iPad, but when you are watching video I will bet real money that end users never see these eight hours of battery life, let alone their hedged-bet of seven and a half for video playback.
  • Incompatible with ePub format! – This one took my breath away! Any device should at least be compatible with the ePub format, but Amazon has elected to support their own format called AZW instead. There are other formats supported, but ePub is not on that list and my library is configured to support ePub and I prefer it that way.
  • Prime Membership – If you want the most bang for your Kindle Fire buck, you’ll have to spring for an $80 a year Prime Membership. This could be useful if you do a lot of Amazon.com purchases but I don’t. It’s a little creepy that Amazon sells you a device and then charges you over and over again to use it fully. Feels more like a cash-grab and/or a gyp to me.

I don’t really believe the Kindle Fire will pose much of a risk to the iPad and iPad 2 class devices. I haven’t gotten a chance to hold either of the more relevant competitors devices in my hands to give it a right and thorough review. Based on just the description from the manufacturers alone, and even considering the Nook Tablet costs $50 more than the Amazon offering I can say just from the start that the B&N device is the one to get. Better battery life, better storage, better hardware, ePub format, that’s the one that I would get if I didn’t already have an iPad.

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog. I doubt I’ll ever get my hands on a Kindle Fire, but I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually be able to review the Nook Tablet.

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color Review

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Today I got a chance to sit down in private with a Nook Color from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and give it a thorough try. After I’ve used the device for about half an hour, I have many good things and some not-so-good things to say about the device.

The Good

  • The device is small, but not too small. It most resembles a paperback book and that’s both a pleasing shape and comfortable in the hands.
  • The resolution of the display is sharp and crisp, there was very little eye strain.
  • The charger is a standard wall-wart and the plug is a universal mini-flat USB cable. I give B&N mad props for not reinventing some awkward or fragile interface and going with an industry standard.
  • Touch sensitivity is a welcome feature from the original Nook device. The entire screen is touch-sensitive and that goes very far in making the device very person friendly
  • Buttons are where I expect them and function well, except for one which ends up being in the bad column.
  • Apps allowed to work in the background was a nice surprise, also the notification system was pleasant after I noticed how it worked, being in the lower left corner of the display.
  • The keyboard click is surprisingly clean and very crisp. That was a very nice surprise and very good feedback.
  • You can download ePub books from the Internet. I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales. The device opened the ePub book competently and all the features of reading a book worked as I expected them to.
  • Being able to add extended storage via the SD card was a pleasant surprise.

The Bad

  • The Volume Buttons on the right side appear to be too close together. This presents a volume control issue. When I pressed the + Volume button the volume went up, but if I pressed it again, the volume went down. I think it’s because the two buttons, for volume up and for volume down are too close together or the rocker has been damaged by too much use.
  • The keyboard is both too laggy and too sensitive. When I get to entering web addresses I find myself typing in wwww accidentally. Also, related to this problem is the Search bar. When I touch on Search to look for something I notice the Nook volunteers the last searched item, this is fine, but when I go to tap on the X on the right to clear the field, the keyboard expands and pushes the X up and out of the way. Unless you are very watchful and expect this keyboard behavior, you end up searching for whatever was searched before over and over again, or at least until you master the knack.
  • While playing Pandora in the background I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I did something that taxed the processor, the music would stutter. Perhaps Pandora needs a bigger cache, perhaps there is something else afoot. It wasn’t an awful flaw, but it was noticeable.
  • The lack of Bluetooth Technology precludes wireless keyboards which would render the Nook Color a poor blogging tool.
  • Despite the device being run by an Android Operating System it cannot run Android Apps. It will only use Barnes & Noble’s App Store and not the Android Marketplace. This fragmentation may prove to be an Achilles Heel for this class of device and most certainly will detract from someone comparing the Nook Color to an iPad.
  • The device comes with 8GB of storage, 3 of those are reserved for Android itself, so that leaves the user with 5GB of storage. This pales in comparison with the 16GB iPad, and doesn’t even show up on the field when compared to the 32GB or 64GB model of iPad, however, the presence of the SD cards does mitigate this failure somewhat
  • The Nook series of readers can only consume content from the Nook store, there is no way to get iBooks or Kindle content on a Nook.

