Category: Technology

Amazon announced their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player to let people store and play music from the cloud. You get 5GB for free which is about 1000 songs.

Now it gets interesting.

Everyone was expecting Google vs. Apple on this one, but Amazon just jumped in there big time. There’s a nice Android app and it works on any browser. Well, any flash enabled browser. Kind of an interesting technology choice given the primary competition.

I loaded my library (imported all my iTunes playlists) and frankly it works great. To me having your music library on your computer hard drive where you sync up other devices with wires doesn’t seem right. Having it in the cloud makes total sense to me.

There are potential issues of course. Doesn’t work so good on the subway. And how will it impact your phone’s no longer unlimited data plan?

What’s fun now is that there is real competition. Apple has been so dominant that they’ve been getting away with iTunes which is kind of a crappy app. That being said, Amazon’s Cloud Player app is going to need improvements as well. It’s definitely a v1 app.

But now we have Apple, Amazon and Google battling over music with the music labels wondering what the hell to do.

Game on.

Google Street View is becoming rather amazing. My daughter has taken my phone, gone to Google Maps and “walked” the route from our place to her best friends house, via Street View.

That’s a totally pointless use of the technology, but as an old dude, think about the implications. From your phone, you can map the route visually from one place to another on the fly. That’s pretty amazing.

I use my Android phone for navigation when driving. I go to random places and when I arrive at the destination it shows a picture of where I am. No matter how random the place is, I get a picture.

We’re about to go on vacation and visit my wife’s brother in Orlando. So of course, I google his address to get directions. I’m used to getting the perfect map, but in the upper left is a picture of his house. Not like his block in the general vicinity, it’s a flat out snapshot of his house.

Very cool, but a little creepy…

Not that I would ever suggest getting something for free, but people are already figuring out ways around the upcoming NY Times paywall (which already exists in Canada).

Apparently it requires just four lines of javascript:

javascript:(function() {

var s=document.createElement(‘script’);

s.setAttribute(‘src’, ‘http://toys.euri.ca/nyt.js’);

document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0].appendChild(s);

})();

You can apparently drop this on your bookmarks toolbar and when you see the NY Times “you need to pay for this” screen, click it and you get the article for free.

Again, I’m not suggesting that you actually do this…

A little bit after I got my HTC Incredible, Swype became available for Android in beta. Swype is an alternate keyboard. For iPhone users that don’t get the concept, with an Android phone you can swap out the standard keyboard for something different.

There are several Android alternate keyboards. Some try to predict the next letter and make the most likely letters much bigger. But Swype is different. Instead of touching each letter individually, with Swype you touch the first letter, keep your finger on the keypad, and swipe your finger from one letter to the next. The software figures out what word you intended.

Depending on the word, it isn’t always unambiguous, so Swype presents you with a list of options. The software isn’t perfect (it’s still in beta) and doing double letters (i.e. the same letter twice in a row) is a bit tricky (it’s best to do a tiny loop on that letter). Seems like extra effort, so why do it?

Because it’s really fast.

Like world record fast. Like quadriplegic dude types faster than you fast.

When I first installed it, I hadn’t been using my phone for very long. It seemed a bit faster, but it was hard to tell. I got some nice envy from iPhone users, so that probably encouraged me to stick with it. It’s really handy holding the phone in one hand. But I wasn’t sure if it was a big deal or not.

Until I lost it.

Something funky happened. It’s not available via the Android Market so the installation process is a bit different. I was using it one day and I got a message, “your license has expired, please upgrade”. So my first thought was, “crap, they are out of beta and now they want to charge me”. But I couldn’t find any obvious way to upgrade. So I figured I’d check their website later when I got home. No biggie. But then I needed to send a text.

Torture.

And this was just a text. 50 letters tops. Seriously, torture. Typing the regular way was soooooo slow. I vowed that whatever Swype was charging, I would pay it willingly. The whole, “maybe I’ll switch to iPhone now that it’s on Verizon” thing went out the window.

