Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • Kindle – tenth anniversary

    I was blown away when I realised that it was the tenth anniversary of the the Amazon Kindle. Ten years, think about that for a moment.

    Amazon Kindle & Sony eBook

    If you look at the original Kindle versus the latest model you can see how the design language moved from a ‘BlackBerry’ type product design to a smartphone type design. Along the way it benefited from improvements in e-ink display technology to provide a crisper viewing experience. Sony’s competitor might have looked more modern bit it didn’t manage to get the marketing mix and the hardware / services mix right.

    Sony’s failure indicated while you could be successful in a number of media markets, it didn’t guarantee success in other media.

    Rather like Apple products Kindle is a combination of hardware, software (including content), payment infrastructure and the Whispernet global mobile virtual network.

    Like Apple, Amazon came in and refined an existing business model. Companies like Sony made very nice e-readers, but they didn’t have the publisher relationships and market access that Amazon had.

    Context rather than convergence

    In a time where consumer electronics thinking was all about convergence, from the newly launched iPhone to the Symbian eco-system, Amazon were determined to come up with a single purpose device.

    Amazon resisted the trend and created a dedicated device for reading. That is why you have a black-and-white e-ink screen and an experience exclusively focused on seamless content downloads.

    Yes, they’ve rolled out tablets since, but even the latest range stick to the original Kindle playbook. Some of their decisions were quite prescient. The Kindle was deliberately designed so that it didn’t require content to be side loaded from personal computer like an iPod.

    The Kindle has survived the smartphone and the tablet device as a reading experience. Even if ebooks didn’t conquer the book publishing market in quite the way Amazon had planned.

    Using the U.S. legal system to clear the field

    Amazon was helped out by the US government prosecuting Apple under the Sherman Act. Wikipedia has a good summary of this case. On the face of it Apple was doing a similar structured deal with publishers on book pricing to what it had done previously with record companies for iTunes music.

    This case effectively stalled Apple book store momentum and lumbered Apple with overzealous US government overwatch. The consumer benefit has been minimal – more on that later. The irony of all this is the way Amazon has leveraged its monopolistic position to decimate entire sectors of the retail economy.

    The interesting thing about this case, say compared to the Apple | Qualcomm dispute is that Apple still kept Audible audio book sales in iTunes throughout this dispute and didn’t look at ways to bounce the iPad Kindle app from the app store. Audible is an Amazon-owned company.

    By comparison, Amazon bounced Apple’s TV from its own e-commerce platform and has taken a long time to support the AppleTV app eco-system – long after the likes of Netflix.

    Piracy in China

    Amazon hasn’t had it all its own way. China had a burgeoning e-book market prior to the Kindle and Chinese consumers used to read these books on their laptops.  Depending which store you used; it might have more books at a cheaper price because intellectual property wasn’t ironed out. This has undermined Amazon’s slow entry into the Chinese e-book marketplace.

    A cottage industry sprang up that saw Kindles acquired in the US and Japan shipped back to China and reflashed with software that made them compatible with the local app stores. These Kindles were bought at a subsidised price as Amazon looked to sell devices to sell books.

    The Kindle brain phenomenon

    I moved from the UK to Hong Kong to take up a role and tried to lighten my burden by moving my reading from books to the Kindle. I found that I didn’t retain the content I read. I enjoyed the process of reading less and did it less often. I wasn’t an e-book neophyte I had enjoyed reading vintage pulp fiction novels as ebooks on Palm devices and Nokia phones in the early 2000s as a way of passing them time on my commute.

    Talking to friends their experience was similar. I now read on the Kindle or listen to audio books only for pleasure. I tend to buy my reference books in the dead tree format. There is something more immediate about the process of reading from a ‘real book’ rather than an e-book.

    It seems that digital natives aren’t ready to give up books just yet. Studies about the use of digital technology and e-books in education are mixed and anecdotal evidence suggests that technology industry leaders liked to keep the level of digital content in their children’s lives at a low threshold.

    The Kindle hasn’t replaced the bookshelf and the printing press yet.

    Pricing

    Disposing of the medium didn’t mean that we got cheaper e-books. On Amazon it is worth looking carefully to see what is the cheapest format on a case by case basis. Kindle competes against print books and secondhand books.

    Secondhand books win hands down when you are looking at materials beyond bestsellers. A real-world book is easier to gift and Amazon Prime allows for almost instant gratification. The Kindle starts to look like Amazon covering all the bases rather than the future of publishing. This may change over time, a decade into online news was a more mixed media environment than it is now – but Kindle feels as if it has reached a balance at the moment. More related content here.