The Ugly

  • The device is HEAVY. It’s about as heavy as my iPad, or at least it feels like it is. It’s surprisingly heavy for it’s size and I did have a little trouble holding it like I would a paperback book, in the way it’s design most clearly points that it should be held. It wasn’t enough to upset me, but it was enough to comment on.
  • The built-in speaker system is rather tinny and dinky. I suppose if I tried it with headphones the audio experience would have come out better. There is a part of me that really likes to listen to classical music as I read on a device. This was minimally acceptable.
  • The way the Nook Color scrolls with a touch is disconcerting at first, there is almost no scroll inertia and when you scroll quickly the display stutters and you get the sensation that you’ve missed something in the list as it has gone by. After a while of use you get used to this little idiosyncrasy and it wasn’t a show-stopper.
  • While the Nook Color can download and display ePub book files, I didn’t find a way to move those books into the Books section of the Nook. For these files you are relegated to mucking about in the file system explorer in the Nook to get your books and it does shatter the “All My Books In One Place” theme. I would be far happier if the ePub books that I downloaded off of the Web were immediately shunted off the File System itself and off to the Books function where I could see everything I have in one convenient place.

Final Verdict

The Nook Color is certainly a capable and useful device now that it has a more complete and up-to-date Operating System. The ability to access email, calendars, iCal, Exchange, and use of ePub books are all quite nice to see. I assume that if you copied MP3 files over the Nook Color could be an acceptable music player as well. What it really comes down to here is price. The Nook Color retails at $249.00, and with an Employee discount it hovers around $200 flat. This is in comparison to it’s nearest rival, the Apple iPad which hails at $499.00 for the base model. For half the price of an iPad you can get yourself a very good tablet that can do a majority of the things most people would do with tablets. If you are looking for a “Desktop Replacement Tablet” you won’t find that with the B&N Nook Color, for that you’d be better off going with the Apple iPad. For avid readers who aren’t interested in the Apple App Store or doing Desktop tasks with your device, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fantastic device.

New Blogging Tool

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I’ve found a new blogging tool called Blogsy. I bought it from a recommendation from The GiveMeMind Blog.

The way the app is set up is a novel approach and it is taking a little getting used to. There are two sides to a blog post, a rich side and a write side. Establishing a link is a little cumbersome, but it’s better than having to schlep to an HTML reference to remember the vagaries of assembling an “a href” construct.

I’ve defined all my blogs that I use. Thats another small issue, as I write there isn’t any clear way to say which blog I’m writing to at this point. I suppose that when I get to publishing we’ll see how is all works out.

I figured out where the settings are, but they aren’t ordered logically. the blog you post to is at the bottom of the list, but it’s settings determine all the other fields above that one, urrrr? Also, while WordPress has a correct hierarchy of categories, Blogsy just squashes them all out into a linear list. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a later update. Let’s hope so.

The cost was $2.99 and so far I’ve seen about $0.99 value with this app.

Tech'now'ledgy Expo

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I attended for a little while the Tech’now’logy Expo that TotalTech puts on every year. In attendance was my friend Matt Merrill with CDW-G and Chris Doemel with Apple.

They are pretty much two out of maybe a handful of vendors that I do not want to pitch into a swirling abyssal vortex. The expo itself was a little lean on actual vendors, but HP and Dell were there, and my CDW-G vendor was flogging Lenovo pretty hard. I hadn’t the heart to really bust down Lenovo despite it being a cross between an IBM Stink-Pad and Cheap Chinese Plastic Crap. I can’t really get down on Lenovo too harshly, at least there wasn’t a Lexmark pusher there! Lexmark gets pitched into that aforementioned vortex.

