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Seven Days With a Galaxy Nexus

Announced in October and first sold in the US in December, this review of the Galaxy Nexus is late, even by my standards. But it took me longer than expected to get one, because AT&T still hasn’t offered it and I’m averse to spending north of $600 on a device whose shelf life is maybe two years and which is more likely to be lost, broken or stolen than a laptop. Switching to Verizon to get one wasn’t an option because they have no coverage on the island I currently live on: for better or for worse, I’m stuck with AT&T. And frankly, I’d prefer to have a GSM version of the phone; I don’t travel internationally a lot, but it happens enough that a CDMA handset would be suboptimal.

Eventually, I worked out an upgrade path. Purchase a Galaxy Nexus, then renew my contract with AT&T using my upgrade to get a subsidized Galaxy Note, which when sold on Craigslist or eBay should more than offset my cost for the Nexus. The net for the Nexus then, is my AT&T upgrade price: a far more palatable sum than $600+. Having used the phone for a week or so, here are my thoughts. In Q&A style, naturally.

Q: Why a New Phone?
A: I never loved my previous phone, a Nexus One, the way that I understand that Hilary Mason did. But it was – is still, in fact – a fine phone, if one showing its age. It was limited to 3G, but that wasn’t enough of an issue for me to upgrade. Instead, my primary issue with the phone was storage space. Unlike the Galaxy Nexus, the Nexus One allowed you to upgrade the onboard MicroSD card, so that you could expand – dramatically – the amount of available storage. But pre-Honeycomb versions of Android distinguished between internal and external storage. Later improvements allowed applications to be moved to the larger external storage card, but many – like Twitter – did not. With only 190 MB of available application storage, then, things got crowded. Crowded enough that by the end, when I wanted to install one application I had to pick another to uninstall. Which isn’t handy if part of your job is evaluating mobile applications. So a new phone was in the cards sooner or later.

Q: Why the Nexus?
A: First, because Android fits my needs better. Second, because I advantage Nexus devices.

Q: Taking those in order then, why Android?
A: A few reasons. First, most of my services usage is Google centric. I use Gmail, and we’re a Google Apps shop, my music collection currently lives in Google Music and so on. The integration of those services on Android is better than it is on competing platforms. Second, while I’ve been an iPhone user in the past, owning a first generation and then a 3GS and enjoying both, I prefer some of Android’s conventions, most notably the back button. Third, the competition. Apple still makes, in my opinion, the best devices, but their services don’t deliver the same experience. MobileMe was, by Apple’s own admission, a failure, and the early returns on iCloud and Apple’s second generation services are mixed. Which would be less of an issue if I wasn’t consuming these at an accelerating rate, but more on that later. As for Windows Mobile, they’ve gotten a lot of positive press lately, and while it’s generally well earned, this is enough to make Windows Mobile a non-option for me.

I kid, but only sort of. As I’ve told reporters repeatedly, Microsoft’s biggest problem in mobile isn’t product, but time. They were very late to market, and the result is a vicious cycle of fewer apps equals fewer sales equals fewer incentives for application developers to create new applications. We’ll see what role Nokia can play in changing those fortunes; for now, Windows Mobile wasn’t an option for me, and not just because my @hotmail.com address is my spam address.

Q: Ok, so why the Nexus?
A: A few reasons.

  • Google, while not Apple’s equal in software design and usability, is better at that than Samsung, HTC, Motorola and any of the other Android manufacturers. I have no more interest in what OEMs do to Android to differentiate themselves than I did in what Lenovo did to Windows. Features intended to differentiate are, you can be sure, not features put there solely for the user.
  • The Nexus line comes with full, uncrippled functionality. While iPhone users, for example, are required to pay extra for the ability to tether their connection, I can do that out of the box. And before someone says to the above that I could always swap a carrier ROM for something custom, I get that. But the days when I had time to sift through the various phone ROMs and play with various combinations for pleasure are, in all likelihood, gone.
  • Nexus devices are first inline for operating system updates; a not insignificant advantage given the well documented problems with Android version fragmentation.
  • Nexus devices are unlocked, so when I’m in Europe I pop in a different SIM: no need to pay for unlock codes from sketchy vendors on eBay.

