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.

  • Revox B77 series

    When I started off having an interest in DJing I went around to a a friend’s house whose older brother was into audio engineering. As well as having one of the first set of Technics 1200s I had ever seen he had a Revox B77 tape recorder. He used to record tracks on to the tape reels and then splice the tape to make tracks longer by extending breaks, or extend the breakdown or vocal hook of a track into staccato repetitions; which sounded like Max Headroom-esque stutters of vocal hook or ‘machine gun’ drum breaks.

    Splicing tape took patience, practice and a modicum of skill to achieve. At the time however it was the Revox B77 tape machine itself that I fell in love with. These machines were made in Switzerland and felt like they were hewn from aluminum. Even the buttons were solid, giving positive feedback through a satisfying clunk when pushed and the VU meters glowed with a warm light and needles danced as the sound levels went up and down.  As interfaces went, the analogue controls of the tape machine have yet to be beaten by anything that Apple has come up with. All of this belied the complex engineering that happened inside.
    Revox B77 MK II
    All of this engineering expertise turned out machines that were about the best recorded sound that money could buy. Many artists today record digitally, transfer on to an analogue tape machine like the B77 and then master back to digital for CD manufacture and iTunes reproduction because of the way analogue treats sound.

    Revox was a consumer facing brand of Swiss professional audio manufacturer Studer (now part of Harman International) and much of that professional engineering went into the Revox products. The Revox tape machines were professional ‘wolves’ in consumer electronics ‘sheep’s’ branding.

    The B77 series of machines came out in 1979 and sported full logic controls (which made things smoother) and direct drive motors (which meant that everything got up to speed faster), but otherwise improved on the A77 of the late 1960s. The machine used 10 1/2 tape spools to make its recordings on with a tape throughput of 15 inches per second on most models which was the professional master recording standard and one could vary the speed up to over 20 inches per second if you wanted to – this operated a bit like pitch control on a Technics SL-1200 turntable.

    The B77 series came in a number of guises:

    • The LS ran at low speeds for radio stations and call centres that needed to log everything that happened
    • The basic model which ran only at consumer speeds
    • The HS which ran at professional tape recording speeds
    • The PR99 (Mk I, II and III) which were designed to be more edit friendly and had less knob controls which could get in the way of the manual tape splicing process

    All of this engineering came at a cost and the Revox B77 weighed a proverbial ton (actually closer to 20Kg for the machine itself plus whatever you carted it around in, like a studio rack or a flight case)

    Quarter inch tape recording isn’t dead, the tape is still made around the world by Quantegy, RMGI, ATR Magnetics and Jai Electronic Industries. Otari Inc still makes an analogue studio master machine and Denon still sells a similar machine for broadcast purposes in Asia.

    In addition, high end studios still use multi-track digital reel-to-reel machines when you want to record to 48 tracks as the time code technology and audio encoding technology used in them is superior to more modern computer-based solutions. More related content can be found here.

  • Nokia N9

    Hong Kong-based independent mobile industry analyst Tomi Ahonen is one of the most prominent critics of Nokia. One of the points that Ahonen makes is that the Nokia N9 (based on the MeeGo operating system; parts of which has now been incorporated into Samsung’s mobile operating system Tizen) is more attractive than the equivalent Nokia Lumia phones.

    Nokia has been suspiciously ambiguous about Nokia N9 sales numbers. Mr Ahonen has made some guesses that put the N9 selling in broadly the same numbers as the Lumia range; despite not being sold in many developed world markets and not being backed by a $150 million advertising campaign. These are just estimates so I was curious to to see what the relative interest was for Lumia devices versus N9 when they are sold side-by-side.

    I decided to look at Expansys.com. Expansys is the place to go for early adopters to get the kind of handsets that UK carriers, Phones4U and Carphone Warehouse don’t want to sell. In common with many sophisticated e-commerce websites Expansys has a search function that has an auto-suggestion function based on popularity to help get consumers to the item they want as fast as possible.
    Untitled
    In this unscientific study the Nokia N9 is more popular than all the Lumia models – when the products are sold side-by-side, which is probably why Nokia has taken care to minimise the amount of market competition between the Lumia and the Nokia N9. This still doesn’t give me any idea on differentiation between the N9 and the Lumia models.

    I decided to have a look at the different Lumia models and the N9 on Google Insights for Search. What this shows is an overall decline in interest on all the premium Nokia brand phones I looked at over time. Whilst the Lumia 800 has been the most popular on the chart, the gap between it and the Nokia N9 doesn’t merit the fact that Nokia blew an estimated $150 million promoting the Lumia 800 – their biggest ever budget and didn’t for the N9.

    One could argue that Nokia has been handicapped in its carrier relations because of Microsoft’s Skype acquisition, and reviewers have given the handsets themselves mixed reviews. But what I found most disturbing is that it seems that the evidence suggests consumers have failed to be sufficiently excited the Lumia phones; that an unpromoted, unsupported handset running an operating system that Nokia has killed off is giving the Lumia range a run for its money – despite the Lumia range having Nokia’s largest ever marketing campaign behind it.

    Nokia still has a stretch of runway to make its transformation complete, but it doesn’t fill one with confidence, perhaps RIM will be the third mobile eco-system? More Nokia related content can be found here.