    More information

    New study suggests ebooks could negatively affect how we comprehend what we read | USA Today
    Shelve paperbacks in favour of E-books in schools? | BBC
    Study challenges popular beliefs on e-reading | The Educator
    Are Digital Textbooks Finally Taking Hold? | Good eReader – makes the case for a heterogenous book environment of standard textbooks, e-books and used books
    Do ‘Digital Natives’ Prefer Paper Books to E-Books? | Education Week
    Our love affair with digital is over | New York Times (paywall)

  • 10th anniversary of the Kindle + more news

    Amazon marks 10th anniversary of the Kindle, the ’18-month project’ that took 3 1/2 years – Kessel said the team was determined to keep the Kindle a single-purpose device – something where you could lose yourself in a book, rather than a multipurpose piece of hardware that might create distractions.

    They were also focused on making it easy for customers by ensuring they could access new books without connecting a cable to a computer for download. That dedication, which lead to a built-in cellular data connection and, eventually, the ability to sync your books across Kindle devices and app, was no small feat. “We said books needed to download in less than 60 seconds, but it definitely didn’t work that way at first,” said Kessel.

    Patience was something the team was forced to learn.

    “Originally I told Jeff (Bezos) it would take us about 18 months to build the Kindle and we could do it with a couple handfuls of folks. It took us three-and-a-half years and a lot more than a couple of handfuls of folks.” – On the 10th anniversary of the Kindle, it is also worthwhile thinking about why it didn’t bring in a paper book apocalypse, and sales of paper books even increased.More Kindle related content here.

    The Motherboard Guide to Not Getting Hacked – Motherboard – really interesting guidelines

    Do Facebook and Google have control of their algorithms anymore? A sobering assessment and a warning | Poynter – is this a ‘SkyNet’ moment? How would you troubleshoot? A lot further out, if you got to sentience at a later date how would you know, particularly if the machine learning system goes down the root of the logic outlined in Cixin Liu’s ‘Three Body Problem’ trilogy

    There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It – Talking Points Memo – Problem #1 (too many publications) and Problem #2 (platform monopolies) have catalyzed together to create Problem #3 (investors realize they were investing in a mirage and don’t want to invest any more)

    Monodraw for macOS — Helftone – OmniGaffle but for ASCI art

  • Sony Walkman WM-R202 – throwback gadget

    sony wmr202
    I got a Sony Walkman WM-R202 and loved it, though it was only for a short while. It was delicate and fragile, or I had a lemon; but it was the kind of device that stuck with me and made sense for me to profile as an iconic throwback gadget. Back when I started work I was obliged to do night classes in advanced chemistry. It was tough going (partly because I wasn’t that focused). I had a long commute home in a company minibus and my existing Walkman WM-24 whilst good had given up the ghost.  I decided to put what money I had towards a Sony Walkman WM-R202 that would help with my commute boredom and my night classes.

    Why that model:

    • It could record reasonably well which I convinced myself would be handy for lectures. It was not up to a Pro Walkman standard as the Dolby circuit fitted was for playback only. (I couldn’t afford the professional grade WM-D6C at the time and they weren’t the kind of device that you could easily fit in a pocket either. They were big and substantial.)
    • It had a good reputation for playback. Not only did it have Dolby B noise reduction and auto reverse on cassette playback, but it held the cassette really well due to its metal construction. I learned the benefits of good tape cassette fit in a rigid mechanism the hard way. I had got hold of a WM-36 which on paper looked better than my previous Walkman with Dolby B noise reduction and a graphic equaliser, but had to keep the door closed with a number of elastic bands. It was a sheep dressed up as a wolf and I struggled on with my original dying Walkman
    • Probably the biggest reason was that it intrigued me. It wasn’t much larger than an early iPod and was crafted with a jeweller’s precision. It was powered by a single AA battery or a NiCd battery about the size of a couple of sticks of chewing gum. It looked sexy as hell in in a brushed silver metal finish.

    Whilst the buttons on the device might seem busy in comparison to software driven smartphones it was a surprisingly well designed user experience. None of them caught on clothing, the main controls fell easily to hand and I can’t remember ever having to use the manual.

    What soon became apparent is that you needed to handle it very carefully to get cassettes in and out. I used to carefully tease the cassettes in and out. Despite my care, one day it stopped working.  Given that mine lasted about two weeks, I am guessing that mine was a lemon and that the build quality must have been generally high as you can still see them on eBay and Yahoo! Auctions in Japan.

