LIVEdigitally

I’ve been thinking about a bluetooth headset for a long time.  Since I got my iPhone, I’ve almost exclusively used the included iPod headphones / speakerphone to talk with other people.  But it tangles often and it’s starting to get worn out – the rubber on the earpieces has rubbed off completely.  :(  That combined with the California headset law (and the joy of playing with new toys) convinced me to try to go blue.  Eric Benderoff’s review of several top bluetooth headsets gave me a little background, and the pure sex appeal of the Jawbone II gave me a starting place.

There are a lot of different possible categories from which to assess a gadget like this: form factor, simplicity of use, pairing ability, sound quality, battery life, durability, cost…  I don’t often write really analytical reviews which numerically asses and assign rankings to devices, but this time I plan to for the sake time and conveneience.  Elsewise this review will ramble, extensively.  Long.

I will rank each of the above categories with a numeric ranking between 1 and 10 (naturally) and then average out the scores.  By doing this I am essentially saying 1.) that each of the chosen categories have equal weighting, and 2.) that other possible categories (say, color) do not factor into my assessment.  Those are both true things, so take my review with the appropriate grains of sodium hydrochloride.

Form Factor: 10 (this is a sexy looking gadget, slim, black, ribbed and fancy)

Simplicity of Use: 7 (as bluetooths go, it’s pretty easy to start, pair, adjust and figure out what’s happening)

Pairing Ability: 7 (turn it on, and turn on bluetooth on your phone – they just seem to find each other)

Sound Quality: 6 (I can hear people OK.  When I need to turn the volume up high, it seems to get a little fuzzy.  People can hear me OK.  Not great, but OK.  This might be due to poor pairing, or simply the nature of the device. )

Battery Life: 6 (battery life seems to be about what you’d expect, or just a hair better.  I seem to get about 2-3 hours of active talk time.  If it sits idle on a full charge for a couple days, I can still use it.  If it sits idle after a full charge for 5 or 6 days, not so good. )

Durability: 4 (the device body seems to be fairly compact and well made, I expect it will last as well as anything else out there.  The ear pieces are another issue.  As you’ll see in the pictures below, one of my stems broke.  Jawbone is kind enough to package multiple stems [for differently sized and shaped heads / ears] so I had a backup, even though it’s a suboptimal size.  I did NOT mishandle nor manhandle the ear piece – just rotated it as it’s designed to be rotated, and the little sucker just snapped.  Boy was I irritated. )

Cost: 4 (this is a pricey little sucker.  I’ve seen it at the T-Mobile store for as little as $99, and at a Verizon store for $129.  If you shop around you’ll find it for somewhere over $100.

If we assume that each of the above categories carrie an equal weighting, then the score on the Jawbone II bluetooth headset comes out to 6.29 (10+7+7+6+6+4+4=6.2857147)

I like this device’s style and simplicity.  It’s elegant, pretty, fairly easy to use, and the it sounds good.  Not “oh my god holy crap” amazing, but it sounds good.  The cost of the unit, and the fact that the stem broke in the manner it did are both very offputting for me though, and they are the biggest limiting factors in my estimation.  That particular pair of issues (high cost with questionable durability) is expecially disagreeable.  I’ll be interested to see if/how the company responds to my customer service request.  If they do, I will update this post.

Forced to give a numeric rating between 1 and 10, this device averaged out to a 6.29.

This review is also available at 1TO10REVIEWS.

Disclaimer: We know, love and work with the people from 12seconds.  Impartiality is severely dented, if not discarded outright.

Today 12seconds.tv did a few cool things:

1. They’ve re-designed their website – cool new look and feel, with a strong focus on video consumption
2. They’ve concluded their invite-only Alpha phase and opened up in a public Beta where anyone can register and use the site
3. They’ve had their iPhone application approved and launched in the iTunes App Store (for $0.99)

I’m happy for their progress from Alpha to Beta, and I think the re-design looks great.  But I’m most excited about the iPhone app.  You all know (both of you) that I’m an iPhone user, and one of my few frustrations with the device has always been the lack of a video recorder.  Apple steadfastly refuses to release one, and there’s no third-party video recording application available (unless you choose to jailbreak your phone). This annoys me.

