Consumer Cellular

This is the kind of joke I repeat to myself in my head: “Sasuga Consumer Reports.”

Consumer Reports, the magazine/organization that is dedicated to do consumer retail testing and evaluation, has a reputation. Or better put, several. One of them is that they’re biased towards Japanese cars. Another is “their consumer electrics/gadget reviews are so out of date it’s useless.”

I think some of these reputations are true. Moreover, despite the reputation, they do good work. And thanks to their cellular service guide and ranking, I think I put my folks (and sister) on the right wireless carrier for them.

And all of it is because AT&T is retarded and wants to charge a minimum of $30 for any subscriber (post-paid) on top of their monthly voice plans, if they’re rocking a smartphone. In fact if it wasn’t for this, my dad would not have had the impetus to switch carriers.

Simply put, he wanted a smartphone. He also doesn’t want to buy one, which is fine. I have plenty of hand-me-downs, or if not me, one of my siblings. He’s fine with hand-me-downs (especially if it’s a Nexus One rocking Android 4.1.2) since all he does is use it to call, text, and occasionally use MMS or Flipboard or something. Actually he doesn’t really need a smartphone at all. He probably can get by with a Blackberry or a feature phone with a keyboard. But he hates how AT&T charges him $30 (plus tax!) just for this. And I think it’s retarded, too. He’ll use, what, 150mb a month tops? Because wifi at work and at home is not enough? Anyway, it’s your loss  AT&T. Sort of.

Since my dad is a salesman, he needs rock solid cell reception and coverage. That means basically only AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Since we don’t have any hand-me-down phones on Verizon (not to mention…how does it work, CDMA?) that also means, well, we’re looking for a AT&T MVNO.

I did my usual research and found out something interesting. I started to look basically last summer. Ever since my youngest sister got married and moved to Texas, there’s really no reason for the family to stick to AT&T, as long as they can dump her contract onto her husband (who is luckily also on AT&T). That part was confusing but basically it goes like:

You’re basically transferring billing responsibility for one line from one billing entity to another

  1. The plan owner who has the line first call customer service and explain to them what’s happening (you want to move one line to another due to marriage or something).
  2. Hopefully the customer service rep will leave a note in your file for this. They’ll give you a specific phone number to call to reach a specific department that does this.
  3. The plan owner who is taking in the transferring # should then call that specific line and have them pull the number over.

At least, that’s how it worked for AT&T. I imagine it’s similar for VZW.

So we’re ready to go to Cricket sub-company #XYZ right? Nope.

Cricket is really the go-to MVNO. They have AT&T, VZW and TMO contracts, but of course VZW phones only works on VZW bands, and you’ll need a GSM phone to use TMO/ATT. Which is fine, we’re full of GSM phones. Specifically we need sim cards. So to my surprise comes Feb 2013, suddeny all these Cricket subsidiaries (like Straight Talk or Net10) stopped stocking AT&T sims. What is up with that? I guess we did put off transferring for a long time. And we also tried calling them, and one Straight Talk rep gave my dad the runaround.

After googling and looking around to no avail–it’s a developing situation–I went looking for an alternative AT&T MVNO. That’s where Consumer Reports came in. It has ranked, in 2012, Consumer Cellular as the #1 post-paid carrier in the US. That’s neat, I thought, as I was paying attention to the pre-paid section.

“Who the hell is Consumer Cellular?”

A quick search told me all I need to know. AARP AMIRITE w. But they do contract-free AT&T MVNO with share plans, which is almost perfect. Nobody’s perfect, I guess–if they went from 1GB to maybe 2 or 3 GB then I think I can rest in peace. But for $80 we were able to get 1500 minutes, 10000 text, 1gb data, between 2 phones. I think that’s a reasonable compromise. Sure, we can do better on TMO or Metro, but let’s not sell ourselves short. Not to mention when you call them, they pick up without any hold. That’s awesome. HSPA+ here we come.

I think of course, both phones on the plan are light data users–the sister keeps it under 250mb every month (she was grandfathered in from an older AT&T plan) and I have no clue how much Dad uses. I think 1GB is more than enough.

Oh, one thing I forgot–part of this impetus was that Dad scored a One X, so even more Smartphone Use Pressure was building.

http://www.consumercellular.com/

This was not a paid blog post or anything. Honestly, they’re a solid MVNO–although they are not exactly competitive on price, they provide a lot of great service.

Life From The New World

There is a whole new world out there. People lived in it, but in the normal one at the same time. Others didn’t, and the new world was invisible.

This new world is built on pipes and RSS. It is the first Web 2.0 world that was promised in our earlier days. It was also the one that was left behind–not for any technical reason, but it was simply invisible to the average human eyes.

But for the people in that new world, they see things differently. For a large number of them, websites like Google Reader was the single, entire gateway to the online world. It’s true syndication.

