The First Lethal Weapon is Great But UltraViolet Is Not

Somewhere in my vast travels across the internets yesterday, I came across an offer for a free movie simply for setting up an UltraViolet account. Fair enough. The selection wasn't spectacular, but one of the choices was Lethal Weapon, one of my favorite movies as a youth. UltraViolet is the entertainment industry attempt at 'freeing' your content by making movies and tv shows you purchase available on a variety of platforms while at the same time maintaining Digital Rights Management.

The good news is twenty five years after its release, Lethal Weapon is still a great movie and kicks ass over most of the crap coming out of Hollywood today. (It helps to pretend that you don't know how horrible Mel Gibson is in real life.) Additionally the download speeds and playback quality were on par with anything else out there.

However getting to the point of starting the movie download was an adventure in a bad user experience. The promo was somehow tied to Flixter so you had to set up a Flixter account, which seems only possible if you want to connect it to Facebook. Then you have to set up a UltraViolet account. Then it says the movie is not available for download until December (this past December? next December?). Then you have to link your Flixter account with your UltraViolet account. Then I had to download the 'Flixter Collection for Adobe Air.' (after updating Adobe Air of course!) Then the UI was underwhelming so I had to search the Flixter Collections app for how to download. Finally I figured out how to download and it did so in a reasonable amount of time. It was easily a good 10 minutes to actually get to the point of starting the download.

Now think about how easy it is to buy a movie on iTunes or Amazon or to Bit Torrent a movie. The overriding thought in my head while I was going thru all this: "I'm getting to old for this shit."

The Right to Civil Disagrements

I was recently watching an episode of What the Tech (a great show featuring Andrew Zarian and Paul Thurrott). In this episode they were discussing their choices for the worst of technology for 2011.

One of Paul’s ‘worst’ for 2011 was Google Plus, and he was very harsh. Being a big fan and user of G+ I immediately bristled. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” I said to myself. A bit upset as I have a ton of respect for Paul’s take on technology, I continue to listen. Later in the show he starts to talk about the Kinect for Xbox and how much of a disappointment it is. Now I’m feeling a bit better as I am a Playstation 3 owner and fan. Later in the show he had a point about Apple I liked alot (especially since I am an Android fan). Suddenly I stopped myself. Is my opinion based solely on my level of like/dislike of a certain company or technology.

So I went back and listened to what Paul said about G+. While I still disagree with his overall conclusion about G+, he actually brought up a couple of points that made me rethink a couple of things. I think too often in the Techosphere we let our fanboyism and certainty of our rightness close ourselves off to legitimate difference of opinion. Worse, it all too often leads to incivility.

All this made me think about how the Techosphere can be pretty hypocritical. While we stomp our feet about how horrible SOPA is and how it threatens our freedom of speech, we often don’t provide a civil arena to practice that freedom of speech. Whether it be big name bloggers going after each other or fanboys hurling personal insults in comments because someone has the temerity to not like everything Apple/Google/Microsoft/Amazon does, we aren’t always good stewards of the rights we demand. Too often we are dismissive of opinions and points simply because they are critical of a company we admire.

Why Android Fragmentation Doesn't Matter

One of the stories kicking around Techmeme during this usually slow news week after Christmas is renewed talk about how Android updates are all over the place, how it is a huge problem for Android, and how Samsung is screwing the owners of the original Galaxy phones:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-android-updates-are-a-mess-its-the-business-model/4300?pg=2
http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/12/23/the-galaxy-s-not-getting-ics-isnt-a-samsung-problem-its-an-android-problem/
http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/23/2657492/samsung-touchwiz-fails-customers?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Thing is, it doesn’t matter. Here’s why:

Let’s start with the original Galaxy phones from Samsung-who announced this week that this line will not be getting the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update. These phones, give or take a couple of weeks, were released 18 months before ICS. So a line of phones nearing two years old, where a vast majority of owners will be eligible for new phones starting this summer, that has been upgraded at least once and in most cases twice, that has just enough power and ram to only run a pure install of ICS, is an example of the impending Android Apocalypse? My guess is that if Samsung actually updated all of it’s Galaxy phones to a pure install of ICS, it would please one percent of customers and leave the 99% of the normal non-geek customers dazed and confused.

