• Good web browser – responsive and doesn’t crash like it does on my Droid; both iPhone and Android look to have done a good job with the latest versions
• Fast internet – 4G sounded like the way to go at this point, but after seeing what problems my brother has had with the 4G phone he got a few months ago, it doesn’t seem to me like the network’s ready
• Good music player – the Android music player I’ve been using leaves much to be desired and the new one does look better, but still limited; having iTunes to sync music from my computer seems like a better approach, especially now that it’s via wifi
• Space for music – I originally wanted to be able to fit all the music I had on my computer, but I’ve realized that I don’t listen to all of it and find myself having to skip through songs a lot on my phone, so as long as I can easily sync, I’m okay with picking and choosing music I’ll actually listen to
• Syncing for Gmail – this includes Calendar and Contacts; Gmail makes it more seamless on Android for obvious reasons, but I can get the same capabilities on the iPhone too
• Reasonable screen size – I’m tired of so many phones that are supposed to be portable coming out with bigger and bigger screens; my brother has one that’s 4.3 inches and it just looks ridiculous; having an iPod Touch for almost a year now, I like its screen size and am glad the iPhone 4S decided to stick to the same size
• Great camera – the one on my Droid has been disappointing and I wanted something that would be good enough to replace my digital camera; as I’ve been keeping my eye on reviews that compare phone cameras, all the ones I’ve read come to the conclusion that for overall photo and video quality, there is no better option than the iPhone

You can probably tell by my responses that I’m leaning towards the iPhone. And it is in fact what I went with. It wasn’t an easy decision since I’ve had a pretty decent Android device for the last two years and the latest Android update looks promising. But besides the features above, there are two main reasons why I ultimately decided to go with the iPhone:

Android’s philosophy doesn’t seem to work

The philosophy of  ’openness’ and ‘choice’ was the first thing I bought into when getting the Droid. After two years, while it still sounds like a nice idea, it doesn’t seem to actually work when put into action and instead seems to have caused an unintended consequence, fragmentation: devices are not getting the updates needed, showing a lack of support for customers but also slowing down improvements for the platform as developers turn away because they don’t want to deal with making their apps compatible for so many different versions. I’m not saying the open concept doesn’t work, it’s just that at it’s not showing any real benefits over the alternatives.

Better apps are on the platform that has incentives to create better apps

Android being open source doesn’t make a difference when developing apps since it’s ultimately just another platform to develop on. However, when you look at compare iPhone apps with Android, it’s clear that developers prefer to develop on the iPhone. Besides the fragmentation issue with Android, innovation seems to spur further innovation and the iPhone continues to keep that momentum going for its developers.

On a related note, I designed my own app for Android that kept track of pages I wanted to look at a later time. I outsourced a developer to program it and the experience didn’t go so well. Besides the fact that it took two months to get its basic functionality working correctly, it only lasted for another two months before something changed in the way it tied into Google Bookmarks and is now completely broken.

I have hope for the Android platform, but I’m willing to wait and see where things are two years from now when I look for my next phone. The phone and mobile device market is a very interesting point, who knows how things will be two years from now.

It’s been over a month since I got the Chrome notebook and I wanted to share my thoughts on it so far. Before I even get into it, I think I should mention that just the idea of a web-browser-only computer I was already sold on since the Chrome OS was announced and I’ve already begun preparing my own laptop for working primarily on the web since then. So when the Cr-48 came, in a way, I was completely ready for it! Now, on to the review.

Setup

The initial setup was painless, taking about 5 minutes. I open the laptop lid, the Google Chrome logo shows up and about 10 seconds later is a screen to sign in with my Google account and start the short setup process. As I started using it, about 15-20 minutes later in, I notic my preferences and bookmarks are synced from my desktop install of Chrome. So now I’m good to go, no further setup needed.

Web-app mindset

The next step I took was thinking about how I could replace some of my Windows-based apps with web equivalents. This is what I came up with:

• Music –  My last.fm account came in handy for listening to my library of music online
• Documents – I finally decided to give Google Docs a shot and am really liking it so far even though I still need to get used to the idea of keeping ALL my documents online
• FTP and code editor – Even though I still primarily use Dreamweaver on my Windows desktop, I did try out Kodingen in the Chrome Web Store which looks very promising although currently is somewhat buggy
• Photo editing – in case I need do something quickly, Pixlr looks like it can do the job which I also found in the Chrome Web Store, I haven’t come across an opportunity to use it though
• Additional tools - For dev testing websites I think Adobe Browser Lab is a good alternative to using the actual browsers themselves

Of course, for specialty apps that I use,  like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and After Effects, there are no alternatives to replace with. But even if there were, I wouldn’t want to use them on a 12-inch screen anyway. And video games also, but there are only a couple I’m currently playing on my PC, most of the time I’m playing them on the XBox.

