a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Here’s a very quick outside shot sample test between the iPhone and Lumia. These are straight shots with no adjustment or change in settings.
Looking out at the deer path leaving our backyard …
To my eye the Lumia is delivering a richer shot. Color is better – the sky shows more blue, leaves pop more and the grass is greener. The iPhone (3264 × 2448 pixels) uses many more pixels here as well compared to the Lumia (1278 × 720).
Today is a dreary, rainy day and while waiting for the train I was in the mood for some music. I somehow stepped back into time to find Rocket From the Crypt, but then immediately thought of King Kong another older indie band I was introduced to in 1995.
I’m not really sure why they came to mind so quickly but then I received the image above via Timehop, my daily reminder from the past 1-5 years. A year ago to the day I had Godzilla on my mind thanks to my son discovering the original cartoon on Netflix.
Back to today and King Kong … Impossible to find on Spotify! A quick check on iTunes where I’m paying for Match only to be reminded what a mess that truly is for large collections. And then my old friend Pandora delivered. Artist radio initiated … I can’t control what tracks or albums I listen to (thanks ancient and out of date music industry licensing) but I’m able to get a song every few in the rotation.
I picked up a Wii U system for the kids and we have definitely been enjoying it. First impressions are solid. Setup is pretty simple and the gamepad charged up while we had dinner.
As with quite a few devices I’ve owned the system wanted to connect right away to check for an update. Though it happened again with each of the two games we have as well. We have Nintendo Land (bundled) as well as Super Mario U….
I have no idea what the nature of the updates were but can tell you that they took quite a while to download – particularly the initial system one which failed actually a handful of times. I had to eventually consult the online support to find out that it might take a few tries and in fact the download resumes with each connect. Unfortunately all this downloading kept the kids on edge the whole time. All they wanted to do was play Mario.
Today we’ve definitely spent a considerable amount of time playing Mario and with the downloads behind us, the experience has been great. Nintendo definitely has a winner here. Graphics and sound are vastly improved and I’m thankful the prior controllers work along with all our games.
Still a ton more to explore … I noticed that Netflix, YouTube and Hulu are all on the initial grid, but all are stub apps requiring more downloads …
update I’ve got YouTube and Netflix loaded up and they look great! Seriously good. YouTube actually has a pretty sophisticated UX … Easy access to subscriptions and watch later lists.
Amazon has a very cool subscription manager for magazines which I’ve just seen today thanks to a holiday gift subscription from my dad. But check out the estimated delivery window …
Gotta hand it to PayPal … they pretty much have every base covered now. Whether people use all this stuff is another thing, but the pre-paid enablement for eCommerce is very smart.
I don’t see any mention of fee structure … which is typically and unfortunately fairly predatory in under-banked products.
via TechCrunch.
I’m a long standing TripIt user and have largely been satisfied, though lately there’s been some rumbling in social media land about the loss of rewards tracking. For whatever reason Airlines are removing Tripit’s ability to track rewards as their own apps become more sophisticated. To be honest using Tripit’s rewards tracking feature is really secondary for me, but it’s still important particularly if you travel frequently. As my job involves a good bit of travel opportunity and my interest in what airline to take is shifting (from AA to Delta) I’m a bit more conscientious of my potential status.
The Next Web just brought MileWise to my attention and it looks like a winner. It’s connected to Google owned ITA so you get a very comprehensive database of flight information combined with over 500 reward programs in a single app. You’ll be able to book smartly knowing you are earning the most or taking advantage of potential opportunities you’d certainly miss via more traditional bookings. I’ve been using Hipmunk as my initiating research stop and will likely continue, though once I’ve found a few flights of interest it looks like I’ll be dropping them into MilesWise before making and decisions. Tripit will likely remain my goto itinerary service as well …
The inevitable reality of ads appear to be en route to Instagram via the Facebook acquisition. I get it, it can’t all be free (I do work in marketing) but I was hoping there might be more attention to things like integration as a first priority.
Only recently have Facebook notifications been including Instagram content that you can actually see. For a while many of the times I’d see someone had liked a pic (via FB) and not been able to click through to the actual media. This was particularly annoying on mobile as the link would essentially be a dead end. Now, that’s fixed but those likes don’t travel into Instagram and comments are carried through two separate streams … One on Facebook and another on Instagram. Once these merge, we’ll have a single coherent thread which will be quite excellent … If people still keep sharing through all the ads of course.
Google News – now optimized for tablet consumption … check it.
When I learned via The Verge that Twitter’s long rumored photo filters were live for Android, I loaded up the Google Play Store and updated my app to snap my first filtered pic. The experience was certainly functional, but that’s about it.
Twitter image with filter. Probably won’t use this much. twitter.com/atmasphere/sta…
— Jonathan Greene (@atmasphere) December 10, 2012
I don’t ever snap pics from within the Twitter app to start so that makes it a long shot right from the beginning for my usage … That said, just adding a filter doesn’t really make a difference to limited sharing experience. Instead, Twitter seems to have released a very poor man’s Instagram – and right after Instagram decided to remove it’s twitter card-based sharing.
Unfortunately for Twitter, simply adding a filter to an image doesn’t change how sharing, discussion or notifications work within their system … all critical features elsewhere. Twitter is a very real time focused zone and that’s it’s real strength. There is limited if any threaded discussion (no real threads) and certainly nothing really orgainzed fashion at the core of the service either. By comparison, when I share a picture on Facebook, Instagram, PicPlz (now dead), Google+ or others you can create social engagement around that object. Twitter does make things easy enough to link to, but there’s no sense of activity on that shared piece and no real draw back to it from those who have engaged. Those last two pieces are what twitter needs to fix … Disposable stylized media was the easy part.
Googles Lost Social Network is a terrific walk down memory lane for Google Reader. While I consume content from lots of sources today, Reader still remains central to my process. I miss all of the features that have been cut like everyone else … Seems there’s actually still both time and a real platform on which things could evolve. Getting Google to re-focus energy is unlikely sadly.
In case you missed the update or perhaps don’t use the app, Google updated their GMail iOS app to 2.0 today. I updated mine and have decided to give it a more permanent go vs the exchange push I’ve had running in the mail.app. Notifications work great and you get the richer power of Gmail … give it a look!
The new GMail, much like the Google search application, provides connectivity to the web when you click links instead of linking out to the device’s Safari browser. This is a major opportunity to show the power of sync and connected accounts – something Google gets better than most. In the case of the app, however there is no obvious connectivity …
In Chrome when I click a link to a site where I need to login the browser like all modern browsers asks if it can save my credentials and other helpful data to assist in future connections. I use this all the time and even use LastPass to enhance the capabilities. Beyond simply saving my password data and syncing across multiple machines, Chrome actually syncs my extensions, history and tabs as well. Getting a new computer means I just have to login to have everything neatly restored … which brings me back to the GMail app.
I know the Gmail app is not designed or intended to be an uber app, but it does link into what appears to be Chrome while I’m signed in to my account. I’m looking at Google to connect the dots and enable easy access to any site via a link I might click in mail. If I have to login to every site (at least once) I’m going to be less likely to want to stick with the GMail app and instead switch back over to Mail which is linked to Safari and where I’ve already gone through this “pain” over time.
There are very few companies that can do this. Apple certainly hasn’t shown any real strength in connected synchronized services. Contact and Calendar sync has been a mess since the beginning and iTunes Match is a very mixed bag. Google excels in this and should really push it forward … hard.
Lumia 820
iPhone 4S