Hey, I have news this morning about the T-List itself! It’s now available in RSS feed form for your daily (well, Monday through Friday) reading pleasure. Thanks to T-Reader Brad Mays for the suggestion.
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Author Archive | Harry McCracken
Bloggers Needed
When folks ask me about how Technologizer is doing, I say that it’s doing very nicely indeed–but it’s still in soft-launch mode. That means that we’ll be rolling out a number features that haven’t yet appeared–and one of those features will be contributions from folks other than me.
Those contributors will be freelancers, not staffers, and the work is not going to be huge in terms of either volume or pay. I’m particularly interesting in finding a person or two on the east coast, simply because the one downside of doing this from the Bay Area is that most of the country is awake and doing newsworthy things before we get up out here.
If you know and love personal technology, are extremely well-informed about news, have a smart take on things and know how to express it in the form of blog posts, and are interested in contributing to Technologizer, I’m interested in hearing from you. Drop me a line using my contact form. I can’t promise anything…but I will respond to everyone who I hear from.
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iPhones at Best Buy? Cool! Probably!
[Update on the post below: MacNN says it’s confirmed that Best Buy will start selling the iPhone in early September.)
AppleInsider is reporting that Best Buy may be about to announce that it will begin selling iPhones. I have no idea whether that’s true, but it’s certainly plausible enough: It’s safe to assume that the phone will eventually be available at venues other than Apple Stores and AT&T shops, and Best Buy is both the nation’s 800-pound gorilla of electronics retailing and one of the few places other than Apple Stores to stock a relatively generous selection of Apple products.
If the rumor pans out, it’s good news on a number of fronts. More choices when it comes to buying stuff are always better than fewer (even if the increased competition doesn’t result in the iPhone being available for less than $199, which I suspect it won’t). The more iPhones that are sold, the likely it is that software develpers and accessory manufacturers will jump on the bandwagon; that would be a boon to everyone who’s bought an iPhone anywhere.
And if the iPhone ends up sitting on a counter alongside other phones from multiple manufacturers and carriers, I think it’ll prompt Apple’s competitors to move even more quickly than they have been to try and match or exceed everything that’s good about the iPhone–its industrial design, its screen and interface, its media features, and, most of all, the fact that it’s a full-bodied software platform. For that reason, I hope that the iPhone lives in Best Buy’s phone section, rather than off with other Apple products.
(When CompUSA was a national chain with an “Apple shop” tucked in the corner of the showroom floor, Macs and other Apple products were segregated from more mass-market rivals. It’s quite possible that Apple insisted on this approach, but every CompUSA Apple shop I ever saw was a ghost town; I would have much rather have seen MacBooks and iMacs alongside machines from HP, Gateway, and Sony, where people who didn’t think they wanted a Mac might have discovered them.)
With the iPhone 3G’s current Apple-and-AT&T-only retail availability, the phone gets tender loving care unlike that of just about any consumer product I can think of. The Apple Store folks are able to devote huge resources to marketing and explaining the thing, which is obviously part of why it remains a phenomenon a month after it went on sale. (Just this last weekend, I saw a line of buyers snaking out of the Apple Store in the Fashion Show Mall on the Las Vegas Strip.) And while it’s far from the only phone at AT&T stores, it’s clearly the only superstar there, and receives a lot of TLC: When I walk into an AT&T shop, I’ve sometimes had a greeter suggest I look at iPhones the moment I cross the threshold.
My impulse was to be worried that Best Buy, or just about anyone other than Apple and AT&T, might struggle with the iPhone simply because mass-market retailers are usually so very bad at giving their customers actual authoritative advice about the products they hawk. That’s been an issue with other Apple products in the past, and was presumably a major reason why Apple made the surprising (and amazingly successful) decision to open its own stores. And while Best Buy apparently staffs at least some of its stores with dedicated Apple experts, the ones I’ve happened to visit have had Apple sections that looked like smaller, tidier versions of the ghost towns I remember from CompUSA.
