Netflix Bug & the New Xbox Experience

For those that have been playing around with the New Xbox Experience (NXE, or just “the new Xbox Live update”) that came out last Wednesday, you more than likely jetted over to the Netflix integration to see what it’s all about.  Arguably one of the most anticipated features of the NXE is the ability for Netflix subscribers to stream on-demand movies to their Xbox systems in HD with surround sound.

I was no exception, and when I got onto the internal beta for testing the NXE, the Netflix integration was one of the first things I tried.  It worked like a charm, but after playing with it a bit I did notice one odd thing.

First, the NXE allows you to see, on screen, a listing of all the movies in your Netflix “instant view queue”.  It does not allow you to add more movies, or adjust movie settings.  That’s all work left to do via the traditional webpage interface of Netflix.  The Xbox is more of a “read only” type UI.

That said, what you’re presented with is a listing of all the box tops of movies in your Netflix queue that can also be viewed online.  Netflix had offered this service (online viewing) for some time, but previously the only options for viewing were [1] on your PC or [2] on your TV using a Roku built set-top box. 

On the Netflix web UI, there are two queues.  One is your main movie request queue (the movies that are going to be mailed to you) and one is an instant view queue.  Typically, as you add movies to your queue for mailing, they will get automatically added to your instant view queue if they can be.  In addition, you can see all the instant viewable movies in your main queue as they have little “play” buttons next to their names.

Now that we have context, I can explain the bug I tripped upon.  I noticed that the movies listed in my Xbox were not all the movies that I expected to be able to instant view.  At first I assumed this might be a bug with the Xbox code, but after poking around in my Netflix account on the Netflix website, I found the same bug there.  My main queue had 15 movies in it that were available for instant playing (play buttons next to them), while my instant view queue had only 12.  It appeared that the NXE was using Netflix’s instant queue view as it’s primary listing of movies available to it, and that queue (which is maintained by Netflix, not Microsoft) was not correct.

Intrigued, I rung up Netflix support to see what to do about it.  The cheerful customer support rep thought about my problem for a bit and came back with “yeah, I think I’ve seen that before… mostly with really old queue entries, sometimes they just don’t seem to get automatically bumped over into the instant view queue”.

Indeed, the two items that weren’t showing up had been in my queue “forever” and that could very well have been their common thread.  Regardless, Netflix recommend I either [1] remove the movies from my queue and re-add them or [2] go to the details page for each missing movie, and choose the “add to instant queue” (it pops up when you mouse over the play button) directly. 

Both workaround methods worked for me, and once they were in the instant queue online, they immediately appeared on my Xbox.

First Impressions on the iPhone

After much internal debate, with the launch of the iPhone 3G, I finally decided to take the plunge and try a non-Blackberry again.  The items that tipped the scale for me were really the software, not hardware changes.  Big changes that made me try out the new gadget from Cupertino:

• Full Exchange ActiveSync support
• New application platform
• Already existing top-notch web browsing

So, after years of Blackberry (BB) use, and a few of Windows Mobile use (mostly awful years for the later) what are my “first impressions” (well my first two months impressions) of the phone?

Before I dig into gripes, let me say after two months I’m pretty impressed with the phone.  It has plenty of room for improvement, but for the breadth of tasks it offers to solve, there is little in the industry that can give it a run for its money¹.  I still feel that the Blackberry is a better pure email/texting platform, but the iPhone makes up for its shortcomings in these areas by offering top-shelf capabilities elsewhere that BB users only daydream about.  Some that I would now find hard to go to living without:

• Ability to look up anything on the web at any time and not worry about if it’ll be readable on the screen².
• Twitteriffic – I follow tweets far more now than I ever did prior (very few folks I follow are important enough to follow using SMS alerts, but many I still like to read when idle – also as more and more folks post URL’s in their tweets the point above comes into play).
• HP12C calculator emulator – A 3rd party application, from Stone Meadow Development, that is quickly becoming a serious dependency for me (and a great example of a unique to each person “essential app” that the App Store platform opens up on this platform).
• Pandora’s music streaming application – Though the hot rumor is that Pandora may not be long for this world, I hope that’s not true because this app is fantastic.

What I’m Not Talking About

Also before we get started, I’m not going to use this post to discuss all the various issues and patches and new issues that the entire online community already seems to have hashed and rehashed to the point of babble.  There are plenty of folks out there documenting the failings of the radio, the issues with 3G, and the bugs in Exchange support.

I’m also not venturing into the pros and cons of the new iPhone SDK, App Store, Apple policies/TOU agreements, and related issues that are so important (rightfully so) to 3rd party developers on this newly open(ish) mobile platform.  Some of these topics I may cover in later posts, but not here.

iPhone Challenges

In order to understand the gripes I have, it’s important to understand how I’m using the iPhone on a daily basis.  Running atop v2.0.2 of the OS, I use it to connect to my corporate Exchange email, calendaring and contact system.  As part of this connectivity, my corporate IT requires the phone use the iPhone’s screen lock with a four digit PIN to unlock the phone.  Finally, I almost always am connecting to the network using EDGE (not 3G)³.

And so, without further delay, here’s my initial list of issues:

Contact List is not for serious users - While the iPhone contact list isn’t as bad as say that offered by folks like Motorola, it’s a far cry from the RIM contact list in the speed and efficiency provided to get to a key contact and then take action on it (email, phone, text that contact). 

