Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Category: gadgets (Page 4 of 4)

Why the Nexus One isn’t exciting

January 6, 2010 /

From my post on aiaio:

In partnering with HTC, a company that produces cell phones for every US carrier and two different operating systems, Google ceded control of the overall experience. Never mind that the handset is slim and fairly attractive. It’s also generic, and apparently imperfect. When David Pogue pushes your phone’s home button, you really don’t want it to fail.

There’s a huge difference between designing and engineering a device, as Apple did with the iPhone and Palm with the Pre, and a company having a device “built to its specifications”. Google was telling HTC, “We want our phone to do this,” and HTC was putting the requisite componentry in place. This tends to minimize holistic product definition and by its very nature waters down the innovation. In contrast, Palm and Apple (and Motorola and Nokia, for that matter) manage the entire process, and their software is designed to complement the hardware, maximizing user experience. Google, a company that is strictly virtual, doesn’t know how to do this.

Apple completely reengineered the UI of mobile telephony with the iPhone. Visual voice mail. Screen-based keyboard. Multi-touch interface. The list goes on and on. Google, in contrast, is very “me too” at this point in its phone development cycle. It will be interesting to see if Google follows the Microsoft model and finds nirvana in its third or fourth release.

The next Apple gadget

January 5, 2010 /

From my post on aiaio:

[The Apple] tablet’s pixels per inch will be impressively high, like the 160 ppi of the iPhone. Most Mac desktop and laptop displays hover around 110 ppi. An 11″ screen at 160 ppi will provide almost the same amount of pixel real estate as a 13.3″ MacBook screen does now. This will help minimize people’s perception that they’re giving up detail for size.

Apple wants an iPhone in your pocket, an iSlate (or whatever) on your coffee table, and an iMac on your desk, with laptops positioned for students and the mobile workforce. It’s ambitious. And more than a little smart.

Relatively knee-jerk reactions to my new iPhone 3GS compared to my old, original iPhone after roughly 39 hours of ownership

January 4, 2010 /

My new iPhone is much faster. Every function performs better, from finding wifi to launching apps.
The iPhone 3GS feels noticeably lighter than the first-gen phone, despite their officially weighing the same in grams.
According to my wife, people calling my phone can now hear me clearly, as opposed to my old one, which had developed awful reception and sound quality. On my end calls are less crunchy but not entirely different.
The warmer white point makes everything look irresponsibly yellow. I feel like my phone is jaundiced.
The ringer/vibrate button is in higher relief than on the old phone, and every time I put it in my pocket, the ringer turns back on. I hope my soon-to-arrive case will mitigate this effect. (Also: the AT&T Wireless store charged me $10 more than the manufacturer’s website pricing for the aforementioned case. Rude.)
I am now keeping up with the joneses… until July, when the iPhone 3GT or whatever makes me instantly out of date.

Headphones at the halfway point

August 16, 2009 /

My fifth headphone review went live on Boing Boing Gadgets Friday, marking the midpoint in the series I’m doing this summer. I’m penning 10 pieces covering 11 models from seven different manufacturers.

And what have I learned? More than I expected, some of it obvious, others less so:

  • Greatness is variable. Undoubtedly, almost all of the headphones I’m testing are great, in one way or another; the cheapest pair is a hundred fifty bucks, after all. But what defines greatness? To Etymotic, it’s pure reproduction of original sound; to Klipsch, it’s top-to-bottom balance; to Audio-Technica, it’s pumping abnormally strong bass through miniature devices; to JVC (coming next week), it’s replicating its audio style across product lines. More than once I’ve found myself thinking, really, who am I to judge?
  • MP3s truly are a crappy audio medium. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to the sound, and I don’t deny progress. But the high quality of electronics in my possession exposes an MP3’s flaws and has me casting a skeptical eye on my iTunes library. Someday I’m going to switch to a 200GB iPod and a lossless audio format.
  • I’m a picky son of a gun. Etymotic has pure sound the likes of which I’ve never experienced. My wife swoons at the mere memory of listening to music through them. But I disliked the lack of low-end punch, which I noted, and which made my contact at Etymotic downright wistful. Maybe I should lighten up a bit.
  • But hey, I know what I like, which is a balanced output that brings warmth and resonance to music at low volume levels. While I remain impressed by it, I don’t need Etymotic’s hyper-clear output. Give me the Klipsch, thanks, with a side of Audio-Technica‘s mind-blowingly good noise isolation. Heck, I’d take the Audio-Technicas, too. I like bass. (I’m bringing them both on a business trip I’m about to take.)

This project has been a ton of fun, and I haven’t even written about the fancy models yet. My continued thanks go out to Rob Beschizza and Joel Johnson for giving me the platform.

