Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 12

Review: Droid Charge

While my original Droid will always by my first smartphone love, last month it was finally time to move on to greener pastures. After agonizing over the choices for far too long, I picked up a Samsung Droid Charge.

First a look at some other current options, and why I dismissed them:
-Droid 3: A beautiful phone with beefy specs, but sadly it has no 4G.
-Droid Bionic: Perhaps most obviously, it isn’t available yet. And while I would be happy to be wrong about this I have concerns about what 4G plus a dual core processor will do to battery life.
-iPhone: I’m not a hater, the iPhone is indeed a very nice device. But Android just works for me, and I’m pretty firmly embedded in that ecosystem now.

I’ve been very happy with the Charge (despite it having a semi-difficult name to search for online – every Droid phone out there has questions about getting it to charge).

The good:

-Verizon’s 4G speeds are amazing. They don’t enhance regular web browsing that much, but I stream a lot of music on the bus and it makes a huge difference there. Speed tests put it better than my home broadband connection, which is both exciting and sad at the same time.

-Battery life, while not spectacular, is still a big improvement over my old Droid. I can get through an average workday without plugging it in and be down to 10% by bedtime. With heavier use (like our recent trip to San Francisco where I used maps all the time) I still need to carry around some sort of extra battery. But at least on most days I’m not constantly searching for outlets anymore. And I still have to wonder – will smartphones ever get the multi-day charges that my dumbphones did? I miss that.

-The HDMI mirroring is really fun to play with on a big screen. Never has Angry Birds been so amazing!

-It works with Netflix streaming, unlike a lot of Android devices.

-Also unlike most Android devices, I can take screenshots via a simple button press instead of involving the SDK. I’m still baffled that this isn’t a standard Android feature, but at least I have it on the Charge.

-The 8MP camera is the best I’ve seen on a mobile device. Outdoor shots in sunlight are almost on par with my Canon point & shoot, and indoor or dimmer shots aren’t too shabby either. The 720p video camera is similarly impressive.

-Android in general has matured as an OS a lot over the last 2 years. Much smoother around the edges.

The bad:

-The Charge is running Android 2.2, when 2.3 has been on other phones for many months now. That’s sort of embarrassing. 2.3 enables a lot of video chatting features, so the front-facing camera is pretty useless without it.

-Samsung’s customizations to the Android UI seem questionable at best to me. The home screen is a mess, and of the dozen or so pre-installed apps (which I can’t uninstall!!) I don’t want any of them. Most of the home screen customizations can be undone by installing an alternate Launcher (yay Android!), but I still wonder why Samsung would go to so much trouble to make things worse. Apple is currently suing Samsung for supposedly copying the iPhone UI in their Android phones. If that’s true… well they did a really terrible copy/paste job.

Thankfully both of these negative points can be negated – the alternate Launcher gets rid of the UI junk, and the Charge will supposedly get an OS upgrade soon(ish). Crossing my fingers on that one.

I recommend the Droid Charge without major reservation. It feels much more future-proof that my original Droid did – I was ready to throw it out the window by the end as it ground to a slow halt – and I’m confident it’ll get me through till my next upgrade cycle.

Spotify vs. Rdio

Now that Spotify finally launched in the US I’m happy to recommend it to people. (I admit I’ll miss the British ads – it was somehow charming to hear all the pleasantly accented shills for products I’d never heard of and cannot buy.)

Sarah gave an excellent overview of the pros & cons of Spotify and Rdio. I won’t bother reinventing the wheel here, but do want to toss my $.02 into consideration.

I like Rdio a lot, especially now that they have useful desktop apps which respond to keyboard controls. I love the potential of it’s social features, recommending music back and forth among friends. But social on Rdio has turned out to be a largely unfulfilled fantasy for me – almost nobody I know uses it. I think I have two friends on the service, and only one is actively using it.

Here’s where Spotify’s free version comes into play. Sure, it’s only 10 hours per month of music. But that’s 10 hours per month more than my friends are using Rdio, and a real chance to send songs back and forth. I already have 21 friends there, most of whom seem to be active users. So Spotify wins the network effect for me. Which is a shame, because I think Rdio’s overall interface is much better. I find it astonishing that Spotify doesn’t have a better way to organize a collection of albums.