First, performance is ridiculously bad.  I haven’t gotten a chance to tinker/debug to see if this is a result of the contact list being tied to an Exchange account⁴, however, I can tell you it’s just shy of too slow to be useful.  When you bring up the list (tap on the contact app from the home screen or goto the contact button in the phone app) the screen comes up quickly, but all input is paused for a good 10 count and sometimes longer (and no, I don’t have a billion contacts – my list is at 93).

While the addition of search was intended to make finding contacts in a large list faster, it falls short on its mission.  Similar to starting the contact app, starting to search can be slow in the extreme.  Add to that the poor UI thinking on the app (too may taps/steps to do a search) and the whole experience feels teeth grindingly sluggish.

Simply, the UI is not optimized for fast “muscle memory style” action – something I argue is a big value to heavy communication behavior users. 

As an example, to bring up the contact on a BB:

1. Open the contact app (which can be via a single hardware key click).
2. Start typing the contact’s name (first or last, and partials all work to help narrow the results real time: typing “st sch” brings up “Steve Schreiber”).
3. Hit enter if there is only one contact showing in the search list or select the appropriate contact if more than one in the list.

On the iPhone, here’s the same set of steps:

1. Open contact app by tapping the contact list app from the home screen.
2. If the last time the app was used the list was not at the top of the contact list, double tap the very small system bar at the top of the screen to page to top of the list (the only place where the search box is available).
3. Tap on the search box to get the on screen keyboard to come up.
4. Start typing the contact’s name (partial matching also works similarly for the iPhone – this is nice).
5. Tap on the contact name (even if only one is matching).

It doesn’t look like a lot more steps, but it feels like it.  Combined with the sluggish performance of the app itself and it’s painful⁵.

SMS is too slow & too unreliable - While not nearly as bad as contacts, the SMS application is also plagued by slow GUI behavior.  There is at least a 5 count pause from starting the app to when UI control is returned to me.  Judiciously clearing conversation histories has not seemed to affect this start time.

Further, the app could easily be optimized for fewer steps to do tasks.  As an example, when entering a “conversation” (a thread of SMS messages to/from a given contact) it’s not crazy to assume the user will want to send a text.  However, this is not the default.  Instead, to send a text, you must click on the input box at the bottom of the screen to bring up the input keyboard and begin writing your message (a needless tap).

Finally, I personally have experienced some disturbing message loss (or at the least high delivery latency) when using SMS.  I used the same account with a BB for over a year with no such issues, so I must assume it is something to do with the device.  I routinely use SMS as a form of IM when trying to meet up with friends, etc. (a use pattern that the Apple UI would seem to encourage since it takes the form of a conversation the same as their desktop IM client), so my expectation is near instantaneous back and forth trading of messages.

However, I’ve found a few of the folks (yes, it does seem to happen with some people more than others) I text with will often not receive my messages for minutes after I send them (and I often will receive ones from them with similar latency).  Also, in some instances, though less frequent, messages have never been delivered at all.  The end result of this flaky behavior results in me often wondering if someone is not responding because they’re busy, or because of my device not doing its job⁶.

Control over alerts is non-existent - Often referred to as “profile” behavior (e.g. the ability to create sound/vibration alert assignments for given user settable “mode”), the iPhone makes almost no allotment for this reasonably common functionality.  While many platforms don’t let you create new profiles or limit to some degree how much customization you can do in a profile, the iPhone is the most bare bones that I’ve seen in a smartphone.

First, there are only two alert modes for the iPhone: Ring (sounds on) and Silent (sounds off).  The user is allowed to configure if they want vibrate alerts on in either mode, both or none.  There is no ability to create additional modes/profiles beyond the two provided (and mapped to the hardware switch above the volume controls on the side of the phone).

Second, there is no ability to configure any sounds for the device other than the ring tone for phone calls⁷ and incoming text messages.  All other events that would trigger an alert are stuck with the Apple default tones.  These events include: new voicemail, new mail, mail sent, calendar alerts, lock sounds, and keyboard clicks.  The user may turn these individual event’s sounds on/off, but that is the only control provided.  For all events, there is no control provided for vibration alerts.

This means that when the device is configured to vibrate only (my primary mode for using my devices) you cannot differentiate between a calendar alert, a new email, and a new text message (phone calls vibrate more than once, but all others are single vibrates). 

In addition to the daily device-in-pocket issue, if you use audible sound alerts, but you find the default Apple sounds to be undesirable (either because you don’t like them, or more likely because for you, you can’t hear the damn things – a common complain especially for the barely audible new email sound), you’re out of luck.

In contrast, BB provides the ability to assign different multiples of vibrate (or custom sounds) to all the major messaging events you’d want to know about.  BB users are also allowed to create as many additional profiles as they want and have the ability to differentiate alert sounds/vibrations on a per-email account basis – thus enabling my “weekend mode” I’ve discussed before.

These limitations are frustrating.  While simplicity is a trademark of Apple products, and I’m all for the “less is more” world of thinking, I believe that these limitations have taken simplicity to such an extreme as to begin to needlessly cripple the device.  When you pair this issue with the next gripe, assessing if a given incoming alert is something you need to take immediate action on is needlessly complicated.

Locked screen event alerts are too spare - Because of the limitations of the audible/vibrate alerts and the fact that I’m required to use the screen lock, I have had some disappointment with the on-screen event alerts.  These alerts show up as little “bubbles” on a locked screen (before you bring up the PIN unlock keypad).

