Posts Tagged android
Why I’m excited about the Nook
For those of you who don’t know, the Nook is Barnes & Noble’s new eBook reader. It was announced this week, and despite the goofy name, it has instantly shot to the top of my holiday wish list, although it’s at least as much about what I think the Nook represents as the product itself.
A nap nook - my second favorite kind of nook.
See, the whole concept of an eBook reader has been hamstrung from the start by the lack of a common, open format. There are plenty of other hurdles: the lack of color screens, the incredibly slow refresh rates of E-Ink displays, the high cost of adoption. But the real setback in my mind has always been the fact that a physical book doesn’t limit who can read it, or where, or when. You can lend a book to a friend. You can sit in a bookstore and leaf through a book before purchasing. If you buy your books from Barnes&Noble, and your friend buys their books from Borders, that doesn’t mean you can never read your friends books, or vice versa.
A good analogy is the mp3 player. The file format mp3 came along while the only way to consume digital music was still off of physical discs that spun around and were read by “lasers.” But thanks to the internets, and small hard drive space, the mp3 format took off, followed by hardware mp3 players. Think about it: they’re called mp3 players, not emusic players. By the time Apple rolled around to dominate the market, as much as they wanted to use their own fancy proprietary format (AAC), every iThing supports mp3 files. Even the music you buy through iTunes or Amazon can be had DRM-free and device-agnostic.
This has not been the case with ebook readers. Amazon’s Kindle uses their own special format that nobody else can use. If you want to read some other type of file on a Kindle, like a PDF, you have to use their special file conversion software to work some voodoo magic and have it anointed by Bezos blood before it can pass through the fiery tunnel of Whispersync and reach your device. And that’s IF that other file type is supported.
So, why am I excited about the Nook? Because it looks like maybe the final puzzle piece that will topple the ebook format quagmire. The Nook uses the EPUB format, an open format which has also been embraced by Google’s vast store of digitized books, as well as Sony who recently converted their entire store to the format. This essentially leaves the Kindle as the lone proprietary ebook store. And while Google and Sony jumped on the epub bandwagon first, Barnes&Noble is in a unique position to actually compete with Amazon for content. Any ebook reader that comes out from now on will basically be required by market forces to support epub, and from there the road gets a lot smoother.
But that isn’t all. B&N is uniquely taking advantage of their brick-and-mortar stores to do some very booklike things that have been glaringly absent from the current options. You’ll now be able to lend ebooks to a friend for a short period of time (although how many times you can lend a book, or to how many different people, is in question. This thread says that it will be very restrictive, but things can always change. Better to start heavy-handed and get looser than the other way around). You’ll also be able to take your Nook to a B&N and read a book from their online store right on your device, without purchasing. I think this is brilliant, since it really addresses how people actually shop for and handle books. There’s also a great licensing opportunity here. Much like Amazon allows anyone to sell an item through their online store, B&N (or someone else, Borders perhaps) could allow other bookstores to sell digital content through the B&N store and offer similar in-store reading and lending opportunities. Boutique bookstores could actually have a chance to draw customers back to their stores thanks to an ebook reader. I’m not saying it will happen, but it could.
The Nook also has some other nerd-lovable features. To get around the slow refresh, grayscale limitations of E-ink, there’s a capacitive touchscreen LCD at the bottom to help you navigate your library of books and other control features. On top of that, the device is powered by Google’s open mobile OS Android. These two things could open up a world of possibilities. Just a few mundane thoughts: a Pandora app to stream music while you read, or a twitter app to comment on what you’re reading. What I’d really love to see, though, is a coverflow-like page skimmer. It’s already been noted that the Nook will feature a coverflow interface for browsing your books to identify them by the cover, but how about while reading being able to “flip” through pages? One of the biggest inadequacies of ebook readers until now has been poor navigation, the loss of being able to easily jump forward and backward through a novel to find a particular passage based on your memory of physically where it was located in the book. I might cry with joy when I am able to flick through miniature pages on the touchscreen to navigate whatever I’m reading. This might not be available on the Nook when it first hits stores, but it will get there eventually. I’d put money on it.