Apple was pleasant as usual. I really love the company, and AppleCare itself can’t be beat, but my previous run-ins with Apple Sales has left me feeling a little quixotic. They aren’t as hold-your-hand as the rest of Apple is, but they are attentive and the reflected glory from the mothership in Cupertino does them a lot of good, but while I’m seeking out the ARD Development Team for body-breaking hugs, the sales team has always left me feeling rather tepid. They respond very positively when you tell them you’re sending clients their way, but everything else isn’t really that exciting for them, which I totally understand, but it is a little surprising that sales isn’t as rabid as the rest of them are.

Something that is coming up is iOS management. I’ve got a new systems contact at Apple, a fellow by the name of David Seebaldt. Should be interesting to see what he is going to recommend for us. Currently we’ve got 6 iPads in play and 3 iPhones. I fully expect that level to rise with time. I think one of my first queries will be why iPhone, and no other iOS device displays a single-Library preference. iPod Touches, iPod Nanos, and even iPads can touch as many iTunes Libraries as they like, but iPhones? One central library, the first one they see, and that’s it. It’s as if the iPhone imprints on the first Library it sees and that’s it for life. Odd.

I certainly hope that they get more foot traffic, because the lunch-time period wasn’t so rah-rah-rah.

iPad 2

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I caught up with Apple’s announcement of the iPad 2 after I got back from Comixlunch with Scott. It appears at least to me to be an evolutionary enhancement to the original iPad device. The A5 dual-core processor is a very good improvement and the cameras are certainly quite nice to have. In many ways it’s as if the iPhone 4 design team and the original iPad design team had a kegger and came out with a really great new design. It seems to be a forward-thinking blend of the two reference devices.

Along with the actual meat of the matter, the silly stuff is also front and center. People moaning and carrying on about “does it come in white?” will be happy. When I fielded some questions about the iPad 2 today one of my coworkers remarked on the devices lighter weight and thinner presentation than the original device. In response I laughingly referred to the original iPad as being made of neutronium and wondering over how we all coped with the agony of the first iPad. I see this next device to be an evolutionary step up from the original iPad. It’s not revolutionary, to do that would require a wholly new form-factor, a new design, a new OS, new everything. If it isn’t that, then it’s evolutionary. It’s impressively better, but it’s still an evolved form of the original device.

So, for those people who are seeking my advice about buying an iPad, here’s the skinny:

  • If the pricetag is the most important thing for you, then go for the now deprecated original iPad. Apple knocked $100 dollars off the price of the device and now it’s really quite compelling.
  • I would seriously avoid buying any refurbished device. I’m quite bearish on refurbished devices. If you can find the extra $50, you really owe it to yourself to get a factory-fresh model and not some repaired victim.
  • If money isn’t an issue then I strongly recommend buying the iPad 2. The speed, the cameras, the new software and the 1080p via cable is quite compelling.
  • If you already have an iPad and it’s working for you, I don’t see any reason to dump your current device and buy a new one. The only caveat to that is if you are planning on gifting your device to someone else, then feel free to buy the new iPad 2. The new iPad itself doesn’t have enough “Killer Features” to warrant the dropping of iPad 1 and rushing out to the Apple Store for iPad 2.

I forecast that the iPhone 5 will be even less of an evolutionary leap. What more could the device do? Get thinner? Transparency? What new technology could possibly be stuffed into the device to make everyone get all hot and bothered for it? Apple is running out of room to innovate. Saying that, I could be surprised, but it would take a lot to really get me to look at my current iPhone 4 with anything less than utter adoration.

Verizon iPhone 4

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Everyone is weighing in on a device that hasn’t been released yet, and everyone already has formed opinions based on rumors and suppositions. Since this is the way it is going, I’ll just toss my unrequested three-cents in with the rest of the noise and babble.