First, the iPhone provides bubbles for:

• Calendar events (showing what calendar alarm has fired with its subject)
• Incoming SMS messages (complete with the sender name and message text)
• Missed phone call number (complete with name if it’s in your contact list)
• New voicemail

What’s the major other communication event that would happen while the phone is in your pocket that *isn’t* represented?  That’s right, new email.  You don’t even get a bubble telling you “new email” (let alone who from, what account, a message subject or text preview, or how even just how many unread items are now in each account).

So, my phone buzzes in my pocket, I pull it out, click on the screen and there is nothing.  Luckily new email is the only event that doesn’t have a bubble, so I can assume that I received an email, but there is no additional data for me to decide if this new message is worth me unlocking the phone, navigating to the email app, and then looking at what is the new message – or if it will wait until later and I can just put the phone back in my pocket⁸.

This brings us to the problems with the calendar event reminder bubble.  At first, this seems wholly adequate, however, once you log into your phone the event is dismissed.  If you were too quick on the draw to parse the reminder bubble when you pulled the phone out and typed in your PIN, then it’s gone forever – needless to say, this completely eliminates the ability to “snooze” an alert.

Finally, the bubble design really falls down when you’ve had multiple events happen without unlocking the phone.  Then the phone starts to prune these down.  A text message goes from preview to from and a numeric indicator of how many messages (seems reasonable), missed phone calls similarly have number/contact with a numeric indicator, voicemail just has a numeric indicator.  Calendar events just fall apart, the phone keeps trying to truncate them until their largely useless (and of course, you can’t see a richer version post-unlock as noted).  An, of course, there are no indications for how many emails happened.

I’d love to see this area reevaluated by Apple with focus on better locked screen quick glance-ability for all communication types.  Perhaps starting with their rich bubble to start (and expanding it to support email and to differentiate email accounts), that ages out and then goes to icons to indicate messages/types pending.  Add in more robust calendar alert UX and the value would be much increased.

Calendar invite model (at least with Exchange) confuses -  The entire calendar/invite model seems forced and inconsistent on the iPhone. 

First, when you receive a meeting invite – which appears in your “calendar inbox” – and you tentatively accept it(“maybe” reply in iPhone parlance), the invite sticks around effectively forever in your calendar inbox as a “maybe”.  This makes no sense.  Maybe is just as “done” a response state as accept or decline (both of which remove the invite line items) but doesn’t get the same treatment⁹.  If, after replying “maybe” to an invite, you try to clean up your calendar inbox by deleting the left over maybe-responded invites, the items are removed from your calendar (definitely not the intended behavior).

Next, there seems to be a very weak linkage between the calendar inbox and the “real” email inbox items.  In Exchange, meeting invites arrive by email (effectively such invites are a special type of email).  In a desktop experience, of which Outlook is the dominant Exchange client, a user receives invite emails in the same inbox as their correspondence emails.  When you open an invite in your inbox, you’re presented with controls to accept/decline/tentative and, once a response is issued, the invite email is removed from the user’s email inbox.

However, with the iPhone, this model gets a bit confused – in part due to the creation of two inboxes to achieve the same goals.  When an invite arrives, it arrives in two places; the email inbox for the Exchange account and the calendar inbox. 

If you open the invite in the email inbox it just looks like an oddly formatted message, with no buttons or even a “jump” to go to it’s mirror entry in the calendar inbox.  The user is left to wonder what do to (ex: can I delete this email and then go to the calendar inbox to accept the meeting, or will that delete the meeting entry in the calendar inbox?).

If you open the invite in the calendar inbox first, then it is clear that there is a meeting request pending, and it is also clear what response options you have (albeit with the odd “maybe” response behavior noted above). 

Further, I have noticed that when the phone has a spotty network connection – or if it’s intentionally disconnected in airplane mode – the iPhone’s client software makes no formal “link” between the calendar inbox entry and the email inbox entry.  Specifically, if you are disconnected and accept a calendar inbox item – the expected behavior is that the client software is smart enough to remove the corresponding email entry from the email inbox.  This is not the case, unfortunately, and again you’re left with an entry in your email inbox you’re unsure if you can delete.  I suspect this happens because Apple is leaving the linkage/reconciliation of the two items to the Exchange system (Exchange sees a meeting accept response and will remove the corresponding entry from your email inbox even if the client software was too dumb to).

The net effect is that the entire calendar invite system feels very fragile when paired with Exchange.  As a user, I’m constantly worried that something isn’t working right and I’m unintentionally mucking up my own calendar.

Accelerometer driven landscape/portrait viewing of webpages doesn’t work consistently - I find that when reading a page, I’ll put the phone down at my side for a moment, bring it back up and find that the page has gone from portrait to landscape.  However, bringing the phone back to my eyes in portrait orientation was not enough force to make the phone reorient.

This then results in me comically tipping the phone back and forth and generally shaking it in frustration to try to get the accelerometer logic that was so easily tripped when I didn’t want it to re-trip now that I do.

Additionally, the entire orientation sensing behavior seems to often be a victim of hanging (like other user inputs) when the device is busy doing something else – say on the network. 

Finally, I almost never find the need to go into landscape mode for webpages.  I can clearly see the value for movie watching, coverflow and games.  But for web browsing is seems needless (and the elimination of landscape mode in email composition, where I’d argue it really could be useful, is baffling).  The ability to turn off accelerometer behavior for the browser would be very nice.

