Author Archives: omo

Apple Watch for me

I’m one of those people who backed the original Pebble and lived the smartwatch-enabled life for over 2 years now. In that sense, I’m intensely interested in the Apple Watch not so much as some kind of dumb tribalism behind various platforms (or software idologies) but evolution of the wearable in the populace.

My alma mater formally started a wearable computing department the year before I graduated, and I graduated a long time ago, by 2015 standards. So gargoyles ala Snow Crash (to date myself further) is not some strange thing for me. What was more strange was people walking in campus with a neck-and-chest strapped platform so they can use their Macbook Pro 17″ laptops while walking between classes. That’s real dork in a school full of them.

The Apple Watch, by all 5-6 reviews I’ve read yesterday so far, seems just like a very fancy but less functional Pebble. It does beg the question as to what is the point of the smartwatch, and that’s a question all makers of smart watches ought to answer to an extent. And this is where I think that will, at least in the first iteration or so, determine which one is worth buying.

The first thing about the reviews I’ve read is that many of them precisely struggle with this question. It’s rather unlike the iPod and iPhone and iPad launches where the use cases are pretty compelling. A big portion of Apple’s success is in its way of marketing things beyond the technical specification an d use cases; what makes luxury desirables worth a lot of money and got people to buy them is behind the Apple Watch’s DNA. That alone is something both besides the point of the first smartwatches and a core part of why Apple’s personal electronics business is so successful.

“Very fancy” is already a desirable. In that sense the Apple Watch is the best smartwatch. But of course to a nerd like myself (as opposed to the average internet commenter) it’s not just a spec sheet, or how smooth and how it tempts me to rub my face on it, but how good it is at satisfying use cases. Pebble (especially with the current iteration via Android Wear APIs) is actually the best game in town. People may think the Moto360 is actually the best game in town, but none of those people actually own one. The commenters I’ve read that did all thought it lacked something, which most reviews (and more importantly, sales numbers) agreed. Not a surprise for anyone following the scene, because anyone who knew smartwatches know it’s just too nascent, and only one watch line came anywhere close to nailing what a smartwatch was initially imagined to be. No Pebble bias here–just ask any long-time smartwatch user whose smarthwatch ran out of battery and was wearing a useless thing on their wrist.

It’s both exciting and frustrating to read these apple watch reviews. For one, they tend to be flipping the flags for prime-time reviews of prime-time gadgets, with pull-quotes that mean nothing but obfuscate the real value in their reviews. I understand it, that’s the business of writing online professionally (as I sometimes do). It’s exciting because all these reviewers are trying hard to verbalize the value prop behind smartwatches, and I care more about that. A lot of praises for the Apple Watch across all the reviews I’ve read hedged against a non-smartwatch, which means the Apple Watch doesn’t actually differentiate from the Pebble or even Android Wear items. Or it was comparing how this or that use case is improved by not pulling your phone out of your pocket. It (vague pronoun here as I don’t know if I meant Apple Watch or Apple Marketing) was making a case for smartwatches, much like how iPhones did for smartphones, that it ought to be purchased and used. It frustrates only because these articles pose no good comparison with the Pebble, if any other smartwatches.

But i think it’s a good thing. If wearables are to be economically successful, I hope it’s because of the utility they provide and it makes our lives better, regardless of what drawback there may be. To have a big splash in the category is good for everyone, even if you may not be interested in wearable computing at all, or even if you are an Android/other/troll/etc.

FCC’s Net Neutrality

I run into this issue pretty often while reading the news and talking to people online. From my POV as an employee of a company that plays the interconnect game, albeit at a different level not a part of this debate, I have a lot of reservations as to the newly announced strategy for classification of ISPs as Title II utilities.

At the same time I think I am okay with net neutrality. It’s just that there is definitely a mission creep thing going on. Not too different than what Wheeler expressed in his Wired article about consumer protection through the courts invariably gets interpreted wrongly. As a regulatory regime, maybe this will work, but it becomes a ‘who do you trust more’ to regulate stuff issue, at least from a “which method encourages more innovation and is better for consumers” end result POV, and I’m not sold that the FCC can do it.

Some press already identified things like TMO’s free music deal as an example of what something that’s good for consumers would be not allowed under this regime.

Anyways, I thought this article sums up my concern pretty well, although I’m not that hung up on it. The problem is about just how good the FCC is at regulating things like complicated internconnect agreements in a non-monopoly, high-tech environment, and if the end result is actually something people would like compared to the alternative.

But on its face, I don’t really have a problem with what FCC has proposed. Just that I have some concerns.

A busy end to 2014

I haven’t put up a blog post here in half a year because I got promoted at my job. Promoted in terms of work load but not so much pay? I don’t know. It got really busy.