Key Differences between AT&T and Verizon on the iPhone 4:

  1. No 4G Service – Who cares to have broadband speeds in your pocket? Eventually there is a good-enough-speed that people reach, with 3G and WiFi pretty much available everywhere this claim is only going to make the really geeky miffed. If you need such speeds in your pocket, what exactly are you doing IN YOUR POCKET? At some point extra speed only benefits BitTorrent users. The only exception to this is media streaming, but frankly my dear, if you are sitting back and enjoying a movie, chances are you are doing so in the comfort of some place that has WiFi. Just like FaceTime Chat…
  2. iPhone 4 Antennagate – CDMA doesn’t have the same antenna as a GSM phone has, so physical attenuation isn’t a problem. The Verizon phone won’t have the grip-of-death, while the AT&T phone will.
  3. CDMA-GSM Simultaneous Data and Voice – I have to admit to living without this as such a thing is by the design of CDMA very unlikely if not impossible to bring off. I’ve never needed both data and voice services at the same time. My logic is that people smush the phone against their face to talk, they aren’t going to smush-tap-tap-smush-tap. The fact that AT&T can do this is pretty much a cute empty little extra. People who have been using CDMA won’t notice at all.
  4. Network Size – AT&T has done NOTHING to address signal quality in key markets that I find important. Really it comes down to Kalamazoo. AT&T bought out Centennial, along with all their 3G towers in the area. The fact that AT&T hasn’t enabled those towers speaks volumes to me. They don’t care. They claim that their network reaches 97% of Americans, and it does, some are graced with 3G service like the people in Grand Rapids or Chicago, while the rest of us have to contend with their EDGE network. So, what about Verizon? They’ve got a giant network and they have 3G in Kalamazoo. I live in Kalamazoo, it is an important market. I would argue that Kalamazoo is more important than Grand Rapids. So, when it comes to 3G network traffic, who wins? Verizon.
  5. Finally, It’s AT&T PEOPLE! – AT&T, which lets face it is just a shelled out mask that Cingular wears to ritzy dinner parties (yes, it wears another’s tanned hide) is still CINGULAR. Just because it’s wearing AT&T’s dead face and animating it doesn’t mean that it’s somehow got a new soul. Both Cingular and AT&T were as I regard them, abhorrent companies. Cingular for their lameness before trapping and gutting AT&T, and AT&T for being inherently EVIL. Many people don’t recall, and it’s understandable, that AT&T used to be Ma Bell. The giant monster company that abused it’s customers, ran a monopoly, and retarded real technological innovation for decades! This is less of an argument based in reality as it is a name-game since Verizon also was a shard of Ma Bell’s evil empire. It’s not that somehow Verizon is good, of course they aren’t, they are just as evil as AT&T is, but AT&T is stupid and evil. Verizon is clever and evil. It’s a very fine difference.
  6. Waiting around for iPhone 5 – Great, so Verizon is going to get iPhone 4, but Consumer Reports goes on at length about how they are going to wait until iPhone 5 before they’ll look at it again. What exactly are people waiting for? Isn’t the iPhone 4 “Good Enough”? What can Apple do to make the iPhone 5 compelling enough for everyone to suddenly acquire buyers remorse regarding the iPhone 4? They could make the device thinner, perhaps make it transparent, change the shape perhaps but in every other instance the iPhone 4 can be field-upgraded to whatever iOS revision is coming down the pike unless Apple is serious about enabling things like BitTorrent on the iPhone. For this class of device, how much can change? Is it enough to continue to suffer with AT&T? In my case, is it enough to continue to suffer with Sprint? My answer is no. I don’t care what is or is not coming out in June or July. I’ve been waiting for the iPhone 4, without the grip-of-death, on a competent 3G network FOR A VERY LONG TIME. Who cares if you are locked into an iPhone4 for two years? It’s not like an immense base of other iPhone 4’s out there are suddenly going to just vanish. Just because there is something new doesn’t mean it’s needful. Sometimes what you need is right in your hand all along, or in this case, in the traveling roadshow that is Verizon.

For me, this entire release of a CDMA iPhone is mana from heaven. I’m willing to give up data+voice simultaneously for fewer dropped calls (in AT&T’s case) and way fewer impossible-to-make calls (in Sprint’s case). My professional recommendation is that the Verizon iPhone 4 is exactly what people need and they should pounce on it immediately. If you are beyond your ETF-barrier on your contract with AT&T or Sprint, you owe it to yourself to leave them behind and hop on. Even if a few months down the line iPhone 5 comes out, it’s not going to be revolutionary, it’ll be evolutionary. The same way the iPad 2 is not going to make me love my iPad 1 any less. A device is still a device and if it works well, isn’t that enough?

