A bit less than two years ago, I excitedly drove to my nearby Verizon store to give up my Motorola Droid and jump ship over to an iPhone 4s. I was sure this would be a great match, and my days of smartphone-hopping were over. And they were, for quite a while. But over time I’ve grown frustrated, and the iPhone has begun to feel a bit stale.

My main frustration has been with the battery life. My 4S started behaving atrociously about three months ago; I would routinely get under 8 hours of standby and maybe 5 hours of usage on just email and texting. A few times that dipped down to 3 hours of use and 6 hours of standby; obviously, something was wrong. I tried wiping the phone and starting from scratch, but that didn’t fix the erratic, angry battery. An informal poll among some 4S owners in my office indicated this is possibly related to iOS, as everyone has seen this behavior in some form or another, but without a fix it’s become incredibly frustrating.

My dissatisfaction is also with the iPhone’s user interface. In some ways, the consistent rows of icons are simple and effective, but compared to the competition they just feel static and a bit dull … stale. I don’t need much, but having the notification menu as my only insight into new emails, messages, calls and notifications outside of opening each app is getting clunky. There’s just nothing dynamic about the everyday workflow anymore.

So, lucky for me I am due for an upgrade in a few weeks. But what do I choose?

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This morning on the news, I heard a report of a retailer who has thus far been an online presence only. Now they are opening a brick and mortar store because they understand that customers like to see, touch and compare the actual products. Fortuitously, an experience I just had at Best Buy served as a reminder that bricks and mortar are just the beginning. What really makes the difference is… customer service.

That was what was lacking during my recent shopping experience at Best Buy, and it is why Amazon.com got the sale.

I went into Best Buy to purchase a Sony NEX mirrorless camera. When I walked up to the camera area, there were four or five different customer reps standing there speaking with each other. I looked at the cameras, but then when I looked up to ask some questions there was no one to be found. I stood there for five minutes. Then I stood there for another five minutes. No one was to be seen. So I walked up to a Best Buy salesperson and asked a question. He replied it wasn’t his department, and they really couldn’t help. So I walked up to someone who had appeared in the department but was looking at the computer. I asked him something, but he never even looked up.

15 to 20 minutes had passed by this point. Someone finally walked over and said, “Can I help you?” I said “Yes, I’ve been standing here for about 20 minutes, and no one has come up and been available; I’m looking to make a purchase.”

His response? “Okay.”

“Okay?!?!” I thought … and I started to walk away, but decided that there was a point to be made. I walked back to him and said, “I’ve been standing here for 20 minutes, and no one came up to help me. I tell you that, and your response is, “Okay”? It’s not okay. The proper response is ‘I’m sorry, can I help you with something?’”

His reply? “Okay I’m here now, can I help you with something?”

“Yes,” I said, “you already did. I wasn’t sure if I should buy here or through Amazon. You helped me decide.”

My camera arrives from Amazon tomorrow.

I recently saw an article from USA Today on a new “Create Your Pizza App” Xbox 360 app that lets users order food from Pizza Hut right from this game console. This free app includes the full Pizza Hut menu.

The app caught my interest while the justification for the app was laughable to me. A different way of doing the same thing.

Each app element was socially constructed based on our experience…how we relate to the elements individually or collectively.

There are many social factors working here. Overall, pizza delivery is something many people use it and I don’t it is going away any time soon.

“The very last thing a kid wants to do is look for a phone to order a pizza,” says John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, a cloud technology provider in a recent USA Today article on this app.

The last thing a kid wants to do is look for a phone? …Really? Most “kids” I know have a mobile device close by and on their body even while playing their Xbox 360.

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Saucony #BostonStrong Medallion

Much has been written about all of the amazing people who stepped up after the Boston Marathon bombings, as well as companies in the area that opened their doors for stranded runners and other impacted individuals. We have since seen both good and bad examples of those who claim to want to help. The obvious bad example was the fake Twitter account looking for retweets claiming a donation would be made for each one, and the many fake charities looking to funnel off some of the generosity that has sprung up.

One of the best things that happened was the immediate formation of an official charity; you should definitely check that out.

In the nearly two weeks since the tragic events, I have been glad to see the intense fundraising continue to help the families of those whose lives were lost and the survivors whose lives have been forever altered. As a runner who subscribes to dozens of blogs and has accounts on pretty much every running-related site or app, I continue to see loads of email and blog traffic about this. Amongst these there are mostly good ideas with a few bad ones mixed in. Let’s take a quick look:

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I watched the Facebook Press Conference during which Facebook Home and the HTC First Android Phone with Facebook Home launched two weeks ago with a bit of amusement. I’m not a huge Facebook user, but my amusement really wasn’t just about my lack of being a Facebook fanatic at play; the idea of Facebook being my welcome screen and launcher just didn’t seem like something I would ever want. Facebook Home takes one means of connection and makes it central to my entire mobile experience. Having it on a dedicated Facebook phone means that I would need to go THROUGH Facebook to get to my other apps and services. It means I would basically need to give over a huge portion of my mobile life to Facebook, and that simply didn’t interest me.

Apparently I’m not alone.

To say that sales of the HTC First Facebook phone have been bad would be generous. A more appropriate word to describe interest in the HTC First with Facebook Home would be “abysmal”.

That’s the word an industry insider used when sharing with me the pre-order and first weekend sales numbers of the first phone built specifically for Facebook Home. How bad were the sales numbers? Let’s put it this way - less than 500 units on the East Coast. That’s not 500 thousand units, or 500 units an hour; that’s not even 500 units per store. No, my source told me that the TOTAL number of presale and first weekend handset sales on the East Coast was a TOTAL of less than just 500 units.

I cannot begin to imagine what stock AT&T is currently holding of the device, but I have a pretty good sense that the phone which is currently $99 on contract will be dropping down to $49 or even 1¢ in a matter of weeks.

The bottom line is this — sales of the HTC First with Facebook Home were basically non-existent.

In contrast, I don’t know what pre-orders for the HTC One look like, but I have a review sample and it is fantastic!!

That means the HTC First Android Phone with Facebook Home is a complete flop and, at least thus far, so is the Facebook Home app.

I’m not surprised in the least by any of this; are you? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Please save me from the tyranny of forced new purchase downloads, Apple!

As more and more information storage moves into “the cloud” — that is to say, you aren’t necessarily storing all those movies, TV shows, books, and whatever else locally on your system, but pulling them in from the Internet at need instead, using other people’s storage instead of your own hardware — it’s interesting to me watching various companies adapt.  Amazon has of course been out in front with their AWS service.  But Apple has also done at least a workmanlike job as well, slowly adding services so that now, if you like you can store a bunch of your entertainment material on their servers instead of your local hard disk, and pull it down at will.

This has its down sides, of course; I am nervous about someone else storing my material (what if they won’t give it to me when I want?).  What if they lose it, or (more likely) lose the record that shows I own something?  And of course there’s the download time; I have good connectivity, but it can still take hours to download a high-definition movie.  So yeah, it makes me nervous, but in the main I have been keeping more and more of my entertainment material — videos, in particular — in iTunes cloud storage.  When I want to re-watch “Animal House”, say, I download it and watch it, rather than storing it locally on a 2 TB disk or something.

But Apple hasn’t quite thought it all through yet, it seems to me.  Consider this situation, which I am finding occurs more and more frequently:  Through the wonderful world of streaming, you discover something new.  My daughter, for example, has recently been hooked by Dr. Who.  Netflix has many back-seasons available for streaming, but not all of them.  So okay, Maggie, I’ll buy you a season.  What happens next?

Why, iTunes downloads each and every one of those files — tens of gigabytes of files — to your local system.  Whether you want it to or not.  And even if you go into the download window and pause all the downloads and delete them from your queue, as soon as you try to download anything else — new app update, a new book, a new podcast, anything – BOOM those files are put back in your queue.  iTunes demands you download them.  You cannot store those newly purchased files for later downloading; you are required to download them after purchase, no matter what.  The only thing you can do is let iTunes download them — plugging up your Internet pipe for hours and hours — and then delete them.

And this is, of course, silly.  Just because I bought Maggie a season or two of Dr. Who, doesn’t mean I want to download every episode immediately.  Heck, I may not even want to download every episode at all; I just want to buy them and let Maggie download them on her laptop when she’s ready.  But iTunes won’t let you do that.  (Which I only was able to find out for sure after three increasingly annoyed letters to iTunes.  Seemed simple:  ”Here’s what I want to do; can I?”  They kept talking to me about “automatic downloads” and pointing me to forum chats.  No, I kept saying; I don’t want to download automatically, is that possible?  More pointers.  Etc.  Three exchanges to get a straight answer.  NOT THAT I’M FRUSTRATED.  Ahem.)

So the cloud is here, and companies like Apple are implementing it.  But they’re not there yet.  So Apple:  C’mon, get with it!

Google Reader and Google Keep are two different services, but when placed side by side they offer a cautionary tale for anyone using the web. There has been a good deal of chat among the Gear Diary team on our backchannel, and  Judie, Mike, Carly and I have been further discussing the demise of Reader and the introduction of Google Keep among the four of us quite a bit. Here’s some of what we have to say…

As Joel posted Wednesday, Google has just rolled out Keep, their Evernote and OneNote competitor. Evernote, as you likely know, offers users a powerful free option, but those who want to take maximum advantage of all the service offers generally opt to pay for a Premium Subscription. At $45 per year, it isn’t a lot of money, but it is money. Google’s offering, on the other hand, is absolutely free — at least from the perspective of cash money. And while Evernote could jack up their price at any time, and Google Keep could eventually eclipse Evernote’s functionality (because after all, Google has the resources of … Google), there is no way I would ever use Keep.

Why? Simple — Google Reader.

As Google just demonstrated, using their products for free — save the cost of whatever info they might manage to glean from your personal information and browsing history — means that the company can do what they want whenever they want with the service. That’s why they could simply decide to shut down Google Reader (a service all of us here on GD rely upon) and then remove the link to it from their menu bar just a few days later. From a financial perspective, making the change costs them nothing; they don’t need to care that we all all a bit angry or frustrated. They can do what they want, when they want, and that’s the end of the story.

Evernote, on the other hand, depends upon people liking the service so much that they are compelled to move from Evernote Free to Evernote Premium. Evernote needs subscribers because that is their revenue source. That, in turn, means they have an incentive — like the health and future of the entire company — to keep the service going and to constantly work to make it better, more attractive and, in turn, more profitable.

I asked my fellow Gear Diary Editors if they are inclined to try and potentially use Google Keep. Here’s what they had to say…

Carly: Google Reader’s shutdown makes me extremely concerned about my entrenchment in Google going forward. What scares me isn’t that they shut down a service I liked, what scares me is that their reasoning is vague (“didn’t fit core business”). Exactly what is Google’s core business these days? Ads mostly, with a healthy dose of data monitoring and mining as well. What was Google Reader? An insight into how millions of people interacted with websites. Granted, I am looking at this from an outsider’s view, but it seems to me there is a ton of juicy, valuable data to be found in how users track their favorite websites.

And even if I accept that Google Reader really did fall out of Google’s main business, the fact that their business is so vague makes me worried about a service like Keep. Either Google is going to inundate users with ads, or they are going to possibly use the content of notes as a way to mine even more data about its users. If Google Reader wasn’t a core business, and Reader was all about a firehose of data being managed, how then is Keep to become a core business? It isn’t, unless Google plans to track every word typed into the service.

I am also a bit concerned about Gmail now, too … will parts of Gmail be stripped away and given to the albatross that is Google+? And will Google Calendar be able to survive as a standalone? I keep looking at the Google services I use, and now I can’t help but wonder “Is this next on the chopping block?”

So no, I won’t be touching Google Keep. And I plan to back my data up via Google Takeout at least once a month. And for the first time in a very long time, I am keeping one eye on the alternatives to Google services … just in case.

Mike:  For me the bottom line is that the Google Reader Cancellation is a reminder that Google IS Google+.

Recent events out of Google have caused me to go back to think about Google and its core business: Search. This is certainly not the first time I have done this — in fact, a while back I made the controversial claim that Google was now more of an advertising agency than a Search technology company. My basic position was that public companies are judged by how they bring in revenue, and for Google nearly all revenue is from advertising. To me, that means anything that bolsters advertising revenue is good, anything that diminishes it is bad (simplistic, I know).

When ‘search was king’ at Google, the mantra was get customers on their way as quickly as possible – they openly ridiculed the densely populated Yahoo! screen, saying that by providing the best search they benefit customers and companies alike, which in the end benefits Google through advertising. Google Alerts allowed you to set up email reminders for when new items appeared in certain search queries, and became widely used among a certain niche. Again, Alerts sent you elsewhere, but there was a strong value proposition for searchers and companies alike. Same for Reader … you scan RSS and head to non-Google sites, which pretty much all contain ads back to Google, again benefitting customers, site-owners and Google. Even later additions like Google News and iGoogle offered curated (and likely paid) news slots that allowed you to go elsewhere very quickly.

