Watch live video from Jeremy Toeman on Justin.tv

If you are unfamiliar with the term, read my friend Harry’s article for a great piece on “the fanboy“.  Now, onto the piece – which I anticipate bringing me tons of annoyed Android folks (much like my tablet rant did last year).

I started using Android last December with the HTC Droid Eris.  My decision came after watching a friend really enjoy the use, a small amount of personal hands-on time, and the excitement about the platform itself.  Eight months later, and other than the vision of an open platform for smartphones, I have nothing but disdain for the current Android phone landscape.  I find the devices crude and clunky, the product experience weak, and the overall state of the platform in “advanced beta” at best (if enough people clamor in the comments, I’ll write another post on just that topic).  Granted, I am a product purist and I have one of the weaker Android devices on the market, but I’ve had a chance to use every one of the current “state of the art” phones other than the Droid 2, and my opinions remain the same.

Yet they are selling them by the bucketful.  So I can’t possibly be right on this, as 20+ million other people are defying my belief that the phones themselves are lousy and barely usable.  Or can I?  After lots of discussions with Android users, I’ve divided up the Android world into the following buckets:

• Android Newbies: This group is new to the Android experience, and are probably very happy with their experience, despite lots of frustrating glitches at times.  Why?  Most of them are upgrading from feature phones (the industry term for a non-smartphone), and this is likely their very first experience to having the magic of Interwebbing on their phones.  What’s not to love?  That part comes soon.
• Android Haters: Having used their Android device for weeks-to-months, they have come to notice all its shortcomings, ranging from inconsistent back button use to awkward keyboards to erratic input sensitivity, all things they failed to really notice during the 30 day window to return the phone with no commitment.  Furthermore, they are likely annoyed that their phone became outdated in less than 90 days since purchase – a phenomenon not well appreciated by tens of millions of people, despite what the tech community thinks. They/we are trapped, waiting, hoping, watching…
• Android Fanboys: The folks who think Android just freakin’ rocks, man.

What’s wrong with a Fanboy? Nothing at all.  I have nothing but good feelings for anyone who loves any product, platform, service, etc – it’s fun to love stuff.  However, I’m more than a little concerned about (1) more newbies buying products they shouldn’t, (2) building up the “Awesomeness” of the platform to the tech industry, when it’s not really at the same caliber as it could be (and indirectly letting device makers off the hook to build better products), and most importantly – (3) my phone sucks and I’m pissed, so this is my chance to vent.

Here’s some tips how to tell the Fanboys from the rest. Take it all with a grain of salt.

