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iPod Touch + Click Wheel = Best Usability

Posted on April 28, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 13 Comments

I misplaced my iPod Touch the other week and went back to using my 30 GB iPod Video. Given my type of usage (primarily podcasts while driving) and some of the iPod Touch annoyances I wrote about previously, the iPod Video and other click wheel-based models definitely fit me better. For example, slewing back and forth in content with precision is much easier with the wheel. This is due to the fact that the distance your thumb must travel around the click wheel is much longer than the slide distance on the touch. As a result, actions like adjusting volume and moving back and forth in a podcast are much less sensitive and hence more accurate. A click wheel on the iPod Touch is entirely doable on the Touch’s multi-touch screen. It could be enabled on the screen when desired. It might look something like this (rendering my own):

Podcasts aside, I still believe that a virtual click wheel on the iPod Touch and iPhone would benefit all content types.

Kriegster’s Tips for Buying an HDTV

Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics | 5 Comments

Note: This post is more informal and stream-of-consciousness than normal.

I often get asked by friends, family and coworkers for advice on buying an HDTV. I’m no home theater expert by any stretch, but after going through the research and purchase process myself I’ve come to the conclusion that consumers are unnecessarily focused on the technology details rather than the things that matter most (good price, favorable reviews, technology not obsolete).

Some thoughts in no particular order:

1. I have no overall brand preference - for people like you and me (home theater amateurs), most brands will be good enough
2. I have full confidence in the Costo-type off-brands like Vizio since the screen and core components are made by the same folks. The prices are lower because their standard definition tuners are typically lower quality. If you plan on watching a lot of standard definition content you might want to steer away from these.
3. It’s normally difficult to find online reviews of Costco and Sam’s Club TVs. This is because the model numbers the manufacturers use for the warehouse club units are typically different than the mass market models. Rely on the fact that the TV looks good enough in the store and that Costco lets you return almost anything at any time.
4. Don’t get hung up on comparing TVs to each other in the store; it’s a total apples to oranges comparison. Some are older, some are newer, some have been sitting on the floor for 8 months running 24×7 and their bulbs are dim, the lighting stinks and is different in different parts of the store. If a particular TV looks good enough then it’ll be fine at home. Even if conditions were 100% equal, you’ll go nuts comparing two sets, but if you took either of them home, within 5 minutes it’ll be the only one you know and will look great.
5. Rely heavily on online user reviews, especially on Amazon. Stay away from TVs that don’t have any (or many) reviews.
6. You might be able to negotiate a better price on plasma because there are way more LCDs selling as plasma is phased out
7. Don’t buy an extended warranty from the reseller
• It is almost always a sucker bet
• The resellers make almost no margin on the TV and ALL their margin on the warranty; they’ll gouge you on the warranty price.
• If you insist on having an extended warranty, see if you can get it direct from the manufacturer post-purchase. For example, I got my Sony TV at Tweeter and they wanted $300 for an extra 3 years. I called Sony and they told me I could buy the exact same warranty direct from the Sony web site up to 1 year post-purchase for LESS THAN HALF the price. The caveat is you need to buy the set from an authorized reseller.
8. If you buy with an American Express card you’ll add a year (max) to the base manufacturer’s warranty at no additional cost. American Express will also give you accidental damage protection (e.g. Nintendo Wii controller wedged in the screen) for 90 days
9. Personally I don’t like Best Buy or Circuit City; I find their prices very high. Sears has VERY competitive prices. Online prices are normally the best but you’ll pay shipping. So you just have to do the math. Tweeter is normally much more expensive and I’d normally never buy there but they matched Sears and they give great service (e.g. the sales person isn’t a pimply high school kid who doesn’t know anything). Find the best local price and see if Tweeter will match. As a rule, they won’t match any online reseller or “fell out the back of the truck” places.
10. Don’t forget to upgrade your cable service to HD. And if you use your existing Tivo with the new HDTV then you’ll have to keep switching between the regular cable and HDMI inputs. My dad has this problem. I told him to either get an HD Tivo or a HD DVR from the cable company or else it’ll be a giant ongoing pain.
11. If your cable box offers HDMI output and component video output (in addition to the standard coax, RCA and S-Video connectors), use the HDMI. I’ve seen many people hook up the new TV with their existing coax or RCA or S-Video cables and they get a lousy picture because connections can’t carry an HD signal.
12. Do not ever, under any circumstance let the store sell you HDMI cables. Don’t even buy them from Walmart or other mega-chains which are normally cheap. You get charged 5X what they are worth. Buy them from Amazon (you can get a 6′ cable for $7 online vs. $30 or more in the store).
13. There is NO DIFFERENCE between the super-duper-gold-special HDMI cables than the regular old ones. Pretty much universal agreement on this. Just get the cheapest ones you can find that don’t have cat teeth holes in them.