Some minor email nitpicks - I would greatly like to see the following addressed as they hit me every day: (1) I should be able to “reply to all” from a meeting invite so I can shoot off a quick email to let folks know I’m running behind/etc.; (2) I should be able to mark an email high priority; (3) Email should not inform me of it’s arrival until it downloads a majority (if not all) of the message – I routinely am informed of an email arrival when I have a weak network connection and, when I go directly into mail to see its contents, find the little spinning “busy” symbol going where text should be.  ActiveSync (the MS protocol that Apple licensed to connect to Exchange systems) allows for full body downloads, the iPhone should support them and not alert me until such downloads are successful; (4) “Getting more” content for an email is, in general, not nearly as seamless as on the BB.  I find myself waiting and watching the device screen a great deal more.

Copy/Paste is MIA - As I had feared in earlier posts, the lack of copy/paste is hugely annoying.  While I don’t want to use it constantly, when I do hit a situation where I wish I had it, it is usually because there is no other way to go forward.  Without a system-wide clipboard, the user is beholden to hoping that the developer(s) of the given app they’re using has thought through every possible use scenario one might have for the data (highly unlikely).

The Unexpected

Finally, a quick highlight of some items that have turned out to be pleasant surprises with the iPhone:

• Battery Life – I had expected this to be awful.  Especially true in comparison, since my BB use was heavy and yet resulted in routinely running on 6 days with a single charge.  While the iPhone is certainly *not* as good as the BB in this category, it’s not nearly as bad as Windows Mobile devices I’ve had before. 

  As I noted, I usually have my iPhone in EDGE mode (my BB was also EDGE).  When using it this mode, and trying to hold myself to using the iPhone just as I did my BB (lots of email & texting, the rare voice call, and a few brief Google queries) the iPhone was able to make it just shy of 48 hours on a single charge. 

  Of course, mine rarely makes it that long in daily use, but I attribute that to my using the iPhone in a far larger array of uses than I had my BB (not the lease of which is much longer browsing sessions which chew up battery by keeping the screen/backlight on).

• Soft Keyboard Surprisingly Functional – Again a fear I had written about, the software-based keyboard has proven to be a far more reasonable replacement to my BB keyboard than I’d expected.  While I can, in no way, go as fast as I could on my hardware keyboard, it works much faster and more accurately than I had assumed.

  The key (no pun intended) for me was to just let the auto-correct software take over.  Stop trying to read as you typed and course correct for your bad typing.  Instead I two thumb type and go as fast as I can.  I’d say > 90% of the time things turn out OK.  Where things tend to fall down is on extremely short words (to, do, go) that the software doesn’t have enough keystrokes to narrow down its guesses.

• Phone+iPod Actually Useful – I had never felt I needed my phone to be my music player.  I always have my phone on me, but I’m not the type of person that feels like they need to be listening to their own personal soundtrack anytime they’re not talking to someone, so the value of always having my music was a bit lost on me.  In short, having a top-notch music/media player in my phone was, for me, at the bottom of the list of reasons to buy an iPhone.

  That said, now that I have it, I find myself using it far more than expected.  Of course, I use it where I normally would’ve used my iPod (plane and bus trips being the big areas here).  However, I also find myself using my iPod in my car far more than I ever did (because I always have it on me) and using it to show friends, etc. a new video podcast or a new song – something that I rarely did before (again because I didn’t have my iPod on me all the time).

To close, I have a lot of complaints with the iPhone, but even given them I can honestly say I’d buy it again.  Luckily almost all of my major issues can be dealt with via software updates.  Apple does seem very committed to upgrading their iPhone customers regularly, so I can only hope that many of these challenges are addressed in the future¹⁰.

 

1In contrast with the Windows Mobile platform that has always been about breadth over depth (“it’s a platform play damnit!”).  Where I’ve always contended that the mobile market was not the right place for breadth (I’ve always argued that targeted devices that solved discrete use cases really well would always have more success – the whole “jack of all trades, master of none” problem), the iPhone is the first breadth play that has made me reconsider this bias.

2 True this doesn’t include the oft argued lack of Adobe Flash on the iPhone.  However, I cannot think of any major site (content or web app) I use daily that has instrumental use of Flash as part of its experience.

3Partially because I don’t want the battery drain of 3G, partially because of all the already hashed networking issues that the iPhone + ATT’s 3G network seem to have (almost all the complained about flakiness seems to disappear when you run EDGE only), partially because I’m in Michigan half of the time and 3G support there is spotty at best, and partially because the only activity that seems to seriously benefit from 3G is web browsing (though you loose data behaviors when you’re on the phone on EDGE and that can be annoying in rare situations).

4As bloggers like John Gruber have claimed that early v2.0 poor performance has since been fixed with the dot upgrades, I’m not sure if their expectations of performance are just much lower or if they’re not seeing the same problems because almost universally these folks aren’t using Exchange support.

5Not to mention being the brunt of many jeers from my BB toting peers who are already off into a phone call by the time I’ve gotten UI control of the contact list returned to me.

If startup time + a simple UI enhancement (defaulting to search input as the start up behavior) were addressed, I think a lot of my perceived pain with contacts would be eliminated.  If Apple doesn’t like the default to search input for the main default, then make it an option – please, I’m begging here.

6No, this isn’t a “broken device” issue – I’m on my 2nd 3G iPhone (the first one had a screen flaw) and both exhibit the problem.  Also, it’s not a signal strength issue – this behavior often happens at 100% signal strength in downtown Seattle on EDGE.

7You can have a custom ring tone per-contact for incoming phone calls.

8For all events, BB’s keep a count of all the unread events that have happened and note these in little “counts” that are always visible (even if the phone is locked).  So, if you remember your counts, you at lease can divine which email account was just messaged.

