It's definitely turning into summer here in SF. (By July it'll be turning into fall, but never mind that.) Dolores Park was a madhouse on Saturday. You'd think it was the only nice weekend of the year, there was so much grilling and beer drinking going on.
Dolores Park
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Standard Blue - Los Angeles, CA
I realized tonight that I'd better stop using Flickr to post photos here... Who knows if they'll still be around in a few years (or if I'll still be paying for Flickr Pro.) Time to stop...
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Downtown San Francisco from Portrero Hill
Snapped on the way to dinner, with a 15-second exposure. That's the 280 in the foreground. I'm sure I'll go back and try it again a little closer to sunset now that I know this spot, so there's a bit more ambient light to balance the direct lights (and maybe a ND filter to allow for a longer exposure.
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Great for travel: Fujifilm X10 Compact
The early previews seem good - if the image quality is decent, this will be a new top pick as a pocketable option for digital photographers.
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Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch - Amazon's Two-Prong E-reader Strategy
This morning, Amazon announced the Android-based, color, Kindle Fire for $199, and two e-ink, black and white readers for $79 and $99 respectively, the "Kindle" and "Kindle Touch". Most of the press so far has been focused on the Kindle Fire and it's potential as an iPad competitor. That seems a little misdirected to me, given that it's coming out at about 40% of the price point of the iPad, but I guess it makes for better headlines.
There's a large percentage of Americans that are not heavy book readers (occasional at best) but are heavy consumers of other media - particularly video and music. I think the Kindle Fire is targeted at them, while Amazon has been smart enough to continue advancing the book-focused Kindle line.
(Will Apple come out with a competing device between now and Christmas? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think they're more interested in improving the iPad's dominance at the $500-$1000 price range than undercutting their own product with a $200-$300 unit. But I could be wrong.)
Not only that, but rather than trying to push for more revenue via features, etc, they're pushing that side towards lower and lower price points, moving it towards utility device that anyone can afford. If you set aside the Fire, and just saw an announcement of two new Kindle devices for under $100, that would be pretty big news on its own. At $80, the Kindle is now the price of 3-4 hardcover books for a fantastic device (based on my experience with earlier versions) that offers immense portability, easy reading and great battery life.
All of this is another huge step forward for ebooks and a really bad sign for print books, especially text-heavy, black and white ones. There's going to be millions of these low-cost readers being given as gifts this Christmas. At less than $100, it's now gone from being something you'd really see only bought for signficant others to a more general gift you might give that Aunt, Uncle, friend or in-law who loves books.
I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire this morning (they're expected to ship mid-November) - I'm already both a heavy Kindle user, and a heavy Amazon Video On Demand user. Plus, as an Amazon Prime subscriber I have free access to thousands of videos. It seems like a great device to have in my bag for my commute to work, or waiting on my next flight, and I'm looking forward to testing it out.
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Nexus S - first impressions from an iPhone user
I've been an iPhone user for a while, but my new job means I have to be as fluent with Android. So one of my first steps has been to get an unlocked Samsung Nexus S and start using it as my phone, to get a feel for the UI, interface metaphors, environment, etc. Obviously, I'm still biased towards iOS, if merely because I have so many hours on that platform that it's inevitably going to "feel" more intuitive. But I'm coming up to speed pretty fast on Android too.
(The Nexus S has been out a while - I realize that. But I'm trying to learn about the typical Android user's experience rather than the new hotness, for the moment.)
I just thought I'd list a few of my early impressions, since they're so important to any product and they tend to fade away after the first week of use:
- The hardware just doesn't feel as good as an iPhone 3 or 4. It's not significantly lighter, but it feels lighter and cheaper, more "toylike." The temperature characteristics of plastic vs. glass play into this - I think we assume that the cold of metal and glass is a more expensive build than the relative warmth of plastic.
- Setup, assuming you're using Gmail, is super easy. Basically, you log in, and much of your stuff - Gmail, Google Music, Google+, is all ready to go
- The empty home screen when you start is a little odd. I've since populated it, but why not put a few obvious icons on there like email, places, maps, and messaging? I suspect a significant number of users fail to move stuff onto the home screen and forever fumble with the "all applications" view.
- I really like the better notifications system, but I don't like that I can't see/access them without unlocking the phone. Maybe there's a pref to change that but I doubt it.
- As a Google Voice user, one of the first things I did was switch the voice off of Tmobile voicemail (ugh) and over to GV. Annoyingly, this resulted in a voicemail notification I could not clear from the phone, because it was a prompt to set up my Tmobile voicemail. In the end, to clear it I had to switch back, set up voicemail I'll never use, send myself a message, then delete that message. All just to clear a notification. I doubt many users will do that.