Another strike against Rdio is their recent removal of music. Laura Marling and Placebo, two of the bands I’ve listened to most on the service, suddenly had much of their catalog pulled with no explanation. Placebo has been gone for months, and Laura Marling for weeks. I’m assuming a rights issue is involved somewhere along the line, but ultimately I dont’ care – I just want to listen to the music I subscribed to. Right now Spotify still has Laura Marling’s catalog intact, and some of Placebo’s songs.

Summary: I can boil it down to a struggle of Rdio’s interface vs Spotify’s selection and social features. While I’d like to say that UI is important, ultimately the catalog available to me is even more important. The music is what I’m paying for, after all. I’ve cancelled Rdio and will give Spotify a turn this month. I’m not entirely sold on it long term, but it deserves a shot.

Xoom vs. iPad

I’m a regular (some might say obsessive) iPad user, but recently had the opportunity to use a Xoom Android tablet for a few days. The experience made me think a lot about what’s necessary for me in a tablet, and I’ve been mentally evaluating how each option measures up. It’s impossible to review tech like this in a vacuum, and I always find it most useful to look at competition side by side. I’ve broken it down into a list of the things I most need a tablet to do – here’s how each option measures up:

First, productivity-related tasks:

Instapaper has become the centerpiece of almost all my professional reading.
-iPad: Instapaper has an official app, which is one of the best-produced apps I’ve seen anywhere.
-Xoom: There’s still no truly great Instapaper Android app, either for phone or tablet. Instant Fetch is functional, but can’t compare to the iPad app.
Victor: iPad

Google Reader is the source for much of what I read in Instapaper, and helps me filter down an incredible array of sources.
-iPad: Reeder, like the Instapaper app, has a beautiful UI that’s a joy to use. It fully integrates with Google Reader.
-Xoom: While nothing’s quite as fun to use as Reeder, Feedly functions well and does the job.
Victor: tie

Gmail.
-iPad: The mail app gets the job done, but in a clunky fashion. I’m continually annoyed that I can have either a delete or archive button, but not both.
-Xoom: The Gmail app is everything I could want it to be. It beats Apple hands down.
Victor: Xoom

SimpleNote is the repository for all my text notes – work, trip planning, random thoughts, meeting notes, drafting blog posts etc.
-iPad: Once again there’s a beautiful official SimpleNote app.
-Xoom: Andronoter, while unofficial, is just as good.
Victor: tie

Dropbox is amazing. Enough said.
-Here the iPad and Xoom are fundamentally equal – both have great official Dropbox apps.
Victor: tie

Then there’s of course the slightly… less productive side of tablets. The fun things I need a tablet to do:

Games.
-iPad: There’s no contest here, the Apple App Store is chock full of great games.
-Xoom: There’s Angry Birds, which is admittedly at the top of my list. But other than that Android has a long way to go catching up.
Victor: iPad

I use Google Maps all the time, on both tablets and phones. I don’t know how I’d navigate or plan trips without it.
-iPad: The Google Maps app is embarassingly out of date. It hasn’t substantially changed since the original iPhone launched in 2007. The ipad-optimized webapp is actually a far superior experience with all the nice features Google has added in the last 4 years.
-Xoom: As expected, Google has packed Android full of amazing Google product apps. Their tablet-optimized Android map app is a shining example of what the platform can be.
Victor: Xoom

I don’t listen to music on tablets a lot, but it’s still nice to have the option:
-iPad: There’s iTunes, which I honestly haven’t used for purchasing music in years. The default music player works, but I find some of the UI elements confusing. And since I almost never sync the iPad with my computer, it’s a pain to put music on it. I can also use the Rdio app, but it’s designed for the iPhone and doesn’t look great here.
-Xoom: Between Google Music, Amazon’s Cloudplayer, the Rdio app and more I have almost too many good options to pick from. All without being tied to iTunes or my computer.
Victor: Xoom