Field testing

After I had it setup the way I wanted, it became my main computer for pretty much everything I did. While using it, a few things came to mind:

• It works well as alternative to a home desktop machine where the desktop is the source machine and a Chrome laptop is secondary along with other mobile devices that serve their own specific purposes. It seems to becoming the trend already with primarily-reading devices like the iPad and Kindle.
• Wireless is available pretty much everywhere now. All the places I went to, when I thought about using the laptop, I managed to find a wifi spot. The only issue I had is that it would sometimes disconnect where there appeared to be weaker hotspots.
• Tabs work well fullscreen since it is a small screen, but when I eventually connected to my large monitor at home, I got the urge to have multiple windows pulled out which is what the desktop version of Chrome is great for.
• I understand this is just a test unit, but the the two biggest issues I ran into were: the poor processing power which started get frustrating at times while trying to just watch a video; the instant on sometimes required reconnecting to the network which took a little bit of time.

Final Thoughts

I could see why Google’s taking its time and testing out the product before bringing it to market. Coming out with something by the end of this year would allow them not only to fine tune and fix issues, but the additional technologies it needs to work well can catch up to Google’s big picture idea. One would be Verizon’s 4G network which could be built in as the alternative to wifi. The other are more and better web apps that will be developed and eventually featured in the Chrome Web Store along with Google better-preparing their own web apps with more features to package with the final product.

What will probably be the ultimate selling points above other laptops would be speed and simplification. The instant-on works very well and Chrome is the fastest web-browser available, tie that in with good internet and it’s a winner. And simplifying the laptop makes a lot of sense: eliminating the annoying parts that come with a desktop OS, focusing on a clean, unobtrusive interface, and even cleaning up the keyboard layout. Cost may also be a factor as it seems like it could be considerably lower than other laptops since there’s no licensing fee for the OS and could potentially require less processing power.

I’m generally OK with the features on my current phone, it has the basics of what I need: Calendar, Notes and Contacts which are all syncable to my PC. The deciding factor for switching is having access to the internet (the Q technically has it but it works so badly that it’s not even worth using). There’s a lot of potential for doing more with mobile Internet access and sofware like Android that uses it well. And as a web designer it feels like I’m missing out on something by not having it.

It’s no surprise, that like a lot of people, I’ve been becoming more and more of a Google fan this past year… switching all my email to Gmail, using Picasa for photos and using Chrome as my primary browser. And along the same lines, Android’s open platform for apps seems to have the right idea. It’s a format that worked for both Windows and Apple since they came out for desktop computers and it’s the direction phones have been steadily heading in anyway. Pretty soon we may even be able to interchange phone carriers. So this could be the last two-year contract I’ll need to commit to!

My latest attempt was with Picasa 3 and I think I may have found a good fit. It’s one of the better tools out there for organizing photos, but it’s best feature is it’s Web Albums functionality where you’re able to upload to an online account either handpicked photos, whole folders, or flagged photos and to send the website link to friends and family.

The funny thing is that it’s done in such a simple way by today’s standards… the photos are uploaded to a web server and viewed online as a photo gallery. Windows Vista promised a way to do this directly from desktop folders, but it’s still not possible now almost three years later (even though it’s now a feature of the next version of Windows). All it took to do this was a storage medium and software that tied an online account into a desktop app. And Google with Picasa made it work together in a simple, seamless process.

And by doing this, Google was able to accomplish something else Microsoft’s been trying to do with Windows Media Center for years: get the photos on your TV. Because you can upload your photos online, if you have a Tivo, you can sign in to your Google account through it and view your online photos as a slideshow.

The next step may be to somehow share the online photo gallery with social networks like Facebook so you don’t have to manually upload photos to your other online accounts that have photo gallery features.

Three years

The main reason the change was necessary in my opinion is the amount of content that is now available on the system. What started out as a few downloadable games and videos has exploded into an extensive marketplace of game content, films (including access to Netflix titles) and television programs. The new interface does a good job of organizing all of it in a way that makes it all easily accessible. It does this in three main ways:

• Primary navigation – Instead of the left and right ‘blades’ of the previous interface being used for browsing 4-5 main categories, they’ve been converted to a list in the top left corner that scrolls up and down. This allows for a dynamic view of categories that change as the user goes into a into a top-level category.
• 3D titles view – As categories are browsed, game/video titles are displayed below with cover art similar the iTunes coverflow except with a 3D perspective. It not only makes it a more immersive experience putting the user in the ‘Xbox world’, but takes advantage of the widescreen format. A few titles closer to the foreground are fully viewable while letting the user know that there are more in the distance to scroll to.
• Information panels – When selecting a title or piece of content, a few things happen. The primary navigation disappears, the background color or texture changes and three information panels appear that are layed out like titles view except bigger as each one has specific actions to choose from. Breaking actions into individual panels creates smart grouping of options that turns a potentially long overwhelming list into almost a step by step process, focusing attention on certain categories of actions, each category perhaps only being needed at different times.