    More information
    Who Wants Numbers? Lumia on T-Mobile? Lumia 800 vs Lumia 710? How Many Nokia N9? – Communities Dominate Brands

  • Sony Vaio PCG C1 series: Throwback gadget

    I’m an unusual choice to write about the Sony Vaio PCG C1. I’ve only had PC envy with a couple of devices during my twenty something years at a Mac user:

    • The IBM ThinkPad 701 series with its butterfly keyboard
    • The Sony Vaio PCG C1 series of notebooks

    In common with the 701, the Sony Vaio PCG C1 impressed me with its product design. In a pioneering design for 1998, the Sony Vaio PCG C1 included a built in web camera above the screen that could be rotated to try and ensure an optimum camera position.
    Picturebook PCG C1-VN

    Sony made a small modular computer. What was important was what they had left out in their device case and instead relied on a set of outboard peripherals so the user could bring or configure their computer set-up to suit their needs.  The PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) slot was equivalent of the USB socket today and used to connect a wide range of devices including both fixed-line and GSM wireless modems.
    Sony Vaio C1 VE

    The beauty extended on to the inside of the devices with some of the range using a Transmeta Crusoe processor. The Crusoe was the Intel Atom almost a decade before the Atom; it used a combination of software techniques and hardware innovations to reduce heat output and improve power consumption. This had some benefit in terms of battery improvement, but battery life relies on a combination factors such as screen power, hard drive power and other parts on the circuit board.

    This device is even more remarkable when you  realise that the Vaio PCG C1 was launched some seven years before Steve Jobs went on stage at Apple’s Worldwide Development Conference in 2005 to announce the move to Intel processors because of a new focus on computer power per Watt. You could consider the MacBook Air that I am typing this post out on as a spiritual successor to the Vaio C1. More Sony posts here.

    More information
    More about the Sony Vaio PCG C1 and one man’s adventures trying to install Linux on it

  • Throwback gadget: IBM ThinkPad 701

    Before we think about the IBM ThinkPad 701, I wanted to flag that I’ve been a Mac user for almost all of my computer-owning adult life. But there have only been a couple of devices that have ever given me PC-envy.

    The first one was the IBM ThinkPad 701, my friend at college Jouni whom I lived in halls with at the time had a 701 and the product design blew me away.

    The IBM ThinkPad 701 had a carefully designed set of accessories providing a full system of accessories that the road warrior would need including a desk dock, cable adaptors, spare batteries and a detachable disk drive.  That was clever and as good as what Apple was doing with with its PowerBook Duo sub notebook. It’s hard to explain how connectivity pre USB was much trickier.
    Design Museum iPad application screen shot
    Surprisingly for a computer manufacturer, IBM turned out laptops that had interesting industrial design. They used magnesium alloy shells, titanium and carbon fibre in different model designs over the years and got less credit than they deserved for it.

    Richard Sapper, a German product designer based in Italy came up with the design language for the ThinkPad which he modeled on the traditional black lacquer bento box. An ex-automotive engineer with Mercedes Benz Sapper was better known for his work with Alessi and the Tizio lamp for Artemide.

    Sapper has kept a connection with the ThinkPad brand and is involved as a design consultant for the current ThinkPad range made by Lenovo.
    Design Museum iPad application screen shot
    What made the IBM ThinkPad 701 special was the butterfly keyboard designed by John Karidis solved the problem of making a portable computer with a full-size keyboard. It had a better action than modern laptops in terms typist feedback and was a compact full size keyboard. This was unheard of at the time. It was delicate the way it folded into place as one opened the lid on the laptop and robust enough to cope with travails of mobile working. More design related posts here.

  • Android differentiation

    I decided to write on my story  onAndroid differentiation after careful consideration. On one hand I didn’t want the companies involved to suffer because one executive had a loud mouth. On the other hand it raised interesting questions about the state of the Android eco-system. So I decided at the time to thinly veil the identities of the different parties.

    March 14: I was sat down in the main dining room of the JW Marriott in Seoul having breakfast and minding my own business when I found myself sitting the next table along from a rather loud discussion of a proposal that a US start-up (Flipboard) wanted to make to a major Korean Android handset (Samsung) and tablet manufacturer in a meeting scheduled that day for 2pm.

    The crux of the pitch was around Android differentiation opportunities. The major Korean manufacturer (Samsung) has a need for something to provide a clear space. The start-up can help the Korean company sell more devices if they pay for the start-up to develop their software. The  software currently is a prominent RSS and social network aggregation as magazine-type reader on iPhone and iPad.  The startup wanted funds to develop it specifically for the Korean company’s Android devices.

    Samsung should also spend a bit more to offer on a new phone or tablet –   a three-month free subscription to a publication like The New York Times, Vanity Fair or People magazine – given the media connections that the start-up partnership development person had: they could broker the deal to make this happen. Would the glorified subscription model be

    I also gathered that a similar pitch had already been made to a Taiwanese handset manufacturer (HTC); but not much progress had happened, though this may change as they had a good idea that the start-up was in discussions with Samsung. HTC were apparently keen to talk to Flipboard again.

    Now ignoring the lack of common sense in having this discussion in a public place with colleagues when your voice carries across the room I was struck by two things regarding Android differentiation:

    • The economics of major applications on Android seem to require major financial incentives if this guy had flown half-way around the world to pitch this offer at the same time that SXSWi was on in Austin
    • Android device differentiation / hyper-competition is becoming an issue, if the head of marketing at a large corporate would spend time to do this meeting and seriously consider the start-up’s proposal. The market must be seriously commoditised and there must be little ‘value-add’ benefits between devices

    Now I don’t think that a free three-month subscription is going to move the needle that much, particularly if one looks at how Nokia’s Comes With Music initiative failed to arrest the decline of the world’s largest phone maker. And the implication about the economics of high-quality Android application development was something that concerned me, particularly when I look at the increasing demand for mobile work from clients. More related content here.