Massive Mileage

No Google Voice for the iPhone

I'm using Google Voice now for two weeks, after I was lucky enough to score an invitation. It is an amazing service and not because it allows free calls within the U.S. It allows you to select a phone number and manage it yourself, with forwarding to different landlines or mobiles, voice mail, greetings by contact groups or individual contacts and much more. Many more features I haven't had a chance to try, but I've started distributing my Google phone rather than my cell number. 

The basic functionality of Google Voice is the callback: you select a phone number on the website and it calls you back on any phone, connecting to the number you called. The called person would see the Google phone number as caller ID, which avoids disclosing the direct phone numbers. This also works through a mobile version of the website.

However, on the iPhone, the webapp is much less convenient than the built in phone. I probably would use it for international calls, where Google Voice rates are much cheaper than the fantasy rates AT&T charges. But in most cases I'd go through the built-in phone app with its convenient access via address book or voice dial and live with the fact that my cell phone number shows up in the called phone rather than the Google Voice number.

This all would be different with a native app for Google Voice, but Apple doesn't like this. AT&T probably neither, even though Google Voice requires the same amount of airtime than direct calls. It does allow SMS sending and receiving for free, but AT&T cannot believe in all seriousness that they can forever charge up to 64 cents per kilobyte for text and at the same time provide unlimited broadband on the same device.

From Apple's point of view it is a short-sighted move not to support apps like Google Voice - it hands an immediate selling point to Blackberry and Android devices. From AT&T's perspective it's understandable, but in the end it never pays off working against your customers wishes, just to artificially protect your business model.

So I hope this is only a temporary hiccup and all parties come to the conclusion that it's better to embrace innovation than to fight it.

The iPhone and the battery - my observations

After each iPhone release, there's a lot of chatter about it's battery life. So it happened again with the 3GS, which supposedly would slightly improve the battery, but many users had the feeling that exactly the opposite happened (for example, here).

After more than two years with all three iPhone models, here are my observations:

• Unfortunately the sad truth is, that current technology doesn't allow sufficient battery life in a 3G device with a form factor like the iPhone.
• The more you use it, the more battery is consumed and the more apps you have, the more you use it. Many apps use 3G internet connection, which consumes a lot of battery. It's as simple than that.
• The web is full of advice, which specific features can be turned off in order to save battery. Again, the truth is, the less features you use, the longer the battery lasts. The iPhone runs very long in airplane mode, for example. But there's no single, silver-bullet feature ("turn off push", "turn off WiFi", etc) that you can turn off and suddenly the iPhone has power for three days.
• The network quality has a huge effect on the iPhone. If the signal is sluggish, then the iPhone has to constantly switch around, which drains the battery. That's the only time, when I change settings: if the 3G signal is weak (for example at the beach), I turn it off - this not only safes power, it also stabilizes the network connection - a win-win situation.
• The 3GS seems to have a more linear battery indicator - the 3G would stay pretty long at 100% and then go down fast, while the 3GS drops earlier, but slower. Not sure if that's really the case, but for me it feels like it.

To get around those limitations, I charge as often as it makes sense, for example when I'm in the office. The iPhone charger is tiny, so I can easily carry it around in my bag.

One last word: I have no idea what the battery life metrics supposed to mean. Yes - I can have a five hour call on 3G, but probably only if nothing else happens on the phone. Or I can watch 10 hours video, but I'm sure that applies only in airplane mode. But in real life I have no idea how far I get with a fully charged phone. So please come up with something more practical, such as the "Wireless Productivity" for laptops.

Why Google Chrome OS is so exciting

Yesterday Google announced that its venturing into the development of a full operating system, which may, some day, compete with Windows, Mac OS and Linux. For now this sounds bigger than it is, for the first release they just take one available open-source technology, Webkit, and bundle it with another, Linux. But they also announced to rethink operating systems in general and this is very good news.

Windows and Mac OS both are based on concepts that are decades old, centered around having a box on or below the desk that runs all software and stores all data. And while I'm sure that Microsoft and Apple have people somewhere in a lab thinking how personal computing should look in the future, they are heavily invested in their current software lineup. Microsoft, for example, publicly believes that the future lies in heavy operating systems running heavy software packages installed locally, which happened to be exactly what they have been selling for twenty years or so.