Q: The GSM Nexus is HSDPA only. Didn’t you want LTE?
A: I actually have LTE on my tablet – itself a Google Experience device, and it is every bit as impressive as people say it is. It’s one of the fastest connections I’ve used outside of universities, in fact. I consistently get 13-15 down in LTE services markets. HSDPA, by contrast, has clocked in at a little less than half of that; 4-6 down, though I haven’t tested it in a major market yet.

But you know what? That’s more than enough. Besides being faster than what I had, it’s actually 2-3X faster than my DSL connection at the home office. Which, yes, is an indictment of our internet speeds on island, but also confirmation that I don’t need to get too greedy. LTE for my handset would probably be overkill, in fact. And given the battery life issues with LTE at the moment – its extremely thirsty – I’m happy to trade a few extra download ticks I won’t notice on a handset for more usable device time.

Q: The other major complaint about the Galaxy Nexus is the size. News.com’s Stephen Shankland, for example, would “exchange some screen size for a secure one-handed grip.” Any issues with the size?
A: I don’t have Koufax-sized mitts, but the size has been a non-issue for me. Every so often there’s a dialog in the extreme upper corner of a screen, which requires a bit of a stretch, but in general I haven’t noticed it. Part of that is the weight.

Q: What about the weight?
A: The first thing that people – iPhone users in particular – notice about the phone when I hand it to them is the weight, or rather the lackthereof. It’s a mere 5 grams lighter than the iPhone 4S, but because it’s physically larger the difference between expectation and actual makes it seem even lighter than it is.

Q: How about the camera?
A: It’s no match for the iPhone’s, as I understand such things; 5 megapixels. It’s fine for my basic usage, but I’d recommend against the Nexus if the camera’s a priority for you.

Q: How’s Ice Cream Sandwich?
A: It’s got its rough edges here and there, but I’m a fan. The notifications remain good, the application tray metaphor is a big step up from Gingerbread, and lots of little things have been improved like access to Settings and the voice recognition UI (the latter being one of Android’s most underrated features, IMO). Something long overdue – the ability to take screenshots – has finally been added, as well. Personally, I don’t notice the lag or latency that iOS users point to – it feels quick to me – but your mileage may vary.

I still don’t think believe it to be the equal of iOS, but I like it.

Q: What about the storage size?
A: This has been one of the more interesting epiphanies I’ve had; after thinking about it, I got the 16GB model. It used to be that I obsessed over the on device storage, because I wanted to have the majority of my music, at least, with me as I did on the iPod it replaced. These days? I’ve got maybe a gigabyte’s worth of music on the device, to be employed on planes, at the gym or other places I can’t get bandwidth. Otherwise? Everything is streamed, and I’m not worried about maxing the device out. The obvious problem with this is bandwidth costs, as I’ve written about before. If everything is streaming, your data consumption adds up quickly. According to the phone, in the last week Google Music is the leading bandwidth consumer at 151 MB. But what happens when I start watching NetFlix when I’m on the road? Or MLB.tv?

When I asked Google’s Andy Rubin about this at I/O, he was unconcerned, saying that we were a step function away from this being a non-issue. The Verge’s Chris Ziegler would, presumably, be skeptical of this claim. It will be interesting to see who’s right.

Q: How about something you don’t like about the phone?
A: The battery cover is flimsy and difficult to remove, which will be a problem if (when) I get a second battery. The placement of the headset jack on the bottom of the phone is also inconvenient; if you want to listen to music at the gym with the phone on a treadmill or elliptical and use the Kindle app at the same time, you’ll be doing so in landscape.

Q: Speaking of, how is the battery life?
A: I’ll know more when I’ve traveled with it, but when I get up in the morning, an hour and a half’s heavy usage knocks it down to around 70-75% from a full charge. Which theoretically means that if I’m not on the device constantly, I should get a full day out of the device. Even so, I will probably still employ a two battery system, the device’s suboptimal battery cover notwithstanding.

Q: What’s the thing I should do first when I get a Nexus or another Ice Cream Sandwich handset?
A: Install Chrome for Android and replace the stock browser. It’s a vast improvement, and if you’re using experimental builds of Chrome on the desktop, you can even access their tabs.

Q: Tl;dr – thumbs up or down?
A: Thumbs up. This is the first phone I’ve really liked since my first iPhone. If you can find one, I recommend it.