I watch movies a bit more than I listen to music on tablets. But here it’s almost no contest:
-iPad: Besides the iTunes store’s movies, a number of the blu-rays I own came with ipad-compatible copies of the movies that are easy to load. Netflix and Hulu work very well too.
-Xoom: Google just launched Android movie rentals, and I admittedly haven’t tried them yet. But I’ll guess it works fine. The Xoom doesn’t have Netflix or Hulu, and I haven’t managed to quite figure out what video formats it can and can’t play yet. It’s confusing to say the least.
Victor: iPad

The Overall UI plays a role too. It’s one thing to have all these apps, but what about using the OS that ties it all together?
-iPad: iOS just plain works. It gets me from point A to point B with a minimum of fuss but with pretty transitions.
-Xoom: The Android Honeycomb UI, while highly customizable, isn’t quite as polished. I like the ability to put widgets on my homescreen a lot, and the notification system is very well executed, but otherwise it’s not quite there yet. Where iOS gets out of the way and lets me work (or play), Android Honeycomb takes a bit too much active thinking to use.
Victor: iPad

Totaling it up:
The iPad wins out in 4 categories
The Xoom wins out in 3 categories
Another 3 categories were ties

For such a new product, I was impressed to see how well the Xoom holds up. Give the Android app ecosystem another year to evolve and I think a lot of the iPad’s wins will shift into ties. There might be actual competition for tablet marketshare! I can’t wait.

Amazon CloudPlayer – Better than free?

For years I’ve seen a lot of very smart people refer to how the industry of your choice (music, movies, games, etc) can beat rampant piracy: Offer a service that’s better than free. That is, provide features that piracy can never match. For music, I think Amazon’s Cloudplayer has finally found a way to provide a service better than what piracy provides for free.

Amazon’s Cloudplayer lets me do a number of very handy things, including:
-Access my music from mobile devices, without needing to sync ahead of time
-Back up my music off-site
-Re-download my Amazon MP3 purchases, which are automatically stored online for free(!)

I think the second and third features are most important here – I could theoretically pirate all my music, but what happens when I accidentally delete a song or my hard drive dies? (Or what if I simply get a new computer and want to easily transfer my stuff to it?) With a few clicks, I can re-download all my legally purchased music.

I have reservations about a lot of Amazon’s moves recently (see Kindle and their Android app store), but Amazon MP3 with Cloudplayer provides an amazing service. I’ll gladly pay their reasonable prices rather than waste time tracking down music through sometimes dodgy methods. I’m even considering cancelling my Rdio subscription. I love Rdio, but I could take that $10 per month and put it toward building my own streaming music catalog in Cloudplayer instead; a streaming music catalog that doesn’t shut off if I stop paying every month. I can’t see myself ever leaving for another music store or ecosystem, piracy-based or not. But even if I do, I can still get all my old music to take with me.

Geotagging my photos for greater datanerdery

When I do my year in photos project (every odd year since 2005) my worst librarian tendencies surface and I get somewhat obsessive about organizing them and making sure all the metadata is just so.

This year I’ve got a new wrinkle in that mix: geotagging. GPS data can be embedded in a photo, enabling all kinds of cool mapping stuff. Mostly I just like looking at where I’ve been this year in Picasa:

When I take the daily photo on my phone, all’s well with the geotags. The phone uses it’s GPS function and embeds the coordinates in the photo. But my phone’s camera isn’t amazing, and I try to use my Canon camera instead when possible. The Canon has no embedded GPS, so has no way to know where each shot is taken. Sure, I could manually place them on a map in Picasa or Flickr, but that’s tedious and inexact and requires a more detail-oriented memory than I usually possess.

I could also upgrade to a new point & shoot camera with GPS built in, but I’m not willing to face that expense right now. I wanted something that would tie my phone’s GPS into the camera. I didn’t expect to find much, but somewhat surprisingly there’s actually multiple options to do this:

First I found the aptly named Geotag Photos software. There’s two pieces: a phone app (for both Android and iPhone) and a desktop application. Turn on the phone app while you’re out taking pictures. It logs your position at regular (configurable) intervals. When you’re back at your computer, the desktop application compares photos’ timestamps with the gps log from the app. When there’s a reasonable match, it adds the tag to your photo. In my experience this works very well, but requires that I remember to turn the app on and get it logging before I snap a shot. That’s not a big deal for a day of frequent shooting, but for spur of the moment stuff it becomes an issue. I should note that the mobile app can be significant battery hog too.

