Can someone please explain what is wrong with if it aint’ broke don’t fix it

Recently I’ve asked myself this question when a lot of the things I use in my daily life had changed. One of them being, Gmail while most like and the new look I was always a hold out for the old look it just worked better and was great and when it kicked me into the new look I always reverted back to the old look because of the poor use of space and bigger buttons for no real apparent reason.

I also liked the fact that I could see a whole lot more messages in the main view then I do now 20 vs 100 you do the math. Additionally I now have to choose between my contacts and my calendar before I had both why must I choose now? That’s RUBBISH! So I was notably miffed when I was kicked into the new look and the option to revert was gone I checked everywhere for the option to revert back and I think they have abandoned it completely which makes me sad but what gets my goat even more is the fact that in Google’s spring cleaning they will officially stop supporting their Google Sync product on my much beloved Blackberry. This is one of my must have apps on my phone it pulls in my Google calendar and puts it right into my phones calendar seamlessly and with little effort on my part, its brilliant in every way. But since Google has a horse in this smartphone race this little unknown thing called Android they are starting to make sure their products don’t work on anything but their own products. The fix is that they want you to use the built in syncing with the Gmail account tied to the phone so I turned it on for a few days recently and the damn thing near wrecked my calendar, I mean LOOK AT IT

Before those were one event each no its duplicated itself at least 8 times that’s just the all day events and reminders it not even the regular stuff so after this I had to promptly turn that off.  ! I thought their motto was do no evil but apparently that’s no longer true. But it’s not just Google doing it.

Now when Facebook announced its new timeline profile I thought it looked cool but very annoying because it made it near impossible to find something in the past because of the two column layout. Compare that to the single column stacked in order of event to the new two column where the timeline is in the middle and events are randomly placed along each side by some geometric time scheme that makes no sense at all

While it makes sense for quickly skimming for a recent post finding older positing is a lot more work because  you have to try to remember when you posted that photo you want to now take down because you want to make your profile look better for a job maybe. (Because a potential employer really wants to see your pictures of you wild crazy college parties you vaguely remember because you were let’s face it drunk) Or spend the better part of an hour or so scrolling through the confusing timeline attempting to find what you’re looking for either way making it more graphical and multi column isn’t the answer.

I do like new things when they improve on what already was good. But what Google and Facebook have done was taken what worked well and thrown it all out and in place put something that is worse.  Sometimes reinventing the wheel is not necessary just improving it will do and that is why quite simply these redesigns have failed.

EDITORIAL: why modern smart phones make terrible “phones”

I do take some heat from my friends who think Steve Jobs is their lord and savior  by bashing apple products like the iPhone. Even with a Verizon model now available i am still of the belief that the iPhone is a terrible phone. While i have a slightly more open view of Android  most of them are still plagued by the same problem have we all completely stopped talking on our phones? Is having a bigger screen and lack of physical dial pad or keyboards make us less likely to talk to others? Sadly I think yes.

You might think I’m crazy for saying this but this baffles me because i think the 3-7 presses on a touchscreen to place a call is unacceptable because these should be phones first, texting and email a strong second and games and apps should be and added bonus. however, i think the current priorities of smart phones is vice-versa. Think about it you first have to unlock the device tap the phone icon and if the person you want to call isn’t in you recent calls  you then have to scroll through your contacts to find their name then you have to select the number you want to call. It should not take fewer steps to do a foursquare check in then it does to make a phone call. Also these big phones with 4″+ screens baffle me as well their fine for watching video on but  they’re like holding a pop-tart to your ear.

Which gets me to my point while iPhone and Android have all the apps and other stuff there is a smart phone manufacturer who has it right and of corse they aren’t american they are Canadian yes i am talking about humble Research in Motion makers of the Blackberry. Who have been doing smart phones longer than anyone else since the first pager style email only device in 1997. Now if you have made it this far you might think i have gone completely mad but hear me out. The one thing RIM have always done right is their keyboards the keys are properly spaced and in a QWERTY layout like your computer keyboard and it is a key part in phone operation to place a call you press the send key and either type in the name of the person you want to call and press send or look through your call log, or just press and hold the contacts personally assigned speed dial key it’s just that simple. Email and text messaging is also just that easy too it is neatly organized to get you in and out without all those unneeded steps. The Blackberry also has all the essential apps Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Weather bug and Amazon. RIM has used its years of experience tweaking the experience to make it simple and logical to operate and it also just works. it might not be the best looking or most popular smart phone choice out there right now but it’s the best.

(Yes I know about the Blackberry storm lets just admit it was a massive cock-up )

AT&T & iPhone 4: Fewer bars in fewer places

Upon the beaconing of our tech god Steve Jobs some (about 2 Million) people went out and stood in line to get the new must have gadget from the Apple.  It is the iPhone 4 the 4^th generation of Apple’s entry into the smartphone arena and among all the new features it has what is quite possibly the best screen on a phone at the moment but it is only somewhat better than the AMOLED screens in some of the newest phones on the market like the Sprint HTC EVO 4g, HTC DROID Incredible, and the HTC Google Nexus One. Apple calls it the Retina Display and claims that the pixel dimension of the display is so high that it is more than the eye can see.  Steve Jobs says “It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels,” the iPhone 4 is at 326PPI,however Raymond Soneria of Display Mate a company that has spent years calibrating displays disagrees a more accurate “retina display” would have a pixel resolution of 477 pixels per inch at 12 inches” (Wired.com) to read more go to the wired magazine article http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/iphone-4-retina-2/ .

The newest feature of iPhone 4 is  the front facing camera and the chat program FaceTime however to initiate FaceTime you first need to call the iPhone 4 user  and be on a Wi-Fi network  because the video chatting works over Wi-Fi only for now  coming to 3g sometime later on. You must be on the cellular network to initiate the call in the first place, weird huh and it is ONLY iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 which limits the number of people you can FaceTime with, making this feature a cool thing you can’t really use.  Now the real revolutionary feature the antenna design which consists of 3 Stainless steel   bands which make up the thickness of the phone the top left antenna being the 3G GPS antenna the top right being the Wi-Fi Bluetooth and the bottom being the GSM cell phone antenna 

apple claims it gives you the best coverage of any iPhone so far. Or so they thought as soon as the iPhone 4 started to hit the streets there were reports of being able to short out the 3G and cellular antenna by holding the phone in their left hand making the phone lose service completely, and there are numerous videos of people demoing this and being able to do it on command.  A friend of mine let me see his new toy I was personally able to replicate the problem without any difficulty at all on command multiple times so I can say it is a problem.  What is more ludicrous is Apple’s initial response to the problem “Your holding it wrong”  I’m not kidding  and apple advised their Apple Care support team to NOT give out free Bumper cases (the Apple frame case) which will remedy the problem . Why because doing that admits we screwed up which they did admit last Friday saying that “Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”  So what Apple is saying your iPhone has been lying to you the WHOLE TIME!!!!! ‘ so when the iPhone says it has  5 bars full signal  it is really 2 – 3 bars  add this to the absolutely horrid state of AT&T’s network  all one can say it WTF Apple and AT&T?  Read the whole press release at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/02appleletter.html .

You might call me anti- Apple but I am not I proudly own and love my MacBook (fall 2007 black polycarbonate) I do own and use a Verizon Wireless Rim BlackBerry Curve 8330 and have no intentions of buying an iPhone or moving to AT&T but if Apple puts the A4 chipset and retina display in the next generation iPod Touch you call stand in line behind me.

image source  http://live.gdgt.com/2010/06/07/live-wwdc-2010-keynote-coverage/#10-35-26-am