Microsoft Kin phones hoping for a comeback

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by (updated 5659 days ago)

Earlier this year the spectacular failure of the Microsoft KinOne and KinTwo came to epitomize Microsoft’s efforts in the mobile phone market. The two phones weren’t horrible devices in and of themselves, but they were saddled with a smartphone label and pricing that they clearly did not live up to. After selling fewer than 10,000 units in the first six weeks, Microsoft and Verizon summarily canceled the devices and sent all the unsold units back to the warehouse.

It now appears that the Kins might be back, at least for a little while. A leaked Verizon product roadmap for the rest of this year shows the renamed Kin OneM and TwoM coming back as “enhanced” feature phones. The feature phone designation means that they are no longer subject to the data plans that are mandatory for all Verizon smartphones.

Features like the Kin Studio that automatically backed up photos and video to the cloud are expected to be dropped now that a data plan is optional, although Zune Music is still available over WIFI. Those that want data access now have the option of Verizon’s new tiered pricing that gives 150 MB of data for $15 a month. If Verizon had offered this kind of pricing when the devices had originally launched, they might have had a chance. Unfortunately they are coming back just as a slew of low-end Android devices like the Motorola Citrus are arriving with real smartphone capability and the type of social connections built in to the Kins. This might be enough for Verizon to unload the remaining stock of phones but it probably won’t make it a lasting success.

Buy your cell phones from Amazon

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by (updated 5666 days ago)

Recently my daughter’s cell phone line became eligible for its biennial discounted upgrade and she wanted to get an Android phone. When I checked the Verizon Wireless website I found that the company had made a change in policy for online purchases.

For years, Verizon has offered many of its phones in its brick and mortar stores with a mail-in-rebate which typically amounted to $100. Mail in rebates need to be banned and I won’t buy anything with a rebate.  If you went to the Verizon website you could generally get the same phones but instead of the mail-in-rebate, the discount was taken off when the phone was ordered so you didn’t have to pay extra up front and then try to get it back weeks or months later.

Verizon has now changed that to a mail in rebate and worse yet now, you don’t just get a check, you get a Verizon debit card so you have to spend it at Verizon. For the Droid Incredible that Sofie wanted I would have had to pay $299 and then get the debit card. After shopping around I found I get the same phone and do the Verizon upgrade on Amazon.com for just $79, no rebates of any kind.  From now on I’ll probably be buying new phones from amazon.

Time for cell providers to provide family data plans

This entry was posted in technology on by (updated 5666 days ago)

When I first got a cell phone back in the mid-1990s, I only used it sparingly because the price plans will enormously expensive and the batteries didn’t last very long. Over time, though using a wireless device for voice communications became dramatically cheaper as providers started to offer plans with hundreds or thousands of minutes per month at pretty reasonable rates. Of course the cell companies made up for these price reductions with volumes as all the kids started to get their own phones each with its own cost.

Eventually, the family share plan was born which helped a lot by providing a pool of minutes that were shared by up to five phones with extra lines only costing $10 a month. Of course this did little to stifle the ever growing phone bill as we soon added text messaging which of course the phone companies where happy to bundle into the plans for just a little more per month.

Now of course everyone is migrating to smart phones like the iPhone and the numerous Android devices available. Providers are requiring that every one of these phones have a data plan associated with it which currently cost $30 a month for 5GB of data.  The problem is none of us ever use anywhere close to the full 5 GB on our phones.

Over the summer, AT&T launched tiered data plans that will help a bit for some users and Verizon is expected to launch its own tiered setup later this month. Unfortunately the Verizon plans are expected to be the same $30 for 5 GB and a $15 plan that only gets you 150 MB. Checking our bill, we are averaging about 250-600 MB per month per phone so the overage charges on the $15 plan would make it more expensive than just staying with the existing $30 plan.

Since phone companies are forcing users to get a data plan when they get a smartphone, it’s time for them to provide a little more pricing flexibility too. The shared voice minutes work great so why not offer a shared data plan? If four phones are only using 2.5-3 GB of data, how about offering a 5 GB shared plan for a small premium over the individual price? Perhaps $30 for the first user and $5 for each additional user. That way a family of four would pay $45 instead of $120.

Just as family share plans brought in a large number of new subscribers, this kind of shared data plan could prompt more customers to switch up to smart phones.

Ypsilanti library still wrong on downloadable audio books

This entry was posted in drm Ypsilanti on by (updated 5722 days ago)

Several years ago the Ypsilanti Public Library starting offering its users access to downloadable audio books through a service called Netlibrary.com.  Unfortunately that service was riddled with DRM that wasn’t compatible with anything but Windows computers and PlaysForSure media players. Anyone using an iPod or a Mac was out of luck.  At least that service offered a choice of a couple of thousand titles and with a bit of tweaking the DRM could be stripped so that the files could be played on any device.

The library has now switched to different service that is apparently compatible with all platforms including iPods. Unfortunately, it is even less useful than the Netlibrary system. The service offers a grand total of 64 titles. That’s not a typo, it’s 64 titles. Loans are only available for one week at time and each title is only available to one user at a time. These are digital files, why are they only accessible to one person at a time? This is absolutely ridiculous.  Why even bother to offer a download service with so few titles? It seems like a complete waste of time and money.  If the library is not going to get serious about actually making downloadable content useful to patrons, it should just quit trying.

Newsday’s iPad commercial more successful than paywall

This entry was posted in business media on by (updated 5722 days ago)

Last fall Long Island newspaper Newsday decided it had enough of giving away its product online for free and put up a $5/week paywall. Given the plethora of free news sources, readers decided that Newsday didn’t need their money and went elsewhere.  Three months after the paywall went up a grand total of 35 people had subscribed.

Now Newsday is apparently hoping that Apple’s iPad will help it gain some more digital subscribers. It remains to be seen if the iPad will be enough to get people to subscribe, but the ad above is definitely amusing.

The uncanny valley and racism

This entry was posted in culture this and that on by

This week’s edition of On the Media features a segment discussing the concept of the “the uncanny valley.” The idea is that if you have a representation of a human that is 50, 60 or even 95 percent correct, people will have no problem recognizing that image as non-human and accepting it.

However, as you get closer to 100 percent, the brain crosses a threshold where the image suddenly shifts from being a representation to something akin to a human with something wrong with it.  This is most commonly manifested in modern computer generated graphics. That’s why you can watch something like Avatar, Shreck or Up with no problem. The alien or cartoonish characters are clearly not human. However, when you look at Polar Express, the characters look downright creepy with their dead eyes.  This is a movie that falls into the valley.

Most people think about the uncanny valley in terms of technology and how to avoid it. However, it says much more about the human brain and how we perceive the visual inputs that we get.  We see something and process it and if it doesn’t meet our expectations we recoil from it. Is this what drives racism? Do we see someone with a slightly different skin tone or nose shape or height and think that they are “broken”? Obviously we can tell that these people are alive and yet it seems that the way we respond is not so very different from the way we recoil in fear or disgust from the artificial characters in video games or movies.

Is it possible that the solution to problem of the uncanny valley is not and should not be with changing technology but rather with understanding ourselves and making changes within?