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.
Director Tony Kaye happy to be working and out of ‘Hollywood jail’ | The Drum – He says that a story arc doesn’t really matter in six seconds. “I think you can throw anything at it, as long as it’s quite clear what it’s for. If you’re working under 20 minutes, in my opinion, you don’t need any structure. You can be as fragmented or as crazy as you want.” – Tony Kaye was a legend in the advertising world, creating some of the most iconic adverts of the 1980s and early 1990s. His Hollywood debut was American X, a brilliant provocative film with the troubled production. This saw Kaye go to the ‘Hollywood jail’ of the title where he could not get work in the film industry.
Hackers stole a casino’s database through a thermometer in the lobby fish tank – Business Insider – “It’s probably one area where there’ll likely need to be regulation for minimum security standards because the market isn’t going to correct itself,” he said. “The problem is these devices still work. The fish tank or the CCTV camera still work.” – it’s Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in real life. The internet of things is now an under assessed security vector. In the right hands, a lot can be done with very little computing resources and computers have become pervasive in nature.
The Finns who refuse to give up on Sailfish OS | Engadget – given the challenges that ZTE faces. Jolla with Sailfish OS would be an ideal technology stack on their foreign handsets, particularly if they can do an English language version of the Yandex app store. That way they won’t have to localise all of their offerings as a replacement for Google Mobile Services (GMS) layer in Android. More related content here.
Interesting discussion on the use of voice interfaces and services. There is a certain amount of cheerleading involved in the talk; but that is to be expected with vendors in the room. If found it interesting that one of the panelists; Sam Liang of AISense moved out of where2.0 services and into voice. because location is a great gateway to lots of rich contextual information and voice is desperately in need of context and by extension user intent.
It is interesting to get a perspective on the organisations involved in the discussion on voice interfaces:
SRI International
Amazon
Microsoft
AISense
All of them seem to be well behind where the telecoms voice services managed to get to like Orange’s Wildfire.
Key takeouts from this:
50,000,000 voice devices to ship this year (2018). A total installed user base of 100,000,000 (presumably excluding voice interfaces on smartphones)
AISense is looking to build in voice biometrics that would prompt you about who a person is. Privacy implications are profound
The panel struggled to articulate an answer to privacy concerns beyond ‘services need to build trust’ and transparency
Information security and hacking wasn’t a point of discussion; which surprised me a lot
Context still seems to be a huge issue, I think that this is a bigger issue than the panelists acknowledge. Google still struggles on user intent, without adding the additional layer of understanding voice. The biggest moves seem to be ‘social engineering’ hacks, rather than improvements in technology
Amazon and Microsoft don’t have plans for advertising services on voice (at the moment)
We’re very far away from general purpose voice services
Work has only started on trying to understand emotion
More information
Orange’s Wildfire and The Register on its shutdown. Wildfire’s problem seemed to be a failure of marketing more than anything else. We haven’t seen anything else like it. Even Siri is only scraping over the ashes of the work done on Wildfire 15 years ago
Google’s published research on speech processing. What becomes apparent from looking at the list of research is how basic the current state-of-the-art currently is
BBC Blogs – Technology & Creativity Blog – Shifting gear with the BBC World Service – interesting opportunities for developers, this mirrors the expansion of Chinese and Russian media internationally. The BBC World Service has also had its funding disrupted in a manner that make it more political. The long term impact of this bias is likely to damage the BBC World Service as a soft power tool
Apple manufacturer Foxconn just bought iPhone accessory maker Belkin – great move for Foxconn. Foxconn now gets a number of consumer brands including Linksys and can make better Apple accessories faster based on their knowledge of Apple production – if they can maintain secrecy
Louis Vuitton’s new men’s designer Virgil Abloh is known for streetwear, not high fashion — Quartzy – A new generation of consumers is emerging with different values and desires than previous buyers of high-end goods. Instead of spending their money on fancy suits, young shoppers are dropping hundreds of dollars on items like logo tees and sock sneakers. As clothes continue to move away from formality, brands from Berluti to Balenciaga are adjusting their wares accordingly – with younger Asian consumers as the growth market of the luxury sector the two worlds are merging. Its only been four decades in the making
It is a little disingenuous to call the Bose Wave Music System a throwback gadget, mainly because Bose still makes it. It would be reasonable to call it a design classic. There are benefits to picking up a 2006 model Bose Wave Music System, rather than paying the premium of a new device.