1 Comment

Categories: Carriers, Mobile Data, Smartphones.

By sogrady
— March 7, 2012 at 8:24 pm

Why I Got a MacBook Air

11" MacBook Air

Seven years ago this summer, I switched from Windows to Linux as my primary desktop operating system. And while there have been ups and downs, I have no real regrets about that decision. Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu, remains, in fact, the operating system on my primary machine, a Dell workstation.

But as of August 24th, I became a (part time) Mac user for the first time since college. Because I’ve been using Linux for so long, a few people have asked why I made the decision to get a Mac. This is my answer.

Hardware

It’s been said that Apple’s single biggest competitive advantage isn’t its devices, but rather its supply chain. The iPad revenue stream alone would support this argument, but the reality is that Apple can make better hardware, cheaper than anyone else. Like Jeff, the single most compelling reason to get a Mac was the hardware.

It’s not perfect – the battery life in particular on the 11″ Air (i7) is disappointing – but the overall package is light, performant and aesthetically attractive. It’s close to perfect for frequent travelers; the battery’s the only major flaw.

Unix

While I actually like Windows 7 – I have a few virtual instances of it running on my workstation – it’s not an option for me simply because I don’t want to deal with Cygwin. I’m not a developer, but I use a lot of tools that require a Unix core, so for me that means Linux or Mac. There are little differences between the userlands, but overall most of the scripts, libraries and applications I use on Linux run comfortably on the Mac out of the box.

OS X

I’m not as comfortable on OS X as I am on Linux, but that’s to be expected: I’ve been using the latter for seven years, the former for three months. I cannot, therefore, objectively evaluate the usability of OS X. Nor can I comment on the ‘bloat’ that frustrates Tim O’Reilly, as I have no basis for comparison.

I can say, however, that the Mac has been substantially less stable than anticipated. My MBA is crashing about once a week, where crashing means I’m required to power cycle the machine. Whether this is Apple’s fault or the fact that I push my hardware very hard isn’t clear, but either way the experience has not been as advertised.

In general, OS X is nothing more or less than opinionated software. It is heavily prescriptive, and while its approach is inconsistently successful, it is difficult to look at the application breadth and polish and build the case against. And love or hate their individual design decisions, like the omnipresent top menu (I’m not a fan), Apple is by most measures the best in the world at user experience.

Apps

One of the interesting discoveries of my brief Mac tenure has been that the App Store is, by and large, a failure. Of the 93 items in my Applications folder, the App Store claims to have installed 11. By rough count, then, 12% of my applications are installed and managed through the App Store. Anecdotally, this experience seems common; most of the people I speak with are not relying on the store as their primary installation mechanism. On Ubuntu, by contrast, all but a handful of my applications were centrally installed, managed and updated. The App Store application itself, meanwhile, has been buggy, particularly when installing or updating very large applications such as Xcode.

While the store experience has been poor, however, the individual applications themselves are impressive. Conventional wisdom argues that Mac apps are, as a rule, more polished aethetically than their Linux or Windows counterparts. In this case, the conventional wisdom has born scrutiny. Apple makes it comparatively easy for their developers to construct attractive applications.

Apple’s own apps, meanwhile, have exceeded my expectations. While the import/export options are disappointing, I already prefer Keynote to Powerpoint, which in turn I prefer to OO.o’s Impress. Numbers, meanwhile, is not a functional match for Excel, but from a charting perspective I find its graphs and visualizations far more appealing than the Excel defaults.

And then there are the applications that are available on OS X but not Linux, such as the Adobe Creative Suite.

The Net

I like the MacBook Air. The hardware is elite, and while the operating system occasionally frustrates, it’s generally well thought out and aesthetically without peer. I have no plans to abandon Ubuntu on my workstation, but I am somewhat concerned about the state of the user interface on that platform at present as the fragmentation of effort has negatively impacted its direction, in my opinion.

That said, OS X has its own challenges; when high profile users like Tim are frustrated, you have a problem. Bigger picture, there are concerns about Apple’s appetite for control of application delivery. If sandboxing is required, for example, for applications delivered through the App Store, the logical next is either requiring it for all applications or restricting installation to the store. Either of which would be problematic for developers and users alike.

In the meantime, however, I’m happy to have added OS X to my technical arsenal.

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Categories: Laptops.