9True, for tentative responses to invites, the user may want to return to that invite and re-reply with accept or decline in the future.  However, one can easily do that by just finding the maybe event on the calendar (a gray dotted outline event), opening it, and hitting the appropriate reply button.

10To be honest, I’d even pay a nominal fee for such upgrades going forward.  To date, Apple has given such updates for free to their phone customers.  However, I know how expensive it can be to write and maintain software.  If it takes an annual fee to Apple of something like a couple/few dollars to keep a staff of folks highly focused on fielding and fixing customer issues, I’d be for it.  Let’s not forget, that Apple is one of the very very few vendors that make free upgrades to their in-the-field devices easily accessible and available to their customers.  (Even if they are available from a manufacturer like RIM or Microsoft, upgrades to their platforms are often fraught with a feeling of the customer being “on their own” with finding the upgrades and then applying them themselves.  The carriers rarely try to make this process easy.)

Why I Still Haven’t Taken the iPhone Plunge

I enjoy reading Gruber for my regular dose of pro-Apple world views  (and he’s a good writer to boot)¹.  However, I don’t quite agree with his analysis in his recent piece called “Blackberry vs. iPhone“.  In the post he argues that really the only reason that someone, once the iPhone gains its “enterprise features” (read: Microsoft Exchange sync support) this summer, would choose a Blackberry over an iPhone is their odd prediction to preferring a hardware keyboard².

As I’ve written about before, I’m an avid Blackberry user.  That said, as Gruber notes, the iPhone is simply the best browsing device out there on the market.  Arguably better than any that were even dreamed up prior (even in the various wireless conferences I used to have to trot to in a previous life).  It is this fact that has had me wringing my hands over if I should try to hop to it over my current “bulletproof” Blackberry 8800.

So, what prevents me from jumping without consideration?  The following list:

1. Hardware Keyboard
2. Battery Life
3. Copy/Cut and Paste

The Keys to Fast Email

First, of course the “hardware keyboard”.  Yup, Gruber is right, this is pretty damn important to hardcore mobile email users.  I’m talking about those of us that get a hundred emails we need to respond to a day, those that actually need a rock solid email solution on their person always.  I get the impression from his post that this is a bit of a foreign concept for him.  It seems that while having email on the phone and being able to use it is nice, it’s not a life changing event for Gruber and many iPhone enthusiasts I’ve met.  For some of us it is.  The hardware keyboard made by RIM (vs. other vendors of crap that runs things like Symbian and Windows Mobile) is second to none for those of us in that situation.  Combine that with the RIM “smart text” that inserts apostrophes where you expect, and capitalizes as you hope, etc. and you have a tuned device that one can really knock out substantive emails on.

However, I’m willing to reconsider.  I’m willing to even take a chance on a $500 device on the claim that after a week(s) of use it gets much better.  That, while not ever as good as a hardware keyboard (this from former Blackberry users out there now on iPhones), even a former Blackberry user can see clear to using it as their main device.

No Time to Charge

Second is “battery life”.  This is where RIM’s years of wireless engineering and messaging expertise shows.  In contrast to the ActiveSync based solution that Windows Mobile (and soon iPhone) solutions use to sync, RIM uses their own over the air connection methods to ship data to/from the phone.  They can do this because they have that often criticized NOC in between the device and the enterprise servers. 

ActiveSync (AS), on the other hand, has the device open up a full HTTP connection and leave that connection open.  This is a little costly, but what’s more costly is that devices go in and out of coverage – all the time.  That means an AS based sync solution needs to reestablish the TCP/IP connection to the messaging server multiple times a day.  This alone is a huge amount of network chatter.  Layer in the various ACK/NACK behaviors at the TCP layers and you start to get a lot of back and forth that was never really optimized for the wireless world.  What does all this network chatter mean?  Lost battery life.

My 8800 gets 6 days without a charge.  This is while it’s going in and out of coverage.  While it is push email sync’ing 24 hours a day (with around 50 mails in and 10 mails out per day).  While I’m sending around 20 SMS messages a day.  While I’m browsing the mobile versions of Google, NY Times, and others multiple times a day.  While the device is set to vibrate mode for all incoming messages and phone rings.

Anyone who’s used another device, including an iPhone, realizes this is a big deal.  That type of battery life simply “does not happen” on any other device in the market.  For a guy like myself, who travels every week, the ability to not worry about when my major link to the world – that’s always with me – will stop working is huge.

Out of the “big three” issues I have remaining with going to the iPhone, I’d rate this one the highest for myself.  It makes me fret to think about having to plug in my phone every night again.  Worse, if I truly embrace the unified device concept of the iPhone, I’ll be sharing my battery capacity for my main communicator with my audio playback device.

My Scenario: I fly cross country every few days.  During these flights I listen to my iPod the entire time, then get off the plane, and need my smartphone to do email, text and voice all day for me until I’m hitting the sack (e.g. about 12-14 hrs after my 5 hr flight arrives). 

My Question: If it’s only one device that does both these functions, and that device already has tight battery life compared to a Blackberry, will I make it a full day?

In Search of a Clipboard

Finally, copy and paste, or “clipboard” support.  I’ve already griped about the lack of this on earlier iterations of the Windows Mobile platform (the smartphone sub-platform, specifically).  I cannot imagine why this wasn’t included in a new modern phone platform like the iPhone in v1.  I’m sure there was a reason, however, I can’t think of it.