But as I think about it, I’m not sure if the iPhone needs that much explaining. It’s more of an iPod than a Mac–a product that’s extraordinarily well-known, with benefits that are pretty easy to get without much explanation. The $199 price is competitive, too–there shouldn’t be any equivalent to scenarios in which someone looks at a $1100 MacBook and a $600 HP notebook and can’t grasp why the MacBook might be worth the dough.
So I’m hoping that Best Buy is indeed about to roll out the iPhone. But here’s what would please me even more: Amazon.com selling the iPhone. I can’t believe that the requirement that the phone be activated will keep it off the Web forever, and I don’t think anyone (aside from Apple) would do a better job of selling it on the Web.
On the other hand, this post at Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop mentions the possibility of RadioShack selling iPhones. I find that kind of horrifying, although I can’t quite articulate just why. Maybe it’s because I’ve so rarely encountered a RadioShack clerk whose customer-service skills go much beyond telling me where the AAA batteries are. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve been into computers for so long that when I think of Apple and RadioShack, I think of the wars between Apple II and TRS-80 owners, of which I remain a bloodied, battered veteran who’s prone to the occasional painful flashback…
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John McCain: Secret Wikipedia Fan?
A political scandal! A dead service with a funny name! Two e-mail services that have had trouble doing e-mail! And a computer we all know that’s celebrating a very special day! They’re all on today’s T-List.
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Kindlemania! Is It Sensible…or Silly?
I was an ultra-early adopter of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader: I plunked down my money for one last year on November 19th, the day it was introduced. The review I wrote at the time for Slate wasn’t a rave, but it turned out to be one of the more upbeat early evaluations: The Kindle debuted to a thorough drubbing in the blogosphere for everything from its aesthetics (admittedly dreary) to usability (it’s tough to pick it up without accidentally flipping a few e-pages). Even the name prompted jeers.
The Kindle may have been anything but a critical darling, but there were early signs that it wasn’t a flop, either. It quickly sold out and was backordered for weeks, and Amazon.com devoted a remarkable amount of precious real estate on its home page to promoting the device, something it probably wouldn’t have done if it were dead on arrival. I enjoyed using mine, and when folks asked me about it, I usually began by saying “It’s not perfect, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people are saying it is…”
Fast forward to today: All of a sudden, the Kindle’s reputation has gone from so-so to go-go, a transformation that’s rare in the tech industry. A couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch reported that Amazon had sold 240,000 of them–not iPod numbers, but not bad, especially for a gadget that’s only available from one seller, and only via mail order. (How many iPods would Apple have sold if you couldn’t see one before buying?) And now one analyst is saying that Kindles could be a billion-dollar business for Kindle next year, while another speaks of the company selling $2.5 billion in e-books by 2012.
Well, maybe! After nine months of Kindle ownership, though, my relationship with the device is still a strange love-hate affair. Every time I use it, I see both the giant potential of e-books and all the ways in which the Kindle falls short of realizing it.
Here’s the stuff about the Kindle that continues to bug me:
The e-ink screen still stinks. I don’t understand why it’s the first thing Amazon mentions on its Kindle page. (“revolutionary… a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper”). Yes, the battery life is terrific, but the display is grey-on-grey and tough to read unless the light is just right. And it basically doesn’t do photographs–they look like bad Etch-a-Sketch drawings. The display is the single thing I like least about the Kindle.
It’s an electronic device. The Kindle’s battery life is impressive; more impressive still is the fact that you don’t need to worry about battery life at all when you’re reading a real book. (When I haven’t used the Kindle for awhile, I need to find its power brick and recharge it before I can do anything with it.) Also: I do much of my reading on airplanes, and I can’t use the Kindle during takeoff or landing…which means I need to bring more traditional reading matter with me.
It complicates book shopping. I still like to browse in real bookstores, and while I’m not above the notion of finding a book I want in a store and then buying the Kindle version, I haven’t been able to easily determine whether a Kindle edition exists while I was still in the store. Sometimes I’ve just gone ahead and bought the real book; sometimes I’ve made a mental note to check for a Kindle version when I got home. (Now that I have an iPhone, this may not be so much of an issue: I should be able to check Amazon’s Web site on it while I’m out and about.)