Bose Wave System timeline
The original Bose Wave System was launched back in 1984; this was back when Sony was king due to the Walkman, digital wasn’t really on the horizon with the Discman only launching same year. The Acoustic Wave 1 (AW1) was a new take on the boom box radio that was ubiquitous in households and workplaces at that time. The AW1 featured a cassette deck and a two band radio.
Eight years later digital finally arrived when Bose switched out the cassette for a top-loading CD player instead.
In 1993, the Bose Wave System shrank from about the size of a medium sized boom box to something about as tall as an iPod Classic but featured radio only and was called the Wave Radio.
Five years later a slot loading CD player was integrated. In 2004, the CD player also accepted MP3 based discs and Boselink connectivity.
Boselink
Boselink is unique in consumer electronics in terms of the expandability it allows. It was originally designed as a communications protocol for multi-room sound systems, but is also useful for connecting modules that extend the functionality of the basic Bose Wave System. Compatible accessories include:
Multi-CD drive
Soundlink – playback of music which is streamed to the device over Bluetooth
DAB module – UK-only adapter allowing reception of digital radio as well as AM and FM signals
Bose also offered an iPod kit, which charges your iPod Classic and plays back the music. There is a replacement remote for the Bose Wave Music System which integrates basic iPod playback controls.
Vintage over new
The key benefit of a vintage Bose Wave System over a new device is the display. New devices have a back lit LCD display which wash out and aren’t as legible as the vintage vacuum fluorescent displays.
Secondly, you still enjoy the ‘big box’ sound created by the diminutive size of the Bose Wave Music System. They use use a folded waveguide, which is a series of passages from the speaker driver to the speaker grill. This attempts to replicate sound from larger systems. Bose claims the waveguide “produces full, clear stereo sound from a small enclosure by guiding air through two 26” folded wave guides.” The design of the wave guides has changed minimally over the years.
My casual listening at home is based on two systems. A 12 year old Apple iPod Hi-Fi A1121, which works as a centre speaker for my TV when I need it. It takes audio in via TOSLink and gives a better sound than most sound bars that I’ve listened to.
I use a Bose Wave Music System of a similar age to the iPod Hi-Fi with the DAB module connected via BoseLink and iPod adaptor as my go to radio around the house. It is the default provider of background music and up to the minute news. It provides a better sound than most of its newer BlueTooth enabled competitors. It wins out over the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, because of its ability to play digital radio and hide out of the way on book shelf.
I then use a dedicated hi-fi for serious music listening of CDs and vinyl records.
Ok this isn’t the most technical video in terms of its review of the Chinese smartphone eco-system and it doesn’t touch on the WeChat eco-system, but its a good introductory video for westerners by Winston Sterzel, a YouTuber living in Shenzhen. It focuses on only the top domestic Chinese smartphone brands.
If I was looking to explain Chinese smartphone dynamics to a western client, this video is as good an introduction as any to the hardware side of the business.
Here are the key points I’d highlight and additional comments that I would add to the film.
Mobility in the working population drove Chinese smartphone adoption
The transitory nature of the Chinese workforce following China’s opening up has mean’t that many people are migrants and many only return home once a year (for lunar new year) if they are lucky. Staying in touch is critical to keep families together. Secondly being migrants, having a ‘computer’ that you can carry makes more sense than a traditional PC. Finally, the price point of smartphones puts the internet in the hands of pretty much anyone who wants one. These three factors explain why smartphones took off so dramatically in China. This started in the urban areas, but then migrants brought them home to relatives and gave them away as Chinese new year gifts.