12seconds did not manage to sneak a video recorder through Apple’s QA team.  But they did create about the best possible workaround.  App users will take 3 photos (or choose 3 from their picture library), record twelve seconds of audio, and then post their creation to their 12seconds account (unregistered folks can create an account on the fly, in their phone.)  Somewhere in the cloud, the pics and audio are combined and then spit out as a twelve second video slideshow.  Users can email a link to their video directly from their phone  Each video has it’s own unique URL on 12seconds.tv, and can be emailed, embedded (as HTML) or downloaded onto your hard drive.  Here’s a demo video on how to use the app.

iphone app for 12seconds.tv from Sol Lipman on Vimeo.

One thing I really like about this app is the story telling aspect.  The series of pictures with audio narration really give you that James Earl Jones feeling of comfort.  Also, if you flub the audio and need to re-record, you can do so as many times as you like.  With traditional video, if you blow it, it’s blown.  The moment has passed. Here’s one video I recorded with a trial version of the app.

Cold Cuts – Chinese Food Style on 12seconds.tv

The app is a first draft.  It works, and it’s intuitive, but there are some features I’d like to see added, including wanting better flexibility in choosing photos and saving drafts.  But on the whole I think the app is very usable.  There’s just room to improve.

Kudos to the 12seconds team on a great launch and a cool app.  This is the best solution to the video-recording conundrum that Apple’s created that I’ve seen yet.

Related Posts:

MG Siegler at VentureBeat

Greg Kumparak at MobileCrunch

Rodney Rumford at FaceReviews

This post is also published on 1TO10REVIEWS.

My phone doesn’t do email.

It doesn’t synch with my calendar.

I can’t browse the Web (well, technically it can, but it’s quite janky).

For crying out loud, I can’t even view or edit an Excel spreadsheet on it!

I have, sigh, a dumbphone.  And I love it.  I don’t have my office in my pocket. I don’t get interrupted during dinner with some email that didn’t need to get to me until the next day.  I can taxi from the runway to my gate without developing callouses on my thumbs.  I don’t have to worry about cutting and pasting anything. Are there times where I wish I had an iPhone or other boxy-but-good smartphone?  Sure.

It turns out there’s an amazing amount of things I can do with my phone without needing a lot more “smarts” in it.  Here’s a list of services I use to augment my phone’s experience.  The common theme, as you’ll quickly notice, is it’s all about SMS.

• Check a flight status:  text to GOOGL (46645) the word “flight” followed by airline and flight number (e.g. “flight AC 759″ or “flight UA 09″), you’ll get today’s flight time
• Check a stock quote: GOOGL the word “stock” followed by ticker (e.g. “stock AAPL”)
• Set/receive calendar events: if you use gcal you can configure it to text you alerts, and even set calendar appointments by text.  I use this all the time.
• Send yourself a reminder: use kwiry‘s sms-based reminder/to-do system
• Get a restaurant/business phone number: again, GOOGL and the name of the place (add the zip code for more accuracy).  this one isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty impressive
• Research a question: try out chacha by texting your question to 242242, you’ll get a (typically) useful answer.  this is one of my favorite “tricks”, especially if I’m near a screen-pinching iPhone addict trying to find out the same information, but with oh so much more effort
• Get a sports score: yup, GOOGL, the word “score” and your team (e.g. “score Canadiens”).
• Lifecast: if you must, you must.  twitter, flickr, 12seconds, and other services all accept SMS and MMS messages.
• Financial services: there are lots of new options that let you get financial updates via text, including mint.com and others
• And the rest: Here’s a full list of all the things you can do with GOOGL. Pretty impressive, eh?

Here’s my “killer missing app” for a useful SMS service: LinkedIn/Plaxo lookups.  I have all my contacts organized – why can’t I just send in a text and get someone’s phone number or address without much effort?  Seems like a nobrainer.

