Master Dilettante

A good friend of mine just asked me which Bluetooth headset she should get. I’ve done a fair amount of research here, bought a few too many devices myself and actually had planned to post reviews of the BlueAnt Z9 and the Plantronics Discovery 925. I’m going to skip those reviews and instead copy-paste my response to my friend right here:

What are your requirements? Are you thinking of a wireless Bluetooth headset?

J.I. just got the original Jawbone, which has come down in price quite a bit, particularly since a new model has been released. I wrote three blog posts on the original Jawbone, with mixed reviews: http://www.joonsookim.com/blog/?s=jawbone.

In general, I think you should be considering (1) sound quality, both receiving and transmitting, (2) ease of use, (3) physical comfort/fit and (4) durability.

Here’s what I think the options are:

I’ve looked at reviews of other Bluetooth headsets. Some folks like various Motorola versions. My sense is that these four above are among the best if not the best. Certainly, the BlueAnt and the Jawbone receive the highest acclaim.

Lemme know if you have more questions!

With this said, I continue to get some feedback that the Plantronics Discovery 925 transmitting sound quality can be spotty. I’ll likely check out the Jawbone NinjaAssassin at some point and will let you know how that goes.

I’ve been the proud, delighted owner of my 16MB white iPhone 3G for a week now. I love it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its drawbacks. And I find that many of my complaints are around the absence of functionality I had on my BlackBerry Pearl. Following my first impressions, here’s what Apple could do that would make me say, “What BlackBerry?”

Must Have:

• Improve the battery life. The battery life is so bad that I find myself now becoming accustomed to charging my iPhone throughout the day. Granted, my usage is high. I ran the unit several times until it shut down to maximize battery life as an Apple Genius recommended. But any handheld communications-organization device needs to be able to run from the time I wake until the time I sleep. End of story.
• To-Do List/Notes Sync. I used Notes and the To-Do List (the “NextAction” add-on) extensively on my BlackBerry, and they integrated beautifully with Outlook, including Outlook Exchange Web mail. Now, I remain in a quandary as to what to do with the iPhone. I’m looking at Evernote, EasyTask Manager and OmniFocus as replacements (I’m a partial GTD adherent), but none solve all of the problems I have. (More on GTD applications to come).
• Copy/Cut-Paste. It’s beyond my understanding why this is not available.
• More Robust Email. The litany of issues is too long to enumerate. BlackBerry is way better, period. This is essential if Apple wants to steal share in the enterprise market.
• Voice Dialing. Especially in California, where headsets are now required by law when driving, easy dialing while in the car is essential. Favorites, Recents, Contacts — all of these are too difficult to use when driving. I’ve tried the SpeechCloud Voice Dialer application and it (1) isn’t a dialer - it’s a voice recognition lookup tool and (2) it doesn’t work well. In 4-5 tries, it never found the name I was seeking, and I then uninstalled it. In general, contact and phone number lookup on the iPhone require too many keystrokes, and the ease of use of the basic phone function is less than ideal.
• Overall Stability. My iPhone crashes. Not infrequently. Usually when flipping among applications. An open platform is great. It’s got to be more stable that this.

Nice to Have:

• IR Beam. Remember the Palm V? I do. I’d love better capability to transmit data from phone-to-phone.
• Video Recording. This isn’t that important to me, but I look forward to the day.

I’m still a satisifed promoter of the iPhone and look forward to future improvements. It’s been a week, and I’m still having fun.

Here’s what I’m loving so far:

• Evernote — This is a pre-existing capture-organize-search application new to me. Take notes, photos, voice notes. Among the many potential uses, I’m taking photos of random scraps of paper I’ve had lying around, tagging them for Evernote and then tossing ‘em. Love it.
• WritingPad — You’ve got to try this to understand it. It’s faster than the keyboard but lacks the magnifying glass cursor placement. Getting to numbers and symbols is a bit of a pain, but for sheer input speed, it’s cool.
• Twitteriffic — Who knew I had so much nonsense to say? (Yes, yes, everyone).
• Pandora — I was using this Web-based before. The iPhone application is great. It’s already changing how people regard radio.

Check these out!

Over a year ago I endorsed the Jawbone Bluetooth headset with unbridled enthusiasm. At the time, it was clearly superior to any other Bluetooth noise reduction headset. Not too soon after I bought it, my enthusiasm subsided and I reluctantly acknowledged a few concerns. Yet I remained satisfied.

Now, over a year later, events since then and the emergence of competing products prompt this reassessment.