I fret about its DRM. In the music realm, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all decided to shut down DRM servers, thereby crippling media they’d sold people. What’ll happen to my Kindle books if Amazon.com decides a few years from now to withdraw from the e-book market? Or if I see an e-book device from another company that looks more appealing?
And here’s what I still love about it:
Hundreds of books in my briefcase. I don’t want to lug even one hardcover on a trip; with the Kindle I can tote the equivalent of hundreds of them.
The wireless interface. The Amazon.com book-buying-and-downloading service works wonderfully well–it’s far more impressive than the hardware.
The price of the books. Most of them are ten bucks or less, versus $25 or $30 for a new hardcover. Yes, I know that that’s only after you pay hundreds of dollars for the Kindle. But I’ve done that–and books feel more like impulse purchases with the Kindle than in hardbound dead-tree form.
What’s my bottom line on the Kindle? I still think it could be a big deal–but only if evolves at least as rapidly as the iPod has done during its first seven years. I think that e-ink is likely a dead end and that Amazon should release a Kindle with a more traditional color screen, even if battery life takes a major hit. The user interface needs to get less kludgy. You need to have some confidence that the books you want will most likely be available in Kindle form. And so on and so on.
If Amazon doesn’t get all this stuff right? I think there’s an alternate scenario in which e-books become very popular–but on the iPhone and iPhone-like smartphones rather than on dedicated e-book readers. Matter of fact, I’m using and enjoying an iPhone e-book reader application called Stanza. It’s not a Kindle replacement, since it’s library of books is mostly made up of free public-domain classics, not the new bestsellers that you can get on the Kindle. And I have enough trouble preventing my iPhone 3G’s battery from dying without using it to read books.
But Stanza leaves me hungry for an e-book reader with a display and interface that’s as nice as the iPhone’s, and a library of books that’s as wide-ranging and easy to acquire as Kindle’s. I don’t know whether it’s going to be Amazon or Apple or someone else who makes this device, but I’m looking forward to adopting it just as quickly as I snapped up the Kindle…
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Google’s Gmail-a Culpa: Good, But…
In my first post on today’s Gmail outage, I noted that Google’s official Gmail blog was mum on what was going on. I’m pleased to report that after Google had found and fixed the glitch, it used the Gmail blog to report that fact and apologize for the inconvenience. Google didn’t explain what happened, but as my look back at a dozen years of Internet outages shows, the explanations behind unplanned downtime are usually boring, technical, and cryptic–not particularly exciting reading unless you’re a system administrator yourself.
But the one thing about Gmail product manager Todd Jackson’s post that kinda bothers me is this aside towards the end:
“We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.”
Jackson goes on to suggest that people who encounter Gmail problems check out Gmail’s online help and user group for the fastest updates; fair enough. But I hope that Google isn’t too cautious about using its many official blogs to discuss problems with its services and what it’s doing about them. A corporate blog that alerts users to cool new features can be useful; one that’s a comprehensive guide to the services it covers–warts and all–can be invaluable.
Thinking back to AOL’s famous string of humiliating outages in the mid-1990s, one of the things that got the company through them was CEO Steve Case’s letters to AOL users. They were proto-blog posts, prominently displayed on the AOL home page and pretty open about the service’s hiccups, of which there were many.
Today, even Apple is using blogs to deal with MobileMe’s ongoing issues–in a somewhat halting and stilted fashion, but at least it’s trying.
So please, Google (and every other Internet company I deal with): Err on the side of addressing the challenges you and your customers face on your blogs. Apologies are appreciated, but a generally up-front approach to explaining what happened, what you’re doing about it, and whether it might happen again is much more important than “I’m sorry.”
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A Brief History of Internet Outages
Someday we’ll all tell our grandkids about what we were doing during the great Gmail outage of August 11th, 2008. Well, okay, probably not–Google’s e-mail service was down for only a couple of hours, which is relatively brief as Internet outages go. But when one of the world’s most popular mail systems goes missing even briefly, zillions of people are inconvenienced and want to share their frustration. In a weird way, it’s a huge compliment: If Gmail wasn’t essential, nobody would care if it went away.