So no, I won’t be shelling out a fistful of cash for any of this year’s crop of smartphones.  As I’ve said many times, all that “convenience” isn’t much of a benefit in context people becoming less detached from their real world experiences while being overly connected to their worklife.  If your name doesn’t rhyme with Harack Okama, odds are pretty good you aren’t getting recurring emails Saturday at 9pm while you’re at dinner that you *have* to check.  If you are, you need a better job.

I had some time to play with the BlackBerry Storm last week, and I’m surprised how much I disliked it.  I feel it was a complete misstep on the part of RIM, and is indicative of the problems of handset manufacturers short-sighted thinking as they compete with the iPhone.

Competing with the iPhone is like competing with CSI
CSI is one of the top broadcast TV shows every week.  Millions of people tune in to watch a fairly vapid crime drama show with cool lighting effects and gruesome murder scenes. Many millions of people.  So if you are a clever TV exec, and you want to compete in the same timeslot, do you (a) create an equally vapid crime drama show with more cool lighting and gruesomer murders, (b) create a completely different show, such as a romance, comedy, reality, hospital, etc, or (c) offer alternating reruns of Matlock and Baywatch? As tempting as (c) might be, the answer is (b) – they call it cross- or counter-programming.

The World’s First Touchscreen Blackberry?
This is the main marketing campaign around the product (don’t ask me why).  The commercials (much like the gPhone commercials) are blatant ripoffs of the iPhone commercials, and they shouldn’t be.  This is the core problem of the whole device – it’s not an iPhone, and more to the point it shouldn’t be an iPhone.  Instead of building a great next-gen BlackBerry (like they did with the Curve, Pearl, Bold), they made a less functional product by trying to duplicate the core strengths of another product.  In other words, they are airing CSI: Indianapolis when they should be showing Reality Stars Paintball on Ice.

All CrackBerries need a keyboard
The BlackBerry is beloved because… it integrates perfectly into Exchange/Outlook/Corporate email environments and it is a phenomenal mobile email device.  IT administrators love it as do the end-user who can easily write emails while attending meetings, at family events, on the tarmac, dinner parties, and even while driving. The product experience is heavily tied into the keyboard, one could even consider it the signature piece of the device.  A BlackBerry without a keyboard can’t possibly (and, to the point, doesn’t) replicate the same “BlackBerry Experience”.

The Missed Opportunity
The “correct” touchscreen BlackBerry would have a physical keyboard as well.  Seems like an obvious, yet somehow missed move by the company.  Touchscreen keyboards can’t replace the physical one, and just dabbling touch-UI features onto the rest of the BlackBerry experience makes for a wholly unsatisfactory device.  Instead, the company should’ve kept the form factor of the present-day device, but made the screen touch-enabled.  Best of both worlds, satisfies the email-craving workaholic as well as the fun-having gadget owner.

Instead, the BlackBerry Storm might just be the mullet of phones.  It’s probably the best “other” touchscreen phone on the market (so far), but that’s just not good enough.  There are plenty of ways to compete with the iPhone, and I’m dissappointed at the lack of originality and creative thinking displayed by other cell phone manufacturers.  Something tells me the best competition will come out of left field, the way Asus first innovated with their eeePC.  I hope the clever product people at RIM who’s ideas got shot down to make the Storm can bring out the concepts they really wanted to ship (and I’m just going out on a limb with that – despite being Canadian I have no special insight into their product roadmap).

I’m moderating the Under the Radar: Mobility conference today. We’ll be live on ustream (video below), and monitoring tweets that include #utr08. We’ll try to take questions from the audience, and you can also read more at the UTR blog or on CNET’s WebWare.

Free TV : Ustream

I saw a post entitled “Why BlackBerry Storm Is An iPhone (and G-1) Killer” and thought it needed a rebuttal. The post makes some very salient points on how it’s a good device, on good carriers, app store coming, etc. All good points. Now let me explain why I think those points are utterly irrelevant.

The iPhone (which I don’t own, for the record) is not compared to the BlackBerry on the same terms.  It’s not a portable email device, and it doesn’t want to be one.  To compare the two devices its more important to think about the decision-making that goes in to buying either device.

