Throwaway Tech?

They just don’t make stuff like they used to…

In this day and age, our lives are becoming increasingly integrated with our technology: 3G internet, the Smartphone boom (arguably catalysed by the iPhone and other similar touch-screen devices), ultraportable notebooks and netbooks, and the beginnings of cloud computing to name but a few. Even televisions can get weather and RSS feed updates over the air right onto your screen.

So, you’d be led to believe that the quality and lifespan of such technology would increase along with our increased usage and need for it? Well sadly, I don’t think this is the case.

I think the first issue is with mobile technology. Sometimes it feels like the manufacturers deliberately design their

LG Viewty, my current handset

devices in such a way that you’ll be forced to replace it any time from 12 months onwards.

Take my current handset for example, the LG Viewty. I know it isn’t a smartphone by any stretch of the imagination, but it gives me access to online features from anywhere I care to be at the time (network signal providing). It’s very well built despite feeling a bit light and cheap (I must have dropped it at least ten times since buying it, and there’s only a few chippings in the top corner to show for it). It also used to hold up well in terms of battery life, but recently it’s been extremely tempremental. I went away for the weekend last week and because I was camping out in a field, I couldn’t take any chargers with me. The phone lasted from Wednesday morning through until Sunday, with regular texting and calls throughout that time. However, since I’ve come home, I’ve been using it less, and yet I’ve had to charge it up every night unless I want the phone to have no battery left in the morning! It’s become completely unreliable in the space of a week, and since I’ve had it for 12 months now I get the feeling that LG deliberately designed it to last this long.

Motorola PEBL, my trusty 'backup' phone

So when I need to go away for a while, or on holiday where I don’t want to take more valuable items with me, I find myself relying on one of my older phones – a Motorola PEBL. The UI and other aspects of the device are just plain awful, I remember hating having to use it on a daily basis. But one thing it is is reliable. I took it away to Majorca with me in July with a Vodafone SIM card in it (to take advantage of the abolished roaming charges) and it lasted me the entire two weeks without a problem. I naturally took the charger with me this time, but I found that I didn’t even have to use it unless I was planning to make a really long call to people back home. I find the device so reliable that I’ve began to use it quite a lot more – I’ll even take it with me on nights out because I know it won’t do something totally ridiculous like my Viewty does. The PEBL is at least 4 years old now – it should not be more reliable than technology that is only 1 or 2 years old. So why is it that as our usage of technology is increasing, its durability and reliability is decreasing?
That being said, there are a few exceptions. Desktop computers, for example, are getting more and more advanced for the applications most people will need them for. This makes sure that the lifespan of current PCs could last up to 6 or 7 years depending on what you want out of it – we bought a new HP desktop PC in January, but the previous PC had been in our house for around 6 years without any problems (until I began to need it to do processes that it wasn’t really made for and we began to encounter some problems). Moving to Linux can also increase the lifespan of your PC – I installed Ubuntu on the previous computer towards the end to extend its life by at least another year.

You might also be surprised that i find iPods to be pretty reliable. I used to be one of those people that had to buy the

My iPod touch, ready to celebrate its 2nd birthday soon

new revision as soon as it came out – even if there was not much difference apart from memory size. However since buying my iPod touch in November 2007 I haven’t even thought about replacing it – the battery still holds up well, the 16GB storage means that only the music I really want to listen to gets synced through iTunes, and iPhone OS and App Store mean that I can always keep the software fresh.

However, since I’m moving quite a lot of my favourite songs and artists into lossless formats, there’s not a lot of space for the other music I like. I think that sooner or later I’ll have to think about upgrading to a higher capacity iPod touch (fingers crossed the September 9 Apple Conference reveals a 64GB version!), or I could just hold out for the Zune HD…

What about your technology? Do you get the same experiences as I do, or have you found all your tech to stay reliable for as long as you need it for? Feel free to leave comments below.

Spotify Mobile now live!

Spotify on the App Store

As of now, Spotify Mobile is available for download from the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace for iPhone, iPod touch and all Android handsets.

Download of the software is free, but to use the application you are required to have a premium spotify account. Hopefully this will eventually change to only requiring premium for local downloads, as I feel being required to pay £9.99 a month is a bit too much considering how much I use Spotify. Fellow blogger David Gilson has written up a nice debate article about the pricing scheme on his blog.