I got home, checked their website and saw no mention of charging for anything, though there was some mention of a new version. So I just tried uninstalling and reinstalling.

Back in business.

I also paid a bit more attention to the speed and accuracy stats on their website. Sure, it’s marketing, but they are claiming average typing speeds twice as fast as “point and tap” phone methods.

I’m telling you, it’s twice as fast. It was just flat out painful doing anything the old way. I couldn’t bear it.

So while I understand that telling a company that you’ll pay whatever they want to charge is not exactly shrewd negotiating, if they ever do decide to charge for it, I’m buying it with a big fat smile on my face.

If you are on Android, join the beta here.

I’m playing with the release candidate right now, having set it as my default browser. Of course I still go back and use Chrome from time to time.

I’m highly amused by the IE 6 countdown site. Never have so many people, including the vendor, wanted people to stop using a product so much. And by the way, go Norway, nice job at 0.7%.

Anyway IE 9 seems pretty good. It’s quick. I haven’t seen any rendering issues. Origami looks great (but Origami always looks great).

I’m not in love with the way the tabs look. It seems like they went with the minimalist Chrome look but didn’t pull it off as well. Maybe there will be some clean up in the final version.

But overall, I would say well done. I’m sure that I will go back to Chrome. I would certainly miss Chrome to Phone and the Google Voice extensions. But IE 9 appears to be a worthy browser.

Now we just have to get corporations to upgrade to it…

This is an interesting article, suggesting that Android app revenues are puny. But does it miss an extremely important point?

The iPhone market is built off of the fact that people will pay $0.99 for anything. All the revenue is up front payout.

The Android Market is much more based on free apps with ad revenue. I’ve often considered this an unnoticed tax on the cost of an iPhone (my wife has easily spent $100 more on her phone than I have on mine because she has to pay for apps that are free on Android).

Consider Angry Birds.

It is free on Android. There are ads. They are unobtrusive. Angry Birds makes $1MM/month on these ads (that’s after being released for just 4 months on Android – those numbers will likely rise). Those numbers do not show up in the above linked article. That one app would ad 10% to those revenue numbers.

Maybe not so puny?

And the Angry Birds folks prefer the Android model because the revenues continue over the life of the app.

You can argue over which model is better for users. Some folks would prefer to pay the 99 cents to avoid ads. But don’t spout revenue numbers for the app market unless you factor in ad revenue as well.

It’s long, but a very good and relatively quick read.

Oh the embarrassment. Under the assumption that regular readers of this blog are also people I know, there’s a good chance that you received an email from my personal email account with no subject and a link.

First of all, if you ever get an email from me with no subject, do not trust it. Unlike iPhone users who seem to do it all the time (don’t you get a warning?) I do not send emails without subject lines.

So how did it happen? I’ve been wracking my brain on that one.

Given the timing, I suspect it happened from my phone. I came home from work and stopped off for a quick beer. I was surfing the web via Google Reader. There was one moment where it jumped strangely to an ad. At the time I was either reading the Washington Post or Wired, so it didn’t really concern me. It wasn’t a porn ad or anything (honestly, the strangest web site I subscribe to via Google Reader is Dan Song’s blog, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t come from there). I read a wide variety of tech blogs and political blogs, but nothing strange enough that I’d expect malware.

But something clearly got my Google contact list and sent out spam. Actually, this makes you realize how many ancient email addresses are in your contact list.

Anyway, if you got it, I apologize. And if I ever figure out how you’ll be the first to know.

With the Verizon announcement, someone asked me if I would get one. First of all, I’m under contract with my Incredible, so it’s a moot point right now.

But let’s imagine I wasn’t.

In this scenario would I get the iPhone? Definitely not now. There are several things that I’ve grown used to being able to on the Incredible that you can’t do on the iPhone and almost nothing that you can do on the iPhone and not on the Incredible is that tempting.

I know that’s sacrilege to iPhone users but it’s true.

So in that case I would wait and see. For me, my phone is as good or better than the iPhone. So I would wait and see what comes next from Apple and the various Android vendors.

Which is what I will do in my current scenario as well…