Should you buy a Nook? There’s still the problem of the cost ($259 upfront, plus buying new books). And even though the content pool has gotten a lot bigger, there’s still a lot not available, including newspapers and out-of-print material. And there are other potential winners coming from companies like Plastic Logic (who have partnered with B&N) and Apple that will have bigger screens, maybe full color, and who knows whatever other features. The Nook is certainly not the perfect ebook reader, and it will get surpassed, but I think it will be the first to break open the ebook floodgates to the public, which is reason enough for an early adopter like me to jump on board.
Some compelling reasons to ditch your iPhone (and a few for keeping it)
So about a month ago, after writing this post, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and ditch my iPhone. At the beginning of August, Tmobile introduced the myTouch 3G, a Google Android based iPhone competitor, and the economics of it were too juicy to pass up (more on that below). It felt good. Rebellious. A big FU to “the man” and a reaffirmation that I was a made of strong morals and convictions. I probably got a little buzzed from it all, I admit.
The truth, of course, is that this was as much about me getting to play with a new gadget as it was about taking a stand against Apple’s “injustices.” I certainly wasn’t the first to make this kind of jump, nor am I in any way important or influential (see: Michael Arrington, TechCrunch). But after switching phones I found myself repeatedly having to explain in painful detail exactly WHY I got rid of my amazing iPhone to scores of less tech-informed family and friends. And every time the subject came up, I found it increasingly difficult to paint the “Apple and AT&T are the bad guys” picture because all I really wanted to do was talk about how freakin cool Google Voice and background apps are.
Now a month into my self-imposed iPhone exile, I’m forced to address the question: was it worth it? I’d say the answer is a firm but unenthusiastic Yes. Here’s a list of what’s great and not so great with my switch to the myTouch 3G (agnostic of Tmobile’s network vs AT&T). If you’ve been considering the same switch, or are in the market for a new phone and haven’t decided to get an iPhone just yet, I hope this can help with your decision.
Big Wins
- Google Voice kicks so much ass it should get its own Nike endorsement
My biggest hurdle with the switch was getting all of my contacts to start using my new phone number. This required several emails, text messages, phone and in-person conversations, plus quite a lot of setup on my part organizing my Gmail address book. But boy was it ever worth it. The voicemail transcription feature alone is reason enough to start using Google Voice, for reasons I hadn’t even considered until after I switched. A) The transcriptions are often fairly accurate, but when they’re not they can be hilarious. I’ve started answering my phone less just so people will leave me voicemails for potential unintentional comedy. B) Being able to read voicemails is such an amazing experience. Google Voice strips out people’s natural pauses and “ums” and the text translation allows you to skim through a voicemail so much faster than listening to it. I feel like I’ve added years to my life by no longer having to listen to someone say “So, uhhh, we should like, go get food later…and, yeah, cool, ummmmm bye.” Add in the benefit of being able to check your voicemail during meetings/movies/other times when it would be inappropriate to hold your phone up to your face, and hopefully you can see the major win here. I won’t even bother explaining all the other great features of the service. It’s just so worth it, and having it run natively in the background on my phone – exactly what the iPhone can’t do – is enough to make me happy with my switch, and until that changes for the iPhone there’s no way I’m going back. - Cheaper bills, shorter contracts
Tmobile’s unlimited data plan is $25/mo. AT&T’s iPhone unlimited data plan is $30/mo. Also, if you’re a student (which my wife is), you can get a whopping 15% off your monthly bill. Not to mention Tmobile had a plan going at the time where I got 1000 minutes/mo at their lowest price tier ($40). And with Google Voice, I get free text messaging (about as huge as the other perks mentioned above). Aaaaannnnd, although the myTouch is $200 with a 2-year contract, Tmobile (unlike Apple/AT&T) let’s you pay $300 for the phone with a 1-year contract. At the end of the day, I paid a $115 early termination fee to AT&T which I will easily recoup in the next 12 months from my much lower phone bill, and by then I will no longer be under contract and free to switch phones again. I also sold my iPhone on Craigslist for a cool three Benjamins, so I basically broke even on the switch, which I find pretty great. How often do you get to upgrade an expensive gadget at essentially no extra cost? Hopefully when my contract is up in a year Apple will have their act together, and the new (my pure speculation) version of the iPhone with video-chat camera, 64Gb storage, Wifi-n, and background apps (including Google Voice) will be available.