But this is not how computing will look like. The future lies in having a display with some sort of input method, somehow connected to the Internet, continuously or sporadically, and getting the personal work environment and data delivered, optimized for display size, input method and available bandwidth.

And that is the direction I believe Google Chrome OS (and Android) will push for.

Can I take a 130% subscription price hike in eMusic?

eMusic was obviously in the unpleasant situation where they have to present their customers an unpopular change in the best possible light. So yes, eMusic will carry a larger catalog that includes older work from mainstream artists and there will be a unified album pricing. But they also let me know, carefully worded, that I get less downloads for twice the money as soon as my current subscription runs out next January.

Ironically, I anyway wanted to rethink my eMusic subscription and this new development makes it a lot easier. 

There's one main argument speaking for eMusic: It's cheap. Even with 45 cents (up from 20 cents) it's less than half of the iTunes average price (even lesser than the top price of $1.29. Supposedly there are 69 cents songs in iTunes as well, but I haven't seen a single one).

On the other side, there are several things that annoyed me in the two and a half years I'm using the service:

• The catalog looks pretty random. There's certainly a system to this madness, but on the bottom line for each album I may be interested in I have to check if it's available in eMusic or not. In many cases - indie or mainstream - it's not.
• Worse, some albums are released with a delay on eMusic. Nothing better than buying an album on iTunes and then find it a few days later on eMusic for half the price.
• Even worse, some labels and bands are silently removed from the catalog. This happened with Bloc Party or the White Stripes.
• Downloads expire at the end of the month, which leads to get music, that I wouldn't have bought if I had more time to select.
• eMusic doesn't work as a social networking site as their catalog is limited, which makes my musical profile very much incomplete. last.fm is much better here.

On top of it, I don't think that a download subscription works very well for me. 40 songs (or 35 in the future) per month is a lot more than I actually pay attention to during a month. Additionally, all my old music (6,973 song as of this writing) hasn't expired and is still worth be listened to (at least most of it).

So come next January I probably let my eMusic subscription expire and invest the money in individual downloads from iTunes. Yes, this is more expensive per song, but I can select exactly what I want and this is fur sure much less than 40 or 35 songs per month.

Having fun with the HP41CX emulator for the iPhone

If there's one person to blame for my addiction to to portable, battery-operated gadgets, it's my uncle, who had access to the latest scientific calculators by HP or Texas Instruments through his job. We're talking here about expensive little computers with memory in the KB range and 10-digit 7-segment red LED displays.

1980 he would show me the HP 41C, which was a break-through device. It sported a alphanumeric display, which allowed to enter commands by its name and hence not limit its functionality by the number of keys on the keyboard. Users could redefine the keyboard and there were expansion modules for adding more scientific and financial functionality.  I wanted to have one so badly, but there was no way to justify this kind of expense for a sixth grader.

Fast-forward 30 years. The coolest handheld device is the iPhone with memory in the gigabytes. And there's an awesome HP 41CX emulator (iTunes Store link) available in the iPhone app store for $10. The look is absolutely authentic (the feel, of course, is lacking the characteristic plop of an HP keypad) and, for $5 extra, you even get a virtual dot-matrix printer. 

Between the original HP 41C and the iPhone are pretty much 30 years of progress. A 10-character black-and-white LCD display is replaced with a high-res color screen. Kilobytes with Gigabytes, multi-assigned keys with a touch screen and an optional magnet-card writer with high-speed wireless network access. Only the battery life suffered greatly: the 41C was able to operate for a few more days after the low battery warning - with the iPhone you better rush to the next power outlet right away.

One could imagine, if HP engineers in '79 could have dreamed up hardware, they would have ended up with something close to the iPhone: with its touch screen, it perfectly supports the user-definable keyboard without the plastic overlays that were shipped with the 41C. But what do modern calculators look like in 2009? Interestingly the current top model, the HP 50 is a pretty boring piece of technology, with a monochrome low-res graphical display. And the iPhone App Store sports only a few emulators and variations of the build-in calculator. The HP 41CX emulator is the only programmable one (which is technically a violation of the iPhone app agreement - but in this case Apple probably didn't mind too much).

I guess, the top-notch app would be Mathematica. It should be too difficult to port Mathematica to the iPhone, and I'm sure that somebody at Wolfram Research has probably already running it. The main issue with it is probably the $999 price limit in the App Store.