My Blackberry Feature Wishlist

Posted on January 30, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Corporate IT, Miscellaneous | 8 Comments

The Blackberry has been so successful as a mobile email device in part because it offers good enough completeness of experience and integration with corporate email systems (Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes being the canonical examples). By “completeness of experience” I’m referring to the fact that most of what you can do natively in the email lifecycle in Outlook/Exchange and Notes you can do on the device. There are a number of gaps - gaps which force me to use the native email client to accomplish basic tasks - and I’d like to see them addressed.

In no particular order (and from a Lotus Notes-centric point of view):

• Rich text support including the bare basics like bold, italics and support for colored text
• Usage of the Notes Drafts folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to message drafts
• Usage of the Notes Trash folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to deleted items. This would support undelete from the Blackberry as well.
• Ability to copy and paste attachments between messages, or for a functionally equivalent result the ability to forward a message containing an attachment and then delete all text except for the attachment
• Ability to edit portions of existing messages when replying to or forwarding them. The message body is immutable.
• Tab, indentation and bullet support

Any Blackberry/Notes experts out there that can comment?

The iPod Touch Could Do a Better Job with Podcasts

Posted on January 23, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 4 Comments

I’m a big fan of podcasts; I think the medium is excellent. I’ve used the 5G Video iPod and the iPod Touch and I think Apple took a step backwards with the Touch’s support for podcasts. The experience just isn’t optimal.

The following are annoyances and/or problems (in no particular order) which I hope Apple will address with a firmware update:

• Landscape mode is more difficult for podcast listening than is portrait mode. In landscape for example, the play and pause buttons become miniscule and you can’t slew back and forth in a podcast.
• I do most of my listening in the car. When I put the Touch down, the screen invariably switches from portrait to landscape mode as the device turns sideways along it’s journey from my hand to the seat. (This is a case where a “feature” becomes an annoyance.) When you pick up the device you need to wait the second or two it takes to flip back to portrait mode. Note that this problem isn’t unique to podcasts.
• My fingers move faster than most devices can keep pace, and the iPod Touch is no exception. I wish the CPU was faster or the UI was more responsive or that keystrokes and gestures were buffered in hardware.
• Titles that are longer than approximately 20 (give or take, since the font is proportional) characters are cut off and there’s no horizontal scroll mode or marquee behavior to show you the remaining characters. Turning the Touch to landscape mode provides a marginal improvement since the screen is wider, but even then many titles display truncated.
• Screen real estate is poorly used. While a podcast is playing the majority of the screen is filled with the show image (if the audio file included an image) and the title displays in a micro-mini font.
• Almost nothing in the UI is customizable. Fonts, font sizes, screen colors are all fixed.
• Show notes (may include the text of the podcast, summary info, links, etc.) aren’t supported and aren’t displayed. Previous iPod models (and likely the new Nano and iPod Classic) display the show notes when you click the center button. I know the information is encoded in the audio files but the device just isn’t exploiting it.
• The volume should be adjustable with a tactile button on the unit. You often want to adjust volume in very fine increments and this is difficult as a touch control.
• Fast forward and reverse within a podcast are nearly impossible with one hand. The position control is so fine grained that you have to be holding the unit in one hand (or have the device sitting very stationary on a surface - not exactly the conditions while driving) and adjust the position with the other, while looking directly at the screen. Even with both hands you frequently overshoot your destination - makes it very difficult if you want to listen to the last several seconds or jump forward or back to different places in the audio. The click wheel-based iPods do a good job of this by giving you good control over the position. The Microsoft Zune gets this right as well - hitting forward or back jumps a given number of seconds or minutes, and if you hold down forward or back the device does a VCR-type fast forward/reverse behavior.
• Podcasts are marked as played even if you only listen to the first few seconds. This is unfortunate because you can’t turn to landscape mode to get longer titles until you start playing. So to just view a fuller title you’ve marked the show as played. The Zune doesn’t mark a podcast as played until you listen to the majority of the show (I’m not sure I like this method better.)
• You can’t download new podcast episodes or subscribe to new podcasts over WiFi. The iTunes WiFi interface doesn’t support podcasts at all. The root of this issue is that the Touch doesn’t contain a full blown iTunes client with separate podcast subscription capabilities and as a result, there’s no direct device-to-Internet podcast retrieval. The Zune doesn’t have a direct-to-Internet podcast capability either; you have to sync content from a PC running the Zune Marketplace software which in turn does the Internet downloads. See my previously written related rant.

Update 2-3-08: Added additional bullet.

• While in landscape mode you don’t get volume or position controls.
These annoyances are somewhat compensated for by the fact that the Touch is a pleasure to use, but it would be nice if Apple could address these issues.

Mo’ Floppies Mo’ Problems

Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments

I found a stack of 5 ¼” floppy disks while rifling through some old boxes today. The disks were labeled “Full Backup” and were from early 1991. The capacity of a double-density 5 ¼” floppy disk is about 1.2 MB. Amazing. Today I back up about 10.3 gigabytes, which is small by comparison to people who shoot a lot of digital photos or video. Doing some simple math (1 GB = 1024 MB, and let’s assume the floppy disk was full at 1.2 MB - I’m not going to try and find a 5 ¼” disk drive to check it), my data volume has grown 8,789 times the 1991 amount.