On reviewing headphones

July 13, 2009 /

Review: A week with the Etymotic hf2, by yours truly, on Boing Boing Gadgets.
Last week I was on line at Duane Reade and watched the man in front of me ask for a pair of headphones. He selected a Maxell model from behind the register; it was $14.99, I think, maybe a bit more. He contemplated them for a moment.
“Those are very good,” said the cashier, blithely.
“Okay,” said the customer, who paid and walked out.
Suffice to say I am not that guy.
I have always had, and appreciated, top-flight portable audio, from my fancy Sony Walkmans in the 1980s to several pairs of expensive noise-canceling headphones in recent years. And with my tinnitus forcing me to listen to in-ear music at low volumes, having good noise isolation has been a must.
At the tail end of bicycle commuting last summer, I ran over my headphones–my $150, pristine-sounding, noise-isolating, wondrous Shure E3c headphones–with my front tire. Oops. I used them anyway, broken and sad, for several months.
It took me that long to figure out which headphones to buy, and the ones I finally got were good but not great. Useful reviews of noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones are hard to come by. I don’t need wonky audio spectrum surveys, or dissections of the nuances of Django Renhardt’s solos: what I need is, do they sound good? and how well do they shut out the outside world?
So I decided to do what any good blogger should: do it myself. I pitched Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets, and he gave me the go-ahead. Two months of emails later, I have $2880 worth of headphones in my dining room, a ridiculous categorical spreadsheet, and a fun, interesting commute to work. Goofy expressions like “in hog heaven” come to mind.
The first review went live today, with 10 more to run through the summer. My thanks go out to Joel and to Rob Beschizza, my new editor, who inherited this project and has been most gracious and helpful. Look for more posts on BBG and some additional commentary in this space as the project continues.

A-minus

July 22, 2007 /

To answer the question I hear most about it: yes, I love my iPhone. It is every bit the gee-whiz, fun-to-use, eye-candy-rich, conversation-starting geek toy I expected when I bought it. It does so many things so well and has fast become an indispensible tool. It also simplified my life: I have shed my pocket day planner, streamlined my contacts list, and I no longer lug my laptop away from my desk, since I can just whip out the iPhone for the majority of what I want to do online.
What’s great about it is that so many of the “wow” features in the iPhone are actually practical. Pinching and spreading to zoom in and out: wonderful. Scrolling around a screen by dragging displays with one finger: so great I keep wishing my computer supported the same function. The touch screen is an easy, intuitive way to do, well, everything, and the relatively transparent access to the Internet (even on AT&T’s network) turns the iPhone into an iAnything. Web browsing is great. The iPod is great. Google Maps is phenomenal. The weather pane seemed like a throw-in when I got the phone, until I found myself checking it a few times a day, and now I can’t live without it.
That pretty much sums up the whole user experience: once you have an iPhone, you immediately find it useful and pleasant, and everything else pales in comparison. In a word, terrific.
Alongside my praise, I am not afraid to admit it’s not a “perfect” device, in the sense that all of its capabilities are not pinnacles of joy and ease-of-use. I will defer to the many, many reviews of the iPhone elsewhere online for a reasoned critique, but here’s what I personally am crinkling my nose at:
~ The vertical keyboard layout is mediocre. I might enjoy it more in horizontal web layout, but since it’s not available anywhere else, I just do all my typing upright, and three weeks in, I’m still tapping words with my index finger. Yeah, it works, but BlackBerry and Treo users (including myself) will feel slowed down by its interface. It does trump T9 on a phone, but that’s not enough.
~ Neat, look at the wheelie calendar scheduling interface! I use this all the time to show off how nifty the iPhone is. But as an actual scheduler, it’s pretty damn annoying. If I used my Mac to book appointments I’d be in good shape, but I generally plug them straight into my iPhone, and man, wouldn’t it be nice to have a 10-key number pad for dates and times.
~ Holding the device steady enough to tap the touch-screen camera shutter is a challenge. I could probably learn to juggle on a unicycle in the time it will take me to learn how to never blur my photos.
~ I worry endlessly that the spam-filter-less mail function and the fun but error-prone slide-to-delete finger stroke in it are exposing my email address to happy spammers around the world.
~ I’ve noticed that the side of my thumb is not a sufficient surface for the screen to pick up on tapping. This might just be my freak thumbs, but whatever the reason, it’s annoying.
So, no, it’s not perfect. I’m looking forward to firmware updates that continue to improve the UI, although I’m expecting them not to address all my concerns. The iPhone simultaneously reminds me of why I continually buy Apple products… and why I don’t use the applications in OS X outside of iLife.
All this said, the iPhone is still a fascinating device and a complete game-changer in the world of consumer electronics. I am gleefully obsessed with it and proud to own it.

Got mine

July 1, 2007 /

iPhone
If you wanted an iPhone this weekend, you could have waited on line for three days, like some of the folks who made it into national newspapers, or you could have done what I did: roll into the Apple Soho store just after it opened at 9:30 Saturday morning, gotten on a very short line at the register, and walked out with one in roughly four minutes.

So far, it’s pretty terrific. The learning curve is short and the pleasures of the UI are long. Free wifi is easy to find in the city, so the major shortcoming cited in early reviews (AT&T’s slow EDGE data network) has not been a factor. And I can sheepishly report that the iPhone withstands a three-foot drop onto concrete without any damage to the system or the beautiful display, although my day-old gadget is nicely scruffed.

Also: the iPhone comes in a dedicated iPhone bag. Carrying this bag around Manhattan turns a person into a temporary rock star. The buzz around this device is truly astounding.

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