The new interface also allows for integration of new features that have also been rolled out into the upgrade including the (Mii too) 3D avatars that are a part of the environment, with the environment itself customizable with ‘themes’.

The well-named New Xbox Experience is a great example of interactive experience design making it a great improvement to the old interface with plenty of room for what’s become the core aspect of the Xbox 360, online digital media.

Let’s compare prices of the different editions of Vista when it was originally released compared to current prices:

The most popular edition, Home Premium (what I’m using as I type this on my laptop) has gone up in price while the most pointless edition, Ultimate went down by a considerable amount. Looking at that, two conclusions can be made. First, there should only be two editions, Home for $199 and Business for $299. And that pricing is reasonable considering the fact that most people just upgrade their PCs with the OEM editions anyway and it looks more competitively priced to the Apple OS which is $129. And second, anyone who bought Ultimate when it came out got jipped. My dad is one of those people, in fact buying two copies, one of which was for me to upgrade my home desktop PC.

Based on some of the initial features for Windows 7, it looks like some are fixes to issues with Vista, while others are improvements to things that are pretty much already a part of Vista. I’m not sure if the features are worth the upgrade cost, probably being $150-$250 (which is basically what Vista costs to upgrade from XP).

So for Microsoft to get some of its reputation back, it should 1) offer upgrade options from XP to Windows 7 for the standard $150-$250 upgrade price 2) offer Vista users a lower-cost upgrade for Home Standard/Premium and Business editions at half the standard upgrade price and 3) for those who actually bought the Ultimate edition, Windows 7 should be free via Windows Update.

UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft is listening.. They’re offering points 1 and 2 that I made above, however they’re completely disregarding their most loyal Ultimate edition users, according to this PC World post.

UPDATE 2: Final pricing and comparison of features for each edition of Windows 7 have been released with every edition costing $100 less than Vista. For more info, take a look at Microsoft’s Windows 7 comparison chart.

• PhoneBook 2.0 – Seems like where cell phone contacts should be already.
  
• Wertago – A better use of online maps and a useful tool on a Saturday night.
  
• Life360 – A good way to keep connected to your network of contacts.
  
• PedNav – A better approach to running errands.
  
• cab4me – This could me something that gets people to use cabs more.
  

You can take a look at the full gallery of apps here.

Sam and Max is the first successful episode-based video game series. Part of its success is based its interesting plot and characters which is what made the original 1993 version a cult classic. And part of the reason the writing is such an important aspect is because of the ‘adventure’ format of gaming which typically relies on the storyline.

The way adventure video games work is sort of like watching a movie you can interact with at certain points. It’s a little more complex as it also lets you interact with the environment and your interactions don’t always have to be made in a certain order. But unlike other video games, your goal isn’t to earn points or shoot your way through levels, it’s to solve a problem. You watch the story unfold then interact with the environment and its characters to get clues on how to further develop the storyline. And that’s why the writing is so important. And with good writing is how the episode format can work, since it basically turns into a good television show you interact with.

HD Proliferation

Well, it looks like Blu-ray may have won the format war. Along with that, HD technology is spreading to everything. From digital cameras that use the 16×19 aspect ratio to more affordable HD camcorders.

Content Delivery

In another step closer to TV going online, these new set-top boxes could be replacing your cable box:

• Slingcatcher – A product that was a big hit last year now offers HD
• Netflix and LG – Could be the ultimate movie-playing device
• Vudu – Server and receiver for downloading and storing movies

One problem these boxes solve is multi-room support, allowing for viewing selected media throughout the home. Of course a fast reliable internet connection is required.

Smart Devices

Another use of your internet connection is for networked devices that respond to online data or data networked from your computer. Your future home appliances won’t just have a computer chip, they’ll also be connected to the internet.

Also worth pointing out is the evolving technology in touchscreens and ebooks.

As I started reading a blog post about a desktop app recommendation, I realized I needed to change out my desktop wallpaper (I usually look for a new one about every 1-2 months). By the time I finished the article, I thought about how desktop wallpaper can be distracting sometimes.

I went into my desktop settings looking for alternatives when I came across a Solid Colors option I never really paid any attention to before since I was always focused on loading the latest graphic I found.

After about a day of having just a one color background (screenshot above), it feels somewhat refreshing. I think I’ll give it a try for a while. Maybe use some color themes from online inspiration sites and do a different theme each month (with a different color from the theme each week).