Features include full access to all of Spotify’s library, streaming of said music, and also a nifty little feature that lets you download and store a playlist locally so you can listen to it even while offline. The app also live syncs any playlist additions or amendments.

So what are you waiting for? If you have an iPhone or Android device and a premium account on Spotify, this may well be your killer app!

Spotify have also just announced, on their blog, that they are developing the Mobile application for S60 devices. This is fantastic news for me, considering my next phone may be the Nokia E55. S60 demo video is embedded below:

If you’re still looking to get into Spotify, I have 5 invites remaining to give away, more details here.

T-Mobile has Pulse

I was surprised to find this morning that there’s a third Android handset making its way to T-Mobile. T-Mobile UK’s official twitter page posted a tweet about an upcoming handset called the Pulse (below)

Front view of the Pulse and its bespoke Canvas UI

It’s the first Android handset on T-Mobile to be produced by a manufacturer other than HTC. Instead the Pulse is being built by a company called Huawei. It’s also the second time in almost as many weeks that a new Android handset has been released on a network out of the blue (Samsung’s first Android handset, the Galaxy, is available on O2 now)

The Pulse uses the same QualComm MSM7200A chipset as the current “flagship” Android phone, the HTC Hero, offering 528mHz of processing speed. Further comparisons reveal that the screen is larger than the Hero’s – 3.5″ instead of 3.2″, and the Pulse has 2GB of on-board memory, which is larger than the paltry 288MB in the Hero; memory is expandable to up to 8GB using MicroSD.

The alleged 210 minutes talk time is pretty poor for a touchscreen smartphone, and there’s no standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which seems like a backward step for any smartphone in 2009. There’s a 3.2mp camera on the back, without an LED photolight or Xenon flash, so low-light shots are likely to be noisy. The camera features autofocus and video capture software.

As you can see, the 3.2mp camera has no flash

In other news the Pulse also sports its own customised layer on top of the standard OS – HTC began this with the Sense UI on the Hero, and now T-Mobile have produced their own UI called ‘Canvas’, featuring up to 6 customisable home screens.

The Pulse will be the first Android handset to be released on Pay-As-You-Go. T-Mobile announced that the Pulse will cost £180 from October, whilst you can either pay £5 a month for internet access, or up to £1 a day depending on usage. This pricing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, so I’ll clear things up once I know more. Contracts may be offered but pricing has yet to be resolved. I think T-Mobile will have quite a lot of success with this handset on PAYG however, £180 on any kind of smartphone is a pretty good deal, the closest “smartphone” I can think of at a similar price is the 5800 XpressMusic from Nokia, and even then it isn’t a true smartphone, per se. It even costs £15 more on the same network!

In all, it looks like a very good, low-cost entry into the world of smartphones for the more mainstream audience.

The complete T-Mobile Android family

Spotify Invites

NOTE: Anyone requesting an invite from the US may need to search for proxy solutions to get around the lack of availability there. Apologies to anyone affected and good luck – it’s worth it!

As it has been quite a while since I’ve needed to use Spotify (thank you Leeds Festival, for providing me with new musical tastes), I haven’t been aware that I actually have 5 invites to give away.

If you want to sign up to the service using one of the invites then drop an email to kingbeaneq [at] yahoo [dot] com. Invites will be given out at a first come, first serve basis, and this post will be updated when there are no longer any to issue out.

Regular posts will be returning soon, I’m just really busy at the moment preparing for life at University!

Probably the best day of my life so far

A level results day. D-day. A day I have been dreading all summer finally dawned on me today, and from the header you can see where this is going!

I applied for an MPharm (Pharmacy Masters) course at Manchester University, which they would give to me on proviso that I achieved grades ABB in Chemistry, Biology and Maths (in any order).

I went into college to get my results today and this is what I got:

• Chemistry – A
• Biology – A
• Maths – B

As you can probably tell, I’m extremely happy with this – once I start my course I’ll begin to write more about the Pharmacy world, as well as the usual stuff.

I’d also like to say well done to everyone who got the grades they needed today – I wish a successful future for you all!

I’ll be back with a new post very soon.