Farewell, Google Reader. Hopefully there is still room for hope.

Nexus One Redux

I guess it’s going to be my three-year anniversary with my Nexus One comes end of March, so it’s kind of fitting to blog about it again. The $500+ purchase was what it was. Planning a trip to Japan later in the year, I decided to pull the N1 out of storage (especially since I gifted it to Dad, who has since found a spare AT&T HTC One lying around) and put Jelly Bean on it. And it is on it–4.1.2.

My Verizon Galaxy Nexus, until this moment, was on 4.1.1.

Com’on Man. Ok, yeah, I’ve grated on this enough. I’ll stop now (until the next Android update).

You might’ve read some news clipping on the Nexus One being sent into space as a part of a school satellite project. You know what? That phone is probably just as flimsy as the next Made-in-China consumer hardware, speaking of averages. However it’s probably one of the toughest phones out there rocking the vanilla variety of android, and because it was a reference development phone, it’s also “open” enough so developers can easily run circles around it and, well, make it run Android 4.1.2, despite its aging hardware specs. Or whatever you use for satellites. I bet it uses ext4. I never thought I had to format a micro SD card with ext4. Srsly. I can see why all these reference Nexus hardware are ditching the micro SD slots. Ext4, man.

I just want to say I spent about as much time doing that as side-loading 4.2.2 on my VZW GNex. Srsly. Well, not counting the 4 hours subsequent trying to load all the gapps I want on the N1. In the end I didn’t even a2sd gmail, which is regrettable but at this point I’m way too lazy to circle back for it.

PS. Japan now can support UTMS 2100 MHz, which does mean your garden variety iPhone (GSM) and Nexus items will work in Japan. Yay.

The Pebble smartwatch: 72 hours review

As a 4/12 backer (this is how people identify themselves on the shipping ranks over at reddit or the Pebble forums–those with earlier dates lord over those who have later dates as they’re likely the ones with a pebble over those who don’t. For the truly curious, you can look at this chart and think about what you are curious about.) I got my black Pebble just before Chinese New Year. CNY is important to Pebble backers because China goes into holiday mode for a week or so during CNY, and little gets done. Which means if you aren’t within the allotted 16k or so watches that were made and shipped to the distribution centers before CNY, you’ll have to wait that extra week. I guess I’m also within the first 5000 black pebble backers!

Gloating aside, the Pebble is sort of hyped, but it probably does not deserve the hype. What is really interesting about it is that it is an e-ink smartwatch. It’s not the first nor the last nor the best looking out of the lot. (Okay, the CST watch is probably too unique-looking for me; now if they made it in silver…) It is the first one with e-ink. The point about e-ink is that you can get some extraordinary battery life out of an e-ink display and designing the gadget around that low-power concept. I think this applies to mechanical and typical battery-powered watches just as much, but nobody wants to run out of juice on their watches. If you tell me I have to charge my watch every night I would not be a happy camper, even if I can live with it. The Pebble strikes a comfortable compromise at about 7 days of battery life. Throwing in waterproof at 5 ATM (as far as I know no other smartwatch does this either) you got a sale. It helps that I swim.

But anyways, the thing with smartwatch is about designing a personal electronics thing that does not rely on a feature set. This is something, sadly, that the industry as a whole suck at. Watches are not a new fangled thing. It’s about marrying new technologies together to do something pretty ordinary. Which is to say, Pebble does very little else besides as a watch with an e-ink watchface. Its most boasted secondary feature is that it funnels notifications from your phone, so if you get an email or text, it will let you know. Maybe you can even read off it. But if you were expecting the Pebble to do something special, you might be disappointed.

What e-ink offers is that you can have an always-on watchface that you can develop and customize. Pebble actually does promise this, but they haven’t released the watchface SDK (which is different than the general SDK I guess) so there are about only 7 watch faces you can choose for the time being. It defaults to the text watch watchface, and I think that is a big reason why I took a liking to back the Pebble early. There’s a widget on my phone that displays the time and date basically in the same way; I see the pebble being the wristwatch extension of the same.

For details on the hardware, I think various gadget sites like Verge and Engadget covered it well. It’s not a pretty thing but it looks durable enough and functional. The display is NOT retina, and the viewing angle is not the greatest, and it’s a not matte screen. HAHA matte screen oh man I wonder if anyone dislike the glare on your watch HAHAHAHA. Anyway, the display is not the best because it’s pretty low resolution, and if you look at some of the smaller font stuff on the watch (such as when the watch is in phone mode) it makes you feel like you’re operating a budget LCD watch. The construction is what you’d expect for a waterproof 5 ATM watch. It’s glossy, but since it lives under my sleeves most of the time, it doesn’t get any fingerprints anyway.