Business buy BlackBerries.  They will continue to do so.  Few businesses buy iPhones, this too will likely remain the same.  Accordingly we don’t need to take enterprise purchasing into account, as this market makes purchasing decisions based on price, security, integration, etc.  What we’re really talking about here is consumers.

Consumers who buy luxury goods are not buying things based on cold-hard fact comparison.  If you drink Grey Goose vodka or use Kiehl’s skincare products or purchase Infiniti cars, odds are pretty good you do a lot less “comparison shopping” than you do when buying mainstream products (btw, for more on this I recommend reading “Trading Up“).  The iPhone clearly falls into this category, people buy it for reasons that have little to do with technical specifications or even feature set (heck, they sold almost 8 million units before they launched the app store).

The iPhone has further achieved success because, frankly, it’s an amazing product (despite its inability to do video recording like my good ol Samsung UCH-740). It’s one of the best phones, best MP3 players, and overall best gadgets you can buy.  It doesn’t matter if the BlackBerry does “somewhat better” in almost any category, whether it’s web-surfing, email, or downloadable games.  Being “better” is far from good enough to beat the iPhone.

A recent survey showed that 22% of teens wanted an iPhone.  I don’t think these same teens are even remotely close to buying a BlackBerry (you know, like Dad uses at work).  There’s no sex appeal to the BlackBerry brand, and building a great device isn’t enough to turn it into a sexy one.  Just ask the HTC G1/Android phone that question (that thing is enough to make Nokia phones look sleek!).

The BlackBerry Storm seems like it’s going to be one heck of a BlackBerry.  Best one ever, no doubt.  Probably the best portable email device ever made.  And they will probably grab a good chunk of the existing BlackBerry market.  But kill the Iphone?  That gun’s not loaded yet, and it would take RIM years to create the combination of product/brand positioning to come even close.

As a long-time Verizon Wireless customer (originally back with GE!), I must say I’m generally quite happy with my service. My bill is a tad high, but then again we have 2 phones with lots of minutes, a Family plan and full access in the US and Canada, thus offsetting our home phone bill (~$10/mo for a landline). During my daily busride, I like to play games on my phone (Samsung SCH-U740 – awesome). I think Verizon may have created one of the best platform potentials but laden it with one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever seen.

In my phone menu, going to Games, then Get New App gives me a fairly easy set of options. I can instantly buy one of their top 2 games/promotions, or browse through categories to find what I want. The categories are pretty self-explanatory, and that’s about where the usability ends.

Picking a game brings you to a screen with three options: Subscription price, Unlimited price, and Info. On a rare occasion there’s also the option for a Free Trial, but we’ll ignore that for now. Let’s presume that I pick an interestingly named title, for example “Stranded: A Game of Survival” ($2.99 Sub, $7.99 Unl). Clicking “info” shows me the following text:

You awake Stranded on a mysterious island with other survivors. You discover that not everyone can be trusted. Will you escape? Without a price plan that includes an unlimited data feature, you will incur either (depending on your plan) airtime charges at applicable overage rates if you exceed your minutes bundle or megabyte (“MB”) charges of $1.99/MB for downloading the application. Some applications may result in additional charges for sending/receiving data during use. [Size:479KB]

First of all, I don’t know anything about the game! This category (strategy games) includes things ranging from Command and Conquer to Triple Scoop Twist, so there’s no information about gameplay. Is it a RTS? An RPG? A puzzle? Etc. Interestingly the website has nice screenshots and much more text describing the game itself. Why isn’t this available in the game page on the phone when I’m considering a purchase?  Even the website descriptions are lacking the specifics I’d want to know to make a decision.

Second, the data usage warning is terrible. I get that they want to warn me about a potential charge, but how is the text they use going to help? I don’t know if the app actually uses airtime/minutes to play, or if that’s just for the download itself! I understand it is a lot of extra work to figure out a user’s plan in real-time (well, no, I don’t *really* understand it, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt), but a simple clarification of the English would be swell.