But three things changed all of this: mobile, social and GMail. GMail is nothing new, but as it has developed and grown into a huge service with millions of people leaving thousands of emails around (I have 55,000 in one of my accounts, and I thought I kept my email fairly clean!), Google suddenly has a massive dataset to use with all of those servers and software bots to mine for trends, topics and other saleable items. GMail might be guilty of everything in the ‘Scroogled’ or ‘GMail Man’ ad campaigns by Microsoft, but in general users don’t care – they acknowledge the trade-off and move on. But GMail taught Google a valuable lesson – the more data users provide, the more money Google makes. It is that simple – and therefore Google transitioned from ‘quick on and off’ to ‘you can leave, but tell me EVERYTHING first’.

It is really hard to think back 7 or 8 years in terms of smartphones. I was still using a dedicated PDA and a basic cell phone then. Palm, Windows Mobile and particularly BlackBerry ruled the world. But there was a real push to do more on these devices than just simple email and messaging. By the time the iPhone arrived, other companies were working on or releasing full-featured devices … but it was the iPhone that captured public imagination and changed the world. It also changed how the world viewed the web — on the small screens there simply wasn’t enough room for ads, search data was harder to track, and all of that was lost in apps. So with Android, Google ensured they would have a continuous revenue stream and information stream, and the app model of free with ads ensured Google could have eyes on whatever and wherever you were.

As for social … sites such as Facebook in particular are trying to build a sort of portal that you really never leave. Chat, messaging, open discussions, news, pictures and video and more — all on one site surrounded by your friends. This presents a major problem for Google, as they get no data when someone stays on Facebook, as they are essentially invisible to Google. So after failing with Buzz and Wave, Google came up with Google+. Aimed at being a hybrid social network that seeks to keep you on Google territory as long as possible, it quickly became more … and less. More because suddenly everything you did on a Google property was a Google+ action – like that YouTube video? That was a +1 on Google+, and so on. It felt like a numbers game, where Google leveraged their monopolies to appear larger in the social space than they actually were. The appeal for Google is clear – the more time you spend on G+, the more data they get from you.

As for how Google+ is ‘less’? Well, in spite of the falsely inflated numbers, and in spite of forced integration and sign-ups as part of getting an Android device, Google+ remains fairly marginal in terms of appeal and reach. Not even close to Facebook, they don’t supplant Twitter for news, Instagram for pictures, Pinterest for random food and clothing pics (can you tell I’m not a huge fan?), and so on.

Which brings us back to Google Reader and Keep. As soon as the cancellation of Reader was announced, there was quite a bit of backlash. Some of it was because Reader did what it did so well, it killed off the market. This was a Microsoft tactic, which they did effectively with ‘Internet Mail & News’ back in the very early web days.

But some of the backlash was also because it didn’t make any sense – Reader didn’t cost much to sustain, as they weren’t doing much to improve it anymore, so it is clear that it wasn’t about the money. Even moreso, very quickly you had some seriously high volume sites showing data about the huge differential on what is driving traffic – it IS from Reader, and it is NOT from Google+. That pretty well shuts down the theories about how ‘marginal’ Reader was and that was why it was shuttered.

What all of this comes back to is a strategic change – Google is NOT about Search, it is Google+. Search is necessary, but since search will generally drive people off the site Google has changed up their approach so that advertisements, paid sites and Google properties get top billing – and apologists who like to pretend that isn’t true need only check out this article about the NCAA tournament to see the difference between Google (all about Google) and Bing (broad set of choices) to realize how far Google has headed in the wrong direction.

Further evidence of the dismantling of search? Apparently now Google Alerts are pretty much broken across the board, without any notice. Which is what has now happened with Reader – Joel alerted us when Reader disappeared from Google Play, and Judie noted when it no longer showed up in her menu bar, and I also found that in the full list of products it is gone. Sure you can still get to Reader, but Google clearly doesn’t want you to easily find it!

So what does this have to do with Keep? One angle is that we can’t trust Google if they will so quickly screw millions of customers over for no good reason. While true, I think that the way they handle our personal data and some of the advertising we get as a result already let us know that (and yet millions of us stick with GMail in spite of it).

For me, the reason I will not touch Keep is that it telegraphs Google’s motives like a toddler waddling towards the shiny breakable thing on your end table. Google knows that people store everything in Evernote: personal lists, business tasks and todos, friends info, blog drafts, kids’ birthday lists, groceries, and on and on. They also can imagine the money they can make selling all of that data, associating personal info with emails and other documents that enrich the context of each bit of data.

To get market share they do what they do best – wrap it up with their other products and make it free. Next step will be to give it more features while simultaneously breaking interoperability between their stuff and other utilities (like they have been doing to cripple Windows Phone). These tactics might seem both familiar and evil, and that is because we have seen them before – from Microsoft 15 or so years ago. So while I am sad to see Reader go, it is one less tendril that has me tied to Google. I have switched to Bing for search, Safari (FireFox on PC) for web browsing, no longer use Docs, and so on. The more they tighten their grip on my data, the more services slip through their fingers.

Judie: This is going to be a bit of a rambling response, so please just bear with me and I’ll eventually get to the point …

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, Julie and I used to regularly say “Google is my friend” when someone would ask how we found an obscure fact so quickly; we would even say it to each other at times, and the funny thing is that we were only half-joking! Google search was better than any of the other search engine options available at the time, because its algorithm was extremely good at finding specific data across the web.

Before you could even specify Google as your default search engine, I was one of the millions who would automatically key www.google.com into my browser whenever I needed info on anything; calling up Google search became second nature. I doubt any of us gave a thought as to what Google might be doing with the information they gathered from us every time we entered a seemingly innocuous search phrases such as “best full body workout”, “Republican rally Austin, Texas”, “Church of Scientology”, “how to remove SD card from DVD slot on iMac”, or “composting toilet reviews”.

Why should we care about the information Google was collecting from us? We weren’t searching for anything illegal or immoral, right? What difference could it possibly make? But what we were doing was freely giving Google the type of information that we might not have ever shared with even those we trusted the most; we were essentially allowing Google into our heads as it became second nature to search Google for information on everything and anything the minute we had a question about it. “How to remove blood stains”, “tide tables”, “largest Yeti cooler size” …

Do enough searches for seemingly unrelated items, and patterns begin to emerge — patterns that could and would be used to make money for Google.

Google also offered other services that were seemingly unrelated to search, but they all had one thing in common — advertisements. Maybe there were times when it seemed a bit disconcerting that Google would know to show us ads that could only have been placed based on searches for specific items that we had performed in the past, but we got over it because some of those ads were for things we might actually want to buy. Eventually we just came to expect it, I think. And how could any reasonable person possibly begrudge Google a few targeted and relevant ads when they started giving us free email that came with 7GB storage (an unheard of amount at the time) along with the best spam filter any of us had ever seen?

I think many of us failed to consider the ramifications of  giving a company access not only to the terms that we searched for, but to every email we would ever send or receive. Google even made a point of telling us that there was no need to delete email; they were giving us plenty of storage space so we could keep everything … but if we really needed more, it could be had inexpensively. Google even introduced their own web browser, Chrome, which offered services such as this one …

But Google had even more in store; in order to send readers to the most relevant sites so that people would be in a good mood when they clicked the displayed Google ads, Google introduced an algorithm called PageRank to numerically evaluate every site’s value. Suddenly sites weren’t being judged on their own merits (such as the content they produced or the amount of people who visited daily), they were being judged on the sites that they linked out to and — even more importantly — the backlinks from other sites based on those linking sites’ values.

In the early to mid 2000s, it was common for advertisers to look at a site’s PageRank when determining whether or not to advertise, and if so for how much; it was also common for PR companies to check PageRank when deciding who to send review samples to. Whatever its original purpose may have been, PageRank became a snap judgement value indicator for websites; anyone who had a site could breathe a sigh of relief if theirs scored anything higher than a 4 (out of a possible 10). At some point in 2009 or so, Google became extremely negligent sporadic about updating PageRank numbers — even going so far as to tell webmasters not to get so hung up on their PageRank, because there were other factors which were more important — but even today it seems that many never got that memo.

In February 2011, Google introduced Panda, their new algorithm that was supposed to lower the search engine rankings for ‘low quality’ or thin sites; what it did instead was force many webmasters to rethink everything they thought they knew about blogging as they watched their sites appear lower and lower in Google search ranking results, sometimes further down than the scraper sites reposting their content.

Google has always taken steps to be much more than just the best search engine and the best free email service. Over the years, Google has introduced a plethora of web-based applications  – many were direct competitors to other popular services at the time. Some of the Google products I’ve used include Google Video, Google Docs, Google Buzz, Google Labs, Google Wave, and Google Apps. A few of these were original Google concepts that even now might be considered ahead of their time, and some were eventually rolled into other services offered by Google, but the one thing that all of these free services had in common is that every one of them was eventually discontinued by Google. In fact, if you want to see a disheartening list of some  of the more popular services Google has introduced only to later axe, look no further than this post on Salon.

Salon’s interactive Google Graveyard

I currently use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Accounts for Gear Diary (we were grandfathered in for the free service), Google Reader (and several iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone and Android apps that import Google Reader information), Chrome, Google Play, Google News, Picasa, Google Maps, and YouTube. I pay $50 per year for 200GB storage (grandfathered again) on one of my Google accounts, and of course I have an Android phone. I have been an early adopter (essentially a beta-tester) of many Google products for what seems like forever, and I am completely invested in Google services.

But here’s the thing: I’m feeling the loss of Google Reader more than I expected to, and I’m disappointed and more let down than I probably have the right to be. Google Reader was a free service, and of course Google had the right to kill it at their discretion … but this time, it’s causing me to reevaluate the ways that I use Google and their free services. I honestly don’t have any desire to invest myself in another Google product, especially when there are other, better products already available. I also don’t see the need to give Google access to even more of my private information. As it stands, Google knows more about me than my mother, my daughter or my husband, and they have even inserted themselves into the way I have to manage Gear Diary; I’m growing less and less comfortable with that.

So there you have it — the four Gear Diary Editors — none of whom have strong feelings about this, and all of whom will not be going anywhere near Google’s latest offering.

What do you think? Is Google Keep of interest to you? Can you see yourself using it? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.

One of the talks that I had really been looking forward to at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi)–as a contributor to an online site as I am–was David Carr’s talk, “Gates of Heaven, Gates of Hell”,on how media was adapting to the internet, and specifically about the NY Times’ experiences with pay walls, online advertising, and the like. If you’ve been online for a while and followed the business news regarding making online sites pay, you know it’s a tough row to hoe. It sounded fascinating.

It wasn’t.

The New York Times has taken a couple of stabs at charging for online content.  The first was back in the early 2000s, when the “information has to be free!/I ain’t paying for nuthin’ on that durn Web!” mania was at its highest.  The Times sealed off their most popular contributors with a paywall, despite howls from many quarters that “That will never work.”  And it didn’t.  After a few months, the Times bailed and pulled down the paywall.

More recently, the Times came up with what, in my opinion, is an extremely convoluted and quite bizarre hybrid scheme.  I won’t go into all the details, but basically you get a certain number of free views of Times articles every month, after which if you want to see any more, you need to pay.  The structure for subscription purchases is extremely slanted towards forcing you to get an “online and paper” combination subscription.  The best deal (I’ve been told) is the Sunday physical paper and online viewing option.  I wouldn’t know, because it offended my online-only sensibilities to be essentially forced to purchase a physical newspaper that I would throw immediately into the recycle bin just so I could read the online content in the event that I exceeded their number of monthly visits.  Which I rarely ever did.

In addition, there are gaping tech holes in the paywall (that I’ve been told by several people are intentional).  For example, if you follow a link in Twitter to a Times article, you get up to your maximum number of views . . . and never exceed it.  In any given month, I’ve seen the “This is your last free article” message a dozen times (Paul Krugman writes a whole lot of very short posts) without being cut off.  If this is intentional, the reasoning escapes me.

In any event, as you can see I find the Times‘ strategy to be bizarre in the extreme.  But they’re giving it a good go, so I wanted to hear what Carr had to say about the trend in general, and how the Times‘ experiment has played into it.

What I got was an apologia for how awesome the Times‘ strategy is, and why it’s a model for the industry.

Okay, yes: Carr is an employee of the Times, and so one would expect him to be very much in favor of their model (at least in public).  But he hardly addressed the many disadvantages, the lack of a solid growth curve for online subscriptions, and many other drawbacks to their model that I was really hoping to hear about.  He also had very little information about other media companies’ models and how they stacked up.  In short, I found it exceedingly dull and much too “The Times is doing it right!” cheerleading.