• They preach about openness.  The Android fanboy will tell you multiple times about how the platform is open and how that’s a great benefit to everyone. Let’s be totally blunt for a second: the average technology user cares about “open” products roughly zero.  If they did, then companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc would never have become the behemoths they are.  Openness is great in theory, and in very specific instances can be a huge factor, but it is not, in and of itself, a “benefit”.  My “open” phone has a lousy app marketplace, requires third-party software to be regularly usable, has no inherent easy way to play media files, and actually shipped with not one, but two different native email applications (one of which actually disappeared on its own during the last software update).
• They show you widgets. “Look ma, its the weather! On my Phone!” Android devices are capable of displaying widgets, which are unquestionably one of the coolest things about Android.  But there’s only a few really useful widgets, and they do not, in any way, make up for the rest of the Android experience.  I have a widget called “Agenda”.  When I view it, it takes up to 5 seconds to show me my agenda (during which it doesn’t say “loading agenda”, it says “NO agenda”.).  Ditto for my Stocks widget, Mail widget, etc.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the widgets, but they alone do not a good phone make.
• They ignore the little details. My “send text message to my wife” shortcut on my home screen is very cool (shortcuts, after widgets, are a very cool element of Android).  But when I click on it, it brings me to a “send message” screen, with my cursor highlighting the “To” field, resulting in me starting to write my text in the wrong place (it should be the “message” field).  Not a big deal, right?  There’s tons of them. Now compound that little experience to all experiences and you’ll get a better picture.  It’s as if every edge possible could be the rough version.  But Fanboys don’t care, they’ll trivialize these nuances or tell you they’ll be fixed in an upcoming version (more on that in a moment).  Here’s the thing: it’s the little things that matter when it comes to product experience!  If every single time I send a text message I have to go through an inconvenience, how on earth can this be “awesome”?
• They know the difference between Android versions and implementations. For those unaware, Android is a rapidly evolving platform, which at the surface sounds really great.  But it isn’t great to most consumers who are buying phones for their use now, and who don’t want to have to think about things getting fixed in the future.   I’d make the analogy to early days of Windows, except when you buy a Dell or an HP (or, shudder, a Vaio – wow, been a while since I went there!), you get a product that works consistently, with some extremely subtle nuance in specific applications.  In Android, a Froyo with Sense is different than an Eclair with Blur.  Yup, that was a technically accurate statement. The problem here is the very core, the baseline experience simply isn’t good enough, and Google is trying to fight the very upstream battle in mobile of getting manufacturers to not differentiate against each other.  Lastly, since there’s upgrades coming all the time, it’s impossible to know if the phone you buy today will do the things Android is promised to one day do.
• They justify carrying huge phones. Have you seen the Evo or Droid X?  Massive.  Practically as big as my iPad (no, not really, calm down).  Maybe if the platform included a great video delivery experience (translated: or any video experience) this would make sense.  Instead, you get a huge brick and are left to figure out what to do with it on your own. Worst of all, the bigger phones are the “good” ones, leaving consumers with the awkward decision between buying something convenient versus a house phone. The moment a device isn’t pocket-sized, it’s competing against non-phones, but yet the Fanboys overlook this every time.  And if carnies can’t hold it, I don’t want it either.  And while I’m at it, can someone explain how 2-3 hours of use with a fully charged battery is considered acceptable??
• They make a big deal out of commonplace stuff. Here’s a recent review of the HTC Hero, which used no fewer than three sentences to praise the headphone jack.  Yes, the headphone jack.  And so you don’t have to read it, just know – it’s just a headphone jack!  In the words of a fanboy: Woot!1!!
• They get excited about hot-sounding but generally impractical features. Translating voice into text messages?  Sounds awesome.  Now use it.  This piece sums it all up nicely.  In all truth, you really can build some amazing things with Android, I don’t deny that at all.  But if you don’t have the basics working amazingly well, it doesn’t matter.  It’s like having sprinkles on your hot fudge sauce on your ice cream on your 7 layer cake only to find out the cake is liver-flavored.

And now for the clincher

They compare against the iPhone, all the time.  Greatness is defined by what you are, not by what something else is or isn’t.  I wrote this entire post without referencing the iPhone (until now), as I have no interest in comparing the two (I personally have never owned an iPhone, for the record).  I have no idea what Android does “better” than an iPhone, I don’t care, as it doesn’t improve my experience one bit.  But Fanboys do.  Fanboys can’t not bash the iPhone to make a point (here’s an article with 18 references to the iPhone alone). The iPhone being a closed system doesn’t help me decipher bizarre icons littering my experience.  The iPhone dropping calls doesn’t help me accidentally hang up on callers because the logic to process touch events handles them after rendering new activities (translation: I am clicking a button on the screen, a call comes in, and the place I had just clicked was “ignore call”, and the phone decides that my click was to ignore the call, not whatever I was doing before.  This is poor design).  The iPhone having a death grip doesn’t make my onscreen keyboard more usable.  So I’ll say it again: Greatness is defined by what you are, not by what something else is or isn’t.

It’s been official since a tweet last week, but the i-stage website was updated today to reveal this year’s judges/mentors, and I’m extremely excited to have my name in the list.  Other judges this year are Richard MacManus (founder of ReadWriteWeb) and Frank Gruber (founder of TECH Cocktail), and previous judges have included Blake Krikorian (my boss and mentor at Sling Media, currently living mostly off the grid), Ryan Block (founder of GDGT, former editor-in-chief at Engadget), Natali Del Conte (CNET), Ross Levinsohn (Fuse Capital), Jeff Pulver (involved in pretty much everything), and more!  Needless to say, I’m honored to have my name in this list of esteemed technologists!