So THAT’S where old dashboards go…

Sony today announced (well, confirmed what everyone knew already) its new iteration of the Sony PS3. It’s supposedly slimmer than the original black monolith, so they went with the name ‘PS3 Slim’. Original.

A Side-by-Side comparison. Courtesy of Engadget

My thoughts? Well to put it into a single word: Fugly. I don’t like the matt plastic, there’s no longer any chrome trim, and the touch-sensitive buttons on the front look like stickers. It all looks really childish.

It also reminds me of the plastic you find on the dashboards of old cars – are Sony stripping our old cars of all their plastic trim before they get scrapped? It would appear so!

The price drop is equally uninteresting – The Sony PS3 now has a whopping price reduction of… £50! Yes, it’s no longer £300, RRP has been cut to £250 (presumably because the Slim costs them no money to make, because they’re recycling old car dashboards). If you actually looked around, you could have already gotten an 80GB PS3 for £250, which is why I was wondering why news coverage was talking about long-awaited price cuts…

What annoys me the most about this development is that it will be extremely difficult for me to get a good price for my 80GB PS3 (which I bought, brand new, for £220 last October), so I’ll just have to set it up in the living room as a Media Centre before I leave home in Autumn.

Feel free to leave your comments, do you like the new styling of the PS3 or do you prefer the “Fat” version, like me? Do you even care?

The night I became a pirate

Tonight it became known to me that a certain controversial political party had extended its arm to this country.

Originating in Sweden earlier this year, the Pirate Party are actively campaigning for changes in Copyright structure, Patent Laws and Freedom of Speech. The main goal is to allow the non-commercial sharing of digital content without crippling restrictions, otherwise known as DRM. Whilst doing this they want to make sure that the creators of the content get the fair payment they deserve, instead of it all feeding down the greedy rights holders, otherwise known as the record and film companies.

They also want to remove some of the unecessary patents on potentially life-saving drugs. As I wish to pursue a career in Pharmacy, I am strongly interested in this. I feel that it is our right as healthcare professionals to ensure that such drugs are accessible to those who need them – we shouldn’t control the distribution of drugs just based on the depth of the recepient’s wallet.

You can get more information, or sign up and become a member at the Pirate Party UK’s official website.

Before I go, I’ll just leave you with a quote from the bottom of their page:

“Outdated laws must change, and will change. The only question is when will we change them. Join our cause, and help make this change happen now!”

Chasing the online dragon

A thought occured to me this very evening (well, morning) as I was sat at home after coming back from work, with iTunes catching all the latest Podcasts, RSS feeds letting me know of anything new and (obviously, since you subscribe to feeds yourself) interesting happenings, and TweetDeck letting me know that I had at least 104 unread tweets — although I don’t use TweetDeck all the time, so it doesn’t know if I’ve already read them or not.

There’s something very exasperating about having so much information to catch up on, that at times I just can’t be bothered to work my way through it all and I let it all pile up until one day I’m forced to just to get it out of the way (hmm… a bit like tidying my room then!). But at the same time, because all of this information that’s flooding itself over me like an avalanche is content that I actively subscribed to, and thus relevent to my interests, it can be enjoyable to do – I quite like waiting around until the end of the day to catch up on all the news — obviously this only applies when I’m not around to catch it as it occurs.

But then when I’ve caught up, the number of new podcasts/feeds/emails reads ‘0′ and all the news has slowed down because it’s the evening, it’s quite possibly the most bored I can ever get (apart from General Studies back in College) – I’ve ran out of things to catch up on, and wouldn’t my time have been better spent doing something more productive, or even making some of this news for myself? As the internet reaches out into the future, we’re just going to be catching up on past events more and more.

Does anybody else experience this, or does it mean that I’m turning into an internet addict?

How Xbox LIVE Games on Demand can improve

I’m here to offer some constructive criticism on how I think the Games on Demand service can improve itself. A new Dashboard update was rolled out to the public yesterday (August 11) and, among some other trivial tweaks, Microsoft introduced a new ‘Games on Demand’ service, where you can download full Xbox 360 games right to your HDD without the need for physical media.

There’s a few issues with the service though. I’m going to address a few of these, and offer my suggestions as to what they can do to improve them.