By sogrady
— November 18, 2011 at 7:37 pm

Using the iPad as a spare battery. Any tablet?

I could write about five different iPad reviews – all on different aspects of the machine. For example – how the iPad inveigled its way into my wife’s affections with a game of Sodoku. But I wanted to say a little about the amazing battery life of the iPad.

Like my founding partner Stephen – I find the constant scurrying for plugs at conferences (and kvetching when there aren’t any) to be a real drag. So his talk of long battery life on the Android-based Motorola Xoom was compelling. Unlike Stephen however, I am not looking to replace my laptop as a note-taking device any time soon. But when Adobe gave me an iPad ( seriously! so I could keep tabs on their tooling for IoS) I started taking it to conferences to augment my ancient, creaking, two hour on a charge Thinkpad. I’d be sitting in a session taking notes when suddenly the Thinkpad shut down. When that happened I just pulled out the iPad and carried on taking notes. The cloud-based Evernote note-taking software is really helpful in this regard (thought not auto-saving on IoS sucks, and caught me out a couple of times).

As I travelled with the iPad I kept expecting it to run out of charge, but it never did. I would go away on Sunday, and still have juice left for a few games of Angry Birds on the flight home Thursday afternoon. Thing is with the iPad is that at rest, if its not registered on a wifi network, it just doesn’t draw any power. Taking a device on a trip without needing a charger – its like going back to the Nokia 6310i.

I explained here why the Dell Streak’s limited battery life is a deal breaker; so while Ian Lynch argues in a comment on that post that this won’t be the case for Android tablets in general I haven’t had any hands on experience yet. My HTC Desire phone is certainly power hungry, for example – and perhaps surprisingly Google Docs background sync is a big part of the problem there. Protip- turn off background updates when you’re travelling for better Android battery life.

To be fair, Android tablet reviews indicate power consumption on tablets is not a show stopper.

However in summary – the iPad basically won me over through the simple expedient of having really good power usage. When I took the iPad on holiday to Greece, and we had power cuts, my son could still have ten minutes of digital entertainment.  And so on.

Am I still in the market for an Android tablet? At some point sure. I am an Android. But the family has certainly taken to the iPad, and it sure makes a great spare battery.

 

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Categories: Tablets.

By jgovernor
— July 5, 2011 at 3:10 pm

Withings Scale

Withings scale

The problem with scales is their ephemeral nature: it reads your weight and once you step off, the measurement is gone. You can record it, but that seems so tedious. The Withings scale neatly solves this problem: it’s a scale for the app generation. First, it’s connected to wifi so it uploads your weight to the cloud, as it were, where it keeps a historic record. Not only is there a website, but also a iPhone and iPad apps with nice graphs of your weight and the the other measurements it tracks.

These other measurements seem like some kind of voodoo: lean mass and fat mass, some kind of BMI thing. I don’t really trust that those can be measured through your feet, so just ignore them (clearly from my not knowing what they are).

It works with more than one person, too. It tries to identify by weight, and the weights are too close, the scale asks you to step on the left or right side to identify yourself.

Withings iPhone app

There are some awkward things: the scale is so pretty, with a glass top that you’re alway afraid you’ll break it; the setup over a USB cable is weird (there’s an iPhone way to do this, but I stopped short of doing it least I screw it up); and you have to wait around 30 to 60 seconds between measurements.

But overall, if you’ve always found scales kind of not, well, updated to the rest of the world, you’ll like the Withings Scale. I actually find it very helpful my weight losing: it’s fun to take your weight and check out the pretty graphs. Once you build up several months of data, it gets even better.

I got the scale as a birthday gift, my wife knowing what kind of dork I can be. It’s expensive, compared to unwired scales, but I’d go for it.

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Categories: Uncategorized.

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By cote
— May 17, 2011 at 1:08 am

The iPad Revisited – a liminal device

When nerds pack

After several months with a tablet, the iPad, and trailing different uses, I revisit where an how it fits into my daily workflow and life.

The iPad finds itself most useful to me as a second computer. I leave my laptop – my “main” computer at work and just use my iPad and iPhone at home. From time to time I borrow Chrome with sync on my wife’s laptop (getting all my settings, plugins, and such through sync), but the platform provided by my two iOS devices gives me everything I actually need at home in the evenings and weekends.