Smaller wins
- Background apps
This is a great feature to have in a phone capable of so much. Just like you can run lots of programs on your computer and switch effortlessly between them without having to quit out of one to start another, background apps on the myTouch (and other Android phones) allow you to do things the iPhone simply can’t, or needs special hacks to achieve. The Google Voice app is just one example. Other things like live streaming video (Qik) and customized phone settings based on your situation (at the office? automatically set the phone to vibrate. Away from home? automatically turn off wifi to save battery) make the phone so much more fun in a lot of ways.
So why isn’t this a bigger win? Simple: performance. The myTouch processor is simply not as powerful as the iPhone, and things tend to get sloooooow. Battery life might actually be worse. There’s no multitouch (although I don’t actually miss it all that much). The responsiveness and the smoothness of the iPhone is just not present here. I’ve heard that installing a custom ROM (more on this below) can really fix or improve these things, but I have yet to try it. A fair analogy here might be like switching from a Ferrari to a custom-built supercar. You can do a whole lot to your modified kit car that you just can’t in a Ferrari…but it’s still not a Ferrari, and it never will be. - More buttons?
While aesthetically the myTouch isn’t a slick as the iPhone (re: Ferrari), all those extra buttons on its face actually come in handy. There are times when the scroll ball is a lot more intuitive/useful than touch input, having physical call answer and end buttons is wonderful (no need to “swipe” to answer a call, a novelty which wears off as soon as you try to use your iPhone with gloves), and the Back button actually navigates you through your app use history, so you can follow a link from your Twitter app to your browser and then with the click of a button you’re back in Twitter where you left off. - Removable stuff
The battery comes out. So does the SD card for expanded storage. And the back of the phone (aka battery cover) can be easily slipped off and replaced with another one, which can be completely customized by the Skinit site. I used their online interface to make my own cute Wall-E battery cover and it was a really easy and fun way to waste $20. But it definitely adds some charm and character to the myTouch in a way you can’t really achieve with the iPhone.
Small Losses
- Less buttons?
Despite having a plethora of extra buttons on the phone, the designers of the myTouch missed a biggie. Little did I know that one of the things I’d miss most about my iPhone was the silence switch. With a simple flip I could turn off the phone’s ringer. While a terrific Android app called Locale lets you set preferences for things like ringer volume based on situations such as your location, it can’t account for those other times like visiting family, going to a board meeting, attending a movie, etc. Tiny iPhone ringer on/off switch – I hope we can be friends again some day. - The SD card
Yeah, cool, I get it, a removable micro-SD card is great and all because you control it, or something. Sometimes I just want 16Gb built-in, ok? I just paid $300 for a phone, and now you want me to shell out more money so I can actually put some podcasts on it? The phone comes with a 4Gb card, but that’s so 2007. And this brings me to the next section…
Big Losses
- Media management (aka iTunes integration)
While some may bemoan Apple’s icy cold grip on your media management by forcing the use of their application (iTunes) with their products (iPods/iPhones) and not letting anybody else in (see: Palm Pre), the fact remains that it’s a dead-simple and pleasant way to manage all of that content. Gigabytes of music, podcasts, photos, ringtones, tv epidodes, movies…you just set up your synchronization preferences, hook up the phone and let it go to town.
There’s no such unified system with the myTouch (or any Android phone). This thing is about as user-friendly as a starving pitbull when it comes to managing files. You actually have to MOUNT the SD card on the computer through an arcane process of long-holding the USB connection message and…sorry, I’ll refrain from wasting your life the same way mine was when I first wanted to put some damn music on my phone. There are some options out there, like doubleTwist, that can manage media on the phone, and a new Android app from Google called Listen allows you to manage podcasts in a pretty easy way. But I desperately miss the integrated iUniverse, and I’m actually planning to just get an iPod Touch and use that for all my music and video needs.
