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.

  • 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.

  • Apple Knowledge Navigator + other things

    Apple Knowledge Navigator

    Apple Knowledge Navigator was a rewarming of Vannevar Bush’s ideas in his essay ‘As We May Think that’ was published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic. There is a clear line between Vannevar Bush’s notional Memex machine and the Apple Knowledge Navigator.

    While Bush had the good sense to realise that a device with all of a user’s books, records, and communications had value. It reminded me a lot of the modern smartphone or the Wikireader. But there was less consideration with regards organisation and search in the Memex.

    These were some of the challenges that Apple thought through in this 1987 concept film.

    The Apple Knowledge Navigator concept film had really interesting search concepts in it. It is a shame that we’re nowhere near where Apple thought search and natural language processing would have been in 2007. This is still a concept video for today.

    Business

    Apple should shrink its finance arm before it goes bananas – The Economist – the risks associated with Apple’s cash mountain

    Media

    Update on Our Advertising Transparency and Authenticity Efforts – Facebook Newsroom – desperately trying to get ahead of regulation

    China Box Office: ‘Geostorm’ Blows to $33 Million Win as ‘Blade Runner’ Flops – Variety – interesting that Blade Runner cratered. I talked to a couple of friends and found out that the first film was not known in China, even amongst film buffs. Secondly the Chinese name was very misleading – moviegoers were expecting a film about a killer.

    How many people see your content on each digital channel? | The Drum  – bookmark for heuristics

    Retailing

    Amazon gains wholesale pharmacy licenses in multiple states | stltoday.com – this is going to blow up the share performance of Walgreens, CVS etc etc. More related content here.

    Security

    Facebook denies ‘listening’ to conversations – BBC News  – probably not the microphone, but would be surprised if they aren’t dipping into chat data or beyond

    Software

    Huawei AppStore and Huawei Video Service heading to Europe in 2018 – Gizchina.com – interesting move challenging Google

    LG K7i (LGX230I) – Smartphone With Mosquito Away Technology | LG India – if this wasn’t being sold on a legitimate LG site I would question if this was a shanzhai phone with fake LG branding. Its an interesting idea though

  • AMD Live and the connected home ten years later

    A decade ago I worked on AMD Live. A hodgepodge of hardware and software that provided media access where ever and whenever you wanted it.  Here is a short video that we made at the time to bring it to life. The idea was that AMD would be able to sell higher specifications of PC components into the home to act as digital hub. They wanted to push their Opteron server processors into the home.

    An engineer came in and spent the best part of a day setting everything up throughout the house prior to shooting the film. At the time much of the streaming boxes didn’t work as promised so some of the screen images were put in post-production. There was a mix of cloud services and home hosted content. At the centre was a PC running Windows Multimedia Centre. There was a raft of third-party apps needed as well

    • Network management apps
    • Video and image compression apps
    • Instant messaging (that wasn’t MSN or Skype – no idea why it was in the bundle)
    • TV tuner software
    • A music jukebox application
    • Network management
    • An AMD GUI which provided a 3D carousel effect and integrated web browser

    It was all a bit of kludge.

    Digital content was well on its way. Streaming technology was well known but unstructured. RealNetworks had been going commercially since 1997, but the playback quality was dependent on Internet network connectivity, We only started to see widespread DSL adoption from 2003 onwards in the UK. By the first quarter of 2003, DSL was enabled at 1200 of the 5600 telephone exchanges across the UK.

    Apple’s QuickTime streaming server was open sourced back in 1999; so if anyone wanted to set up a streaming network they had the technology to do so.

    Digital audio content prior to 2003 had largely been ripped from optical media or downloaded online via FTP, Usenet or P2P networks. iTunes launched its music store in 2003.

    From a standing start in 2002; by 2004, 5 million devices with a HDMI connection had been sold. The built in copy protection had been developed by an Intel subsidiary and was adopted by all the big Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers.

    By 2005, Apple had started selling iTunes movies and TV programmes  alongside its music offering that allowed sharing of an account on up to 5 concurrent devices.

    Apple launched its MFi programme in January 2005, which begat a raft of speakers and stereos with iPod connectivity in the home and the car.

    Sonos released its speaker system including a wi-fi mesh network and AES network encryption. Flickr had a well documented API that allowed for a fully functioning photo album and picture streaming which was used in early web 2.0 mashups.

    AMD Live was on the back-foot from day one. From a high end perspective of audio streaming Sonos had it locked down. For everyone else moving an iPod from room to room had the same effect.  Mini-video servers could be configured from mini-PC boxes, but they were only for the technically skilled. Even the Mac Mini launched in 2005 didn’t make the process much easier. The key advantage is that it could use iTunes as a video source and a playing software.

    Back then because it was US centric in its view AMD Live completely ignored the rise of the smartphone as a music playback device.  By 2007, Nokia launched ‘Comes With Music‘ which put mobile streaming in play. Apple Music and Spotify have now made streaming effortless. Video playback now comes from devices the size of a thumb drive. New intermediate screens from tablets to smartphones changed viewing habits and the PC has become redundant as the home hub for all but the most enthusiastic AV aficionados.