Entries Tagged 'Reviews' ↓

I recently had a chance to evaluate the Jesus phone.  I have a lot of experience with smart phones including Blackberry 7000 series all the way to the Curves, many different iterations of Windows mobile phones, Palm OS via the Treo 650, and many more.  The iPhone didn’t turn out to be quite deserving of its name when considered from a business user’s perspective.  Read on for a list of things that I experienced while using the iPhone.

1. The battery life sucks.  I’m fairly accustomed to not charging my phone for 2-3 days.  I can’t even have a full work day with dinner and drinks afterwards without having to charge my phone.  Why shouldn’t I be able to check my Active Sync e-mail once an hour or so, and take 3-4 calls per day without my battery running out?

2. It is kind of…big.  When I hold this thing up to my face, people stare.  I guess most die hard iPhone fans like this and imagine that the people staring are having gadget envy.  I, however, felt like a trendy jackass.

3. No keyboard?!  WHAT?!  The touch keyboard sucks.  The predictive text sucks.  Training my dictionary was a huge waste of time just to hit a baseline productivity.  For business communication, you just can’t allow typos and mistakes to come through.  These kinds of mistakes cause one to appear sloppy and lazy.  Even without this standard, the mistakes coming through on text messages, e-mails, notes, etc. are really irritating.  I suppose that you could get used to it, or better at it, but I never needed that kind of “training” to use the keyboards on my Blackberrys, or my T Mobile Wing, or my Treos!  It took me so much longer to get out a three sentence e-mail on the iPhone that I often asked myself “why don’t I just go to a computer to finish this?”  It absolutely killed my productivity away from my desk, and irritated me to no end.

4. It isn’t really a phone with entertainment options on it.  It is an entertainment device with a phone built into it.  The primary purpose of the phone is obviously NOT a communications device, and the design of both the UI and the phone itself are a testament to this.

5. It sticks to your face when you talk on it for more than a few minutes.  It is slippery, too, I dropped mine twice.  That being said, it is quite durable. 

6. The signal isn’t that great, side by side, my other phones were often in signal when the iPhone was out, or had a better data connection.

7. Oh the fingerprints.  This device will have you cleaning it 20 times a day, if you have any kind of standards for appearances.

Those problems are really quite…numerous, for something people often refer to as a Jesus phone.  This phone is meant for people that have a primary purpose for a device that they carry with them everywhere…entertainment.  If you are often listening to music, and watching television/movies, reading websites, etc. on the go, then this is the phone for you.   You don’t need a phone to talk to your Apple Store music collection.  You never need to text your downloaded Season 3 of South Park.  You probably don’t need to communicate much at all, just be sweetly and quietly entertained.  For the people who are actually doing business and communicating with friends and loved ones often, this is not the right phone.

As an employee of an international corporation, my interests are always piqued when I hear the word replication.  When I learned of an acquisition by Microsoft of a product called Byte Taxi, I checked into what it had become within the walls of the largest computer company on earth.  I found my answer in Foldershare.

Foldershare is a new product in beta.  A tiny application that sits in your taskbar and brokers connections for file sharing and replication between you and your friends, family, colleagues…whatever you want!  It also allows some interesting file access to your own machines.  If you had the desire, you could edit your hosts file from Bangladesh, all via the web.  If you want to check it out with me, contact me on google talk at wharrislv.  

A simple and free way to replicate files between your friends, work, home, etc.  This is great for sharing photos amongst family, video files and software amongst friends, and the killer app : offsite backups!  Set up replicated folders to your friends, get everyone a 1TB drive, and automate your offsite backups for free.  The taskbar app is really lightweight, and almost all configuration is done on the web, which mirrors Vista’s UI style.  User based access control allows share level permissions like read only or owner, so you can control what happens to your files.  The client works on both Windows and OSX, and the service is based in the Live ecosystem.  The developers keep a blog that could show some promise, I hope that they keep a real conversation with the beta community.  

The limit on files within a share is 10,000, which is too bad.  I’d love to sync my music collection to work, but I’ll have to continue using the streaming functionality of Jukefly.  The developers have said that they are considering an increase in the future, but for now we’re stuck with that limitation.   Additionally, you can only sync files up to 2gb.  I don’t personally see the reason for these limitations, but I imagine they’re in place to get people ready for the inevitable switch to a payment based model.

One glaring omission is the ability to control your bandwidth utilization.  My measly 1mb upstream can be saturated with replication at times, but overall the feature set makes it all worth it.  You also cannot share network drives, which is a huge oversight in the modern world of network attached storage.

I encourage everyone to give this service a try, the fact that it is free for now makes it all the more attractive.  Let me know what you think about the service in the comments below, I’m curious!