I won’t even get into the stupid USB headphone adapter. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be fitted with a ball gag “adapter” so they lose all desire to produce sounds from their mouth. - The Virtual Keyboard
Here’s a great writeup on exactly why the iPhone’s virtual keyboard gives the myTouch what I can only imagine is the smartphone equivalent of penis envy. If this were the first touchscreen keyboard I’d used I would probably think it’s great, but coming from the iPhone I’m only ever satisfied at best, ragingly annoyed at worst (it sucks, but it’s not that bad. It still beats the MotoQ physical keyboard by a mile. Goddamn that phone…).
There are also little things to the iPhone keyboard software that I really miss. For example, Android puts the comma and period right on the main screen flanking the spacebar, while on the iPhone you have to hit the special characters key. That would seem like an improvement, but because the Android keyboard on the myTouch is already cramped, that comma and period makes it even harder to hit the spacebar, which is maybe my single biggest gripe while typing. On the iPhone, after you’ve gone to the special character screen and typed your comma, hitting the spacebar switches you automatically back to letters. And the period on the main screen is completely unnecessary, since both phones have the ability to insert a period automatically by hitting the spacebar twice. The iPhone also brings you automatically back to the letters view after typing an apostrophe, something Android doesn’t. Overall I feel like I have to do more key presses with the myTouch just to simply type, but add in the accuracy (and speed) issues and the experience overall is very disheartening. Nowadays I often feel less like I’m typing and more like I’m jabbing at alphanumeric minnows. Which brings me to… - Applications/Customization and Hacking/Rooting/jailbreaking
I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve read that a lot of the speed/keyboard issues on the myTouch can be fixed by hacking, or what’s known as “rooting,” the Android phone. The iPhone equivalent is known as jailbreaking, which was something I did a couple of times during my iPhone’s tenure. Jailbreaking the iPhone gave you access to things like non-Apple-approved applications and special phone customizations (skins, docks and app launchers, even background tasks!). You had to jailbreak to get any of this cool stuff because the iPhone is a closed platform, carefully walled off by Apple. The process, however, is surprisingly simple and more or less painless, with basically no risk of permanently ruining the phone and the option to undo the jailbreak at any time. In fact, you can now get the Google Voice apps that were pulled from the Apple app store by jailbreaking, although trust me here that it just isn’t the same experience as direct integration.
Why does this matter? Well, Google’s entire concept of the Android platform is an open source phone operating system, unencumbered by rules and restrictions. Except reality doesn’t really play out that way. The phone carries install their own customized versions of Android on the phones, in effect limited their performance and capabilities. Sure, you’re still free to install any applications you want, but changing the core functions and performance of the phone are still off limits. And unlike the iPhone, the process to root (jailbreak) an Android phone is actually kind of complicated and scary (unsurprising considering the media management), although recently that’s improved. So a gloriously free and iPhone-performance-rivaling myTouch can be yours, but it will probably void your contract agreement and take you several stressful hours to complete. I’ll let you all know how it goes.
Add on the fact that the Android app market is just nowhere near the robustness of the iPhone’s, nor is it nearly as easy to find and get good apps or manage them on your phone (the lack of iTunes-like synchronization rains on another parade). That too should be changing soon, but the basic fact is that there’s no Pandora app for Android, or 1Password, or etc. etc. etc. Except, of course, there is Google Voice. BOOYA IPHONE! In the words of SNL-Sean Connery: Shuck it, Steve Jobs. Shuck it long, and shuck it harhd.
If I had to summarize this agonizingly long article in a single sentence it would be: While the myTouch is a mere BMW next to the iPhone’s Ferrari, if you want to use Google Voice natively (and you DO) then it’s worth grinning and bearing the shortcomings to experience the virtues, and it might just save you a buck or two.
Updated 09/09/09 (just had to write the date): The Pandora app for Android was released today, which is another +1 for the phone, although that headphone adapter is still damn annoying.
I also thought it would be funny to point out how Google Voice has continued to fail with transcribing my name, “Dylan.” So far it has called me Jill, John (multiple times), delyn (so close!), know, and Joe. I don’t even mind, it’s always a fun surprise for me when I get a new voicemail.