For a dozen years or so now, the Internet has been a mainstream communications medium, and its history has been pockmarked with examples of big-time services choking for extended periods–often a lot longer than today’s Gmail blip. The most famous examples of unplanned downtime have a lot in common: They usually last longer than anyone expected and get blamed on cryptic technical glitches. Almost always, angry consumers announce they’re done with the service in question; almost always, the service eventually recovers.
Oh, and one more thing: The biggest and most embarrassing failures all seem to happen during the summer months. Maybe technology, like human beings, just doesn’t work quite as hard when the weather’s hot and there are distractions like baseball games, picnics, and vacations to contemplate.
Now that Gmail’s back, it’s worth recapping a few other outages that made headlines when they happened–and since the ones that follow are in alphabetical order, they begin with maybe the most famous one of all (hint: it involved a company whose initials are A.O.L.)…
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Gmail: Maybe the “G” Stands for “Gone”?
Last week, I blogged about a Gmail outage and noted with relief that it hadn’t affected me. Gmail is down again now, and I’m not feeling so lucky: Both my personal and work accounts are displaying the same message at the moment:
It would appear that I have lots of company–Twitter is abuzz with reports from folks who are locked out of their accounts. When I went looking for more definitive word on what as going on, I checked TechCrunch–it has covered the outage and calls it “systemwide.”.
I also visited Google’s official Gmail blog in hopes that it might be a source of information on what’s wrong and when it might be fixed, but the last post there is a week old. I read a whole bunch of Google’s blogs and find them valuable when the company’s up to something new and interesting, but they will be far more valuable if and when the company chooses to use them to communicate with customers in real time about issues like this.
I also find the error message above less than entirely clarifying, since it sounds like it’s my particular inbox that’s feeling sickly at the moment. As Slate editor John Dickerson said on Twitter when he got the same message:
TechCrunch says that Comscore estimates that 20 million people visit Gmail every day; I’m sure that a goodly percentage of those folks, like me, absolutely depend on it for both personal and professional use. Google’s track record for dependable service is generally so strong that it’s easy to get complacent and assume that its stuff will always be there when you need it. So I’m going to consider this outage a perversely useful reminder that it’s always good to have a backup strategy. Especially when it comes to services you don’t pay for, and even when those services come from big, technically savvy companies like Google.
Update: At the moment, my Gmail access is back, but the service is loading really, really slowly. I’ll hope that’s a sign that things are on their way back to normal.
Let’s end this with a silly little poll:
Further update: I can get into both of my Gmail accounts again, with no signs of trouble. Let’s hope that the outage is over–and that Google tells us what happened.
Furthest update of all: Google has posted about today’s outage on the Gmail blog. And I in turn have posted about that post.
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In Australia, the iPhone 3G Isn’t “Twice as Fast.”
Two things are pretty much undeniable about Apple ads:
1) When discussing technical specifications, the company likes to make bold claims, and…
2) It doesn’t like to use footnotes, qualifiers, or disclaimers to get around the fact that virtually no claim you can make about a technology product is equally true in all circumstances.
That’s how you get a commercial like this iPhone spot (titled “Unslow”), which shows someone zipping around the Web on an iPhone more quickly than I’ve ever been able to in real life, and which ends with the tagline: “The new iPhone 3G: The Internet–you guessed it–twice as fast.”
If I’d tried to recreate that 30-second ad with my iPhone 3G during my trip to Las Vegas this weekend, it might have been a three-minute ad…even though I was on 3G at the time. on
A bit of type at the end of the ad does say that 3G isn’t available in all areas. But an iPhone 3G ad that aimed to set consumers’ expectations realistically would have pointed out that there are entire states–ten of ’em–in which the iPhone 3G can’t get on a 3G network, and that even when you’re on a 3G network, it doesn’t guarantee that your experience will be “twice as fast.”
(You also gotta wonder how they filmed that ad: Is that really the AT&T network in action? Did they do multiple retakes and choose the fastest one? When they shot the ad, did they choose a studio which they knew to have superb AT&T 3G coverage? In what percentage of instances across the country will the New York Times load as quickly as it did in that ad?)