Second is LatiPics. I’m a little astonished that Latipics has such anemic coverage on the web, because it’s pretty amazing. Latipics removes the separate mobile app from the equation, using only a desktop app. Instead, it pulls locations from your Google Latitude history. I already have Latitude turned on and logging, so it requires no extra effort on my part. Otherwise, the desktop application works a lot like Geotag Photos – it compares photo timestamps to my Latitude log, and adds geotags to the photos where there’s a match. This is pretty much my ideal solution (see the aforementioned lack of extra effort), but Latitude updates my location at somewhat random intervals and as a result doesn’t always provide a precise location for a photo. And of course, LatiPics requires you have Latitude history logging turned on and use a phone that can regularly update the service.

A third option is using an EyeFi SD card. I haven’t tried this personally, but don’t think it would suit my needs. EyeFi geotagging relies on examining your proximity to wifi access points, and so is less precise than a real GPS unit. And if you’re not in range of any wifi networks, it can’t do any tagging at all.

Geotag Photos and Latipics have different strengths and weaknesses. I find that I use both as a result: Geotag Photos for higher precision when I’ve planned taking pictures well in advance, and Latipics as a slightly less precise ‘better than nothing’ backup plan for spur of the moment opportunities. I should also note that Latipics is free, while Geotag Photos’ mobile app costs about 3 Euros.

(As a perhaps obvious final note: there’s clear privacy issues with sharing geotagged photos online. Mythbuster Adam Savage once accidentally revealed where he lived via a geotagged photo. Just be careful and use common sense.)

An ode to Ninite

I recently purchased a new laptop. I got it all set up – programs installed, files transferred, etc.

My shiny new laptop’s hard drive died, almost immediately after I was done tweaking things.

I had to repeat the whole procedure.

Carbonite’s (mostly) painless file transferring aside, Ninite was the most helpful tool in this potentially frustrating process. Ninite bundles popular programs into one .exe install file. So with just a few clicks I installed Chrome, Firefox, Skype, iTunes, Hulu, VLC, Spotify, Flash, Paint.Net, Picasa, Dropbox, Steam, Google Earth, Defraggler, Revo, Winrar, even Python and Eclipse! All with virtually no intervention on my part beyond launching one install. And this is just a small subset of the programs Ninite can handle! I’m pretty sure it saved me at least an hour of running installs, not to mention trying to remember all the oddball programs I needed to get set up.

But here’s my favorite part: Ninite skips all the bloat that usually comes with these programs. No spyware, no browser toolbars, no annoyances!

I’m sounding suspiciously like a paid ad, so I’ll stop raving now. If you ever have to set up a new PC, give Ninite a try.

Services I pay for online – 2011

I find that as time goes by, I’m less willing to engage in DIY-style tech solutions. I’m realizing that while I enjoy those projects, they take up too much of my time. I’ve decided I’m willing to pay a reasonable price to outsource the tasks. Especially with our semi-DIY cable cutting project taking up just about all my tech time right now. Here’s the services I’ve deemed worthy of paying for online:

Instead of running/maintaining my own photo server, I let Flickr do the job. Flickr is the relative old man on this list, since I’ve been a paid subscriber since 2005. In addition to the sharing & social features, I find my account gives me some peace of mind too – it’s like a low-grade off-site backup.

Rdio, on the other hand, is my newest acquisition. I once briefly tried to maintain my own streaming music server to access songs on the go. It never really worked right, and didn’t last long. For $10 per month, rdio lets me listen to almost any song I could want. In addition to listening on my desktop I can bring it up on my phone (with offline caching!) and they just launched a Roku app too.