Finally, I think a lot more free trials would sell me a lot more applications. I’ve downloaded several of the ones that give me a free level to play, or a few minutes of playtime, and have actually purchased one game as a result. I am a big believer in putting some bait on the hook, as opposed to just throwing a hook in the water and saying “here fishie fishie fishie!”  Especially considering Verizon’s Get-It-Now system is a complete walled garden, I don’t think there’s a way to “steal” a game even if I wanted to!

For the record, I’ve purchased the following games: Sudoku (good version too), Diner Dash (fun, but a bit repetitive), Call of Duty 4 (I’m such a sucker, though it was simple and fun), Transformers (not much more than meets the eye), and Townsmen 3 (meh).  I’d really like to have a very simple Ultima-style RPG (think Ultima 2 or 4) that can be played in short, bite-sized amounts of time.  It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to figure it out even if I find one, but one can always hope…

The NYT feeds the Android/T-Mobile hype machine with a fairly tepid press-release-dressed-up-as-an-article, but this utterly craptastic piece of “analysis” cannot go unchallenged:

Apple’s iPhone has shaken the cellphone industry, partly because of its design, but mostly because AT&T and Apple have allowed owners to download any number of applications to their phones. That freedom to individualize a phone’s functions has helped increase the popularity of the iPhone.

Ummm, NO! Sure, the iPhone shook the celphone industry despite warnings (like this one from Palm CEO Ed Colligan) that making phones is hard and “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” But the iPhone launched without extensibility or third-party apps.

The iPhone began life as a closed platform. In January of 2007, Steve Jobs said “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform”. There were always plans to open the platform up, but for the majority of the time iPhones have been on this earth, if you wanted to put new programs on your iPhone, you had to jailbreak it. It wasn’t until recently, after a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and drama, that the iPhone platform was opened to outside development.

To say that the iPhone shakes the industry “mostly” because of its extendibility is demonstrably false. It shakes the industry because its a well-designed, well-integrated product in a market sector that’s gotten away with producing staid, nigh-unusable garbage for way too long. Which is why the article in question is so offensive – there’s plenty of opportunity for Google/Android ahead, and tons of other areas to focus on the notion of customer freedom. Why force-fit this story about the iPhone when it just isn’t needed?

Here’s to hoping that Google’s introduction of the Android platform will provide Apple with a worthy competitor—and push the industry to develop 21st century phones.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I think Blippr is pretty cool.

Blippr is a review service; you write short-form reviews of all kinds of things (books, movies, etc.)  In an oxymoronic set of circumstances that only the Internet can enable, “micro” services are becoming huge.  Twitter started a couple of years ago, and has become a popular (in the Valley, not in Kansas) “micro-blogging” service.  In 140 characters or less you give your followers a status update.  Some people use this for life-casting (i.e. I’m going to get a burrito) and others for starting conversations (i.e. what are the chances that Vista will stop sucking?).  In my opinion, the latter is a much more interesting use for the service.

Twitter is about “micro-blogging” because they have a strict limitation on your content – all posts must be 140 characters or less.  That’s as opposed to say WordPress, which is unlimited blogging (gurgitate to your heart’s content).   12seconds (which we’re involved in directly and which we posted about last month) also imposes a user constraint (twelve seconds, in case that wasn’t obvious.)  Blippr follows suit with a constraint of their own, 160 characters or less.

Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch wrote an article about Blippr a couple of weeks ago, which offers a fine summary of the product.  I just signed up for an account myself – want to be friends?  So far I’ve reviewed a couple of movies, Dark Knight and 300.  Blippr encourages reviews for all kinds of products, including movies, music, games, books, and more.  The restraints force you to be choosy with your words and even your characters.  (Might want to start liking the ampersand.)

I see lots of opportunities in this product to link out to other products and services, whether amazon book and music purchases, netflix movie rentals, booksfree book rentals, social networks likes Shelfari, Facebook, and more… the list is more or less never-ending.  Some of those deals could include affiliate deals that might even generate revenue, which is always a nice little bonus in an internet company.