Last year, I articulated my evaluative criteria: (1) sound quality, both receiving and transmitting, (2) comfort/fit/usability and (3) durability. I rated the Jawbone as outstanding in sound quality, I was noncommital with regard to fit, and I questioned its durability.

I stand by my assessment of transmitting sound quality, and reports are that the new Jawbone NoiseAssassin has much improved receiving sound quality.

However, I grew more and more dissatisfied with the fit the longer I used the original Jawbone. No matter which ear bud or ear loop I tried, I could never get a reasonably comfortable, snug fit in my ear; the Jawbone always felt as if it might fall.

On top of this, the usability and/or durability of the Jawbone wasn’t up to snuff. I’d originally broken my first one by a single short drop to the floor. Next, I found difficulty getting the Jawbone to charge. The awkward fit between the charger and the Jawbone port was a difficult marriage to make. Even using different chargers, sometimes I simply couldn’t get the Jawbone to fit and charge. Finally, the last straw for me was when the Jawbone would appear to charge but simply wouldn’t power on or function anymore.

Now, the NoiseAssassin is sexier in its sleekness, but I’m reading even more criticisms of its hit or miss fit. (I think this is the downside of relying on a heralded designer — the wrong designer will emphasize aesthetics over function). Apparently, Jawbone recognized the charger issues and has addressed them. But at this point, I’m once bitten and twice shy about trying the Jawbone again.

Oddly, I remain a promoter of the Jawbone. I’ve found that no headset is perfect. But I’ve since parted company with Aliph and its products and moved on to other alternatives. More on my quest for the perfect headset very soon.

I’ve been marveling at the rate at which humankind is generating data and the hardware capacity that will be needed to store it all. Has anyone analyzed the physical limits to electronic data storage?

Core77 (cool design site I follow) is blogging today about the above Neatorama chart visualizing 12 terabytes of information. As a sometimes fan of Edward Tufte — love his books but find his lectures wanting — I found the Neatorama chart pretty neat. Check out the original Neatorama post for more figurative color.

If you’re wondering how large a terabyte is, note:

• 1 Bit = Binary Digit
• 8 Bits = 1 Byte
• 1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
• 1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
• 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
• 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
• 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
• 1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
• 1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
• 1000 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
• 1000 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
• 1000 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte

By the way, I’ve long assumed that human brain capacity far exceeds electronic data storage capacity. Neatorma is estimating human brain capacity at 1.25 terabytes by relying on the opinion or work of futurist Raymond Kurzweil.

Enjoy.

After 6 hours spent at 6 different retail locations over 3 days from Southern to Northern California, I finally have my iPhone 3G!

I switched from my BlackBerry Pearl once Apple removed my primary barrier to adoption — lack of push email and calendar — and I am overlooking the challenging keyboard and lack of notes/to-do list sync.

I’ll miss the dedicated convenience of my Pearl, but “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”* between me and my iPhone.

The good:

• It’s cool and gorgeously, super sexy.
• The usability, both setup and ongoing use, is extremely good.
• The open platform and applications significantly increase the utility.
• 3G is pretty darn quick.
• The GPS is sweet. I could drive around all day just watching my car on the map. (Dork, I know)
• I do love it and am having a ton of fun.

The bad:

• On balance, I still believe Apple botched the launch weekend. Even aside from the long queues and the likely artificially suppressed inventory at AT&T stores, Apple made two critical mistakes: (1) Apple should have been better prepared for the server traffic from the iPhone 2.0 software upgrades and new 3G purchases. Apple now has placed itself in a position where it is offering mission-critical services to individuals and businesses. Effective outages (from bricked phones) and activation slownesses of the lengths experienced Friday are inexcusable and unforgivable. (2) Requiring that users with corporate accounts or discounts activate only at AT&T stores resulted in horrible customer experiences and undermines Apple’s entire strategy of acquiring business users. Business users require convenience, and the need to go to an AT&T store was decidedly inconvenient.
• Battery life on 3G is atrociously bad. I had a full overnight charge, started using the iPhone at 7:00 a.m., and my battery already is 30% drained. Granted, I’m using the thing a ton and haven’t optimized power consumption yet, but still . . . it needs to make it easily on one charge from the time I wake until the time I sleep.
• As with all things Apple, when things go wrong, you have few options and much frustration. Ringtones purchased on iTunes wouldn’t play at first. I’m frequently prompted to re-enter my iTunes password. A song spontaneously started playing this morning. Once I synced with my Outlook calendar through Exchange, I found that I have two calendars, including one that contains events from four years ago. The device has rebooted spontaneously a few times. It’s frozen a couple times inexplicably. In all these cases, your options and explanations and guidance from Apple are few.
• The touchscreen is great, but I have a hard time believing a touchscreen keyboard will ever be as good as a keyboard with tactile buttons.