Now, the environment wasn’t the best: it was in a giant hotel ballroom that was only 1/4 full; the sound system was atrocious; I found Mr. Carr was a very uninvolving speaker, rather bland and dull in my opinion; and it was clear that Carr wasn’t a tech person, or familiar with the tech issues. I could only take it for 30 minutes and then left. (It’s absolutely possible that the Q&A was better, but I didn’t want to stay for it that badly.)

So in all, folks, this was a #Fail for Doug at SXSW. (And the thought of the other talks I could have gone to makes me go “Augh!”) Let this be a lesson: No matter how carefully you choose, you’re still going to get a clunker now and then!

The rumor mill is flying with word that a so-called ‘iPhone mini’ is on the way. Most suggestions have the new offering from Apple being mini in price but not necessarily mini in size. That’s too bad, since a smaller, lighter iPhone would actually make sense for someone like me who never leaves home without his iPad mini. All the arguments for the iPhone mini seem to hinge on Apple shifting from offering older models of iPhones at steep discounts to the company actually releasing a phone with less costly components — this might include anything from a return to a plastic case to offering a more limited degree of storage.

We usually don’t give credence to the latest Apple rumors du jour, but one of the more absurd rationales for the rumored arrival of the iPhone mini really struck me, and I want your help to determine if my position on this is accurate.

The rationale in question is the premise put forth in an iPhone Alley post, that one of the biggest drivers pushing Apple to release a less expensive iPhone is the success of the less costly iPad mini. The post notes that “…there’s no reason why the iPhone couldn’t follow suit”.

There is no arguing that the iPad mini is a runaway success for Apple; it is a terrific device. And there is no arguing the fact that at $329 it is a less expensive option for those looking to buy into Apple’s tablet experience. Still, the iPad mini is $329 and won’t be sub-$300 until Apple allows refurbished models into the market. (The lower price of refurbs, I have argued, one of the reasons Apple wanted a price of $329. Refurbs will let the company drop below the psychological barrier of $300.)

Even at $329 however, budget shoppers will still opt for the Kindle Fire or Nexus 7; the iPad mini is still a premium-priced item. No, I would argue, it is not the lower price that makes the iPad mini the success that it is; rather it is the smaller size and lighter weight that has made it a star. The iPad mini is small and light enough to take just about everywhere, but it still offers an uncompromised tablet experience (save the lack of a retina display) that includes all the iTunes App Store Apps, Siri, an HD FaceTime camera and a rear camera that is actually usable for pictures.

My point of view is that the argument that says that the success of the lower-priced iPad opens the door to a lower priced iPhone is rubbish. Or so I believe. But I need your help to try to test my position.

If you own an iPad mini did you…

A. Buy it because it was cheaper than the $499 entry price of the full-sized iPad

B. Buy it because it is smaller and lighter but still gives the full iPad experience

C. Other

Let us know in the comments below. And how is this for incentive … one of the people who comments will win a Speck CandyShell for iPad mini, and we will announce the winner in the March 3rd GD Newsletter.

Cablevision vs FiOS? Which should you choose?

We are finally getting close to moving into our new home, and of course my number one priority is getting the Internet up and running. There are two choices for our area, Cablevision or Verizon FiOS, and both are relatively similar. We had both at our old house, so we are fairly familiar with the customer service pros and cons of both. The bigger issue is the labyrinth of bundled deals available. How do you determine which deal is the right one? I called both companies to get more information, and was very surprised by the results!

First, I made a list of what we needed. If it were up to me, we would have the rock bottom cable option and the fastest Internet speeds possible. However, Sarah likes having cable channels to surf and the options from free OnDemand menus, so we will need some kind of full cable package. We also pay $145 a month with taxes for our Verizon Wireless plan, so we really don’t need a cable phone option. So really, our priorities are a basic cable package, fast Internet, and either a completely free phone or no phone option. Simple, right?

Try telling that to Cablevision. They have every option you’d like, as long as you want cable, Internet and phone bundled at one price of $84.95 a month. Plus $7.99 for the cable box. So really, they want $94 a month. I point-blank asked the rep if we could drop the phone service, and he informed me it would become more expensive without the phone. He did offer me the “economy triple play”, which clocked in at $70 (plus $7.99 for the cable box). What makes it economy? Instead of a few hundred cable channels, you get 40. Plus that phone line we won’t use.

Verizon FiOS was slightly better. We could opt for a “build your own double play” package, with a basic HD cable set (140 channels), and “Quantum” Internet service, no phone (hallelujah!) for $74.99. There would be an additional $6 charge for the set-top box, but even so, that’s a $15 savings over Cablevision. The catch is that to get that price, we would need to sign a two-year contract.

Even so, I am leaning heavily towards the FiOS deal. We get the cable that Sarah wants, the Internet I want, and we are not spending an additional $10+ a month on a phone we don’t need. $10 isn’t much, but that’s $120 extra per year, or $240 over the span of two years. Plus Verizon will toss in a $100 gift card if we sign for two years. Verizon will further sweeten the pot on the two-year contract by locking in that $74.99 for the full two years. Cablevision will only lock us in for the one year, at the end of which we would have to renegotiate or face a much higher monthly costs.

Honestly, both are more than I would like to pay for cable and Internet. But we don’t have a lot of options. And instead of looking at this as being forced into a two-year contract, I look at it as locking in a halfway decent price for two years. At least Verizon isn’t forcing us to buy a phone we don’t want, though I do find it ironic that the cable company is insisting we buy phone service, while the phone company is totally ok with us skipping the phone!

Those are the options I’ve got; what choices and compromises did you have to make when you decided what would go in your home?

Gay-Friendly Amazon Kindle Paper White

Amazon’s new Kindle Paper White commercial shows just how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. Allow me to offer a bit of personal background. A little over a decade ago, a debate raged within my religious movement regarding rabbis officiating at ceremonies celebrating same-sex couples. My position on it was clear, and I told my Board of Directors. One of my most stalwart supporters, a man whose wisdom guided me on many issues, disagreed strongly and went so far as to almost beg me to vote otherwise or, at the minimum, to abstain. I respectfully told him that we would have to agree to disagree on this front. Fast forward to last year. The New Jersey State Assembly passed a resolution on gay marriage that would finally bring marriage equality to the Garden State. I signed on to travel to Trenton to testify on behalf of the proposition. I had a meeting of my Board of Trustees the night before and decided to share my prepared statement with them. When I finished, there was no dissent but, instead, there was a thunder of applause. What a difference a decade makes.

There has been a (wonderful) change in attitude, and I see it pretty much everywhere I look. When I ask current teens their position on same-sex marriage equality, they look at me as if I had two heads. Their unspoken response is something like “That’s a dumb question.Why is there even a discussion?” When I quietly changed our membership from to read “Parent 1. Parent 2″ as opposed to “Mother. Father”, no one said a word. And when our students with two mothers or two fathers celebrate their B’Nai Mitzvah, I am thrilled to say there is nothing exceptional. (Except for the awesome 13 year olds leading the service of course.) And while I live in a progressive part of a progressive state, the changes can be seen on television, in movies and, yes, in Amazon’s new gay-friendly Kindle White commercial.

Jeff Bezos has been outspoken with regard to marriage equality, and he even gave a significant amount of personal support when gay marriage was up for debate in Washington State last year. It is, however, one thing for an individual, no matter how rich or powerful, to offer personal support, and it is quite another for the company itself to make the statement. Taking the latter action carries potential risk to the bottom line, and since companies are in the business of making money this is no small statement. It tells me that either Bezos and his company hold the moral position above the bottom line, or they actually believe there is less risk running such a commercial now than there would have been a few short years ago. I would like to think it is a bit of both.

There is, however, another aspect of the new gay-friendly Amazon Kindle Paper White commercial that is worth noting. It is, I believe, the more important statement. That statement? “There’s no statement to be seen or heard here.” The iPad-user refers to his husband as casually as the bikini-clad Kindle-reader does hers. It reminded me of something I said to Carly and Sarah when we were meeting prior to their wedding. “Folks,” I said, “You’re just as boring a couple as the rest of us.”

We will know we have achieved real marriage equality when, instead of referring to the “gay couple”or the “lesbian couple”, we refer to “the couple”. With their new Kindle Paper White Commercial, Amazon brings us one step closer.

via Teleread

Tesla and The New York Times

When something comes from a trusted news source, it carries a certain cachet; there’s an expectation of truth, integrity, and objectivity. The only time objectivity gets a pass is when something is entitled “opinion” or “editorial”, but reviews are always expected to be reasonably objective. So when The New York Times published John Broder’s scathing review of the Tesla Motors Model S electric car, it was natural for their readers to assume that the review was accurate based on the experience of the reporter who wrote it.

But as it turns out, John Broder may have exaggerated his experience in order to push an anti-electric car bias; Tesla says they have the logs to prove it, and they are refuting Broder’s article. If it’s true that Broder has a known anti-electric vehicle bias and his review was allowed to run, what does that say about The New York Times and their journalistic integrity?

Tesla and the New York Times

Tesla Motors and The New York Times: Background

For those who may have missed it, this story has been a back and forth between Tesla and Broder since his review of the Tesla S hit The New York Times on February 8th. John Broder told of driving the Model S through the mid-Atlantic region and sweating bullets about the range between charges. He talked about driving slowly, turning off the heat, and barely making it to charging stations. At one point he flat-out said the car ran out of charge and had to be towed. Tesla Motor’s CEO Elon Musk responded by saying the reporter lied and he had logs of the drive to prove it; they’ve been released and appear to corroborate Musk’s allegations.

You can read the original New York Times review here.

According to Tesla Motors and their rebuttal of The New York Times’ review, the car was never fully depleted. In addition, they say that Broder drove past charging stations while he said the charge was low. Worst of all, Tesla says that their logs prove that Broder’s car was driven well above the stated speeds in the review, the car was never charged to full capacity, and the reporter apparently tried to drive the battery to zero by doing circles in a parking lot.

You can read Tesla’s rebuttal here.

Tesla and The New York Times

Some of the log information from the Tesla Motors vs The New York Times situation is certainly subjective. Speed and temperature averages may not reflect highs and lows perfectly. But it’s hard to explain away driving a half mile in circles in a parking lot, unless the reviewer was REALLY lost looking for that charging station. And even if the reviewer was dead-set on getting to the faster “supercharger” station, instead of stopping to wait for hours at a regular charging station, there was no mention in the review of another charging option being available. At first glance, the logs reflect what Tesla alleged: The New York Times’ writer stretched and mangled the truth to make his review more interesting instead of making it accurate and fair.

Or did he? John Broder fired back that Tesla was wrong. According to Broder, Tesla told him the car was fully charged, Tesla didn’t tell him there was a closer charging station than the one he was heading to when the car died, and Tesla gave him conflicting battery preservation instructions. Also, he wasn’t just tooling around in that parking lot trying to run down the charge; he was apparently unable to locate the charging station in that poorly lit lot.

You can read John Broder’s rebuttal here.

It’s not that I don’t believe Broder; I don’t know him. But I have a hard time completely believing his version, because he even says in his rebuttal that one point he made in his original article should have been more precise.

It’s entirely possible that Tesla reps did make contradictory instructions, and Broder clearly had some issues with the car. But I have a hard time believing that while looking for the Supercharger at a rest stop, and doing circles in a panic, he didn’t think to ask for help. He was able to call Tesla over every other little thing, but he was driving a car he thought was going to die and didn’t think to call to say “Hey, do you know on which side of the rest stop the Supercharger is located?” It just struck me as another way to ramp up the drama and tension in the review.

I don’t doubt that range is a concern with an electric car, but The Verge also reviewed the car (and wrote about their range anxiety) with far less drama, hand wringing, and all around “doooooooom”.

This review on the Tesla Motors Tesla S isn’t the first time The New York Times has shown questionable integrity in their reporting. I have been suspicious of The New York Times since mid-2012, when they ran an article viciously slamming Lolo Jones for being an image-conscious athlete. It didn’t help when they ran an article later in 2012 that presented a deeply sympathetic view of a runner named Christian Hesch who was caught blood-doping. As it turned out, The New York Times had several basic facts about his story wrong, stemming from the fact that most of the facts in the story were provided by Hesch and never fact-checked or corroborated.

What struck me after these incidents that if The New York Times was this messy, biased, and inaccurate with information that I knew was wrong, how could I trust them as a primary source on anything they printed?

After reading the review of the Model S, comparing it to Tesla Motors’s response, and reading Broder’s defense, I’m still not sure.

I’ve been working to recover from a major hard drive crash. Fortunately, I knew it was coming…those telltale crashes from nowhere and other glitchy warnings. I have what I thought was a pretty safe backup set up, and so I haven’t “lost” anything exactly.