I took the blogging down a notch both here and at the anime blog because I just don’t have the time and motivation after work. A lot of context switching suck my energies. I guess it’s also to say the work I’m doing at work is definitely more challenging and taxing intellectually, perhaps not in a technical sense but in an organizational sense.

At any rate, I purchased a Verizon Moto X 2nd gen on Black Friday using their $140 off coupon deal. I logged into the deal page maybe a couple minutes after clock hit 1pm Eastern and didn’t even lag a bit as I put in my entry code. GJ Moto. The Moto Maker experience is not 100% but overall the customization options are a great thing and a major distinguisher between this phone and the others on the market. Of course in exchange your phone is a little bit harder to buy, you have to wait for your gear to get Fedex’d from China, all that.

I probably should have purchased the developer phone instead of the carrier version of the phone. It’s a minor detail because the carrier experience on the Moto X is pretty clean, but the major difference here is that I have to wait for a Verizon patch instead of just being able to hack my way with xda forum’s support. Locked bootloader and all. At the same time, I opted for the football leather version of the Moto X, which is working out pretty well besides how it forces me to change my current car mount due to the limitation of the kind of case you can use with it sensibly. All because with a leather (or bamboo etc) back, it’s not really a good match with a traditional, full-body case. Using a bumper is perfectly okay, but it makes this big phone even harder to hold and nullifies the advantages of the tapered edges. Not to mention my magnet-driven car mount has nothing to stick the backing piece to. I’ll have to go back to the clamp style mount.

The other sort-of mistake I made was upgrading from 4.4.4 to 5.0. Android Lollipop is not ready from prime time. The new UI experience is pretty good actually, but not a drastic improvement from before. More just a drastic overhaul in notification that has some improvements. The issues so far are a penchant for background apps to close for no reason, and there’s a wifi bug that prevents me from connecting to my work wifi. I don’t know if it’s because of the switch they’re using or how it’s configured, but it just doesn’t connect.

Bugs and mistakes aside, this phone is very nice. The display is tops and the battery is adequate. It’s speedy and what not. The customized Moto app experience blows the Samsung one far and away. Should last me another couple years while I figure out how to refurbish my old phone, the cracked GS4.

On Net Neutrality

In general this is how I see the current debate: There’s the content part, and there’s the delivery part. How they overlap is where the issue is.

Also, it is similar to the new media debate in copyright in that the end user is suddenly now an interested party. As a rule, the end user is not an interested party in terms of how utility infrastructure is developed unless there’s an outage or high prices. The reality is in the USA both are commonplace for broadband consumption. But the reality is also that broadband is precisely for this reason not an utility, despite the increasingly important role it plays in our lives.

So you get people milling about the FCC for comments and overloading the servers. But how does that matter in terms of peering agreements or making content providers pay for direct connects? In both cases the price is passed to the customer. You would think making content provider pay is MORE pro-customer because at least that way the price increase only affect the subs of those services. I think the general public is not an intelligent or reasonable voice in this debate because ultimately their interest in this are summed up: lower prices, better services, but somehow they are generally FOR policies that is not for lower prices or better services.

Because I can assure you if you let the ISP rule the peering agreement, service levels will go up more so than having them catering to each changing player in the marketplace, and maybe they would have fewer reasons to charge the end user.

The fear that internet will become cable-ified is a legitimate fear, but it’s also driving people to not look at the situation rationally or from the big-picture view.

The reality is that successful content providers who will need “fast lanes” will have ways to pay for it. By default they are successful already, that’s why there’s a need to do this! Guaranteeing a minimum service level for all is probably the way to go, and like what qualifies for “broadband” changes over time, that service level guarantee should also change with the times. Paying for this sort of thing is a net gain for both ISP and people downstream, on paper. Just because we have these cable monopolies charging arms and legs every month doesn’t mean our internet is any good, after all, so when I see money change hands for direct connect at least I know that money goes directly to improving connectivity and service.

In other words, the public sure can have its say, but unless you are a part of that industry I don’t know who would have anything intelligent to say? It’s not a realistic thing to think that broadband is an utility in the US, because it just isn’t. Now there are systemic problems with the way we look at internet access and how that is deployed in the US, and we need to look to the government to fix it if it’s ever going to get fixed. We need to look there to figure out if it’s even worth fixing (setting up continental-USA-wide broadband with today’s tech is really expensive) yet.

All just because some couch potatoes can’t get their Netflix? Yeah, sorry I’m not exactly thinking this is for the benefit of the innovation on the internet. The money has to flow for this to happen. One way we can improve the internet is to have more money flow into the infrastructure from the content end, ie., make Netflix pay. I think this is not the worst thing if the right regulation goes into place.

In that sense I think the current debate is fine, but the public anger is largely misdirected.