I own a Samsung Captivate running Android 2.2 and am happy with both the software and hardware. It would be nice if I get the 2.3 update, but if I don’t...no biggie. And I’m a geek. The phone runs just fine. All the apps I want run just fine. Touch-Wiz is fine. Plus this July I get to upgrade. The reason I own the Captivate is that an iOS update to my iPhone 3G two years ago rendered it nearly useless and was the tipping point in my move to Android (btw my daughter has an iPhone 4S that I have spent a lot of time with and I am still not interested in ‘going back’ to the iPhone).

Truth is this most consumers don’t know about Android fragmentation. Most of those that understand Android fragmentation don’t think it is a big deal. My guess is that many of those who do think it is a big deal use an iPhone.

However, fragmentation can’t go on like this forever. Tech journalists and enthusiasts really do have the ability to drive opinion in the general public. Google knows this. The answer: Motorola. If Google can complete the acquisition then all Motorola phones move to the ‘true Android experience’ with regular updates from Google. Once this happens it will be a matter of time before the other manufacturers fall in line.

For now, Android fragmentation hasn’t mattered much. Ice Cream Sandwich and Motorola can make it not matter for ever.


Discuss on Google+

Why Google Music Makes Sense

Listening to +TWiT recently +Leo Laporte +Kevin Rose and others were talking about given services like Rdio, MOG and Spotify, Google Music is too little too late. I disagree and here is why:

There are plenty of people (including me) not interested in streaming service. While Spotify is new, streaming services have been around for a while. I’ve tried them a couple of times and it is just not my cup of tea, and there are plenty of people like me. My wife is another. She has spent years curating her music collection and making playlists. She can’t stand Pandora because she can’t choose what song to hear and isn’t interested and putting the work into setting up her music on a new service. For me, I don’t want to worry about the mobile bandwidth as I listen to a lot of music in my car and I would be happier buying eight songs a month. There actually are people who aren’t interested in being able to listen to every song ever.

The iTunes program on Windows is horrible. It is literally a crapshoot if I can make it thru an entire iTunes session without it crashing. Google’s music store is Web-based and available everywhere, not tied to a machine and program. That’s all I need to say there.

I can easily stream my music collection anywhere there is a web browser. To me this is such a great feature. I downloaded a small simple app to my computer, installed and ran it, and a day later all my music was uploaded to the cloud. This little app is always running in the background so any music I purchase from Google Music, either via the web interface or Market on my phone, is downloaded to my computer. No matter what computer I am on at work, home or elsewhere, my music collection is there. Oh yea....this storage and streaming service is free, unlike iTunes Match.

Easily purchase music on your Android phone. You could easily do this on the iPhone forever. Google needed to bake this into Android and now they have.

So even if you use something like Spotify, there is a ton of value in Google Music.

Kevin Rose Previews Oink, The First App From Milk

First things first: Kevin has stated that Milk will develop for iOS and if something really takes off, they will then develop that app for Android. I hope that changes. If you believe in your product you should develop for both simultaneously. I know Milk is purposefully small; however adding a developer or two for Android would be a wise investment.

Now that my Android rant is out of the way...Oink looks very slick, and really in an interesting mashup of sharing, location, rating, and clout at a very granular level. Instead of rating a restaurant/store/etc. you are rating items within an establishment.

Check out the video. I think this app has a ton of potential.

Things of Value

This past weekend my family was up in northern Michigan at the family lake house, a place we have been going to for years. One of the great things about the lake house is this collection of old appliances from the '50s, '60s and '70s: toasters, blenders, mixers, radios and more. Inevitability when ever we are up, there is a conversation which always laments how things are not manufactured with quality anymore and everything seems so disposable.

The lake house is a five bedroom cottage owned by my wife's grandmother. I should say 'was owned' as grandma past away over winter and the estate has been passed on to grandma's five children. Part of our 'responsibility in the process of the estate changing hands is to clean and organize the storage barn, separating thing to be donated from things that are trash.

As we started shifting through this huge pole barn of furniture, clothes, and assorted things collected over grandma's ninety years of life, I began to realize the things she valued the most would have no worth to others: old letterhead, bridge name tags, maps of Sanibel Island; and the things that others would value--furniture, clothes, plates--in the end had no value to her.

So maybe it is ok that "we don't make things like we used to." Maybe the things that technology allow us to pass on...our digital memories ... make up for the fact that toasters are bland and vanilla and will only last five years or so.