Those needs are simple: checking email, checking my calender for what meetings I have tomorrow, reading news (GReader’s mobile web), taking notes in Evernote, bookmarking in Pinboard.in (mostly via email), Flipboard, and entering to do items in OmniFocus. I don’t print or edit pictures or movies, do much with music (which I miss a great deal), or even have a reliable way to get podcasts.

I’ve used the iPad as a travel device, and it’d doable, esp. with the Zagnut keyboard case I have (that case suffers from two things: being $100 and not having a way to “lock” the iPad in while using it, meaning the iPad easily falls out). I actually type a lot “on the road,” using the lonely time away from family and the open schedules to write in the evenings and during the day – but also, writing in near-real time during keynotes and conference sessions…drafting, at least.

I’ve stopped bringing just my iPad on trips as I did for awhile. The portability of an iPad isn’t too appealing, but the battery life (4-6 hours) looks tasty. Portability doesn’t matter too much as I have MacBook Air so size and weight isn’t much a problem as other laptops (I have a Samsung QX, for example, that would be I’ll suited for light-weight travel). And while I’d love to have my iPad with me, I leave it at home if I’m bringing my Air: it’s just a bit too much to have both.

Recently, I’ve noticed that my iPhone (3gs) is the primary device I use at home: I can go days without getting the iPad out of the drawer. Email, Kindle, OmniFocus, Evernote (I wrote the first draft of this post on the iPhone), and GReader works just fine on the phone. I miss having Flipboard though. The iPhone is really “the remote for the cloud”: if you have most of your services and files in the cloud, as I do with things most things I use, that metaphor works.

In truth, I end up spending less time “on the computer” in this laptoplass, tablet-lite mode. I still use computers all the time: there’s lots of Google TV for Netflix, for example. To some extent, I do “create” less, but that’s more my chosen laziness than the form-factors fault. And, creating is for work, where there’s plenty of time for all sorts of things like marking up blogs posts (HTML or otherwise formatted text on iOS is still terrible compared to a real computer), or video and podcast editing that require a “work-station,” not just a desktop.

The verdict: the iPad is a fun, useful device as I’m sure most modern tablets would be. Reading text off it is not only fun, but productive. Apps like Flipboard actually make you more productive, and if you wire-up all of your services to the cloud, the overall system is working well for accessing the data and services you need (see all the apps mentioned above). If you have one of those lurking, dark-plastic covered laptops, the iPad is going to be a much better travel computer and you should try it out. Similarly, if you’re carrying your laptop back and forth to work, chances are you could just leave it at work (if the software you need to use allows for it) and rely on the iPad and/or iPhone.

(Having just gotten a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 at Google I/O, it’ll be interesting to revisit all this after using an Android-based tablet. It’ll be fun to see if my “10 things iPad rivals must do to compete with the Apple” piece holds and water.)

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Categories: Tablets.

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By cote
— May 10, 2011 at 10:37 pm

Google Voice iPhone App

Google Voice is an excellent service, but the iPhone app is too slow to be usable.

I’d been waiting for the release of the Google iPhone App for a long time. I’ve used the service for many years and find it incredibly useful: call screening, ringing all your phone at once, call recording, the (relativly new) click to call funcionalty in Chrome, and the record keeping are just some of the things I like about the service. The issue was always that you really couldn’t use it from you phone, it was overly clunky and overall not worth it.

Sadly, even though there’s an app, that’s still the case for one reason: the Google Voice app is slow, in almost all dimensions that matter.

Opening the app itself is slow: I often wait several seconds with waiting for the white-screen of waiting to get filled in with contacts to dial.

Dialing someone take much too long: there’s some sort of telco hack going on that with dialing other numbers and connecting you to the original number, but, you know, I’m not interested in dancing bears.

And then there’s a slow design: to call someone, you had to select their name and then select dial. On the iPhone, you just tap their name. This my seem petty, but two step dialing adds up, and having one step dialing is helpful in the car, on a bike, or while you’re otherwise not moving.

The txting interface is odd too: when you’re staring a new txt, it likes using phone numbers instead of names and doesn’t auto-complete on typing in names.