I got my backup drive up and running, but decided that I was going to take the plunge and prepare a different drive to upgrade to Windows 8. To get ready, I got a different hard drive, and did a completely clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate. I’ve actually never done that before. My backups all came from when I upgraded Vista to Windows 7, so this was a bit new to me. I was pleasantly surprised at how many things actually worked without my having to install a zillion drivers!

So, I had run the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant on the first drive that had all of my software on it, to find out what was going to be Windows 8 compatible and what wasn’t. The first item that was listed was the need for software that would play DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s on my computer, since Windows has removed the ability to play DVD’s from Windows 8. So, not surprisingly, my current DVD/Blu-Ray playing software, Cyberlink PowerDVD 10, was not Windows 8 compatible. I decided to upgrade to Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 Ultra, since the upgrade also came with a Windows 8 Metro App, and Power to Go gadget, (for easy CD/DVD burning and copying) which I’ve always liked.

Of course, there were no problems with them taking my money, and I got the email promptly with the activation codes for all the software. I downloaded all the files, and saved the codes with the software so I could install them later.

But, after a completely clean install, of course all of my previous versions of the software were gone. I really didn’t think that was going to be a problem, but apparently, every version I had copies of had been an update version as well, which requires the previous version to actually be installed on your system before you can install the next version.

I’ve never actually experienced this kind of problem before. I mean, I have upgraded countless software before. The thing is, an upgrade price is a discount to a customer who has spent money on your software before. I’ve paid for the whole new version, albeit at a discounted price. Acronis was previously the hardest to work with for me, because I had to enter the previous version’s activation code during installation to prove that I owned it – but they didn’t actually make me install the previous version!

I didn’t really think that it was going to be the problem it has turned out to be. I assumed a quick live chat with customer service and I’d have a new link. Uh…no. No live chat on their web site, only email via a form. Okay. Filled out the form, and sent it off. Waited for a response, which said that I could re-download the UPGRADE version only. That’s no help at all! I looked all over for a customer service phone number, but their ONLY option to reach a human is a paid option! For $30 I could get 2 months of customer service. Seriously?

Then, I decided that more drastic action was needed and decided to call their North American HQ. Surely they must have some kind of escalation department there, right? Nope! In fact, the only options are a dial by name directory, putting in a known extension, or looping back to being directed to the website and hung up on. So, I decided to look up the executives and enter them into the dial by name directory. Which it turns out is not set up, so you cannot use it to reach anyone on their executive team! What a joke!

So, then I tried their forum to see if anyone could tell me how to activate the trial version, or help me with a full download, but I was promptly told that an upgrade version requires the previous versions to be installed. As a side note, I really dislike people who feel compelled to answer a post in a forum who tell you to do things that you already said you have done in your original post!

Now, I resorted to really drastic action to see if I could find a pirate site that would have a full version to download. I didn’t want to use a crack or keygen, just the code I paid for, but it was the only place I could think of that would have the full version that I could actually download. All that got me was a browser hijack and some toolbars, which were promptly removed. I should have known better, but I was a bit desperate and lost my head for a minute there!

So it’s during all of this frustration that I went searching back into my emails to see if I can find anything and that’s when I remembered that I had a problem when I bought the previous version as well. Except that time, they took my money, and then days later cancelled it because they said my payment did not go through. Even after I told them that my payment did go through, and proved it with a copy of my credit card statement, they still would not reinstate the transaction.

UPDATE:  I received a response back from their “customer service” (Using that term only in the loosest sense here!) to tell me that they were giving me a download to their version 9, and that I could install my upgrade version of PowerDVD 12 Ultra over the top of it.  They seem to believe that this is an adequate solution.

Cyberlink has definitively odd definitions of what constitutes an “upgrade” and are very firm in their belief that existing customers are NOT to be EVER given an installable version of whatever software they bought and paid for, unless there is predicate software under it.  I cannot imagine how anyone would ever consider purchasing software from them.  Their belief that their repeat customers are not worthy of full installable versions of purchased software is unfathomable.

I can certainly understand that ANY software company needs to take steps to protect themselves from piracy, but this is not a DRM issue, nor is it remotely possible that it is related to “self protection” on their part.  What they consider a “full version” still requires a code to unlock it’s functions.  What this means is that even if there were copies of their “full” software running amok on the internet, you still couldn’t USE it unless you had a correctly verifiable activation code.

Cyberlink also does everything they can to entice users of their software to “upgrade” at every turn.  You get nag screens, even in the paid versions.  And you also get tons of emails from them urging you to take advantage of their upgrade specials.  Which seem like a good idea, right up until you have a problem, and need their help.  Then, you are treated like you are trying to steal something from them when you ask for an fully installable version of whatever software you purchased.  You would think that goodwill from existing customers would make it worth it to them to provide customers with what they need in the easiest way to keep them happy with the company.

But, it is sadly clear that they are doing absolutely everything that they can to ensure that they cannot be reached in person unless you pay additional money, and that you have little recourse in your dealings with them – you get what they determine and nothing else, period.

My apologies for the rather sexist title of this post. I tried to find something more “PC” but could not come up with anything that was even close in its accuracy when trying to describe the situation we ran into time and time again during CES 2013.

As is so often the case at trade shows, there were numerous attractive women in scantily clad outfits showing off the latest gear. In fact, in some cases, referring to them as “scantily clad” would be an overstatement. For example, on the first morning the show floor was open, I happened to pass by a petite woman with long black hair, a thong bikini and … not much else. Her hair was taped in place in order to cover her breasts and another woman was painting her entire body with black body paint. What this had to do with consumer electronics was beyond me but so be it.

Later that day, Judie and I passed by the California Headphone Booth. Judie’s husband Kevin has a pair and, in fact, was using them the night before in our suite. The California Headphone Company started life as a Kickstarter project. Judie and Kevin backed the project, and, for $65, Kev got a pair of the Laredo edition California Headphones. We stopped by because I had admired Kev’s, and Judie wanted to show them to me.

An attractive woman was working the booth and walked up to us. Wondering what the post-Kickstarter price was I asked her, “What’s the MSRP?”.

She replied, “I don’t know, I would have to get someone from the company to find out.”

Judie said, “Okay, we just wanted to know what the post-Kickstarter price was.”

She looked at Judie like a deer in headlights. “What’s Kickstarter?” she asked.

Then she went on to say, “I do know that these sell for $99, and the other ones are $199.”

Apparently she had no idea that the company she was representing had used Kickstarter to launch their product, and she didn’t need to ask a company rep in order to find out what the post-Kickstarter MSRP was. What she needed to do was consult a dictionary and find out what MSRP stands for in the first place, and in that moment we realized we didn’t need to waste another second with this Booth Bimbo.

So there she was at the Consumer Electronics Show working the California Headphone Booth without knowing the history of the product or what MSRP stood for. I have no issue if companies want to grab attention by having attractive people show off their goods, but the least they can do it give them a few minutes of training before they turn them loose.

It is just common sense… and good business.

There are many devices and tools that connect to your smartphone. Likewise, there are many fine apps that let you track your food, drink and activity. However, if you require LED ice cubes to alert you that you’re en route to a blackout, perhaps you need help, and not a text from your drink?

If the novelty of such an item amuses you, though, don’t worry: it does exist.

I’m trying to be fair here, but if I landed in the hospital after drinking too much, my response would emphatically not be to invent a complex ice cube that nagged me if I drank too fast. Granted, most of my “drink too much” days in college were while consuming quality beverages like Miller High Life straight from the can, so it’s not like a glass or ice cubes were an option. But once you get beyond the novelty of this idea, it feels an awful lot like those portable breathalyzers; something that sounds like a fun party trick, but when you think deeper you wonder about the health of someone who depends on one to make good decisions.

Or maybe I’m just getting old. What’s your take on this concept? Great idea or a way to get technology to enable bad decisions? Check out the video explaining the cubes, and then let us know in the comments!

via  The Huffington Post

And as we have seen more and more of these small, low emissions vehicles I’m left wondering… Does lower emissions have to also have to mean less style and taste?

Late last year we heard that obesity had replaced hunger as the world’s biggest food problem. Here is just a sample from that report:

According to CNN’s analysis of the study, obesity rates have increased 82 percent worldwide over the past two decades. Obesity is now a problem in all countries except for those in sub-Saharan Africa, and its associated complications produce health burdens higher than those caused by hunger.

OK … so if obesity is such a challenge, then WHAT should we do? That is exactly what a poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked.

As reported at Greatist, the somewhat good news is that 75% of Americans think obesity is a serious health problem in the U.S. (why only 75%?), but aside from that there is no broad consensus on what to DO about it.

Most people recall NYC Mayor Bloomberg banning sale of drinks larger than 24 oz, and the nationwide freak-out that resulted as people worried about the intrusion on their personal liberties. Did they worry about the health issues, the rising cost on all of us as the nation as a whole gets fatter and less healthy? Of course not, because as with so many other debates the protection of perceived liberties is much more important than the protection of actual life.

So we know that popular pressure will not help get action around dealing with obesity. And given that the processed food lobbies are pretty much as powerful as the NRA, we can be sure we will never see legislative action, because if we care more about keeping our military grade arsenals than we do about protecting yet another group of kids from getting brutally slaughtered, you can be sure that there will be nothing done to help the more than 50% of our kids who are overweight or obese.

Government action CAN be effective: the 2010 world obesity number show that while the U.S. continued to rise sharply, “obesity rates have significantly slowed or stopped in England, Hungary, Italy, Korea and Switzerland, and have grown only slightly France and Spain.” How? The nations have passed legislation that imposed higher taxes on fatty and sugary foods. Simple, and apparently effective – they took the health risk seriously and acted … and got results.

Of course, the counter-argument is quite valid: look at what the government does when they get involved with kids and food! A child who eats ‘government approved’ school lunches is 30% more likely to end up obese than those who brought lunch from home. Any knowledgeable parent who looks at the food served in most schools today will not think of it as ‘healthy’ or ‘balanced … and will more likely be reminded of the Reagan administration trying to allow schools to count ketchup as a vegetable in order to deal with subsidy cuts.

But the clock is ticking – every couple of years we get a new obesity report, and guess what? It keeps getting worse. The easy argument is that it is a matter of personal responsibility – and that is at least partially true. But as we have discussed in the past, the foods we buy now have different chemistry than 50 years ago do to the overproduction of corn, GMO infestation, rampant use of chemical treatments … not to mention the degree to which natural foods have been replaced with ‘healthier’ options loaded with HFCS and other additives. So simple ‘personal responsibility’ is less simple when you can eat less food and gain more weight simply because of the chemistry of how the foods are put together.

One thing IS clear: Obesity IS an epidemic, and our country is the #1 fattest developed country in the world – and by quite a large margin. I am not one to have the government impose new regulations, but it is clear that our current system of letting the fast food industry make the rules and laws is having the expected outcome … and that needs to change.

When the iPad first came out, I was as stunned and impressed as anyone, and anxious to have one of my own. My wife is largely supportive of my gadget addictions, but regarding the iPad, didn’t understand where it would “fit in” as a necessity when I already had an iPhone, laptop and desktop computer. She didn’t get it, even when I tried explaining it to her. (I believe that may be because when I talk about electronics that excite me, most of what she actually hears is “wah, wah, wah….wah…wah, wah…” )
So, I thought that Steve Jobs may do a better job of explaining it than I could. The woman sat and watched the Keynote on the original iPad – all 1.5 hours of it! At the end, she said, “We’re BOTH getting one, and I want the same one YOU get!”  And so, we got the iPads within about 10 days of their release, and have never looked back. When the iPad 2 came out, I upgraded, but she was happy with her original iPad. I never upgraded further than the iPad 2, but it went with me everywhere and became a staple of my gadget bag. (I still have to grin when I walk into the living room and see my wife on the couch with her laptop on her lap, and her iPad in her hands!)

I never planned to give up my iPad, and it was complete chance that brought me the ATIV. I had done no research in advance, other than to think that I wanted to be able to try one of the new Win8 tablets, but I didn’t think it would replace my iPad any more than the Galaxy Tab did when I got that to check out an Android tablet.

But, nearly from the moment I powered on the ATIV for the first time, I’ve been in love. Not because it’s perfect and that everything runs smoothly and problem free. (Hello…it IS still Windows based after all!) In some ways, it’s pretty challenging, but in ways that I never expected, it is ultimately perfect for me!

Yes, iOS is more stable, “cooked” and refined than any Windows product will likely ever be. iOS, is well…iOS. Apple has a polish in their devices and software that really cannot be emulated. But, I don’t think that Samsung is trying to be an iPad with the ATIV.

So, what is the “it” factor for me?

