Kranky (is back) and still in a bad mood

I’ve been a big fan of improving voice quality. After all the quality of the telephone hasn’t changed in over 50 years. The new wideband codecs like G.722 are supported by IP phones from Cisco, Linksys, Polycom and Aastra. This HD Audio sound is remarkable, on a good speakerphone it sounds like the person is in the same room with you.

The benefits of HD Voice is clear (sorry for the pun), for long calls it’s likely less stressful and fatiguing to listen in, since you can hear the other party clearly, less likely to misunderstand and if the other person isn’t an expert in the language you’re speaking, well they’re likely to have fewer misunderstandings.

The problem though with HD Audio is that both of you need to be connected directly via IP. The odds of that happening outside your company is probably zero. So your HD phone has no one to call.

A new company offering HD Voice Conferencing named TurboBridge www.turbobridge.com has appeared. Nice website and they have a public SIP URI that you can point your IP phone or IP PBX directly to it via the Internet. In addition, they have a variety of local dial-in telephone numbers (so you don’t have to have an IP device to use the service).  Finally, it you’re on the road or in some foreign country, they also offer FREE Skype conferencing, so you can dial in to your telephone conference via Skype.

Best of all – they’ll give you an unlimited usage conference bridge for only $49.95 a year, which works out to be abit more than $4 a month. They have other packages as well for larger enterprises. In addition, you can turn on 1-800 access on a low per minute rate if you need that (say for a special customer call).

I’m sounding like Billie Mays, but wait, there’s more (ha), hunting around on TurboBridge’s website I found this URL where you can get a FREE 30 day full unlimited use trial of their service.  Here’s the link http://www.turbobridge.com/HiddenFree.php

I only had to enter my email and bang, my conference was active. I tried out TurboBridge with my Polycom phone (I just programmed their URI as a speed dial) and it connected immediately, cool British voice and working flawlessly. PLUS I didn’t use any of my LD minutes (a potential big savings for those making international conference calls).  I may actually sign up for TurboBridge, it cheap enough and seems to work well.

I got a Barnes & Noble nook e-reader as a gift for Christmas and as it was back ordered it just arrived and after 2 days of playing with it. Wanted to post a review. I immediately admit I have not played with either the Kindle or Sony devices, but the Internet has plenty of side-by-side comparisons.

But side-by-side comparisons may not mean as much in this matter. This is an electronics appliance and the purpose of the appliance is to allow you to read books.

Set-up: Set-up was fairly easy once you got it unboxed. Beautiful but frustrating plexiglas packaging, I was scared I was gonna destroy the nook before I could figure out how to open. The nook shipped with just enough power to get going. Quickly found my home wi-fi and happily logged on.

Searching: Searching seemed pretty straight forward, and the soft keyboard on the bottom, while you’re not going to type a letter on it, was more than adequate for simple search terms.

Purchasing: Quick to set-up a B&N account and once I found a book, the purchase process was simple point n’ click. The book seemed to download almost immediately. You can also quickly download sample pages of many books (usually 20-40 pages, which is more than enough to get a sense of the work).

Readability: The primary display is quite legible and you can switch the fonts and font size to suit you. With reading glasses (that I normally require) I found it easy to read. “Turning pages” required you to depress a side button. The button seems a bit stiff but was not annoying. The page refresh is not instantaneous, with a brief flash of black, your new page appears. Again after reading several chapters I almost forgot about it.

Usability: It’s a e-book reader and seemed to work fine for me. At the bottom is a touch sensitive back lite color display. The display times out and goes black after a delay but awakens fairly quickly. I kinda liked the bottom display area, especially when reading in bed, it seem just big enough (1.5 inches or so) so you rest the Nook on your stomach and read with the cover obscuring  the bottom display. Overall, I was more than happy to read with the device.

Pricing: Some Internet reviewers indicate that Amazon has lower prices than the nook. In my own spot check, fairly limited, I didn’t see any major price differences on popular titles. I have to assume B&N has to be competitive with Amazon to be in business.

Negative: If there is a negative, it’s the power, both the nook (and the Kindle for that matter) do not use a standard USB charger or cable. While I get that the battery lasts for 10 days, it is inexcusable that neither of this products use a standard cable. Thus, if you travel, you’re going to have to lug yet another cable/charger with you!

Summary: After reading along, I couldn’t find any serious misgivings about the product. The nook is a bit heavier than the Kindle, lacks some features, has some feature Kindle doesn’t have, in the end.

I broke down and purchased a Blackberry and put my barely used mytouch 3G up for auction on Ebay. Please bid on this POS. I can’t stand to look at it any more. I tried really hard to like it for almost 3 months.  I knew it was time to move on when my colleagues told me to stop yelling at my phone.

I’m calm now and wanted to dissect the particulars of the my hatred of the Android Operating System and write them out in the hopes that some 20-something Stanford grad who isn’t too busy spending their $117k bonus from Google might read and actually think about change.

Android fails because it’s first a horrible phone. It’s a pain in the ass to make a simple phone call with. I bought it as a mobile phone to #1 make calls and it fails right out of the gate. #2 – it’s a horrible way to manage email. Horrible is an understatement, it just plain sucks platypus snot. You will go absolutely insane trying to do email on it. But I said I was  going to be sane. Here’s the list of things I hate:

Boot time - Android takes 3 full minutes to start up on power on. 3, like in 1, 2, 3. My Windows machine boots faster. Blackberry from a cold battery reinsert takes 2 minutes and from a warm power on is about 15 seconds.