Firstly, they need to do something about the pricing structure. Games such as Assassin’s Creed are on the Marketplace for £19.99. In fact, all Xbox 360 games on the Marketplace are this price. Even worse, the US prices are $19.99, meaning they’re paying roughly £12, which is STILL more expensive than a physical copy of the game! (game deal provided by Frugal Gaming)

I’m happy that they haven’t gone with the ridiculous points system for the games, as they do on the Arcade, Add-On and Avatar marketplaces because I don’t have to pay more than I have to, and then have a silly amount of points that I can’t get anything with — but they really need to think about the pricing structure. Nobody’s going to pay double the price for a DRM copy of a game that you can’t sell or trade in once you’re done with it. Want to take it round to your friend’s house to show him what he’s missing? Sorry, you’re either going to have to take your 360 along for the ride or he’s going to have to buy it. (well, he could come visit you too I suppose…) What I’m trying to get to is: variable pricing structure – it’s ridiculous to think that a flat-level price is a good idea.

My next issue is with the size of these games. These games are on DVD, output in 720p/1080i HD. I tried installing Halo 3 onto my HDD to make my 360 run a little bit quieter (most of the noise comes from the disc drive spinning). I can’t really say that I was surprised when I discovered it would take up 6.3GB – needless to say, my 20GB HDD just didn’t have enough space on it. I assume that all the other game downloads are of equivalent size, which means that unless you have the 120GB HDD that made its début with the Elite, you’re going to run out of free space very quickly. Considering most games have add-ons, map packs, etc. and can take up around 2GB without even being installed on the HDD makes this even worse.

Microsoft require you to use proprietary storage mediums on their system – to store game data and the like you need to have either an HDD or a Memory Unit (akin to the PlayStation’s memory cards)

The largest HDD you can get is the aforementioned 120GB model. The Xbox 360’s main (and only) ‘rival’ in this generation, the PlayStation 3, uses standard 2.5″ SATA HDD. So theoretically you can get as much storage as is available at the time – 500GB onwards if you so desire. The prices for Microsoft’s proprietary HDD are also atrocious — for less than the price of a 120GB Microsoft HDD, you could have 500GB in your PS3. Until they allow us to use external data storage, I can’t see their Games on Demand service being a big hit – because at this moment in time, all you’re doing by purchasing content from it is crippling both your wallet and your 360. And that’s not good for anybody!

Developer Opression? There’s an App Store for that

The Apple App Store. Quite possibly the main reason the iPhone is outselling most of the competition. Over 50,000 Applications, with over 1 billion downloads since it launched last July. It’s quite simple to develop applications for the iPhone, as Apple supply an SDK. You can upload whatever you want to the App Store, but Apple ask that you don’t upload “objectional material”. This is where the problem lies.

Since its launch there have been many controversies regarding certain applications. One of the most common reasons for app disapproval tends to be foul or offensive language that search features within the applications can return. These search features are more often than not provided by something other than the application itself (read: the internet) so it leaves me utterly bewildered why Apple can block some applications for this reason despite its own web browser being capable of the same ‘heinous crime’ </satire>. The first application that I know of that fell foul of Apple’s double standards is Tweetie, but since there’s been so much coverage over it and the application has since been approved without alteration I don’t see the need for me to comment further.

One of the most recent issues the App Store has had to face is with the Ninjawords Dictionary App, from Matchstick Software. Over two months it was rejected three seperate times because people were able to look up objectional material and words. In the end the application was approved, but only after all such words were removed, including standard words that can have an objectional meaning (ass, etc.) and even then it was still slapped with a 17+ rating, meaning anybody with parental controls on their iPhone/iPod may not be able to download it. Meanwhile, Dictionary.com have an application on the app store, free to download, with all the objectional words included – go on, download it, search away!

That’s my main problem with the whole fiasco – you had to actually do a search for the objectional material. If you’re consciously searching for such words, then you’re hardly going to find them objectional, are you?

As far as I know, Ninjawords is still censored on the App Store. But this week Apple approved another app, that’s loaded with “objectional material”: Texts From Last Night. Just take a look at the picture preview Apple offers up:

Everyone can see this image, without even downloading the application. On those grounds, shouldn’t Apple have banned its own App Store? Apple need to change their approval methods, instead of approving and rejecting similar apps like Hitler playing with a Yes/No spinner.