China Mobile had a government mandate to build out connectivity into even the most rural areas in China. Data packages and the applications that run on it like WeChat made telecommunications even cheaper and easier.
The smartphone is where the majority of Chinese online shopping takes place, how families keep in touch and are starting to be a tool for the delivery of government services.
The price-value balance of smartphones
The development of the iPhone had an unintended on the Chinese smartphone contract manufacturers. If we go back to the early Samsung Galaxy models from the S to the S4; the industrial design of these phones owed a lot to Nokia. They had replaceable storage with micro SD cards and a replaceable battery with a battery hatch in plastic. If you dropped the phone the hatch may pop off. This was by design as it got rid of the some of the energy from the fall and the frame had a degree of flex to protect the innards. This is one of the reasons why Nokia 3310 feature phones ran and ran. The face and back might pop off your phone if you dropped it; but they could easily be snapped back on.
Manufacturing phones of that nature also helps with scaling up manufacturing based on mouldings.
Apple didn’t bother with external batteries, which at the time sparked a huge controversy. Their battery life was awful and most working stiffs kept their phone charging from their office PC during the day. By comparison I had a desktop charger with previous Ericsson and Nokia phones, along with a few spare batteries and felt comfortable going on holiday for a few days with a spare charged battery in a zip loc bag and no phone charger. Up until the 6 plus, Apple’s battery has been a real pain.
So Apple differentiated by done what seemed like an insane idea of using a CNC (computer numeric controlled) machine to make the phone chassis. This is like a robot version of the machine tools that you would have used in shop class individually making each phone chassis.
Apple tried this out with the stainless steel ‘belly band’ of the 4 series phone and then perfected it with the 5 series. I suspect the reason why they moved from stainless steel to aluminium alloy for manufacturing was to balance durability with optimising manufacturing time.
Over time these machines move from the Apple production lines onto another product. Soon you can’t be the smartphone chassis manufacturing business unless you have this capability. Apple’s machines may have been sold on, but there was probably an increase in the CNC machine makers manufacturing capacity as well.
So all of the smartphones shown, whether it cost £80 or £800; none of them felt cheap or had a ‘China penalty’ in terms of case design. This has affected the market in the Chinese smartphone eco-system. They are more durable, but there is less incentive to go premium when a cheap or medium priced phone looks and feels this good.
The durability of modern Chinese smartphones might be one fo the reasons why sales in smartphones have declined year-on-year. I’d argue a second reason is WeChat; so long as you can use WeChat your smartphone is fine. WeChat has had a similar effect on Chinese smartphones to what the web had on western PC sales over the past two decades – computers had become about as useful as they were going to be and performance became less of an issue.
Chinese smartphone market consolidation
Winston kind of alluded to it in his video but Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus are all related to BBK Electronics; a longtime Chinese phone and consumer electronics manufacturer. When I first went to visit China I bought a BBK ‘keitai’ style clamshell feature phone. At that time BBK competed with international players like Nokia or Samsung and domestic brands like Ningbo Bird. (Ningbo Bird was the largest manufacturer in China from 2003 – 2005).
Now they make everything from cheap TVs and speakers under the Memorex brand, to smartphones and high end Blu-Ray players as Oppo.
In the smartphone sector, they operate under three main brands. OnePlus is aimed at international users and kind of similar to Xiaomi in terms of the balance that it strikes between technology, features and price. Oppo is more of a Samsung or Huawei analogue. Vivo was launched to have a lower price youthful brand.
Between BBK, Xiaomi and Huawei you now have most of the Chinese smartphone eco-system, by value and sales volume. Just a few years ago there would have been far more players that would have merited a review including the following the companies and their sub-brands:
ZTE
Lenovo
Meizu
Coolpad
TCL
These are still big businesses, and I am not denigrating these brands. The analyst reports show that the Chinese smartphone eco-system is undergoing rapid consolidation; in the same way as Sony and HTC have been dwarfed by Samsung and Huawei.
