Author Archive | Harry McCracken

An iPhone Opinion Extravaganza

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 28, 2008 at 10:20 pm

Late last week, I had a brainstorm: Why not set aside coverage of iPhone-related controversies for moment and ask iPhone users what they think of their phones? I launched a little survey on Friday morning, and would have been pleased if a couple of hundred people responded. Instead, more than 2150 iPhone owners took the time to to participate. And hundreds of them not only answered the multiple-choice questions, but used the open-ended question at the survey’s end to share praise, criticism, and ideas.

I’m finishing up our story reporting on the survey as we speak. [UPDATE: I’m done! Here are the results.] But until it’s up–soon, I promise–I thought you might like to see some of these verbatim comments. You’ll find ’em after the jump–divided into Fan Mail, Complaint Department, Feature Requests, and App Store Analysis.

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Looks Like Pandora Could Stuff Doom Back Into the Box

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 28, 2008 at 8:51 pm

Don’t declare victory just yet, but Pandora, the really cool, wildly popular online music streaming service, may avoid being driven out of business by dramatically higher licensing fees. The House of Representatives has unanimously passed the Webcaster Settlement Bill, which gives online music services such as Pandora more time to work out a deal with the music industry. It’s now headed for the Senate, where its chances of passing look just fine.

Pandora has done a good job of rallying its legions of fans to support it–I got the following e-mail (after the jump) today from Tim Westergren, the company’s founder:

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Walmart.com Stiffs Its Music Customers

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 28, 2008 at 12:15 am

It’s DRM deja vu all over again. Yet another major purveyor of copy-protected media has alerted the customers that purchased downloads from it that it’s shutting down its DRM servers, thereby crippling the stuff those customers bought. This time it’s Walmart.com and it joins Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in what’s becoming a really predictable tradition of handling the situation poorly.

Wal-Mart, which has shifted its site’s music store to DRM-free MP3s (good), sent a e-mail to purchasers of its earlier downloads wrapped in Microsoft DRM advising them that it will shut down the DRM server as of October 9th. Once it’s done that, the tunes can no longer be transferred to new computers or devices; Wal-Mart suggests that customers burn CDs to prevent the music from becoming unusable, long-term.

What it apparently isn’t planning to do is give those “buyers” their money back for the songs they “purchased.” Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all ended up having to do better by their customers than they originally intended; I hope that Wal-Mart, too, will issue refunds or credits. (Actually, I woulda hoped they would have learned from the other companies’ mistake and not replicated it in the first place.)

Remember, Wal-Mart’s music was promoted with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tagline, one of the hollowest promises ever made in the history of personal technology. I don’t know how much it would have cost Wal-Mart to keep its DRM servers chugging, but I suspect it could have come up with the dough if it had considered PlaysForSure to be an obligation rather than hollow marketing copy.

It’s beyond debate: Any time you pay for music, movies, or other content that’s locked up with DRM that talks to a remote server somewhere, you’re not really buying anything. It can be taken away from you at the whim of the merchant, without you being able to do a thing about it–and the way things have gone so far, there’s every reason to think that most such content will eventually be taken away from the people who thought they bought it,

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An Unlocked iPhone? I’d Travel Halfway Around the World for One

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2008 at 6:32 pm

“iPhone 3G puchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”

It’s been slightly melodramatic to say that reading those words left me giddy. I hate phone contracts and phones locked to a particular carrier–hate ’em, hate ’em, hate ’em, on both practical grounds and principle–and would much rather pay full price for a phone then get locked into a contract. If unlocked iPhone 3Gs had been available when I bought mine back on day one, I’d never have committed to a contract to get a price break. (Were I a civilian, I might not have bought an iPhone 3G at all until contract-free ones became available–AT&T is supposedly going to offer them at some point–but it’s impossible to write about personal technology today without one.)

The good news is that the unlocked iPhone is here. The bad news? It’s only really here if “here” is Hong Kong. The text I quoted above comes from the Hong Kong version of Apple’s online store, where locals can now buy the unlocked, contract-free version of the phone.

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Last Call for the iPhone Satisfaction Survey

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2008 at 4:44 pm

[UPDATE: The survey is now closed. Thanks to the 2150+ people who participated–here are our results, and here are more comments from respondents.]

I’m pleased to report that nearly 2,000 folks have responded to our iPhone Satisfaction Survey. We’ll close the survey Sunday morning, but as of the time I’m writing this, there’s still time to participate. If you own an iPhone 3G or original iPhone and would like to do so, please head here to take the survey. Thanks! We’ll publish an extensive report on our findings next week.