    Since mine gave out well within a warranty period, I look it back to the shop and put the money towards a Sony D-250 Discman instead.

    Here’s a video in Japanese done by someone selling a vintage WM-R202 on Yahoo! Auctions which shows you all the features in more depth.

    SaveSave

  • Older iPhones + more news

    Apple CEO Cook breathes new life into old iPhones | Reuters – how Apple’s lower models contribute in markets like India. Older iPhones resold also drive services sales on an ongoing basis, whether the older iPhones are based on to children or sold on

    Culture

    Funko CEO reacts to stock’s 40% plunge on figurine maker’s first day as a public company | Geekwire – surprising given the prominence of geekdom in popular culture

    Gadgets

    aibo | Sony Japan – Matt’s commentary on this from his Web Curios newsletter ‘When I was about 20 I was obsessed with the idea of Sony’s Aibo, the robot dog that was JUST LIKE A REAL PUPPY  but with no hair or faeces or propensity to maul people.; now Sony have announced a rebooted version which is slightly less robotic and slightly more cute, and doubtless far more sophisticated in its ability to dance and caper and charmingly present to demand tickles that will never feel. The weird thing is, though, that now I am older I look at this and feel nothing but a deep and abiding sadness at the thought of the sort of people for whom this actually designed – not rich twats who want a toy, but the terminally lonely for whom a small robotic dog and stroking its plastic, unfeeling case in lieu of actual biological contact. Imagine that being your only interaction with another ‘thing’ for days and days and days on end. I don’t want to grow old.’ Not too sure if this a manifestation of his realisation of mortality that usually kicks in with the start of middle age. It does reflect the resurgence of Sony and how it thinks about consumer products for a greying market.

    Marketing

    See the cool kids lined up outside that new restaurant? This app pays them to stand there. – The Washington Post  – “They hire promoters and marketers and PR agencies to connect, but it’s a one-sided interaction that involves blasting out a message to get people engaged, but they don’t necessarily know if that message is being received.”

    WPP’s PR Units Slip as Sorrell Warns on ‘New Normal’ – O’Dwyer PR  – “It does seem that in new normal of a low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power world, there is an increasing focus on cost reduction, exacerbated by a management consultant emphasis on cost reduction and the close to zero cost of capital funding of activist investors and zero-based budgeters,” wrote Sorrell in WPP’s trading update.

    Online

    Damning stat Facebook tried to bury | News.com.au – 270 million accounts are duplicate or fake

    Software

    This app is like Shazam for fonts | The Next Web – genius, more design related content here.

    Berlin’s Ada Health raises $47M to become the Alexa of healthcare | TechCrunch – would the money be better spent on building skills into Alexa or Google Home?

    Wireless

    Q’comm Profits Dive Amid Patent Disputes | EE Times – ingredient brand most hated by its partners….

  • The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

    I bought The One Device when it came out in July and have gone back and forth reading it. I’d read books on Silicon Valley before; the Apple eulogy  Insanely Great by Steven Levy which told of the graft and hard work that went into the original Macintosh or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon which discussed engineers working really long works. My favourite one is still Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires that portrays Gates as a coupon-clipping megalomaniac and Steve Jobs as a sociopath cut from the same cloth as Josef Stalin.

    Merchant’s The One Device is different. It doesn’t eulogise in the same way, but it also lacks immediacy as it feels detached from its subject matter. Unlike Levy’s work, Apple didn’t cooperate with Merchant at all. The book is broad in scope and sometimes loses its way, each one of the chapters could have been an interesting short book in their own right and this leaves it being faintly unsatisfactory.  I guess this is one of the reasons why it took me so long to read it.

    In the meantime the book stirred controversy over quotes attributed to Tony Fadell about then colleague Phil Schiller.  This made me cast a critical eye over some of Merchant’s adventures in the book. In particular inside the Foxconn industrial complex.

    On a more positive note, Merchant’s vision is grander than previous authors. One man’s mission to pull all the intellectual threads together on what made up the iPhone. The iPhone moves from becoming the child of an over-worked and under-appreciated Apple engineering team to being the totem of a global village.

    If you’ve read a quality newspaper you know what he’s going to say about the global supply chain. He also touches on the decades of software and technology development that led up to the iPhone.  How its multi-touch interface came out of a 1990s doctoral thesis. Ultimately the value of Merchant’s book many not be his writing, but instead becoming a new template for journalists writing on Silicon Valley to look beyond the David & Goliath mono-myth and instead dig into the tangled history of innovation. More book reviews here.