Many will argue that clipboard support isn’t that important.  While I will concede that I don’t need it every day, when I do need it, it’s hugely valuable.  The number of times I needed to write something (often a number or date) on a sheet of scrap paper in order to read it off of one app on my phone, and then re-enter it into another app (say, read out of a mail message and write in a contact’s address book entry) was much greater than zero while I used my Windows Mobile phones.  It’s not something I want to go back to.

Could I live with out it?  Yes.  Should I have to (and this is the crux of the issue, there is no good reason to cut this functionality)?  No.

Making the Call

So, as the countdown to WWDC 2008, with its predicted announcement of “iPhone 2″ to come, enters its final weeks I have been asking myself if I will be willing to compromised on any or all of the issues above.  As I say, I really want to like the iPhone.  With the official release of the SDK, I’m sure there will be even cooler offerings running on the platform to come (and the ever expanding mobile web offering for the iPhone are alone an argument for moving to it). 

Well maybe Steve Jobs and crew could knock down at least one of the three with v2?  That would probably be enough for me to justify taking the plunge.

 

1 I actually love Mac’s and the entire small ISV ecosystem that the platform encourages.  So, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Mac basher, but Gruber can be a little all-pro Apple (to give him his due, some critical Apple pieces show up – most notably his commentaries on how Apple breaks its own HIG’s all the time).

2 I In his defense, he admits that he’s just posting to ponder what may be, but I take some issues with his base arguments.

Feature Request: Better "Send to Phone" Directions

Most of the major map/direction sites online have the ability to “send to phone” locations and addresses that you’ve plotted while on their site.  In addition, Google and Microsoft’s sites both have native client mapping applications for smartphone platforms such as Windows Mobile and Blackberry (and of course the iPhone comes with a Google Map program out of the box).

However, I find it surprising that no one has tried to glue these two features together to greater effect.  Today, the “send to phone ” feature typically is implemented by just dumping a text only flavor of the address or light weight directions to the phone via SMS or MMS messaging.  This is nice, but if I already have the vendor’s mapping client on my device, it could be so much more.

When I have a set of directions or just a set of locations, or annotated locations (both google and live allow this now) – I should be able to send this “package” to a phone via MMS or similar and then “load” the attachment into the local native map client.  This is effectively the method that Facebook’s application for the Blackberry uses to get notifications of your friend’s updates, etc.

Such functionality would allow for one to start mapping out locations on maps.google.com at home; say you’re are researching locations you’ll need for this evening’s outing.  You have a handful of locations you’re going to want later in the evening.  You’ve mapped these out, and now you want to have them with you for later reference in the evening.  You click “Send to Phone”.  Next you can open your mapping application on your smartphone and viola!  The location pins you sent to your phone, with their popup information, are already on the screen.

Blackberry Desktop Software Improves

I’m happy to report that Blackberry’s newest revision of their PC sync conduits seem to be much better behaved.  Earlier, I had complained that the calendar sync simply would not work reliably between my Vista/Office ‘07 system and my BB 8800 over USB.

I was never able to identify the root cause of my issues (which caused the sync engine on the PC to just go into a “not responding” state), but I have been able to get sync back to fully functional thanks to BB’s client software update.

I’m now running version 4.3.0.15 of the Blackberry Desktop Manager and all appears to be right in the world.  My device’s calendar has returned to being something that I can use only daily basis to keep me on time (hallelujah).

Music Venture Capitalists

While reading a recent Wired article by David Byrne on the brave new world of music and an artists new set of options for distributing and promoting their work, a quote from Brian Eno struck me.

“The only idea they have is that they can give you a big advance – which is still attractive to a lot of young bands just starting out.  But that’s all they represent now: capital.”

- Brian Eno on record labels.

It’s a simple observation, but it felt incredibly perceptive and it got me thinking.  For some time now, everyone has been talking about how the traditional music industry is totally changing.  These discussions frequently include the predicted demise of the traditional music label. 

So, if a label was really truly willing to completely rethink their business model, what might it look like?  If the biggest thing they can add to the equation of growing a successful artist these days is capital, then why not focus on that?  It’s your core competency. 

Acknowledge that all the rest, much of which – I’ve read, I have no direct experience – is now subcontracted out, of the services a label provides are either seeing their costs go to zero (recording, distribution) or can be dealt with by the artist creating their own direct business relationship (marketing, promotion). 

For those labels that feel they have solid in house offerings in these areas, spin them off.  Make them stand alone businesses that will succeed/fail on their own.  For the core label that’s left, now it’s just an investor in new artists.  Said another way, the music labels become venture capitalists in the same way that they behave in the technology industry.

The relationship would be the exact same.  Some tech companies get started by the founder’s life savings and credit cards.  However, many still get funded “the old fashioned way” – venture funding.  These folks want to have some semblance of pay while they’re building their product, and need to hire outsiders (engineers, PR agencies, marketing, whatever) to drive it to success.  For these folks, up front funding is needed.

For music, some artists will scrape by on their own and do it all themselves and some will want up front cash to allow them to get new gear and eat while they create their music.  The later will “pitch” their early work and creative vision, and the venture firm will decide if they want to provide them funds in exchange for partial ownership.

Like traditional VC’s, music VC’s can and would provide advice and have suggestions for vendors in music PR, or how to do a ringtone deal.  However, that wouldn’t be something that they directly do.  Again, they act as advisor (as they want to see their investments succeed) and they act as a “friend” that has connections in the industry when an artist needs them, but they no longer have all the in-house noise.  The resulting company would be a lean and mean organization consisting of 10’s of employees, not 1000’s.  They would take their investors money, and they would place bets on what music was going to do well. 