I used to have an elaborate backup scheme involving multiple external hard drives and some scripted events. It didn’t always work right, and even if it did my backup was only on-site. Carbonite sits in the background, constantly making sure all my important files (here ‘important’ even includes my music & movies) are remotely backed up.
As a bonus, the service’s restore features can be used to transfer all those backed up files to a new computer as I did recently.

Tripit Pro is a very simple, yet very impressive service. I forward them all my travel confirmation emails (hotel, air, shuttle, etc) and it builds an itinerary for me. The result is viewable online or via their mobile apps. I get messages about changes to flights as I go, no need to juggle a dozen confirmation messages while I’m traveling! Meanwhile Tripit monitors all my airfares and lets me know about price drops, making it the one item on this list with the potential to pay for itself. Tripit Pro proved its worth to me during honeymoon planning last year, but it’s great for simpler trips too.

All four of these services Just Work, and are worth every penny. If time is money, I’m coming out ahead on the deal.

(With a little luck I’ll remember to continue & update this list in future years.)

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Kindle

I’ve ranted before on multiple occasions about my issues with the current state of the commercial ebook setup.

Then I got a Kindle for Christmas.

I haven’t quite done a 180, but after truly giving the Amazon ebook ecosystem a fair chance I’m more willing to highlight the positives of the experience.

Like Sarah, I feel like a bit of a library traitor in admitting all this. But, things I really like about my Kindle:

Portability. A Kindle is much lighter than most hardcover novels. It’s also much easier to read on the bus, where I often have to stand. I can read the Kindle with one hand, and keep myself upright with the other.
Cross-device sync. if I have a few minutes to kill while waiting in line, I read a few pages of a book on my phone. When I get back to the Kindle, it knows where I left off. if I need to do serious work with a book, I move to my PC. It all just works, pretty seamlessly. I wish the sync feature was more robust than a simple ‘furthest page read’ notion, and that I could sync non-Amazon content across devices in the same way. But it’s still very handy.
Note-taking & highlighting. For reading non-fiction, a Kindle is invaluable. I’ve never been one to scribble margin notes as I read, mostly because I know I’ll never go back and find them all later. But the Kindle puts all notes & highlights in a centralized, web-accessible location. For serious non-fiction this adds real utility to a book that paper copies simply can’t provide. It helps in fiction too. I find myself highlighting the quotes I really like, and now they’ll be much easier to track down in the future.

These are all things that move a book beyond paper. I think I may have been too hung up on the things that Amazon’s ebooks take away from a purchased print title – loanability to friends (Amazon’s new title loan feature is so crippled that it’s useless), library use (nonexistent), resale (nonexistent), etc. While those are still issues (in some cases major ones), I haven’t previously focused enough on the extra features Amazon adds to a purchased title.

I still adamantly refuse to pay more for an ebook title than the print version, and I’ll keep that stance until the issues I listed above are addressed. But I’m now ok with paying a price equal to the print title’s. I’m giving some features up, but also gaining others in exchange. Features which greatly enhance the way I consume text.

The issue of ebooks and libraries is a larger one, which I’m more and more pessimistic about, and a topic for another time (libraryrenewal.org did recently restore a bit of my hope). But as a reader, if not a librarian, I’ve learned to love the experience the Kindle provides. I guess the title of this post is a bit of a lie – I didn’t really stop worrying, but I now worry a little less.

iPad apps

I nabbed an iPad a few weeks back. It was almost an impulse decision, but it’s an impulse I’m glad I gave in to.

Basically, I need a new laptop. I also don’t want to pay as much as a laptop costs. This is a fundamental problem in obtaining a laptop, yes?

The iPad made for a nice compromise on price point and functionality. I still don’t want to type anything longer than a few sentences on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. But for anything else I find myself using the iPad.

I don’t think the iPad qualifies as a mobile device. At least not in the same way that a smartphone does. I’m turning this over in my head a lot, and might elaborate on it at some later point.

I will now share my favorite iPad apps, a ritual I understand is customary upon obtaining a new piece of gadgetry:

Flickstackr – $1.99

I didn’t want to sync my massive photo library to the iPad, as it would quickly overswamp my 16gb of storage. This is a great workaround. The iPad’s native photo viewing interface is beautiful, and Flickrstackr does a good job of replicating it’s high points for my online photos.