Poor Comic Book Sales

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I’ve seen this show up on Twitter quite a bit, the slowly degrading sales figures for popular comic books and what might be behind it. As a light consumer of comic books I can at least state a few things that keep me from buying many comic books:

  • Dullness – Many series, even some that I’m very fond of like Brightest Day from DC are rather dull. For Brightest Day I have faith that the chief writer, Geoff Johns, is simply warming up for some stupendous issues-to-come but so far it’s shaped a lot like a Stephen King novel, huge wads of detail with action all piled up at the end. There are some titles that I won’t even touch because they are monumentally bad. I won’t name any as to not injure people who feel passionately about their favorite comic and start a flame-out.
  • Impenetrability – Marvel Entertainment is chiefly centered when I bring up this point. Unless you establish serious time to your comic book experience you find the bleeding edge zooms away from you quite quickly. What I mean by impenetrability is that there are entire stories that I have yet to read, and by the time I’ve got both time-opportunity and funds-opportunity the number of comics you’d have to read to get the whole story is monumentally large. It feels a lot like it does when I wander through a library. A good metaphor for these feelings is the confusion/starvation of a shark in the middle of a cloud of tuna. There is no real place to start, there are too many options, there isn’t any handy map or checklist so you can enjoy a storyline as it was intended to be told, so you end up not reading anything. The entire oeuvre becomes impenetrable. I don’t start because I don’t know where to start and I don’t have the time or money to properly enjoy the unfolding story being told.
  • Digital Shrink – Comics are leaking out through channels that have nothing to do with the distributor or the publisher channels whatsoever. People are scanning comics and posting them for free online to the detriment of all the hard-working people who spent time and energy creating the material in the first place. It’s a double-edged sword and I’ve written about this in the past as well. These digital copies being free is only incidental damage, there is a lesson as to why these formats are so popular and it has very little to do with it being ‘free’. It comes down to format choice. Ever since April 2010, when I first laid my hands on my iPad, it became my go-to-device for reading both digital books *AND* digital comic books. There are companies like Comixology which are doing their best, but the publishers have to pay lip service to their distributors and their brick-and-mortar children, the comic book stores. The reason that digital comics haven’t been a cash-cow for comic book companies has everything to do with incomplete, inconstant, and inconsistent vending by publishers. I don’t want to buy paper comic books anymore. I want to subscribe to all my favorite titles digitally and I’m fine with coughing up a credit card number, setting subscription preferences (pull lists) and buzzing around the one central Comic Book app that ties everything together. That would get at least $20-40 a week out of me instead of my current $2.99 a week strategy.

Really the biggest point I have to make here is that by not being “The Brave and The Bold” when it comes to digital comics, people like me aren’t going to make any investment in the product and we’re just going to lurk in the dark and keep our buying power in abeyance. I’m not interested in a teaser issue with the punchline at the end being “Visit your local comic book store for more!”, sorry, but no, I don’t want to. I want to “Visit my Comic Book App for more!” when I want more. Unfortunately by not heeding the opportunity, not filling a vacuum, regular folk have filled it. Nature abhors a vacuum and in this case, certain services and new open-source file types such as CBR and CBZ have filled up all the space that could have been occupied by profit-making comic book sales. I’ve said it before and I will repeat myself here, if you fail to innovate, your customers will innovate without you and then you’ll miss the train completely and be left walking along the tracks. It’s funny to see how many old-school publisher/consumer business models failed to adapt to the Internet, you can see the bodies littered all over, Music, Movies, Television, and as unpleasant as it is to say, Comic Books. By not embracing the bleeding edge of technology each model has created subsequent vacuums and people have found ways to fill those vacuums without any one publisher being able to draw any benefit. When popular media takes technology and the Internet seriously, then you’ll see a turn-around, but not before then. As they stuff their heads in the sand, ever deeper, the erosion will just get progressively worse.

You could sum up this lesson that popular media really should learn in one really great curt statement: “Innovate or Die!” So, get busy innovating, or get busy dying.