Unfortunately, I doubt the traditional labels will really do such a thing, I am more a believer that they’ll continue to trend to extinction.  However, that may mean that there might be an opportunity for someone else.  Someone who has cash  and who’s used to such a working relationship.  Perhaps our Silicon Valley VC’s – with the cash they cannot figure out how to invest all of – might diversify further.  What the heck, it doesn’t feel any crazier than seeing them fund new car companies.

Blackberry Fanboy-dom & Crummy Pumatech Sync

My friend Omar is fond of pointing out the inconsistencies of Mac Fanboy arguments.  Their predilection for broadcasting in favor of their beloved OS/machine platform; how they’re prone to highlighting the great things that Apple does; how they tend to gloss over or (better yet) provide apologies for the things that Apple falls short on.

I fear that I may have become the equivalent for the Blackberry (and I fear that Omar may have the same opinion <grin>).  I certainly have become a strong “net promoter” (marketing lingo for someone who uses your product/service and would recommend it to a friend).  In the six months since I’ve returned to owning a Blackberry, I’ve also gotten my wife to buy one and more than a few friends to strongly consider it. 

Also, just the past weekend I also convinced my father to pick one up.  After years (and I do mean years, and generations) of Windows Mobile phones that barely worked, he had come to expect that the price for smartphone functionality and flexibility was poor reliability and complicated UI’s.  After his first couple days of Blackberry use, I asked him how it was going (for the record he picked up the new BB 8830 from AT&T).

New phone is fantastic.  Still learning but works so much better than anything I  have ever had in so many ways. 

Now, my father is the first person to complain loudly when technology doesn’t do what he expects and wants.  This does not mean that he won’t use it, he’s an extremely early adopter (often to his detriment, let’s just say the Vista upgrade was not seamless).   So, what I’m saying is, he uses technology frequently, and this is rare praise from him.

All’s Not Perfect

I, of course, still love my 8800.  However, in the interest of not glossing over shortcomings (perhaps avoiding total fanboy-dom) there is a piece of the puzzle that continues to frustrate.  Simply, the tethered sync program (to sync between your PC and the device when you don’t have a BES in the equation) is a miserable piece of junk.

It’s a poor product that provides few configurations or options.  However, that’s not the really evil problem.  The really evil problem, for me, is that it doesn’t work.  Almost since I started using it, I’ve had an on-again/off-again problem with the sync just bombing out and ending with the PC application crashing.

The specific problem seems to be some types of calendar events in my Outlook can get into a state that the sync engine just doesn’t play nicely with.  If I avoid syncing the calendar events, all is well.  Further, if I just wait the sync window of the calendar will pass over the offending events and will start syncing correctly again (for awhile anyway).  Finally, if I reset the sync relationship, it usually will let the initial post-reset sync work, but subsequent may or may not.

So, what does all this mean?  Well, as a technology guy, I’m still trying to piece together and debug what is happening (and if I figure it out, will no doubt post on it).  However, as an end user, it means that BB sync for non-corporate types kinda sucks.

Unfortunately, I’m not terribly surprised.  I’ve been around devices and sync protocols/technologies as a job for going on 7 years now.  Blackberry’s desktop sync conduit technology is not their own.  Instead, it’s licensed by a shop called Pumatech.  And as folks “in the know” know: Pumatech sucks.

Of course, there is no Pumatech technology in Blackberry’s bread and butter products (sync between their devices and Exchange).  No no, that’s all built in house by RIM.  The outsourcing of the desktop solution comes as a result of non-corporate users not being the original sweet spot for RIM products. 

Such non-BES customers have always been second class citizens for RIM.  However, the reality is that if RIM wants to continue to see growing market share (and a growing stock price) then their users cannot be assumed to be mostly corporate. 

RIM clearly does recognize this at some level.  It is being reflected in their new device designs (they look much cooler – no longer the boxy volvo of smartphones – and they now have consumer focused features like cameras and media playback) and their marketing.  However, it seems clear to me that they have not yet dealt with this at a software level.  If RIM truly cares about this market, they are going to have to bring their desktop software solution totally in house.

Lack of Will or Lack of Ability?

I worry that RIM doesn’t “get it” on this front.  In a past life/startup, I used meet and work with many folks at RIM.  The tenor of the place all those years ago was that they were amazing gizmo makers, top flight telecom protocol guys, and competent enterprise server makers.   What they absolutely were not were user-focused desktop software guys. 

In the “actions speak louder than words” department, RIM seems to still be this type of engineering shop.  They have made no efforts to pressure improvements on Pumatech (or to bring desktop sync in house).  Further, their new picture, video, audio solutions are similarly worrying.  The features are very consumer oriented, but the choice of licensing and outsourcing this desktop sync UI and product set to Roxio smacks a bit of “here we go again”.

I would love to see RIM grab ownership of this stuff and apply the same discipline and precision they have to device creation.  If they want to play in the world of iPhones, with a full integrated end-to-end user focused software stack, they’re going to have to.

Better Privacy Screens

As I mention all too often, I’m on planes a lot.  I also compute a ton when I’m on the plane.  My weekly transcontinental commutes are 4 hour uninterrupted compute sessions.

So, I’m keenly aware that as a good travel citizen I should keep my own eyes on my own screen (or if I’m not computing, my own book/magazine/seat in front of me).  However, I cannot help myself, I often find myself sneaking peaks at my fellow traveler’s screens.  When walking the aisle to the bathroom I find myself noting how many folks are watching movies vs. working on Powerpoint vs. practicing poker.