1) Keyboard Dock

Yes, I know there are a ton of BT options for the iPad, but none of them really address the idea that when you are trying to use the tablet in “laptop” mode that it’s just a bit off. The mousing functions are non-existent and it feels unnatural to lift your hands off of the keyboard to tap on the screen. And one of my biggest pet peeves is just how hard it is to get the cursor where you want it when you are trying to work with text in iOS. With the ATIV, it works just as it does on any other Windows computer, and doesn’t feel in any way like a “work around” to try to accomplish simple word processing or spreadsheet functions.
The dock uses a physical connection between the tablet and the dock, so it doesn’t need a special case or stand to make it work or to be in the “proper” position while using it. That may not seem like much too some people, but after having used several BT keyboards (and even a BT mouse for about an hour – that never really worked) with the iPad, it’s like realizing that you’ve been holding your breath for a long time and exhaling in relief. It’s astounding just how much of a difference that makes for me!

2) Full USB Ports

You get 1 USB 2.0 port on the tablet itself and 2 additional ones with the keyboard dock. (The Atom processor can only use USB 2) They are all fully powered ports, so I can use an external DVD drive, thumb drives, external HDD’s and sync/charge my iPhone from any or all of the ports. You can even run a USB hub from any of the ports if you really wanted too. I tried that before I got the keyboard dock, just to see what would work and what wouldn’t. I didn’t find anything that didn’t work from the USB port like it should.

3) MicroSD Card Slot
I would actually have preferred that this slot was a full size SD slot, as it would make a few things easier, and can take larger cards than 64GB, but I’m not complaining!  I can add an SD card reader to the USB port, and not have to remove my MicroSD card from it’s slot.  The now limitless memory (by being able to swap out MicroSD cards, or use any combination of SD cards, thumb drives or external HDD’s make the non-upgradeable 64GB (about 30GB available to the user) onboard memory of the ATIV much less challenging. I don’t have to worry about picking and choosing content before I leave on a trip, and being stuck with my choices until I get home again.
Previously, I was satisfied with the 64GB on my iPad, but now never having to worry about hitting a memory cap, I realized how constrained I felt with the limited and non-expandable memory on the iPad. Sure, there were some work-arounds again, like using the USB iPad Connection kit, and putting all of your movies into a DCIM file to copy them to the iPad by “tricking” it into thinking they were videos taken by a camera of one variety or another. But those really are work-arounds, and not having to worry about things like that freed me in a way that I hadn’t anticipated.

4) S-Pen

One of my long time gripes about the iPad (and all capacitive touch screens) is that it’s fine for tapping, but trying to get anything that resembles actual handwriting is actually nearly impossible, and when you try, it feels like you’re trying to use the fat crayons from kindergarten. I know there are some people with artistic talent that can use a variety of software and create very impressive works of electronic art, but I’m not one of them. I just wanted to be able to write on the screen in my own handwriting without feeling like I was trying to finger paint.

The pressure sensitive Wacom enabled S-Pen does just that. The added length of the ATIV’s screen when held in portrait mode is also quite cool, since it gives you much more length to write or take notes. I haven’t tried converting my handwriting to text, or even really spent that much time on this feature yet, but knowing that it’s there, ready and waiting for me, is amazing!

You can also use any capacitive stylus as well, so you aren’t giving up any features to gain the use of the Wacom pen.

On the ATIV there is a silo for the S-Pen, so I’m also not leaving it somewhere or having to go digging around for it when I want to use it.

5) Software vs. Apps

I don’t know that anyone else makes this particular distinction any more, but in my head, Software is what runs on Windows 8 in desktop mode, and Apps are what run in the Metro / Modern UI, as well as on iOS and Android devices. Apps are usually “lighter” and utilize fewer resources, and often cost less than software. But, it’s the choice that makes the difference for me. Being able to use MS Office 2010 Professional with no work-arounds, is nothing short of awesome. Throw in some other of my personal “go-to” software, like Snag-It for screen captures and light photo editing, means that I don’t have to learn how to do the things that I like to do in a different way, or use different apps that may not have as many features as I’d like.

But I also like the option to use apps, because many of them are small and both easy to use and finger friendly, and do one thing (say simple photo editing) very well.

In my experience so far, the Atom processor is not great with games that run in the desktop mode. Some work, but far fewer than you would think, even for simple games like hidden object or Match-3 types.

If you use Gamehouse for your game purchases and are contemplating upgrading or switching to Win8, be afraid…very afraid! They have a list of games that are supposedly compatible with Win8, but thus far not 1 will open on the ATIV. Their support department doesn’t seem to care, and they’ve pretty much said that their customers are SOL without just buying new games. The fact that their games don’t run on the Win8 tablets doesn’t seem to bother them either. Wild Tangent has many of the same games in their catalog and you have the option of getting them from the Windows Store, but I haven’t tried to use them. I don’t like having to buy games I’ve already paid for to use them on the same platform! So, I don’t know why the Gamehouse versions will not work. I suspect it has something to do with their anti-piracy/activation/download system, but cannot confirm that with any certainty.

There aren’t tons of game options yet in the Windows store either, but the ones that are there and show the X-Box logo seem to be well done and easy to run. I haven’t tried a lot of games yet from the Windows Store that don’t have the X-Box logo on them, so I can’t really say how some of the smaller developers are doing with those kinds of games.

6) Printing

On iOS, there are work-arounds that will let you use some network printers if you really try hard, but they are not consistent. Bluetooth printers are also not a 100% certainty for being able to print either. And, not everything in iOS is set up to let you print it either, like a web page. The option to just print a web page is something I do often enough with my computers that not being able to do it with the iPad, always made me feel its limitations.
Now, I can install a local printer via USB and have a dedicated printer, including all AIO features like scanning or faxing if I want to. I can also easily install the drivers (using an external DVD drive or thumb drive OR downloading them from the web) for whatever printer I choose. I’m not limited to just a few printers from 1 or 2 makers to get only partial compatibility.
Sure, I can use the camera on the iPad to take a picture of something instead of scanning, but there are times that just doesn’t accomplish what you need it to do.

So, what doesn’t the ATIV do as well as an iPad? So far, it’s not as media friendly as the iPad. Viewing photos, movies, music or audiobooks is nowhere near as easy or instinctive as in iOS. Most media is set up to open by default with a Metro/Modern application. Unfortunately, few of them actually work to open the files.

Movies are supposed to open by default with an X-Box player, which so far is not compatible with any format or video that is not downloaded through the app. The S-Video (Samsung’s video player) works better and will open and play the files, but since I relocated my “My Videos” folder to my MicroSD card, I have to navigate to that folder manually every time, and choose the file I want. There doesn’t seem to be any way for them to show up in the library or to have the app retain the location information for my files. It’s certainly not insurmountable, but it IS annoying. In desktop mode, I have no problem opening any or all video files with Windows Media Player, or with iTunes. It’s a bit of a tradeoff, not being able to watch videos from the Metro/Modern UI, but I’m sure this will get fixed with an update soon enough, or someone will make an app that works better than the 2 options I currently have.

I don’t spend a ton of time with music personally, so I haven’t done much to see how the music apps work or if they have the same limitations as the videos do.

The Metro/Modern Photos app also has some glitches. Photos are set to open by default with the Metro/Modern Photo app. But when I open a folder within the app that has 60 photos in it, and want to swipe my way through them, only about 20 show up. I’m not sure what it is about the app that makes it not “see” all of the photos. But, if I use Windows Photo Viewer, they’re all there with no problem. They just don’t look quite as large or crisp as the Photos app displays them. It’s a trade off again, for now.

Internet Explorer has a bit of a “quirk” as well. You can ONLY use the IE Metro/Modern app if IE is set as the default browser. As a long time Firefox user, this chafes a bit! But, even in desktop mode Firefox is not quite totally “finger friendly” yet. Often, you cannot scroll with finger flicks…you just wind up highlighting text rather than scrolling. That is annoying as heck, since the scroll bar is sooo tiny that it’s really hard to “grab” with a finger. Even using the S-Pen for more precision is hard. Pinching in and out to zoom in or out of a page is also very laggy and is often seconds behind your actions, so resizing a window is very challenging. I know Mozilla is supposedly working on a Metro/Modern app for Win8, but until that’s ready for prime time, I’m using IE, which is very responsive to finger taps, scrolling and resizing. The Metro/Modern app is also quite nice and easy to use. But, when I want to use Firefox where all of my bookmarks are synced and whatnot, I have to be prepared to use the keyboard or a mouse to aid in navigation.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day, most of my issues are related to Windows 8, rather than with the ATIV. And, I have every confidence that those glitches will be worked out easily enough in the end. The Metro/Modern UI apps are not all completely ready to go on machines that are not using Windows RT. Win8 or Win8 Pro users will find themselves using more desktop software to accomplish tasks until the Metro/Modern apps “grow up” a bit.

But I can be patient while I wait, because I can use my desktop software to do what I want to do, AND I’ve gained the ability to use handwriting, add unlimited memory, print wherever and whatever I want to and use any USB accessory I can desire.

The only time that I’ve even picked up my iPad since I got the ATIV, was to restore it and give it to my wife! I was afraid that I would miss it, so took about 10 days before I was willing to give it up, but honestly, I haven’t missed it one little bit! I guess at the end of the day, I really am a Windows girl!

Now, if only someone could come up with a nice case for the ATIV! I hate having it naked!

CES 2013 is ready to kick into gear. Judie and Kevin arrive late today. Carly will be here Tuesday. This is my 4th CES and we’ll be busier than I can ever recall. That’s a good thing. I’m especially looking forward to wandering the show floor as there are always some unexpected treasures. I do not, however, expect this to be one of them.

The HAPILABS team will be showing their new HAPIfork, the world’s first connected fork that helps you lose weight by eating at the right time and at the right pace.

Yes, the world’s first ever connected fork will be on site for CES 2013. It does, however, raise some interesting questions. Questions like-
Do I really need a vibrating fork?
Does this mean I have to carry my fork with me everywhere I go just like they did in the old days?
Do I need to recharge daily or does the motion of raising the fork to my mouth recharge the battery.
And if it does recharge the battery doesn’t that mean I should eat MORE?
And the final two questions.

Is it dishwasher safe?

And

Just because I CAN app-enable a product does that mean I SHOULD?

We have charged Carly with tracking down this technological wonder and providing some hands-on thoughts. Stay tuned.

We’ve been doing a series of posts about the features and use-experience of Bluebird, a joint venture of American Express and Walmart. The financial tool describes itself as “Your Checking and Debit Alternative”. We were sponsored to write a series of posts about our experience and, at least at this point, we would describe it as “a mixed bag”.

Let’s first recap the steps we have taken with Bluebird thus far. I opened an account and then drove to my local Walmart. Once there I deposited $100 in my Bluebird account. It worked well and, within seconds, the money appeared in my account and on my iPhone app. I then turned my attention toward the second main way of adding cash- directly through a linked bank account. Based on my excellent experience with the cash deposit I expected things to work smoothly. It didn’t.

I linked my bank account to my Bluebird account and then… waited. It took two days for two small deposits from Bluebird to appear in my checking account. I “told” my Bluebird account the amounts and the two accounts were immediately linked. I transferred $100 from my checking account and waited for it to appear. Then I waited some more. And some more.

That’s where we left it off. Yesterday I flew to Las Vegas in preparation for CES 2013. That’s when I tried to use my Bluebird card for the first time.

I grabbed dinner and some drinks at a restaurant next to my hotel. The food was okay. The margarita was passable. When it came time to pay for dinner I pulled out my Bluebird card- a card that should have now had $200 available but warned the server, “I’m reviewing this card and this is the first time I’m using it. If the card is declined don’t be surprised. I’ve got the money to pay for my meal.” She laughed. So did I.

She came back, smiled and told me that I would not have to wash dishes. The “charge” (debt actually) had gone through. She then told me about a promotion the restaurant group was offering. It sounded good and I gave her my card back for her to take $25 more from it.

It even told me the remaining balance.

That came in handy when I again used the card to pay for breakfast. That too went through without issue.

And I have about $7.50 remaining in balance.

That’s the good news.

Here’s the bad news- I have about $7.50 remaining on the card. Why is that bad news? Simply- I SHOULD have $107.50 remaining on the card since I added $200.

Yes, the $100 I transferred from my VERIFIED bank-to-Bluebird account is still stuck in pending. I’m not sure what is up with this but I’m not going to call the company and complain. Instead we’ll wait and see how this plays out.

You can learn more here on the Bluebird website.

Just before Christmas, I ranted about the support I was getting from Apple on my iPad Mini WiFi issue when using the phone and their online support systems. I contrasted it with Dan’s experience,  he was seeing a similar issue and had it resolved when he went to his local Apple Store.

My experience at that point was stretched across more than 2.5 weeks and was getting more frustrating by the day; it is too long to repeat here (click link above for the full story), but Dan’s experience is easy to sum up:

Dan’s Apple Store Experience

• Walked in. Explained iPad mini issue. Explained what I had tried.
• Told him what the issue is and …
• Five minutes later I walked out with a new iPad.