Alarm Clock – Traveling I came to depend on my Blackberry’s alarm clock to wake me up. Android has an alarm clock, but the phone has to be powered on to go off. Who thought that up? Blackberry will power on automatically.

Slow to energize - Android would signal it had an incoming call from me, but it often took it 15 seconds are almost 2 ring cycles to be awake enough for me to actually answer the phone. I missed more calls while hitting the green phone button waiting for Android to be conscience enough to connect.

Impossible to use in car - Android should be the leading reason States ban cell phone usage while driving. It’s virtually impossible to call someone while driving with this thing. Contrast that with Blackberry, whose hands free voice dialing using Bluetooth is a breeze to call a contact or dial by number someone. Android’s voice dialing is basically useless.

Dialing a contact - If you have more than 3 contacts, it is a virtual nightmare to try and find a contact to call with Android. Your fingers will be numb from scrolling. I tried various 3rd party apps, with only partial success. Blackberry is really easy, just start typing their name, first, last, name of their dog, who cares, it will try and find it for you to call.

Multiple email – Who doesn’t have multiple email addresses? Android treats everything other than your primary Gmail account as a poor second cousin. In fact, the email interface for secondary accounts is almost completely different. Who thought that up? You end up having to looking at individual folders for each of your email accounts to read your messages. Contrast with Blackberry, which can dump all your emails into a single folder.

Reading email on the go – Android often won’t let you read certain emails if you’re out of radio range (like on a plane, my god, who travels on an airplane these days what with nothing but terrorists and small children). Imagine settling into 32C and trying to catch up on email only to find Android didn’t download the message. Arghgh. Blackberry again wins.

Keyboard - the onscreen keyboard just sucks. You will soon give up and just sned emils ot spelt whtevr wich wuy becuse u dont care anymore and have given up screaming at the phone for fat fingering something wrong. OMG and please don’t try any of the add on programs that attempt to ‘help’ you with spelling. All I can say is the Chinese need to learn how write English first before developing these programs.

Searching email - another painful exercise that also required that your wireless data signal be active. Again slow slow slow.

Random reboots – In the end, my mytouch 3g was randomly locking up, freezing for a moment or two and generally slowing down my communications. I liked the GPS, with turn-by-turn directions, but this often froze the phone solid.

Music dongle – 2 years ago this might have been ok. But to listen to music, you have to attach this stupid dongle to plug in your headset. The dongle plugs into the USB jack. Which means – you can’t charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. Great engineering.

You getting the picture here. I now have reconnected with my hatred emotion when I think about this phone. Thank you Google.

Having said all that, it was a cool little play toy and I had all kinds of neat little games to play with on it to amuse myself. But as a production work tool, Android fails and fails often on multiple fronts. Please bid on it on Ebay today!

T-Mobile USA recently announced they were halting new sales and would ultimately shut down their @Home VoIP telephone service. VoIP pundits were quick to scratch their heads, the folks at FierceWireless saying “It is unclear why exactly the carrier decided to drop the service, which it has offered since July 2008.” What a bunch of idiots. Why do I read such dribble.

T-Mobile shuttered the service for a very simple reason — it wasn’t selling. Duh! At a mere $10 a month, the pricing wasn’t the problem, in fact, I’d argue that $10 from a reliable brand such as T-Mobile was almost too cheap. For those of you (I assume most of you) who didn’t attend MBA school, get out the classic BCG matrix to figure this out.

At $10 a month, T-Mobile wasn’t likely making much money off the service and since it wasn’t selling all that well and since they have limited retail space, well it’s dead man walking. Had the service been selling like hot cakes and despite the relative low profitability, T-Mobile would have kept the service.

Unfortunately, this is another coffin nail for home telephone service. People simply don’t want or need a home phone line. In ten years, us old timers will be talking about how everyone had a phone line. With the demise, a entire series of industries will simply disappear. Cordless telephones? Who needs them? Modular jacks made in China. No more. 66 style cross connect blocks. Done. Follow the cable all the way back and each piece of equipment will no longer be needed and no amount of marketing, repositioning and sales push is gonna change it.

Wireless wins. Game over.

Google announced a free upgrade to their Google Maps application for Android phone to provide a turn-by-turn GPS application.  I’ve long been a fan of my Tom Tom GPS, works great, is to use and hasn’t failed me yet. I’ve personalized and even had one of my children re-record all the voice prompts (all Dad’s can understand this).  So I prepared to wage war against Google on this front.

Unfortunately, the Google GPS actually works and no doubt Tom Tom is doing all sorts of damage control, but as I’ve pointed out repeatedly it’s impossible to compete against FREE and Tom Tom may well be collateral damage.

Let me hit the negative points, there is no windshield mount for the phone, so you’re left trying to figure out how to navigate and hold the phone. This is a serious safety issue. Second, programming your destination is not easy task with the sub-optimium Android keyboard and finally the on-screen display leaves a lot to be desired. Pretty it is not.

But the true question is “did the Google GPS navigate me to my destination”. Well yes it did. It provided me turn-by-turn voice instruction and got me to where I was going. The reality is while many of us now have a GPS, we really only use it when we’re going someplace new and not likely a daily event.

Google GPS did it’s job and I can easily imagine that future versions will only get better. It’s only software right?

A follow-on question is “if I had Google GPS would I buy a separate GPS receiver?”. Argh – that’s a harder question, the realilty is probably not (and probably not the answer Tom Tom wants me to write – another great consulting gig lost). While Google GPS isn’t that great, the free factor seems to be the magic word.

Google GPS needs wireless access (as there are no stored maps) so you’re not going to depend on it in a rural situation but for a large % of us travelers, it’s a fine primary choice.