My nosiness may be rude and poor frequent flyer etiquette, but it isn’t nefarious.  However, I have heard of firms that make a living by flying folks about the country and having them spy on computer users looking for corporate secrets.  This is a problem.

The unintentional sharing of sensitive corporate information on flights is something that many a corporate leader has fretted about.  I have one family friend who, when an exec, strongly discouraged his team members from using their laptops on the plane at all.  He’d rather loose that productivity time than risk the lose of sensitive deal negotiation data.  I’d even venture that this issue only gets worse and worse as the airlines continue to shrink the distance between their passengers. 

All this worry has led to the creation (at least in part) and use of laptop privacy screens.  I have tried using one of these myself.  However, I eventually abandoned it for the following reasons:

• Has to have a film/plastic shield over the main screen, which allows “gook” to collect between the real screen and the protector.
• Darkens the screen.
• Hassle not needed in the 90% period (e.g. when at work or when at home).

I was dwelling on the dissatisfaction I have with privacy screens (and many others must too, because almost no one uses them on flights that I fly – even the ones that are at least 80% business travelers), when I found myself wondering if a better solution couldn’t be found.

I wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to devise a method that makes use of “3-D glasses” style stuff + software (blur mode on the screen + glasses = clear image).  Of course, glasses wearers would be problem (and you may need to have something work so that there were frequencies tuned certain glasses – lest your neighbor have the same glasses). 

I suspect there will continue to be little innovation in this space until corporate IT folks (and it really can’t be far away can it – they worry about data loss constantly these days) begin mandating privacy screens left and right.  Once they do, and once they realize that no one is using these screens – removing them from their machines as soon as they get them – there will be a demand in the industry to have “policy enforcement”.  The same type of thinking that has create situations where you have to use a PIN to access your mobile phone that has corporate email, will demand a new solution to this problem.

Java: A Looser in my Browser

I was checking out a new startup noticed in the never ending stream of same reported by TechCrunch.  Its name is Fuser, I was intrigued.  I headed over to the site and blamo, ran into the reason I would never return.  Java.

I was a Java programmer for ages (or at least what passes for “ages” in the computer business).  I started out coding in pre-Java 1.0 and my god was it a rocky road.  As the platform matured, it became clear what it was good at and what it wasn’t.

It was, and is, a reasonable choice for server side coding (especially when multi- platform support is a concern).  Where it isn’t a success is the client side.  Browser applets were miserable to develop, rarely worked, and required client side code (the JVM) that wasn’t available by default in all platforms – I’m looking at you Windows – and was non-trivial for users to install.  In the late 90’s (and even early 2000’s) Java was really still only viable client choice for many in-browser UI scenarios, but it was avoided by most developers I knew at all costs.

I remember working very hard to make rudimentary DHTML (that’s a precursor to your AJAX, for you hip kids of today) behaviors work.  All to avoid needing a heavy handed UI in Java.  Now, the technology palette available to the web UI developer is amazingly rich: AJAX, Flash/Apollo, Silverlight are just the front runners in a very busy space.

With this new options available to any web developer that bothers to learn one of these newer (they’re really not even “new” anymore) technologies, the interaction options inside the browser are almost limitless.  So, in this new age, why oh why do people bother to still use Java Applets?

For the most part, they’ve become a rare oddity.  I almost never come across one unless you’re on some backwater real estate site (this industry seems to have been sold a bill of goods by some vendor for showing 360 picture views and walk through’s in an Applet), or some crusty old web application that is hasn’t been updated in a decade.

As such, after my more recent Windows rebuilds (and certainly now that some of my boxes are on Vista) there is no longer a JVM on my personal machines.  If you bother to use Java on your site, I – more often than not – will just depart it as soon as I realize your technology requirement, never to return again.

The Java Applet era is over, any web developer that doesn’t get that is in trouble.

This News is Rotten, Please Throw it Out

As I’ve blogged about before, I have fallen in love with Google Reader.  It has just the right amount of flexibility for my news reading needs.  Where others had failed me (including the very powerful, but still constraining – for me - FeedDemon) Google Reader seems to have succeeded.  Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for improvement.

In one such area, I cannot believe that I’m the only user out there that has problems.  I basically have two types of feeds that I subscribe to, one type are infrequent posted or very high value feeds, where I want to read (or at least see and decide not to read) each post that comes from the feed.  The other type are true “news” feeds.  These may be “real” news like the New York Times and TechCrunch, or idle chatter feeds like Valleywag.  Nonetheless, this 2nd type of feed is not well serviced today.

These feeds generate a huge amount of daily traffic.  On the days where I can keep up with it (I do have a day job) I’m not sure I want to.  However, if I actually step away from using Reader for a day or two, the backlog on these feeds can be crushing.  What I want to see for such feeds is the concept of decay.

Said another way, feeds that are highly time sensitive should have the option of aging out in my reader.  I don’t like seeing that Techcrunch has 251 unread items (it stresses me out, this same stress is why I cannot use feed readers that overload the concept of email – more inboxes to triage is the last thing I want).  In reality, I only really care about the last 24 to 36 hours of posts from such a site.  Any older unread posts should age out of my unread information.

Of course, as I note, I don’t want this behavior for all feeds I own.  Instead, the decay of posts should be a per-feed setting (or maybe/also per-folder, if you’re an “organize feeds into folders” type of person). 

Extra points if metadata could be saved to note if something was unread, read, or unread and aged out for later historical search filtering.