- I like widgets, but the lack of visual unity is sometimes jarring if you have more than one on a screen. It seems like everyone designs their widget to be the only one on screen. Or maybe there just isn't sufficient guidance.
- I like the car mode and built in GPS. Definitely two features where I found myself saying "why the hell doesn't the iPhone do this?"
- The camera is not as good as the iPhone. Especially if the flash goes off.
Also, in a weird event, when I paired my Nexus with my car via bluetooth, the AUX input on my stereo menu disappeared. I can't establish causality (partially because I can't get it to show up again) but there was definitely correlation - the AUX input was working that morning, and the only thing I did was pair the phone and the AUX menu disappeared. That may be my car's fault, but it's super irritating nonetheless and will necessitate a trip to the dealer.
I'm going to do my best to use the Nexus as my primary phone for a while. It has a different phone number, so it might be a little challenging -- since folks will still text my iPhone -- but I'll give it a try.
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Electric cars charging on the Google campus
One thing I can't deny is that they put their money behind trying out new tech with has eco benefits. There's a full fleet of all-electric vehicles on campus, and charging stations (for both the fleet and personal vehicles) in front of every building. If I owned a house and drove to work, I'd consider one of these.
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First Class Mail is a Zombie - Kill It Off
Over the past two days I've spent some time talking with friends, both online and offline, about the fate of the US Postal Service and, in particular, its first class mail service. Much of this was prompted by last week's New York Times article on the USPS' woes, and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about the topic in the news this week.
The more I consider the situation, the more alarming the idea of further subsidizing first class mail service becomes. I'm not anti-government, but I think the situation illustrates one of the big downsides to public services vs. privatized ones: it's easy to grow them, but very hard to phase them out and downsize them.
First class mail - in particular, the physical delivery of paper documents in letters from one individual to another - is an end-of-life technology by any reasonable definition. It's a highly mature delivery system that runs very efficiently, but it's not really getting better or more efficient any more (in fact, it's getting less efficient, which I'll cover later.) Meanwhile, its primary competitor, electronic delivery, is a nascent technology that's faster and cheaper, scales more smoothly and is better for the environment.
Companies and consumers have already realized this: first class mail usage has declined by over 20% in the past five years, and it's just continuing to accelerate. It's starting to feel like the only personal letters folks get are wedding invitations and Christmas cards (Facebook long ago took over birthdays.) And companies are doing everything they can to move their customers off of mailed bills - many offer discounts if a customer is willing to sign up for paperless billing.
As that decline continues, it's going to amplify the weaknesses of physical delivery, in particular the difficulty of scaling its infrastructure down to serve smaller volumes of senders. If email volume dropped 50%, you could reduce server allocations, etc to match. Good luck cutting 50% of the costs of physical mail delivery - even if you have half as much mail arriving, it's still going to take your letter carrier just about the same amount of time to put it in your mailbox. Declining volume and fixed overhead mean growing losses, unless you let them raise prices - but that just makes volume decline faster.
(Not to mention the environmental implications of first class mail: billions of pieces of paper, printed and shipped repeatedly, most of which end up in the trash. Billions of miles of mail truck movement. Forests cut down, oil burned, pollution created. Almost 100% of the mail I receive ends up in the bin within a week of delivery. Is that really something we want to sustain?)
All of this means that throwing more money at the problem is just a waste. It's not going to make first class mail competitive with electronic delivery. It's a losing game.
Instead, we need to view this as an opportunity: accept that times are changing, and build better Internet infrastructure to allow electronic delivery to serve as a better substitute for mail delivery, especially for folks who might not be able to afford it today. Provide terminals, scanners and printers to people in rural locations. Public terminals at post office locations. Free email accounts for all individuals.
I realize there are corner cases here: people want to send kid's artwork to grandparents, printed wedding invitations, etc. But so far, nobody's shown me one that isn't just that - a corner case. If you wouldn't build out a physical delivery system to support one of those corner cases, you shouldn't subsidize the current one, either.
Rather than fighting the tide to preserve first class mail, let's lean into the future and make our country more efficient, and more modern, by being the first to provide universal net access and embrace electronic delivery as a replacement for document mail. Not only will it be more cost efficient than keeping mail on life support for another 10-20 years, but it will provide huge ancillary benefits to education and communication, and make us more competitive with the rest of the world.
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Amazon's new Cloud Kindle Reader
Just launched: a very nice new web client for reading Kindle books from Amazon, for use in Chrome or Safari on your laptop or iPad. The reader uses HTML5 to enable offline reading - as soon as you open a book while online, it's downloaded to your browser in the background so it's available for offline reading. Quite slick.
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