Aside from a couple odd UI workflow choices (like double-step dialing and txting), the overall patterns of use are nice. There’s push notifications for txt messages, the history log is exactly what you’d like, you can browse the voicemail transcripts (and listen to them). There’s things I’d love to see like integration with my GMail and GCal accounts to show me information about people I’m on the phone with (from calling or being called). Here, I really like what Windows Phone 7 has with its integrated Facebook and, soon, Twitter information about contacts.

Google knows most everything about me and my contacts, and it’d be very helpful if Voice integrated that info together. Of course, oddly enough, Google isn’t very good at integrating all its services together: they seem to suffer from high silo walls that prevent such integration – just guessing.

The final verdict

After using the app as my primary phone interface for several months, I finally switched back thinking, “I just want dialing to be fast and easy.” And with the native iOS phone app, it is. There’s much potential with the Google Voice app, but without fixing the performance issues, using the app is not worth the waiting.

1 Comment

Categories: Apps.

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By cote
— May 10, 2011 at 10:29 pm

Android at Google I/O 2011 – GearMonk #003

Press Q&A

We’re at Google I/O this week and after the day one keynotes, Stephen and I sit down and go over the Android related news (plus Google Music and Movies). In addition to just going over the news with our commentary; we discuss why this platform play might work better for Google than it did for Sun, Adobe, Microsoft, and the others who’ve tried and are trying; we wrap-up by exploring what Google’s “grand strategy” might be with all this stuff that doesn’t seem directly tied to revenue.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

We’ll try to get a recording in of day two, which we predict will be mostly about Chrome, Google’s platform for (web) application development, more or less.

Disclosure: See the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Podcast, Smartphones, Tablets, Uncategorized.

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By cote
— May 10, 2011 at 9:55 pm

First Pass at Amazon’s Cloud Drive

The Good

  • Pricing is excellent. More generous with free storage (5 GB) and substantially cheaper ($140 less per year than Dropbox at 100 GB) than the competition. Options are straightforward and fairly tiered.
  • There’s no new Cloud Drive Android client: it’s just an update to the existing Amazon MP3 store application. Interestingly, it will play your existing music as well as streams from Cloud Drive. The interface is clean, but the store integration adds clutter and an extra click.
  • Cloud Player played the sample MP3 (Think You Can Wait by The National) I loaded via Chrome without incident both on the browser and Android (Xoom). Network connection was DSL.
  • Music purchased through the Amazon MP3 store does not count against your storage capacity.

The Bad

  • As far as I can tell, at present Cloud Drive offers no synchronization, meaning that you have to load Cloud Drive manually. This alone makes Cloud Drive a non-starter for me. Expecting users to load files and media by hand – after every purchase or update to local files – just isn’t realistic. Sync is what makes Dropbox worth paying for.
  • Service is US only, apparently. Or more accurately, anything but the 5 GB free plan is. Terms for Cloud Player aren’t as clear, but my Twitter stream is full of frustrated non-US voices.
  • No video locker. The ability to store and stream my hundreds of gigabytes of movies and TV would have been worth paying for. Music, on the other hand, is a mostly solved problem.
  • Music previously purchased through the Amazon MP3 store is not automatically inserted in your library: it has to be reuploaded.

The Ugly

  • The Android application explicitly warns users that it streams audio at its original bitrate, reminding them that they’re responsible for all data charges. In addition, the application allows users to set both delivery and streaming preferences, including wifi only. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: streaming services and mobile data pricing are on a collision course, and it’s going to get ugly. Many users will either not be aware of the difference between mobile data streaming and wifi or ignorant of the potential cost of overages, with the inevitable result being some potentially outrageous overage charges.

    None of which is Amazon’s fault, of course. But it seems likely that some portion of their user base will at some point hold Amazon partially responsible for an ugly monthly bill from their carrier.

The Net

  • Amazon Cloud Drive is interesting, and certainly the first of many streaming services to come, but the lack of sync is a full stop omission for my usage. It just isn’t compelling enough at this point to for me to consider leaving Dropbox. Ideally, Amazon’s entrance will apply some downward pricing pressure to the market, but it projects to have little utility for me otherwise.

1 Comment

Categories: Mobile Data, Streaming.