I like the UI in Blippr.  When you type out a review, a blue bar below the text window indicates how much space you have left.  Where Twitter uses a numeric counter (which turns red and features a minus sign when you pass 140), I think the visualization of the blue bar is effective and more interesting to watch.

Blippr’s also done a great job of integrating other services; it’s quite easy to link your blips to your Twitter stream, to your FriendFeed, and to a myriad of other services.

There are a number of things I think BLippr could improve upon – doubtless they’ve considered these already, but I’ll voice them anyway.  I think it would be cool if you could embed blips, make a widget out of all my blips, specific genres of blips, etc.  It’d be nice to have the option to embed them directly on my blog, on a profile page, etc.

Also, SMS integration makes a lot of sense.  According to tehir Get Satisfaction page, that’s coming soon.  I can see a great deal of utility to that feature, especially in regards to a spontaneous interaction with something or other (i.e. I just walked out of Indiana Jones 4, and I’m so offended by the refrigerator scene that I want to tell the world RIGHT NOW!)  I get it, they don’t have the money / resources / infrastructure / developers etc.  yet.  But they need to add SMS soon.

I also think this is an appropriate complement to Yelp, and other restaurant / business review services.  I’d like to see them expand their focus (or create a sister service) that is dedicated to that market.   And lastly, outside access seems really important to me.  How can I dip into the Blippr-o-sphere on my mobile handset when I’m in line at the movie theater and the movie I wanted to see is sold out?  Or I am at Green Apple Books (Clement and 6th in San Francisco, check ‘em out) and I want someone’s opinion on a book.  A short, to-the-point opinion.

Overall, I think this service shows more promise than most “web 2.0″ (god I hate that term) companies.  I’m interested to see where it goes.  To the right I’ve embedded a screenshot of my (considerably) shorter review of Blippr, using Blippr.  Neat.

This is also posted at 1to10reviews.

$4 gas (in the northeast, anyway), bank collapses, sluggish economic growth, pundits predicting recessions, bear markets, $140 oil, $900 gold, rampant foreclosures, and a plummeting dollar!

Oh my.

But for those of you quaking at the specter of Depression, or waiting in line at a California bank to retrieve your hard-earned cash (where you are reading this post on your 3G-enabled mobile device, natch), or those who are convinced that their money is surely safer in a mason jar under the mattress than an FDIC-insured institution, let me offer these comforting statistics:

• On Friday and Monday (“work” days, high 80s and sunny in New York), people waited up to ten hours in line to buy a $300 cell phone.
• On Saturday and Sunday (89 degrees and sunny in New York), people waited up to ten hours in line to buy a $300 cell phone.
• As of 9 PM Monday night, there was not a single $300 cell phone (for which people waited up to ten hours in line) in the entire state of New Jersey. An intrepid reporter found that there were 21 states where one would have to suffer the indignity of not even being PERMITTED to wait up to ten hours in line to buy a $300 cell phone, because there were none to be had.

Don’t read this as an indictment of the people who stood in line. I’ll happily admit I know these wait times because, in my desperate need to 3G-ify myself, I made no fewer than five calls to various Apple stores over the weekend, even stopping by one on the way to the beach on Sunday to see whether their line was less than ten hours – it was, at a mere four, but they had capped the line because lucky Mr. Minute 240 represented the last phone they had in stock.

Folks, there is nothing to worry about. Our gadget-driven economy has never been stronger. As long as we fanboys can find both the scratch and the time, including taking a day off from work(!), to queue up by the sweaty thousands for a shot at the latest shiny bauble (OK, mobile communications device with blazing fast ^TM internet access, location-awareness, and a shiny, shiny interface), we can find a way to ensure tha the American economy remains a juggernaut. Jeremy posited that Apple is really the only company that can do hype right, but I don’t think he’s taken it far enough. Buttressed by Jobs-obsessed tech acolytes like you and me, the company has the ability to single-handledly (multi-touchedly?) drive the consumer engine of this great nation until our worries of collapsing mortgage giants and $100 fill-ups are things that we tell to our kids via a Sling application running on the latest 5G Apple iBrain.

But first things first: can someone give me a ride to the Apple store? I’m kinda short on gas money these days.