So … what has happened to me since? Well … here goes!

- Despite assurances that the notes would make sure my Mini was properly tested, when the box arrived (Christmas Eve), I put in a note detailing the issue and with big letters ‘PLEASE DO NOT RETURN THIS IPAD MINI WITHOUT REPAIRING, IT DOES NOT WORK ON 2.4GHZ WIFI’. I wrapped that around the Mini with the writing on the outside.

- On the 26th I get a notice that it had been received by service. And on the morning of the 27th I get a call from FedEx at 8AM to be expecting the shipment. Then a while later I get the email from Apple. Of course, as I checked the email I see that they did exactly the same thing … returned without doing ANYTHING.

- So … surprise, surprise … when I opened up the box it STILL doesn’t work on 2.4GHz WiFi (but will work on 5GHz).

- So again I call. This time the person sends me to a ‘supervisor’, who assures me that they will do a swap and gives me a specific case # to take to the UPS Store where they will be able to get it shipped out to the correct warehouse and it will be resolved. He gives me the case #, and his name and contact #.

We got over a foot of snow, so it took a bit to get out, but I had to drive my son to a house to do shoveling as part of the local Youth Bureau, and then headed into town to the UPS Store.

You probably know what is coming – when I get there they could not pull up any info on the repair ID, nor by my phone number. And when I checked the email on my iPhone there ws nothing new from Apple Support, meaning that Jason didn’t actually DO ANYTHING! I called from the UPS Store, but naturally got voice mail.

Not surprisingly … the ‘supervisor’ was clueless as it turns out. Apple does NOT have a deal with UPS on handling the Mini, so the person who gave me the info was wrong. Did he call back? No … he just let me go out and find out myself.

So I called again, and this time eventually ended up with a manager, who told me that the UPS Store thing wouldn’t work, but that a box would arrive and then there would be a ‘forced replacement’.

About 10 minutes later HE called ME back and said he discovered that EVERYTHING the supervisor did was wrong … he didn’t actually properly flag for auto-replace, so I would have gone through an identical cycle again! So he had to restart the whole process, meaning I would get TWO ‘coffins’, but that I would then get an auto-replacement and would see that indicated in my support email.

I got the email, saw ‘auto-replace’. Got the box on the 28th and immediately turned it around. Apple got the box on the 31st, and on the 1st I got emails that my Mini would arrive on the 2nd, and it also had the new serial number.

On Wednesday the 2nd, I grabbed the box from FedEx and go home to check it out. As expected, it IMMEDIATELY worked on my WiFi without issue … and has worked perfectly each night and day since.

So …

• It was NOT my home network.
• It WAS a hardware issue with the Mini
• Apple does NOT do proper testing on the Mini to detect what appears to be a fairly common issue.
• Non-retail customers ARE treated as second-class by support.

This issue took FOUR WEEKS to resolve; it involved FOUR shipments going back & forth, and the ONLY reason it got resolved was that *I* did the troubleshooting that Apple either would not or could not do — on an issue that is apparently not uncommon.

I did a quick check on Apple Customer Support, which has topped the industry year after year, and found this mantra used to train retail employees:

• Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome
• Probe politely to understand all the customer’s needs
• Present a solution for the customer to take home today
• Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns
• End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return

The one that strikes me is “Present a solution for the customer to take home today“. Having me get back the exact same iPad Mini which was given minimal (and ineffective) testing without any repair THREE TIMES simply should never have happened. Had the (very polite) Apple support people taken the time to “Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns”, they would have understood the situation, and what had already been done and the certainty that simply returning an unworking device would NOT solve the problem. After the first ’round robin’, the should have simply swapped out the iPad Mini – which is what happened on the fourth go-round, and even then only after having to escalate the issue two levels!

For someone who has been an Apple customer for more than 30 years, this has been a sobering experience … I quite frankly expected much better from them.

Back in mid-November, I wrote a post asking if those ‘unsubscribe’ links in emails of reputable companies actually meant anything. Carly wrote a follow-up post about how companies used junk mail blasts as targeted marketing, because it was surprisingly effective.

So now it is about six weeks since I wrote my original post, making it nearly two months since I started trying to dump unwanted emails. How did it go? Amazingly well!

Through Cyber-Monday I saw only a slight decrease in unwanted email, but immediately after that I noted a sharp decline, followed by slower drop-offs, and then a couple of reappearances between Christmas and New Years, and nothing since. Sadly I clicked something over the holiday break that has led to 2-5 real spam messages a day coming through, but overall I am pleased.

Here is how it broke down:

• A few sites like Buy.com were amazing – ONE click and I was done. I haven’t gotten an email since. THEY will get my future business.
• Most sites such as Walmart, Best Buy, NewEgg, and others used at least all of the ‘up to 10 days’ before leaving me alone. But once gone, they never returned. I hold no grudges with any of them.
• Circuit City / Tiger Direct is like Zombie Whack-a-Mole – they seemed to be gone, then returned, then left and then came back … then I thought they were gone, and then I got an after Christmas Tiger Direct ad. NEVER going there again.
• MeritLine was great for a couple of cheapie electronic connectors and a 2-for-1 deal on earbuds for the kids, but they had gotten to the point of several emails per day, and I STILL get the occasional one in spite of attempting to unsubscribe at least 50 times at last count. No way … I would pay more rather than deal with them.
• But the worst has to be Viacom – the owners of MTV/Nick. The frequency of emails has abated, but they are the worst sort of Zombie Whack-a-Mole because of how much stuff they own. Just after Thanksgiving they accounted for at least a dozen unwanted emails PER DAY. I stopped getting MTV stuff after a couple of weeks and a dozen unsubscribes, but was getting stuff from other properties, and each time the unsubscribe site looked different. I also went to Facebook and Twitter to be sure I wasn’t in any way connected to them anymore. I don’t care what they are giving away … I will never click ANYTHING of theirs again. Like ever.

As for my mistake … despite being quite happy with my current job, I still get job alerts from Jobster on ‘Scatterometry’, a field I was very fortunate to be involved with when it was just starting and have published some significant work and spoken about at technical conferences. Basically it is an extremely math & physics intensive light scattering based measurement method that can accurately describe the lines on a computer chip too small for even electron microscopes to measure. A couple of cool sounding jobs came along, and I clicked to look, which took me from place to place and had me think I was at the actual company, but it was an encapsulated site, and I soon realized that I was likely to get spammed … and I was right. A week or so ago I was getting 5-10 spam mails through to my inbox, which has dropped to 1-2 a day with diligent flagging.

So … two months ago I was doing the ‘half hour of housecleaning just to get to the email I cared about’ routine Carly described, with dozens of emails across several accounts that were simply deleted because I didn’t want them. Now when I am feeding the animals and making coffee in the morning I typically have 12-15 total emails that arrived overnight, ALL of which I have subscribed to or are from actual people I know.

Now when I get an email at some point during the day, there is a ~90% chance I actually want to see it! Definitely a success in my book. How about you? Have you tried unsubscribing? How has your experience been?

Apple has a reputation and standing as one of the best customer support organizations in all of the consumer world. They top the ratings each year; due to their retail stores, the ability to quickly talk to someone knowledgeable has made using Apple products easier than ever for millions of folks. Truth is, in more than 30 years of owning Apple products starting with the Apple ][+, I have never needed service of any type. I have had a couple of questions, and had to email support about a couple of iTunes issues, but I have never had an actual service issue. Until now, with the iPad Mini. More on that in a bit.

During a quick Skype conversation with Dan (part of his review of Sony’s Camera and Microphone for Skype) I was mentioning some success with my iPad Mini issues, and as we chatted he realized he had the same issue and was just sort of working around it … he said he’d stop by the local Apple Store in the morning. Since I live two hours each way from two Apple Stores, taking a full day to go visit one was simply not a possibility, so I had been working with Apple Support on the phone.

Let’s compare the experiences:

My Apple Support Experience

I have stated pretty clearly just how much I love my iPad Mini. Once I got it, I basically stopped using the iPad 3 and it became the most-used item in my arsenal. I use ‘became’ in the past tense for a reason. Just over two weeks ago I came home from work, took out the Mini and … it wouldn’t connect to our home WiFi network. I have talked about WiFi issues with the Mini before, so I already had a routine – I turned WiFi off then back on (failed), reset network settings (failed), switched off and reset my entire home network (failed).

Hmmm … first time THAT happened. I checked out other devices, including 3 iPads (1st, 2nd and 3rd gen), 2-4th gen iPod Touches, Macbook Pro, a couple of Sony Vaio laptops, Dell laptop Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7, HTC Flyer, Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note, Droid, Droid Pro, Palm Pixi Plus, Roku, Kindle, 3 Nooks, Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, XBOX360, HP iPaq 4355, HP Jornada 728 … and likely a few more I can’t recall off-hand. ALL of them worked fine.

This was ‘step change behavior’ – and anyone who has had to troubleshoot any sort of products knows that when you see this, the most likely candidate is the malfunctioning equipment, but it can also be an interaction with something else, or something else interfering with proper operation. But it is always important to remember that the ability to return to ‘home state’ is the ultimate test of problem resolution.

So the next night I was on the phone with Apple Support. After a quick chat they sent me along to the Airport group – it is worth noting that our network is an Airport Extreme (2009 vintage) with two Airport Express extenders to cover our whole house. I worked with them for a couple of hours, including resetting a number of things and taking down the whole network which killed my family watching a streaming video from Amazon Instant Video. On one occasion I got the Mini to connect when I was sitting it right on top of the Airport Extreme, but as soon as I was 3 feet away it dropped, and I could never replicate that.

The final suggestion was to completely hard-reset and treat the network as an entirely new network. The support person thought some of my naming was a bit long and since the Extreme module and network name were the same, he didn’t like that either. So over the weekend I went about completely resetting the network, renaming everything and resetting things as new. The result? No change. I had to manually reconnect every one of the other devices … and the Mini still wasn’t working.

The other problem was that at work I could connect to our WiFi, but it would drop pretty regularly including whenever I closed the SmartCover. But no matter what I tried I couldn’t connect at home. So then I was back on the phone to Apple support. And after trying to push me to head to an Apple Store, eventually they agreed to have it returned for repair. While I waited for the ‘coffin’ to come, I played around with manually changing WiFi channels for the network to see if I could optimize signal. Again, no change for the Mini.

I got the box, but they didn’t set it up properly with a dual ship/return label, which meant another ~45 minutes on the phone with Apple to get them to email me the PDF the next day. I sent it out, then a few days later got an email that they couldn’t replicate the issue … and that they were sending it back. They sent it FedEx overnight … but because of their direct signature requirement and the lateness of the notification email, what I should have gotten at 10AM one day I didn’t see until 6PM the next.

And … of course, it didn’t work.

And worse yet, unlike what they said in the email, it was still on 6.0.1. So I was on the phone with Apple again … and we started the cycle once more. After two calls, they said they would do another return, but there is of course the chance that they will simply send back the same one again.

As additional data of the singularity of the Mini having this issue, this week I got an iPhone 5. It arrived, I took it out of the box, selected to use WiFi, entered my password …and it has auto-connected to my WiFi ever since.

Side note: I requested that they send me another PDF return label so I could use the same box they just sent it back with … but it appears they are sending another return box.

The next day, I took the Mini to work and they had just implemented a new ‘mobile wireless’ network specifically for all of the devices people have – and it worked great with my Mini. I used a WiFi Analyzer app on my Galaxy S3 to scope it out, and found it operating on simultaneous dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz. At home it looked like mine was ONLY on 2.4GHz … so I switched it to 5GHz only mode … then I did a ‘reset wireless settings’ and the Mini connected immediately after I entered my password.

I called Apple with these detail in the hopes it would mean something, but I got the disheartening news that their standard battery of tests doesn’t include isolating to 2.4GHz, so there was a reasonable possibility that I would get the same Mini back AGAIN. I asked to speak to someone to be sure that wouldn’t happen, and after being told (again) that the BEST way was to … you guessed it, go to an Apple Store.

There are supposedly now notes and flags in my file to make sure my Mini gets properly tested.

So now I am awaiting the Christmas Eve delivery of the next coffin, meaning my BEST case scenario is to have a working iPad Mini by New Year’s Eve … or, 3.5 weeks from my initial call to Apple Support.

Dan’s Apple Store Experience

Walked in. Explained iPad mini issue. Explained what I had tried.

Told him what the issue is and …

Five minutes later I walked out with a new iPad.

Conclusions
First off, the iPad Mini WiFi issue is NOT rare or mysterious – to see exactly what Dan and I were experiencing, check here or here or here and so on. And that is just about the WiFi connectivity to 2.4GHz – there are loads of general problems with the Mini dropping connections, weak signal, and so on.