If you haven’t applied for a login to hulu.com’s beta, go do it now! Hulu is a relatively high quality streaming television solution from NBC, allowing you to catch up on old series, old and new episodes of current shows, and clips from a wide range of content providers. Free with minimal advertising, Hulu allows you to watch copyrighted content without the hassle of P2P. In my case, Bit Torrent isn’t much of a hassle, but its great if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. What I really love is that they made older content available. A lot of content is going unused these days, and could result in a lot more people forming a relationship with a studio when they discover older series on Hulu that until now were languishing on DVD if they were lucky.

I like the interface, and it works really well on a modest machine. NBC is taking the first step towards getting viewers like me back into the fold. I shouldn’t have to pay for Tivo at all to timeshift my programming. Let me stream it to my media center PC on demand. I don’t want to steal anything, and giving me the choice to timeshift this programming is just what I need to come back to the light…far away from the pirate scene.

I can only hope that they’ll keep the advertising at a minimum, as they have. People of my generation are not really listening anyways.

URGE music service.

It features MTV and VH1 (along with the country music channel) and is offered with Microsoft Windows Media Player. It sounds like it should be shit, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t!

For $10 per month, you get all you can eat music downloads, similar to the napster and yahoo services. This means you can download, or more importantly, stream any music you feel like listening to at any time. They have an obviously superior selection when compared to the iTunes music store, and I’ve been able to find pretty much anything I’ve looked for, including local bands from the Las Vegas area.

I absolutely LOVE this service, but I’d like to explain how I go about listening, discovering, and paying for the music that I listen to.

In my car, I listen to Sirius satellite radio. I listen to Howard Stern for the most part, but there are times that I listen to the current hip hop stations, or the modern jazz station instead. As I hear tracks I like, I commit the artists to memory and resolve to do some further reading and listening once I’ve got a free moment in front of the computer. This is where URGE really makes itself into a killer app. I can start in the URGE service, and listen to any track from that artist that I would like to check out. I can also follow the very reliable and accurate similar artist links, as well as check out 3-4 internet radio streams that will play music most similar to the tunes I’m looking at.

If I really love the artist, I purchase the physical CD and add it into my library, so that I can do things like burn CDs for friends, or play the tracks on my home network.

In the future, when I get myself an Internet capable Windows MCE (Media Center Edition) machine, I may even be able to do away with the purchase of the CDs altogether. For an additional $4 per month, I can authorize a music player which will allow me to copy any tracks I’d like to my portable player. Purchasing a car stereo unit with the appropriate USB or audio line in connections, I can take my music with me for public usage as well as enjoying a huge library in my car at any time. I’m currently considering the Toshiba Gigabeat unit ( http://www.gigabeat.com/ ), which also supports video, pictures, and various other music formats.

I was reluctant to buy into the monthly service fee, due to issues with what I considered ownership and various DRM problems, but in my opinion, with only a few simple steps this subscription model will satisfy every condition I have for a lifelong commitment.

Some features that I’d love to see implemented are as follows :

1. I’d like to see a temporary (3 day perhaps) authorization for Windows Media Player with my account. If I am on vacation, or at a friends house, I’d love to be able to access the service from wherever I’d like to at the time. I’d also like to give a temporary login to a friend which would allow them access to a personal page featuring only playlists that I’ve created for them. Obviously this login would only be temporarily authorized (7 days would be fine) but it would allow me to share music playlists/mix CDs without having to physically distribute media.
2. I’d love to see integration with the Satellite services given the appropriate authorization. I don’t see this happening, ever, but it would be great!

3. I’d like to upload my own collection to the servers, so that I can access things like Live recordings, or songs I’ve recorded myself. Google gave us a gigabyte for information, I bet Microsoft can foot it. The cost associated with the service could correspond to a bump in the monthly fee. It would be worth it, as I could share my songs and have access to them through a single interface.

4. A lightweight web interface would be sweet for Macs, Linux boxes, and other OSes that I may be on at any given time. I don’t want to be seperated from my music in any case, really.

5. I need more authorized units!! The system currently allows up to 3 computers to be authorized, but in all honesty it won’t be enough to support me in every situation…in fact, it really is only enough to support my PC, my wife’s PC, and a Media center. What about my daughter’s PC, my bedroom’s unit, my Tivo, my Xbox 360, or whatever else I’m interesting in using it for? In a digitally connected world we’re likely to have considerably more units in our lives. I can live with the limitations of the system, but it would be great to expand those rights situationally to make it more flexible.

7. Xbox 360 Support. Make its features as a media center extender even more attractive by including URGE service support on any Xbox 360 in the house. I’d love to strap a 7″ LCD on the unit and put Xbox units all over my house for music, and miscellaneous video.

The service is great, and it satisfies pretty much every condition that I have, given the price, but adding the above features would make it so attractive to me that I’d be a very hard sell for any other service.