If there’s a knock on the construction it would be the way the buttons work. They require a good hard press, but the covering for the buttons feels loose laterally; they don’t move, but when you push down it is not a solid feeling. It’s like they’re spring-loaded but the touch trigger is just a bit aways further in. The design for the buttons could also be better–they could be a little smaller I think, and for a left-hand wearing experience, the button on the left side could be placed better. I kinda get why they put it towards the top, but it’s hard to press.

If you watched the Pebble presentation at CES, they demonstrated the accelerometer-triggered backlight. It’s nice, but it doesn’t work super well by tapping (tapping lightly doesn’t quite always do the trick), but if you flick your wrist it turns on. Which means it turns on when my left hand does anything quickly. Not a problem, but it is something I wish I could turn on or off. Other semi-important things the Pebble is missing includes the lack of a battery level display. I think if it runs out of juice, it just stops working. Having the Pebble for 3 days (after a full charge) I didn’t get to see this.

The current UI design for the music player just doesn’t work. It takes way too many presses (on those hard buttons) to get to the music app. But in the music app you can’t tell time! Actually it takes just as much work to switch back to the watchface. Ugh. And personally I prefer a volume control dial on the watch more than forward/backward, but oh well. It’s all software, so something hopefully can be fixed (or maybe more like, changed) in the future.

I won’t cover anything about iOS on the pebble, because I read it works entirely differently than Android. The Android Pebble app lets you feed some basic notification to the watch, like phone calls, texts, calendar updates. It uses the accessibility service hook to grab the texts from some app updates, like FB, Google Talk and Voice, FB, default email app, and WhatsApp. It requires authentication to use Gmail, which means you have to give it your password. Which is more than what is comfortable for me. Plus I use 2-step so that means extra-extra work. Thankfully someone wrote a Tasker-based plugin/app hybrid that simply repeat the “pipe accessibility updates to pebble” feature that the Pebble app does, but for all your apps, and I found that works a lot better since you can use it to pipe any app’s update with an easy scroll list of checkboxes. The downside is that unless you fine-tune the notification traps, you might not get all the updates you want, and you can’t fine tune anything with this 3rd party app alone. For example, I use TweakDeck, and it sends a update when it tries to send a tweet; this means sometimes it notifies the Pebble when I don’t want it to. But it’s all I can do right now, versus getting no updates from TweakDeck at all. I suppose the development work on Pebble’s part is to write that bit of the notification trap code to ignore certain notifications for that specific app. It’s something you can do with the full-blown version of Tasker, DIY, if you write that bit of the code to go with the Pebble plugin for Tasker.

I remember my Casio LCD watch I wore as a kid…I had that thing for like 6 years on one battery! It was probably also almost $100 (adjusted for inflation). (And no, it was not a calculator watch…I was not that nerdy.) So I guess that is not unreasonable to expect of the Pebble, especially since all we’ve considered is its basic functionality as a watch, and maybe how it can vibrate to remind you of a incoming text or phone call. The true promise of a Pebble is its extensive SDK crap that they haven’t delivered fully. It has the hardware to replace a Fuel Band or Fibit, it can even do other things unimaginable yet. Well the SDK is not out yet, so this is all just invisible gravy. If you’re interested in a Pebble, consider preordering, because the current pebble is just a watch. A watch that can notify you of your phone’s doing, sure, at the expense of your phone’s bluetooth power draw, but it’s still just a watch.

 

 

The Super Tablet

With the embargo off on the Microsoft Surface Pro, we see where we’re going in the next 5 years: the convergence of a newly carved category of machines.

It’s one thing to see Jobs’s iPad as a game changer, but it’s also valid to see that it is a stepping stone towards the perfect device. The perfect device that I want, anyway, since 10 years ago.

It’s small and light, runs for at least a whole day, supports touch interface, can be an data organizing appliance (eg e-book, e-paper, media viewer, camera, etc), can be a competent word processing / desktop tool, can play games, and run all my applications.

It’s okay, I don’t need to make phone calls with it. Ubiquitous internet is nice though.

The Surface Pro is actually the first “tablet” that brings all of that together; it’s not the first to be able to do them or the first designed to do it, but it’s the first to point towards “hey, it looks like this, now you just need to improve my shortcomings.” The wacom digitizer and the gorgeous screen are important elements for productivity  The full-bore Windows OS allows for the rest. We can look at the reviews and note that the weight and battery life are two major drawbacks, but those two are often at mercy of  the impending march of technological progress. It will be soon that we’ll get the same plus those two in a lighter, thinner package, Intel willing.

Discrete or SOC style GPU boost is another story altogether. It’s only now that “ultrabooks” are getting good discrete solutions. Although the jump from a intel-powered tablet and an ultrabook is hardly epic, it’s a real challenge versus battery life and design for thinness. We’ll see.

I give it 5 years.