Apple’s whole “Twice as fast” iPhone 3G mantra (also prominent on its home page as I write this) seems incredibly dangerous for Apple: Since it’s not true when stated that definitively, it sets up consumers who don’t know a lot about 3G service for disappointment. Simply put, it’s selling people on something very specific which the iPhone 3G–as wonderful as it is in most respects that matter–doesn’t deliver.
While poking around YouTube looking for the above commercial, I first found the version that airs in Australia. For the most part, the Australian “Unslow” is a faithful remake of the U.S. edition. But there is one crucial difference, other than the cool Aussie voiceover:
Yup–in Australia, the iPhone 3G is merely “really fast.” And Apple’s home page for Australia doesn’t use the “Twice as fast. Half the price” tagline at all:
In fact, I see that the Apple sites for the UK, France, Italy, and our neighbor to the north don’t use the “Twice as fast” claim either.
I don’t know for sure why this is. Maybe the math of Apple’s EDGE-vs-3G comparison for AT&T’s network doesn’t hold up even in a theoretically perfect scenario in other countries. (I can see why Apple wouldn’t want to use a slogan like “1.87 Times as Fast. .624 the Price.”) Perhaps Apple’s ad agencies in other countries are more cautious. Laws about what you can and can’t claim in an ad may vary.
Back in the U.S., Apple could have made its claim about the iPhone 3G’s speed entirely defensible if it had said something along the lines of “Up to twice as fast.” It chose not to. Like I said, this is a company that just doesn’t like footnotes, qualifiers, or disclaimers…even when they’d turn a claim from questionable to accurate.
Oddly enough, there’s another type of Apple ad, equally common, that avoids all these issues: The ones that are purely based on an emotional appeal, such as all those iPod ads that do absolutely nothing except show people enjoying music. Betcha you could make an iPhone commercial that was similar in spirit to those ones–and it might even sell just as many phones as “Unslow” will.
UPDATE: Jason Fried, who mused about “Unslow” before I did, pointed me to this video in which someone tried to recreate the ad on AT&T’s 3G network in Boston. The results are…well, unfast:
FURTHER FURTHER UPDATE: Close examination of the high-res versions of the U.S. and Australian editions of “Unslow” reveal a very similar, remarkably steady hand. If that is the same hand model in both spots–and I’m not saying it is–were the ads actually shot in the U.S. and Australia, using the cell networks the iPhone 3G is available on in those countries? Conspiracy theorists, elaborate!
FURTHER UPDATE: On Apple’s site, it accompanies the online version of “Unslow” with a disclaimer: “Based on 3G and EDGE testing. Actual speeds vary by site conditions. Based on iPhone 3G (8GB) and first-generation iPhone (8GB) purchases. Requires new 2-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately.” Not very Apple-ish, but shouldn’t it be in the commercial itself?
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iPhone 3G and AT&T: Imperfect Together?
CNET’s Tom Krazit and Marguerite Reardon have publishing a lengthy and interesting story reporting on widespread gripes about the iPhone 3G losing its connection. The article provides no definitive conclusions on what the root of the problems might be–or even just how pervasive they are–but theorizes that the iPhone may do a poor job of switching between AT&T’s 3G network and its older and slower EDGE network on the fly. It’s important that a phone be able to do that as seamlessly as possible, since AT&T 3G is so far from universal.
It’s always dangerous to come to any conclusions about a technology product or service based solely on one’s own experience with it, but my own experience with my own iPhone 3G hasn’t seemed any glitchier than the time I spent with an A&T Tilt, the phone I used immediately prior to buying the iPhone. Almost of all my first month with the iPhone was spent in the Bay Area; there were plenty of times when I could only get an EDGE connection, but I don’t recall any instances of phone calls or data connections conking out on me.
On the other hand, I just got back from a weekend in Las Vegas, and there I did have AT&T issues there. The very first call I made as I walked through McCarran Airport got cut off, and even though my iPhone consistently told me I was on AT&T’s 3G network, the connection was often excruciatingly, unusably slow. On Saturday, I happened to be in the Fashion Show mall on the Strip, and was amazed to see that the Apple Store there still had a lengthy line of folks waiting to buy iPhones; I felt like asking for their attention and telling them that my experience with an iPhone in Vegas had been less than satisfactory…