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By sogrady
— March 29, 2011 at 6:20 am

The tablet round-up: iPad, Xoom, Streak – GearMonk #002

We sit down and go over the state of tablets, looking at three specific ones, the iPad, Xoom, and Dell Streak.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Some of the topics we cover are:

  • Tablet-scape
  • What are the use cases for tablets? Reading stuff, mostly.
  • iPad 2 – does it have enough new to buy if you already have an iPad?
  • Xoom – Stephen’s gonna keep it! And, see the write-up of his first seven days.
  • How does tablet Android compare to Android for phones? Multi-tasking stands out as a big difference.
  • Media on the Xoom – generally pretty bad.
  • Then, the Dell Streak – more of a fun curiosity than a practical device?
  • …and, finally: pricing across tablets.

Disclosure: Dell sent us a few Streaks to look at and is a client.

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Categories: Podcast, Tablets.

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By cote
— March 17, 2011 at 12:23 pm

Old-school & faceless – Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate

Das Keyboard, opening

Two things can be said about the Das Keyboard:

  1. It exactly the old school feel it advertises itself as and feels really comforting to use if you grew up with old, IBM keyboards.
  2. It’s loud.

This is the keyboard that’s modeled after old keyboards, spec’ed out with all sorts of mechanical keys, a full key-set, and much mentioned “German Engineering.” There’s even gold involved! It’s the anti-Apple keyboard, and it delivers on the tactical feel of an old IBM keyboard like you wouldn’t believe. With this comes a loud “clacking” (there’s a softer version). The loudness and the expense ($129) are the only negatives, really.

I checked out the Ultimate keyboard, the one without letters printed on it. I mean, isn’t that what you really want to know: can I type on a blank keyboard? In addition to myself, I lent it to two other people who tried it out, a programmer and a startup CEO. I used this with my MacBookAir: all I needed to do was remap the control and alt keys to match the Apple-layout using OS X’s keyboard preferences.

Using It

The full, 104 key keyboard is something of a spiritual opposite of the keyboard I usually use, and Apple wireless chopped keyboard. I’m no trained touched-typist, having learned some odd, fore-fingers, pinkies and thumbs style long ago. Nonetheless, typing without the letter printed on each key was surprisingly easy. There’s the lesser used secondary keys that I’d have to look up or hunt out some times (quick, which key is “^” on?) and not being a user of anything beyond the core keys I have no idea what’s over on the right side of the keyboard.

The programmer I loaned it out to liked the idea of a blank keyboard to help him learn Dvorak. However, that same coder bemoaned the lack of volume and other “media” keys. Arguably, those can just be mapped to various function keys. Nonetheless, given the $129 price-point he compared it to a “$30 Dell keyboard” that had a volume knob and such. If you’re out for all that whiz-bangery on your keyboard, this is definitely not the keyboard for you.

The feel of the keyboard is the main thing here, though. After all, you can get a Das Keyboard with letters printed on it (which is what I’d probably do if I got one, actually). The keyboard has the heft of one of those old beasts that you could pound nails in with – it makes me think of the hefty (metal encased?) keyboards that my dad had with his IBM XT and then AT “machines,” as he’d call those early desk-tops.

There’s a two port hub built into the keyboard which I didn’t get a chance to test. That’s a nice addition, though.

Clicking

The clicking is more than audible, it’s loud once you “get going.” In fact, the CEO I lent it to said he didn’t even get a chance to plug the keyboard in because his co-workers heard him fiddling with it and said “dude, that’s too loud.” When I showed the keyboard to another coder in my building, he said an old co-worker of his had one and that he’d have to put earphones on when the keyboard started up.

I didn’t mind the clicking too much, really, but I sit in my own office.

The Gist

After using the keyboard, I went back to using my Apple keyboard. I like the Apple keyboard because of it’s size: it’s the size of a laptop keyboard without the number-pad and friends. I don’t use the number-pad or other keys and that part of the keyboard takes up the space I’d rather have my mouse on. I really did like the feel of the Das Keyboard – it felt like doing real “work,” not just typing. Serious business, click, click, CLICK!. I definitely wouldn’t pay $129 for it, but if you’re the type of person who lusts for this kind of keyboard, I don’t think that amount would be too rich: the feel of the Das Keyboard is exactly what you’re hoping it will be.

Side-note: if you’re at SXSW, check out the Das Keyboard IronGeek event they’re having (see the fancier, official page for it). One of the contestants insisted on Dvorak even.

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Categories: Accessories.

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By cote
— March 11, 2011 at 9:20 pm