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Google Celebrates Its Birthday! Finally!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2008 at 9:25 am

I’m not sure why I’m taking this so seriously, but I’m relieved to see that Google has finally dressed up its home page with a special logo to mark its tenth anniversary. This one’s kinda clever, since it’s based on the original, fatter, cruder version of the Googe logo:

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..as used on the site back in 1998:

The return of the old logo, with exclamation point, reminds me of a fact that’s so obvious it’s easy to forget: Google gave its company a name that was almost explicitly inspired by Yahoo, which had an exclamation point first and retains it to this day. I’m not sure when Google lost its one, but it was presumably whacked in part to make sure that Google and its branding didn’t come off as an imitation of Yahoo.

Here’s a brief post at the Google blog on the celebratory logo. And here’s a gallery of special Google logos from over the years.

Still mysterious: Whether there’s any particular reason why the logo popped up now. (Most of the rest of the Google-watching Web celebrated the company’s birthday early in September.)

[UPDATE: Search Engine Roundtable explains everything–historically, Google has marked its birthday on either September 7th or September 27th; it all depends on when people feel like having cake…)

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Operation Foxbook: Livin’ Small With the HP Mini-Note

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2008 at 7:21 pm

Operation Foxbook–my experiment of dumping my MacBook Pro and desktop apps for an HP Mini-Note netbook and Web-based apps within Firefox–continues apace. And the hardware side of things is turning out to have as big an impact on the experience as the software aspect.

The MacBook Pro I use most of the time is relatively thin and light given how powerful it is, but it’s no subnotebook. And it’s the largest, heaviest machine I’ve carried in years. I used to be addicted to subnotebooks like the Fujitsu Lifebook B112 and Fujitsu P-1000, but in 2004 I had an epiphany and bought my first Mac in years–the 12-inch PowerBook, which was a bit larger and heavier. Then I replaced that with the even larger, heavier 13-inch MacBook. And when I started Technologizer, I decided I wanted more screen space and resolution, and bought the MacBook Pro.

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Own an iPhone? Please Take Our Survey

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2008 at 9:20 am

[UPDATE: The survey is now closed. Thanks to the 2150+ people who participated–here are the results and here are more comments from respondents.]

Since the original iPhone was released fifteen months ago, it’s been– by almost any measure–the single tech product that’s generated more news and controversy than any other. And things have only heated up with the debut of the second-generation model, the iPhone 3G.

As with any tech product, the ultimate bottom line on the iPhone is whether the folks who have plunked down money for one are happy with their purchase. Enter Technologizer’s iPhone Satisfaction Survey. We’re going to collect data from a bunch of iPhone users (both the original model and the 3G) on what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re doing with the phone, and what they’d like to see future iPhones do. We have no idea what the data will reveal, but we know it’ll be really, really interesting. And once we’ve crunched the results, we’ll report back in an article.

If you’ve got an iPhone, please help by participating in the survey–it should take about fifteen minutes of your time. Please let other iPhone users know about it, too; the more responses the better.

[UPDATE: I’m closing the survey Sunday morning–if you’re thinking about taking it, please do so now. And thanks!]

Click here to begin the IPhone Satisfaction Survey.

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Apple Adds an Asterisk to iPhone Ad

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 25, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Back on August 11th, I wrote about Apple’s slogan for the iPhone 3G–“Twice as fast. Half the price.”–and said that “Twice as fast sometimes, but don’t count on it” might be a more accurate slogan. Looks like Apple has come as close as it ever will to conceding the point.

I was just just browsing around Apple.com for a post I’m working on, and noticed that the iPhone section still has the “Twice as fast. Half the price.” tagline. But at some point after my earlier post, Apple appended an asterisk:

The asterisk points to some fine print (really fine, at least on the HP Mini-Note I’m using at the moment), which was there before in some form, but unasterisked:

* Comparisons between iPhone 3G (8GB) and first-generation iPhone (8GB) running on EDGE. Actual speeds vary by site conditions. Requires new two-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately to qualified customers. Visit www.wireless.att.com for eligibility information.

Apple isn’t much on asterisks–actually, I can’t think of a case where it’s used one before. (When it built a “Get a Mac” TV spot around a PC World reference, we had to approve the usage of its mention of our story, and Apple really didn’t want to insert any on-screen disclaimers.) For better or worse, it likes to keep its marketing materials like the bottom of a MacBook or the backside of an iPhone: as clean as possible. And even if you never read the fine print, the asterisk tells you that “Twice as fast. Half the price.” isn’t true in all instances, which makes the slogan way less compelling and therefore less Apple-ish.

But bold claims on behalf of the iPhone without any clarifying footnotes got Apple into trouble in the UK recently, and perhaps it’s decided to be more cautious from now on. I hope so–footnotes may be ugly, but they provide an important consumer service when they’re affixed to words that need additional explanation. Which “Twice as fast. Half the price” certainly does…

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