This is neither my first foray with i-stage nor first judging with CES.  Last year I was a judge for the prestigious Innovations awards.  Two years ago I was working with team Boxee when they went to, and subsequently won, the inaugural i-stage event!  This plus the three “best of CES” awards I’ve been involved in, and I’d say I’m quite excited about being on the other side of things this year!

We haven’t seen this year’s list of contestants (still two days to enter), but I’m excited to see what’s up-and-coming in gadget land (especially since I like to think I’m already involved with most of the new stuff – so this makes it even more intriguing).  I’ll put together some thoughts and recommendations on what contestants should (and should not) do to increase their odds at winning (and while cash is nice (kidding!!!!), I’m more interested in impressive technology and great product experiences).

Despite adopting digital cameras in the late 90′s, I managed to lose my pre-2003 library somewhere along the way (hence my quintuple backups, including online and offsite copies). That said, I have over 15,000 digital pictures in my iPhoto library, and average 300 or so new images per month, not to mention the videos stored along side them. At this point, the library is so large it’s right on the edge of being completely unusable.

Scrolling through images? Useless. Manually creating albums? If I don’t do it as I sync the camera, it never happens. Events? Nearly worthless. Browsing through photos on my Xbox? Actually impossible. About all I know is I DO have safe backups, and if I’m willing to scroll enough, the photos are all there to view, print, etc. Which I basically never do.

Further, the actual size of my library is now so big (125gb) I had to move it to a USB drive. And as cameras continue to improve, or as people adopt more DSLRs and video recording devices, collection sizes will grow out of manageable sizes.

And this is a problem that actually notably worsens every month.

So what’s to be done about it? Here’s what I propose:

1) Photo management tools must become capable of comprehending multiple file storage locations.
A user should be able to divvy up their collection across local, USB, and networked drives, and have clear comprehension of how to manage this. Maybe I keep my “recent” and “favorites” on the laptop, the “last year” on a USBdrive, and all the rest on a networked drive (or secondary USB drive, or both). Further, this must be implemented in such a way that a user can easily figure out where stuff is, in a non-technical fashion.

2) Photo tools must have independent, intelligent, automatic, redundant backup services
There are no files I have that are more important to me than my pictures. In fact, my photos become *more* important over time, and as the collections grow, *more* likely to have problems (data corruption, loss, etc). Backup should not be an afterthought, it should be a required element of the environment – plus it’s a great upsell opportunity for virtually all involved providers. On a related note, the management tools should effectively inventory my entire collection, and warn me if any given subset is at risk.

3) The introduction of new photo organization paradigms
While all the apps do effectively decent jobs at creating events, albums, albums within albums, folders, timelines, tags, favorites, and more, it’s simply not enough.  Which makes sense, given that in all reality, this is a problem the photo world hasn’t really faced before for typical users.  In the past, the only people with tens of thousands of photos were professional photographers, who never really need to manage or even access all of them simultaneously.  The digital photo management world is only slightly more powerful than print photo albums and shoeboxes full of pictures.  We need new concepts in how we’ll organize pictures (and incidentally, making users tag them, is not the answer).  I’m personally still noodling on the concept, and have yet to come up with something – but I trust there are better data/knowledge management folks out there than myself.

4) Video must become a side-by-side feature to photo management
Whether it’s video capture built into a digital camera or a standalone device like a Flip, users are increasingly creating video libraries.  And much like our photo libraries, the files are disorganized, not easily searchable, and have no strong mechanisms for organization beyond simple file/folder/date concepts.   Since there’s a high likelihood of people creating even more videos in the future than they do today, this problem must be addressed in parallel to the photo one.