Tips:

• The solution for freezing in some cases is to soft reset the device by simultaneously pressing and holding the power/sleep and home buttons for 30 seconds.
• I’ve found that the MacRumors Forums contain a wealth of information on troubleshooting. Just about every problem I’ve encountered, someone else encountered first.
• Apple’s site has a helpful page on battery optimization, although many of the suggestions are to disable the core functions that make the 3G worth getting.

On balance, I’m loving my new toy. Just remember: The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.

* Humphrey Bogart’s “Jack” in “Casablanca”

Alas, the three-day weekend is almost at an end. At least I caught two flicks, gorged myself at two BBQs and generally relaxed. Here’s what I saw:

Wall-E

Caution: Spoilers below!

I had no knowledge of Wall-E before walking into the theatre. I vaguely recall seeing a remote-controlled Wall-E robot with a bunch of dancers on TV at an NBA playoffs game. I held the notion in my head that Wall-E must be some sort of E.T.-like film with Wall-E the protagonist among a number of mischievous and/or wide-eyed children, likely engaged in domestic comedy or a little light adventure together.

My presumption was wrong.

Wall-E is the latest animated adventure from Pixar, starring the endearing, whimsical Wall-E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class). Wall-E, essentially, is an autonomous, intelligent, mobile trash compactor, persevering at his job on Earth 700 years after the accumulation of environmental waste has left the planet uninhabitable due to toxicity. He makes a surprising discovery with great promise to the human species, and this discovery, along with a robotic romantic interest, lead Wall-E on an action adventure.

As I’ve come to expect from Pixar, the animation was phenomenally good — many of the panoramas look like photographs. The animation was so good that I was extremely revolted by the animated cockroach that becomes Wall-E’s sidekick.

One surprise was that the first half of the movie, it seemed, involved almost no dialog; for a time, I thought the entire film might be devoid of dialog until Wall-E finally found someone with whom to converse.

I don’t recall whether Pixar has been preachy in the past, but I loved the environmental message. I’m not particularly environmentally conscious, although I recycle and, like everyone else, have been bemoaning gas prices these days. While I’ve been trying to catch a rerun of “The Human Footprint” on the National Geographic channel, I’ve become increasingly sensitive lately to the amount of waste I personally generate. I’m alarmed by the amount of food I waste, garbage I generate and even the amount of recyclables I recycle. With this personal anxiety, the environmental message resonated with me.

I also loved the health message. When Wall-E encounters Earth’s survivors on holiday in space, he finds that they’re atrophied, lazy, obese and sustained by liquid diets. I think this condition just might be to be avoided, and I’m going to do some sit-ups after I write this post.

Overall, another fine work from Pixar. I’m not sure it’s as good as the 96% fresh tomatoes reflected on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly entertained. I recommend Wall-E.

Wanted

Angelina Jolie, guns and the promise of action? Sign me up!

I didn’t know much about this flick either but expected from the trailers that it would be suitably entertaining. It continues the trend of movies adapted from comic books and graphic novels. Surprisingly, Angelina’s is not the main character, although she’s clearly the second most important character. Instead, Wanted stars relative unknown James McEvoy as Wesley Gibson, a cube-dwelling, down-trodden drone — surely a familiar archetype to those of us in the Valley. (The only other film in which I’ve seen McEvoy is The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which he plays Mr. Tumnus the faun).

The plot is the basic formulaic one that I’ve always been drawn to in both books and movies: The relatively unassuming discovers latent talents transforming his or her life into one of heroism. I don’t think I’ll ever give up on these childhood fancies, and why should I? I think of Harry Potter, Jack Ryan, Belgarion, Lessa. Yes, I lead a rich interior life at times . . . . In Wanted, Wesley Gibson discovers his genetic and familial heritage as a “good” assassin. This discovery leads him through action, intrigue and a few plot twists.

As with most action-adventure films, you’ll have to disregard a relatively thin plot and suspend disbelief at most of the physical feats. If you can do that, you will, like I did, be entertained for a couple of hours. Rotten Tomatoes, by the way, reflects 72% fresh tomatoes.