Therefore this should be a standard knowledge base issue, and something that service representatives know to discuss immediately. My first job out of school was with a small company where we did *everything* from design to test to installation and follow-up support for specialized analytical equipment. And once there was a systematic failure noted, it became part of the routine to address that with anyone having issues.

So getting a response of ‘oh really, WiFi issues on a Mini?!?’ from Support is simply not helpful and does little to build confidence that a solution will be found.

Next, getting back my Mini and having it shipped the same way as it was received was insulting. I had spent upwards of four hours on the phone with Apple support, and there were supposedly copious notes about the situation, what had been tried and what did and did not work. Maybe it is because I am an engineer who deals with equipment and instrumentation all the time, but when confronted with a non-reproducible issue that has been thoroughly tested to fail before coming to me, I use that as a sign to step back and ‘think different’ rather than say ‘no problem found’ using a simple diagnostic and return the product untouched after a nominal look.

I have been told that it should bother me that I have done 100% of the useful troubleshooting … but again, as a statistician and optical engineer that sort of thing just flows naturally for me.

But the biggest issue I have is that not only was I treated as a ‘second class citizen’ – I was told about it OPENLY. Yes, EVERY person I spoke with tried to push me to an Apple Store. Every. Single. One. And they made it clear from the moment we got to the point of my returning the Mini that my experience would be different if I went to a Store. It would be quick and easy, and my iPad mini could possibly be just swapped out.

But as I said, that solution simply wouldn’t work for me – I love the Apple Store, but between the family schedule and work, there is no way for me to take a full day trip to get to a store. So I have had to deal with Apple’s purportedly ‘world class’ support … which until I discovered the 2.4GHz/5GHz issue was telling me that I would probably just keep getting the same Mini returned – and even AFTER I pointed out the issue I was told that there was a good chance Support would get my Mini, see that WiFi worked for them and return it to me without reading the notes and/or proper testing.

Honestly that is just incompetence – when you have a product that works in two modes, and someone is seeing an issue wouldn’t it make sense to test out EACH mode rather than just BOTH modes?

But as Dan proved, there is a HUGE disparity in the service someone gets walking into an Apple Store compared with what happens through the normal support channels. To an extent I understand that – in one case the person is right in front of you, in the other case you are dealing with a box arriving from FedEx. But in each case you have the same responsibility to the customer, to satisfy them to the extent of providing a working product.

I don’t know how my support issue will turn out yet, and hopefully the swap will serve as a long-term solution for Dan. There are some speculating that early manufacturing runs of the Mini had an issue that later runs do not … but I have no idea. My concern is getting this resolved as quickly as possible – because while I am on the ‘warranty clock’ right now … something tells me that how they handle something one day out of warranty will be different online compared to in-store as well.

UPDATE: According to ArsTechnica, Apple has replied stating the POP didn’t meet the standards for the ‘Made for iPod’ program, but has approved the device for side-by-side (by side) Lightning/30-pin (/USB) charging.

OK, first of all, the title is imprecise; Apple did NOT kill anything. However, because they hold the patents – and therefore the decision to license or not license – the Lightning connector, they effectively held the final decision-making power about whether or not the POP portable power station would be a worthwhile product.

Did you know about the POP portable power station project on Kickstarter?  A cool design in a product that does nothing but serve up power for our various portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. It was cool enough that some of us at Gear Diary backed it; and it was cool enough to get more than double the asking funding!

But now the project has been killed off, and backers will be getting back their money. Why? Because the top-selling smartphone and tablets in the world right now – iPhone 5, iPad 4 and iPad Mini – all use the Lightning connector. This is a change from the 30-pin connector that Apple iPods, iPhones and iPads have used since ~2004.

And because ‘all the cool kids’ have the latest devices, and are also backers and likely customers of the POP portable power station – the manufacturer Edison Jr decided that Lightning support was a ‘must-have’. But Apple wasn’t cooperating. According to Jamie Siminoff, Edison Jr CEO:

“We didn’t get a yes or a no up front,” Siminoff said. “But as we kept going back and forth it was clear that it was getting harder. Then, when we saw that they weren’t even going to allow a Lightning connector and a 30-pin connector together, we knew it was over.”

On the surface this is all rather trivial – a company designs and promotes a product based on intellectual property they do not own, and when they fail to get a license they need to kill the product.

Yawn. So why the outrage?

Because it is a reminder of why proprietary standards suck.

For years, I have complained about Sony and their incessant need for everything to be home-built. I honestly feel that one of the biggest issues with the PSP was that the entire device was built around proprietary standards that they didn’t share freely. The UMD disk was a cool idea, but the mechanics they used for security and the pricing attached to movies (I really wanted Tron to watch on a plane trip, but it was $25) made it a PSP-game-only medium … and the same goes for the Memory Stick and later Memory Stick Pro. Sony used these in their products; their first-party pricing was way out of whack with competing technology, and the licensing and pricing ensured that no one else would use them.

Years ago Apple pioneered open standards – they were fast to adopt the CD-ROM and later DVD-ROM; they led the USB revolution with their Plug & Play peripherals; they led the high-speed interface race with the IEEE-1388 ‘FireWire’ standard connector, and so on. Their video connectors have always been funky, but that is another thing …

And when the iPod launched, it had a FireWire connector in the top that allowed you to fill up your device at amazing speeds and the universal connection made life easy. But with the advent of the 30-pin connector Apple moved to USB, and soon dropped FireWire support at all. People who had iPods in that era know that some accessories would work with one device but not another – it wreaked havoc until things settled down. The ‘iPod Dock Accessory’ market eventually spread to become a massive multi-billion dollar crowded space; Apple has seemed quite happy to allow third parties to operate freely in that space while still making accessories of their own.

With Lightning, Apple has introduced a new standard that is incompatible with old accessories, and has been very proscriptive about how they have allowed accessory makers to operate. We see sub-$10 Lightning-to-30-pin adapters on Amazon and other places, but none of them are fully functional.

And based on what just happened with POP, we see that Apple doesn’t want to have Lightning and 30-pin coexist in a product – or at least not in a well-designed product such as POP. Maybe they think it hurts the market uptake of Lightning … I really don’t know. All I know is that for some reason Apple has an issue with a product that can charge an iPhone 4S and iPad Mini together. No problem with an iPad 3 and Samsung Galaxy S3 … but anything with a Lightning connector cannot charge alongside anything else.

You know what DOESN’T have this issue? Any phone made by anyone BUT Apple. Most people probably remember having a feature phone from Samsung or Nokia or LG that had a special connector that plugged in one way, was fragile, and didn’t work with anything else – even from the same company! Our junk drawer still has a few of those chargers around!

But then the micro-USB standard was adopted, and quickly phone makers started using it, and then the EU mandated it – and suddenly it was cheaper to just use it in every phone worldwide. So now I can grab my Galaxy S3 charger and use it to power up my Kindle, Nook, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, HTC 7 Pro, and on and on and on.

Apple is a company that comes up with amazing designs, and anyone who has used the Lightning connector will never want to go back to 30-pin, because the new connector is directionless and small and … perfect. But it seems that rather than trying to get the connector out there as quickly and as pervasively as possible, Apple is keeping the roll-out closely guarded, and they are seemingly punishing people with Apple devices of all eras who seek to use them together.

Not everyone can simply upgrade everything whenever Apple tosses out a new standard, but it seems likely that using this punitive restriction around licensing Apple will make some people less likely to stay with the iOS world when they DO have the chance to get their next new device.

So as I said, the outcome of this reminds us why closed standards suck … and why companies who use those closed standards as a hammer to force a certain outcome suck even more.

Source: VentureBeat

If you have ever bought something on the internet that didn’t ship solely via USPS, then using either FedEx Smartpost or UPS Surepost was likely an option; they are both shipping options that use the United States Postal Service for the final leg. In other words, UPS or FedEx will deliver the packages to your local Post Office, and the Postal Service will handle the actual delivery.  The concept sounds good, but in practice it can be anything but.

The Good

For the e-tailers, it’s a really good deal.  They setup the contract with UPS or FedEx, and they get shipping rates that are much more economical.  The Post Office gets a steady source of income from UPS and FedEx.  Customers will find that this option is usually is the basic shipping level, and it is usually free or has a very low cost.

The Bad

UPS and FedEx will show up at the local Post Office at the most inopportune times and dump as many as 5,000 packages; according to some anecdotes on Amazon, the Postmasters hate Smartpost because of this.  Since what I read were mostly anecdotes, I thought I would verify this with a friend who works for the US Postal Service. I briefly talked to him about this, and asked if what I had heard was true; he verified that it was.  Even the mail carriers hate these packages.  Once UPS or FedEx drops them off at the Post Office, you’ll get no updates on tracking at all; once your package hits the Post Office, it goes into oblivion until it gets to you.

The other really bad part about the service is that sometimes you won’t even know if your item is shipping via UPS Surepost or FedEx Smartpost until it’s too late; you may not even have a choice.

The Ugly

I mentioned that you usually don’t get a choice about how your item will ship, with the option being hidden under the standard shipping.  The ugly part of this is how long it may take for your item to arrive.  For instance, on a recent gift I ordered, standard shipping said it would take 3-5 days for arrival.  I figured that would be before Christmas, so they should get it in time.  AFTER the item had shipped, it was indicated that the package had shipped FedEx Smartpost, and the delivery estimate was now December 27.  That’s not 3-5 days; it’s more like 11!

I find, on average, that it seems to take anywhere from an extra day to as many as 7 to ship via these services, but I’ve heard MUCH worse.  People might never never even get their package — or they’ll receive it days later than expected.

The one good thing here is that this usually is the free shipping option;  the bad news is that it takes FAR longer than it should.  If I pay $9.70 to ship a package to Anna, TX via first class mail, it should get there in 2 days.  This is cheaper than FedEx 2 day shipping, and it’s actually more convenient for me.  I’d rather pay a nominal amount and have a close estimate of when the item will arrive.  With SurePost or Smartpost you get neither, it’s neither sure nor smart.

Conclusion

If you have a choice, I would not select UPS Surepost or FedEx Smartpost for any shipments — even for non critical purchases.  If you have a choice, my suggestion is that you select only shipping modes that stay 100 percent with that particular shipping company, be it USPS, UPS or FedEx.  If you have to pick from less obvious shipping methods like Standard (ala Amazon), Two-Day or whatever, then pick Two-Day.  You may pay more; sometimes a lot more, however you will at least have a more accurate on the status of your package at any moment along its journey.

In this economy, I do not blame UPS or FedEx for taking advantage of the deals that the Postal Service offer them.  However, I have more confidence in a shipping solution when there’s only one shipping company to blame.  At least you know who to hold responsible when your package is lost or late!

Do you have any horror stories from shipping via UPS Surepost or FedEx Smartpost? Do tell!

Most people know of the popular trope called ‘Step Three: Profit’, in which an idea is started, no plan is developed, but there is an expectation of profit in the end. A random example from South Park:

Step 1. Collect underpants.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. PROFIT

The reason I bring that up is that in a recent article at MondayNote the author basically makes the point that release windows are stupid. What is a ‘release window’? It is the decision by a company to make their content (movies, TV shows, albums, etc) available at different times in different countries – and within a given country to hold off release in some formats to favor more profitable formats.

Some examples are pushing DVD sales (~$15) over RedBox rentals (~$1) by holding off RedBox for 28 days, or artists like Taylor Swift releasing exclusively to places like iTunes (digital) and Target (physical) and not releasing to streaming sites such as Spotify to maximize profits.

This is not news – both Doug and I have written about this several times over the years. So in short, we agree with much of what is said in the article. And you should really read it, because it details the entire release window silliness very well.

The problem is this line:

Then, on September 30th, when season 2 started over, I would have had no alternative to downloading free but illegal torrent files.

To me this is that ‘Step Three: Profit’ idea all over again. Let me do the quick map:
1. Cool TV show I want
2. Not on iTunes (or Amazon, etc)
3. Piracy!

Am I debating that this is what DOES happen? No – we all know this happens frequently. Heck, ‘step 3′ happens even when ‘step 2′ isn’t true! Piracy is rampant in the age of broadband, and as we have seen with $0.99 apps it has little to do with money.

The major issue I have is the attitude that by not being immediately available when the author deems it should be, he is ‘forced’ into piracy. That is a ridiculous argument, and simply wrong. That is just not the way the world works – and as I have said many times, if the lack of instant gratification leads you directly to theft (or infringement), then you were already there before asking the question.

But the author looks at the situation as being the same as those other ‘release windows’. I would argue that it is more like the delay between a theatrical release and DVD. These are different business models.