There it is, my “manifesto” for personal photo management software.  Looking forward to seeing the future of iPhoto, Picasa, and other mainstream tools for what is clearly an impending mainstream problem!

Since three of the four people in my office didn’t realize that FaceTime isn’t enabled by default, we thought it would be nice to share the simple, but easily over-looked aspect of how to actually turn it on for anyone with an iPhone 4.  And yes, I am jealous, but I’m on Verizon and that’s not changing anytime soon (though I think my Android phone is heading to the trashbin fairly soon – more on that another time).  Also, I think this post will do really well for my blog’s SEO purposes, which is great because of all the ads I show.  Oh, wait…  Anyhow, here you go:

When you first get your iPhone and make a call, it’ll look like the old iPhone call screen:

Don’t fret, you are merely 4 clicks away from Facetime!  First, go to home, then settings:

Then click on “Phone” settings.  Now you’ll see a big happy shiny button to enable FaceTime.  Do so.

Now the next time you make a call, you’ll see the FaceTime button dead-center in the middle.  And all will be well in your world!

We had a little debate about if this should’ve been enabled by default or not. I think we all agreed it seemed a bit odd to start disabled, but I’m sure there was some reason behind it, possibly due to privacy, bandwidth concerns, etc.  Once FaceTime is enabled, you’ll also notice a slight change in your call history:

I wonder if a future version of iOS will enable FaceTime voicemails or recording?

Anyhow, hope this was helpful to those who didn’t want to have to use the official Apple FaceTime tryout number!  :)

Lots of musing yesterday that the new Mac Mini is a “Apple TV in disguise.”  It’s not.  Here’s why:

According to Facebook, I have over 400 friends.  According to the number of people with whom I share personal things, go out for drinks, have over for dinner, call to catch up, and otherwise consider “Friends”, that number is off by a long shot.  So I’m going to fix it, and I’ll explain why.

I consider myself quite a social, yet private person (yes, privacy matters, and is not going away anytime soon).  I speak at a good number of public events, am decently well known in the tech industry, and am generally “out there”.  But I don’t like to share my personal life with everyone, partially because I don’t think everyone cares, but mostly because I consider my life private.  I neither need nor want “the world” to know whether I go for a bike ride with my kids, have a date night with the wife, catch up with an old friend over a beer, or any other “regular living” activity.  But it’s deeper than that.

I firmly resent the notion that I am supposed to have to include anyone and everyone I’ve ever met into my personal life, and even if it’s considered an industry faux pas, I simply don’t care anymore.  I have plenty of vehicles for communicating anything remotely work/tech/industry related, and plan to continue to use them.  Facebook, for me, is supposed to be my personal network, not my professional one.

So here’s my new Facebook friend policy:

• Actual Friends, not “friendly acquaintances”
• Current Friends, not “people I kinda knew in high school”
• Work people I go out with socially, not “someone I met at a conference and exchanged business cards”
• etc

In the next few days, I’ll be UNfriending anyone who doesn’t make the above list.  This might sound harsh or alienating, but I like to live my life assuming everyone has enough self-esteem.  I don’t look at this as rejection, and I hope anyone who gets unfriended doesn’t think of it that way either – it’s not.  Just because I like someone and have a professional relationship with them doesn’t mean we’re Friends.

While I might be an “early rejector” I fundamentally believe I won’t be the last, and most folks will come around the conclusion that they need to separate out their personal lives from the professional. While there will be many who have some blend (I believe I’ll be in that camp),  It really never should’ve gotten so far out of hand in the first place. I hope my actions can help others who are feeling the same way, but scared of the potential backlash.

Watch live video from Jeremy Toeman on Justin.tv

Summarizing my video, my predictions:

New iPhone, possible OS X and/or iWork update, lots of stats, demo’s of iPhone 4.0 OS, no cheap Apple TV refresh, no iPhone on Verizon

Links I reference in the video:

• Business Insider (predictions)
• PC World (predictions)
• Engadget coverage of WWDC 2009
• List of 7 iPhone 4.0 tentpoles