In another useless mathematical exercise, assume that a 5 ¼” floppy disk is 1.5 mm thick and (who would have guessed??) 5 ¼” wide. To hold my current backup set I’d need a stack of floppy disks 43 feet high or 3845 feet (about 3/4 miles) if placed end to end.

Finally, let’s assume that in 1991 it cost $20 for a box of 10 5 ¼” floppy disks (my memory may be way off, but unlike what my girlfriend tells me, I don’t live in the past), so $2 per disk. To store my 10.3 GB on floppies would cost $17,578 ($1,707 per GB). Today you can get a 500 GB hard drive for $100 (20 cents per GB). So buy this ridiculously rough measure, storage has gotten 8,535 times cheaper since then.



Windows Home Server Will Achieve Limited Adoption

Posted on February 20, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Internet | 5 Comments

I don’t believe that Microsoft’s recently announced Windows Home Server (WHS) product will achieve wide adoption among the product’s target audience. Announced by Bill Gates at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January,


Windows Home Server will help families with multiple PCs connect their home computers, digital devices and printers, in order to easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents. By automatically backing up home PCs, centralizing a family’s digital “stuff” and allowing access to it away from home, Windows Home Server will help simplify and enhance family life.

I expect the product to see great uptake among technology enthusiasts but I don’t think it will be pervasive with the typical Internet family. Reasons include:

• People don’t think of themselves as running support operations. (Credit for this bullet comes from colleague and friend The Derf.) When it comes to people’s computers, they just want them to work and they expect their data to be safe. Unlike things like printers and scanners (and even WiFi) which provide direct and obvious utility, WHS is a pure infrastructure device and therefore won’t be recognized as essential.
• For PC and consumer electronics products to be widely adopted I believe they must either fill an obvious gap (I don’t think the gap is obvious here since most people don’t think about things like backup) or they must significantly improve the user experience. For example, WiFi allows you to sit out on the deck and browse the Internet. Photo printers give you the instant gratification of passing around just-taken digital photos. So what about appliances that backup PCs? Wait, doesn’t that just happen automatically*?

Paul Thurrott covers the product and states Microsoft’s objectives towards ease of use in his preview of WHS at the SuperSite for Windows. It’s an interesting opposing view.

* Microsoft seems to recognize how important (and generally missing) consumer PC backups are.  (Backup is a primary function of WHS). As such, I’d like to see Microsoft implement an Internet-based backup offering as part of Windows Live OneCare which could be integrated with Windows Vista and XP. I think Vista should present users with an in-your-face prompt to back up their data to OneCare following new PC setup.  Including this functionality in Vista could spread the protection of PC backup to the 90 million+ units of Vista that IDC estimates will ship in 2007.  Note:  If you are interested in Internet-based backup for your Windows machine today, check out Mozy and Carbonite, which are very good and inexpensive.  The Webware blog has a post on some other services as well.

I Went to Macworld and All I *Didn’t* Get Was A Lousy WiFi iPod

Posted on January 25, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics | 5 Comments

Well, I didn’t actually attend Macworld but I figured the title worked.

Another year has gone by and we’ve got no WiFi-enabled iPod.  (A $600 iPhone with WiFi doesn’t count.) This feature just seems to fundamental to me, so basic.  Having to be tethered to a PC to download from iTunes or sync your podcasts just seems so against the grain of the everything-mobile world we live in.  And the iPod doesn’t make it easy (for the average consumer) to get content from multiple PCs either; you’ve of course got to have iTunes installed, your playlists defined and optionally your podcast subscriptions configured.  So not only must you be wired, but you are effectively bound to a single PC.



You can’t blame Apple entirely, no one else really has WiFi either.  Sure, the Microsoft Zune has WiFi, but it’s for Zune to Zune sharing only, and it’s a limited-power/range implementation of 802.11 b/g.

All I want is WiFi in my regular 5G video iPod.  If I were designing the feature I’d have the iPod be a full fledged WiFi client with support for running a slimmed-down version of iTunes and the ability to download content directly from the iTunes Music Store or from my PC which holds my entire song/podcast collection.  Note that I’m not looking for iPod to iPod WiFi.  This will just become another conduit for piracy and people are already irritated with Apple’s DRM and the state of DRM in general.  And look how well the Zune music sharing DRM was received.

Why hasn’t Apple done this yet?  I have several theories:

• They don’t have to; there’s no (significant) competition.  And from the beating that the Zune has been getting by the media and through anecdotal accounts, it isn’t a competitive threat(yet).
• WiFi-enabling iPods won’t sell more of them.  Despite my desire for the feature, people I’ve spoken with aren’t holding off for WiFi before buying one.
• The iPod monoculture already has people willing to pay lots of money for the existing devices.  Why reduce margins by adding manufacturing costs?

WiFi iPods will appear eventually, but on Apple’s timeline.