Here are a few thoughts:
- The author watched the first season of Homeland in August, meaning 11 months after it aired and after it was released on DVD at higher price. In other words, he was able to exercise considerable patience initially, but now … piracy.
- The core argument seems to be that the producers should accept SOME money now rather than piracy. That misses the reason for the delay.
- He also totally misses that one of the big reasons for the quality of programming on HBO and Showtime is that they are subscription-based services linked to a cable subscription. That brings in loads of money (~$180 annually from those who keep the channels year-round). Also, CBS owns showtime and several other basic and premium cable channels, and HBO’s parent company has loads of cable networks – so they work together and with cable networks to earn loads of money … and thereby can invest in quality programming.
- The main thing missed is that the author could simply subscribe to Showtime and watch the show (if the station is available to him). The reason for the release window is that Showtime wants you to subscribe to their network. For ~$15 a month you get homeland and much more – but of course you also need to subscribe to cable, which is another rationale.

What I think would be interesting is something similar to what some movies have done recently – pre-theatrical releases. If you aren’t familiar, you can see some movies on iTunes or Amazon for a $9.99 24-hour rental before (or simultaneous to) the theater showings.

Imagine if as a ‘cord cutter’ you could watch Homeland the same night (or even 24-hours later) than those on Showtime … but it would require a season subscription for $100-150. This would cover the normal Showtime subscription and also a ‘cable kickback’ and a premium over the course of the 3-month season. The bottom line is that the pricing would have to be high enough to allow this a la carte choice to earn enough to supplant the cable subscription model.

Would you be interested in this? Would it work? Chime in with your thoughts!

A few weeks OK I bought a shiny new Red Nokia Lumia 920.  Generally, I love it, although I am STILL waiting for my wireless charging base to show up.  It’s not perfect, in some ways far from it, but the overall approach the OS takes to delivering apps and services is a good one for the way that I want to work – most of the time.  But the journey has been a little bumpy with things needing some serious attention from Microsoft, Nokia, or both.

I have most recently been an iPhone user, and a Lumia 900 (Windows 7.5) user.  I mention both, because I tended to flip back and forth between the two because I like both for different reasons.  When the 920 came out, I switched to it full-time.  It became my daily driver.

The Lumia 920 runs the Windows Phone 8 OS.  Windows Phone 8 is a ground-up re-write of the Windows Phone OS essentially using a Windows NT core (like Windows 8 and Windows RT) rather than Windows CE which is what was the heart of Windows Phone 7.5 and before.  Doing this means that all apps had to be recompiled to work on it, some with greater success than others.  Core services had to be reworked and/or re-written as well.  End result?  A big of a mixed bag, I’m afraid.

The Good
MS Added additional keyboard languages since Windows Phone 7.5.  For me, this is great since I sometimes need to write in foreign languages.  The updated interface gives a lot more flexibility than it’s predecessor and more apps seem to be taking advantage of it.

The Windows Phone 8 flavor of Nokia Drive offers the ability to keep running in the background.  This is very cool and something the platform needed.  Unfortunately, the app isn’t without issues.  I’ll talk about those shortly.

The Bad
Many of the apps I like and use on my iPhone are still missing under Windows Phone 8.  Additionally, some Windows Phone 7.5 apps didn’t make it to the Windows Phone 8 platform (especially some games titles).  Many specialty apps, like banking apps and retail apps, are still not ported to the platform (but some are).  None of this is necessarily a show stopper because you can always go to the websites of these banks and retailers.

Continuing in the “bad” category – for me – is the lack of anyway to send things to a printer.  There are no print services available in the OS, unlike Apple iOS or Android.  Why would they forget an important feature like that?  Odd.

Continuing along, apps sometimes burp and pause.  Words with Friends had a number of issues, including the chat only working one-way, but an update in the past few days seems to have dramatically improved the performance and functionality of the app.  This problem is improving as manufactures fix their quickly ported apps and stabilize them.

As I mentioned earlier, the new version of Nokia Drive offers the ability to keep running in the background.  Unfortunately, it has the habit of having the map display freeze up regularly – especially if you need to switch apps and switch back.  It’s still technically a beta though, so I don’t expect perfection – yet.

A bit more annoying, is the task handling during a phone call.  Lets say you get a call and are talking, but then you need to check you email for a piece of info you need to give to the caller.  Normally, you could press the Home key, then the email app (tile) all while you continue talking.  Currently, however, the phone app will sometimes (about 50% of the time in my experience) try to regain control of the screen meaning you have difficulty doing anything other than staying in the phone app!  The silly thing keeps trying to switch back!

I have also noticed that, while plugged in, the touch display starts responding oddly.  It’s like there is some kind of interference going on.  It becomes very hit or miss. Unplug it and the problem goes away.  Hmmm.

The Ugly
A major OS rewrite does not happen without a few bumps.  This one is no exception.  Random stops, freezes, and reboots are widely reported on the net for this device.  Some people seem to see them frequently, some rarely, some never.  It seems MS is aware of the issue and indicates we should expect improvements soon, possibly as early as this month.  That would be great news.

Now here’s the deal:  I need this to function as my daily driver.  I can live with occasional random reboots, but then the 920 did something really bad –  it did a random shut down the other night while I was sleeping.  What does that mean?  It meant no alarm in the morning.  That, for me, is a show stopper.  If I can’t rely on the device enough to manage my alarms and alerts, especially since the shutdown occurred overnight, rather than when the device was under significant use, then it can’t be my daily driver until those issues are fixed.  Period.

So there I was, or so I thought, at the point where I was gong to have to abandon my Lumia 920 until this problem was fixed.  But I’m nothing if not persistent.  I kept hunting the Internet for feedback from other people who experienced similar issues.  Finally, I ran across a posting that seemed promising.  It indicated that an application, Skype, seemed to be at the root of a lot of the stability problems people were seeing and that removing it seemed clear up the problems for many people.

Really?  An app taking down the whole system?  Didn’t MS learn anything about sandboxing apps like Apple does?  Apparently not, because removing the app did as advertised – it stabilized my phone – a lot!  I still see the phone app trying to control the screen, but I haven’t experienced a device lockup, freeze. or reboot since removing Skype from my phone (going on 3 days now).  Wow.

The moral of the story?  When experiencing issues doing a lot of research on the net can actually help!  Hearing from other people who have the same problems as you can often yield useful results!  And with my “showstopper” problem resolved, I can now afford to be patient and continue to use my shiny red Lumia 920 while watching the platform improve and mature, and the apps I want slowly make their way to the platform.  The world is once again good.

Now if only my shiny red charging base would finally arrive….

I had been hearing bits of this on gaming forums for the past few days, but today it was confirmed – iOS online game ‘Battle Dungeon’ has been pulled from the App Store and the online servers shut down due to extreme levels of piracy.

The developers posted about it at their site and on their Facebook page:

Unfortunately we have taken Battle Dungeon down for the forseeable future. This was due to high levels of server load created by large numbers of pirated copies of the game. The high load revealed technical issues which we don’t feel we can fix to the level that our paying customers deserve.

To an extent this is unsurprising – from the moment the app store launched folks started exchanging app files and posting them to file sharing sites. In fact, as I searched for an image for this post I noted the following breakdown in search results for the query ‘battle dungeon iphone’:
- 25% links to articles about the shutdown
- 25% links to the preview and forum discussions on TouchArcade
- 10% links to the official Battle Dungeon site
- 10% links to random other Battle Dungeon posts
- 5% stuff that I have no idea HOW it made the top of the search lists
- 25% blatant links to download the game ‘for free’

Remember, this game costs $5, offers compelling gameplay from a proven developer, won accolades from TouchArcade, and did I mention it was only $5? And we have a quarter of the highest ranked search results coming back with easy ways to pirate the game for free? But the price doesn’t really matter – when it comes to smartphone apps, these are largely $0.99 apps that have tremendous piracy levels.

For many developers the answer has been the move to in-app purchases and a ‘freemium’ model. That way even if someone gets a pirated file, they will need to pay for the full experience.

Of course, that doesn’t work the same for an online game – which leads me to think we are about to see the iOS equivalent of EA’s ‘project $10′ or Sony’s ‘Online Pass’. I see very soon developers will give away a client with very limited (training mode) for single player, with an in-app purchase of $5-$10 for online gameplay.

As a PC gamer I am not surprised by the incredible level of piracy, but I am disappointed. Because I have listened for years to folks rationalize their piracy based on the $50-$60 price being too high … but $0.99 or even $4.99? There is no way to rationalize that one away.

Source: MacRumors

I have two teenage boys who have both male and female friends, so I know that the pressures and mean-ness hasn’t abated through the years but has continued in daily life and also online. Since I keep track of my kids online, I often see them engaged in things such as ‘Like my status for … ‘ or ‘Truth Is …’ or ‘Rating …’ sorts of back and forth with friends.

Within their groups of friends, I have never seen anything particularly terrible – and certainly nothing mean-spirited. But from a variety of news articles, tragic suicides as well as too many bad Lifetime movies, we know that these harmless games too often devolve into bullying, and that kids don’t feel they can escape because being online has become such a large part of their cultural identity.

But today we hear about a new app called ‘Ugly Scan’, with images of Carrie Underwood and Ryan Gosling used to show off the app.

Here is the description:

Do you ever wonder how hot you really are?

Sure we pretend like it doesn’t matter, but deep down we still want to look our best.

Ugly Scan uses advanced facial scanning algorithms including a build in Retina Scan to scan your face and rate your hotness level.

Score a perfect 10 and you’re HOT, score a 0 and you’re NOT.

Features:
- Advanced Facial Scan Technology including Retina Scan for accurate results
- Load photo or take one from in the app
- Share your score with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Email
- Cheat Mode lets YOU set the score and trick your friends
- Beautifully rendered HD Retina Display Graphics & Animations

Best Practices:
Ugly Scan works best on forward facing full face images. Side shots or diagonal images may not rate as accurately.

There are all kinds of cute thoughts around using it to redo your hair or makeup or decide on whether to keep that beard or sideburns … but in reality we can picture this in actual usage:
- Someone snaps a terrible picture in the hallway, runs it through the app and posts the ’2/10′ rating on Facebook and begins a campaign against the person.
- Speaking of campaigns, can’t you see high schoolers using this to say ‘why vote for the 3 when you can have a 9 as class President’.
- And so on.

It just takes all of those ‘truth is’ and ‘rate’ topics on Facebook and adds some pseudo-science to make people think that one person is objectively ‘hotter’ than another. Do we REALLY need to do this to our kids?

If you are really interested you can head to the iTunes app store … but really, don’t.

When you look broadly across the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), women have made tremendous gains in the decades since I entered undergraduate school. This is excellent – there is simply no reason women shouldn’t have equal representation … so long as the opportunity is equal and fair.

But there are some areas where women are terribly under-represented – and not just at higher levels, but at all levels. This article talks about the hostile environment at Goldman Sachs, but recently there has been a great deal of discussion about the lack of women in game design and development.

Gaming, like the computer industry in general, started in a very male-dominated industry and therefore remained male-centric for a long time. But today, it is estimated that nearly HALF of gamers are women – and these are not just girls playing Nintendogs on the DS, Angry Birds on a smartphone, or ‘Agatha Christie Mysteries’ hidden object games on the PC. No, and while I have had female gamer friends since playing Jedi Knight multiplayer 15 years ago, today you can expect to play against women regardless of the game or genre.

Yet in 2006 there was a survey that showed that even then, as the female gamer population was almost 40%, the game industry employed only 12% women! Pretty bad … but wait, because it gets worse! In a recent survey, women account for merely 6% of game industry jobs! So as the pool of engineering graduates has become increasingly female, the gaming industry has become increasingly male … and why correlation is not causation, it seems like something is amiss!

So there was an article about the situation, and Game Developer Luke Crane asked about it on Twitter … and it exploded. A new hashtag #1ReasonWhy calls for responses about WHY women gamers and developers would feel put off by the industry, and it has really taken off.

There are articles about this on Mashable, MotherJones, the Guardian and a great sum-up at Kotaku.

But I wanted to highlight a passionate blog about it found here. Among her other listed reasons, these are a few that Katie, from AliveTinyWorld, listed:

•Because when I tell people what I do for a living, they still say, “But you don’t actually play games, right?”
•Because we still have people saying, on a daily basis, that sexism will go away if we just stop talking about it.
•Because when a fellow games student from my university comments on my articles, he says that I should stop whining and just accept that games journalism is a boys’ club – even though I’ve gotten far further in my games journalism career than he ever did.
•Because when I tell the PR rep I want to look at AAA console games, he takes me to the pink Facebook games anyway.
•Because I’m told to “stand up for myself” – and then, when I do something like this, I’m dismissed.

There are some amazing posts on Twitter, as well as cool blog posts linked. There are also some disgusting examples of brazen sexism and misogyny … so typical of internet comments.

Head to the articles for more info, and to Twitter to follow the discussion! And let us know what you think!