BBC News – Free

One of innumerable news apps, this one lets me listen to live BBC news radio as I browse stories.

NY Times – Free (for now)

This is free for now, and has a great reading experience. Great enough that I’ll consider paying for it when the paywall goes up sometime next year (depending on price, of course).

Comics by Comixology – Free app, comics range from free-$2.99 each

This device feels like it’s made for viewing digital comics. Comixology has distribution deals with Marvel, DC, and a host of smaller publishers.

Instapaper – $4.99

I’m late to the party on this one, but Instapaper does a great job of collecting all the articles I want to read but don’t have time to parse immediately.

Air Display – $10

Pricey, but magical. This app lets the iPad function as a second monitor, so long as it’s on the same wifi network as the host computer. Not a flawless user experience, but when it works it’s a major productivity boost.

ABC Player – Free

ABC is the only major network with an iPad app. It (perhaps obviously) streams recent episodes of ABC’s shows. Works flawlessly.

Netflix – Free, requires Netflix subscription
It just works. Very very nice.

Angry Birds – $4.99
Don’t buy this. Your free time will thank me.

Bonus app that I want to like but it just costs way too much:
Wired – $3.99 per issue
Of all magazines, Wired seems like one that should be read on a tablet computer. Unfortunately the high price gets in the way. There’s no subscription option – a year would cost $47.88. I currently pay $12 for a year of print issues. Bring the price in line with the print, and I’m onboard.

Android’s App Inventor: Drag and Drop Programming

It took a while, but Friday afternoon I finally got an invite to use Google’s App Inventor program. What is App Inventor? It’s Google’s attempt to simplify building apps for Android devices. Apps are built using a drag and drop interface, and reflected instantly on a connected Android device.

I was skeptical about the system’s ability to produce apps of any real functionality, but I was happy to be proven mostly wrong. Building a well-structured UI is admittedly almost impossible, with only basic layout and design tools available. But the app inventor does provide easy access to surprisingly complex elements of the Android functionality. The GPS, barcode scanner, camera, speech recognition, and accelerometer are among the tools easily usable via drag and drop. After placing buttons and labels to design the UI, a separate drag and drop interface is used to establish how those elements interact with each other. A series of blocks click into each other, with a bit of typing to provide some details.

It’s a nice system, and my skepticism about App Inventor’s potential beyond the toy level was quickly overcome. I ran through the first tutorial app (touch the picture of a cat and it meows! This didn’t help my skepticism…) in a few minutes. Less than an hour later I’d built an app to search the UNC catalog via an ISBN barcode scan. It relies heavily on our existing catalog webapp to do the actual search, but still! I mastered using the barcode scanner for apps in less than an hour. My previous attempt at Android programming (in Java, before App Inventor existed) took me four hours to build an app that simply displays an image. And that simple task drew on every single bit of programming know-how I could dredge up from my undergrad days.

The barrier to entry for using App Inventor is almost absurdly low. My slight background in programming did help, and I would have taken a bit longer if I wasn’t familiar with things like variables and function returns. But the point of App Inventor is that I wasn’t required to know those things in advance. I could have picked it up in a little extra time. This kind of setup seems perfect for intro-level computer science courses, teaching basic programming concepts while retaining the satisfaction of seeing a fully functional app at the end. Google definitely realizes this and is targeting educators as potential users.

App Inventor is clearly still a beta product, with some notable limitations. Apps built in App Inventor can’t be distributed in the Android Market. The install files need to be manually distributed to phones. There’s also no resulting Java source code to tweak for more advanced purposes. And disappointingly, using APIs beyond a prescribed few (Twitter, Amazon, etc) involves more complicated Python coding. There’s also some strange odds and ends, like not being able to change the app’s icon.

I’m not under any illusions that App Inventor apps will someday replace Java-coded apps. But it got me excited about programming in a way I haven’t been in years. That’s gotta count for something.

If you’d like to try the barcode scanner app I built and see what App Inventor is capable of, here’s the installable apk file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/905114/UNC_Catalog.apk