asciidan || news :: rants :: commentary

In the past few years, the smartphone market has basically been divided into two camps: iPhones and everything else.

RIM’s dominance in the smartphone sector was primarily in the corporate world, where businesses appreciate the BlackBerry’s ability to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Exchange. In the corporate world, BlackBerrys have been handed out for years. But the iPhone has raised the bar in terms of what consumers expect from their handheld devices. It’s not just about e-mail and text messaging anymore; it’s about web browsing, social networking and apps.

When my outdated BlackBerry Curve died over the weekend, I was heartbroken, to be sure. But I recognized early that it gave me the opportunity to upgrade. And I love new gadgets.

As an AT&T customer, I could easily go the iPhone route. I’m an iPod Touch owner and love the device. But I know enough about iOS and the iPhone interface to know that I don’t want an iPhone. I don’t particularly enjoy typing on a touch screen. And I want a device that does what I want it to do; the promise of hundreds of thousands of “apps” does not impress me if 95 percent of them are useless. I despise having to use iTunes. And, frankly, the design of iPhone 4 is just not rugged enough for me. So I decided to stick with BlackBerry.

I had my heart set on a Bold. But at the AT&T store, the Torch jumped out at me. It’s sleek and solid. It feels good in the hand. The touch screen is responsive and pretty, and the keyboard, though it has taken some getting used to, makes typing so much easier. But the best part of the Torch? The updated BlackBerry OS and the much-improved web browser.

The first thing you notice about the Torch is its familiarity. BlackBerry die-hards will be happy that, unlike the Storm, this IS a BlackBerry, through and through. It takes a matter of minutes to acquaint yourself with the ins and out of the OS and you can get started messaging and making calls immediately. I’ve read reviews that the Torch’s processor is underpowered, thus rendering the OS sluggish. I haven’t had that issue. I find the phone responsive, quick, and a real pleasure to use. The added ability to create folders for your shortcuts means more organization and less clutter. My favorite part of the BlackBerry — the integrated inbox — remains. RIM has done a better job of handling popular social networking apps, and now includes a Social Feeds feature, which integrates feeds from social networks and RSS into one central place.

The new web browser is excellent. Again, I’ve read speed complaints. But anyone familiar with BlackBerrys knows the secret to web browsing was to immediately download Opera Mini. That’s no longer necessary. The new browser supports tabbed browsing elegantly, keeping the tabs out of the way until you want them. Pages render quickly and properly. Pinch to zoom is included. I’ve found myself actually surfing the web on this device — a near impossibility with BlackBerrys of the past, even with Opera Mini. Even YouTube is a pleasure on the Torch. With just a few seconds of buffering, video renders smooth and largely uninterrupted, even on a 3G connection.

The downsides? Not all apps from your old BlackBerry will run on BlackBerry OS6. Twitter and Bing do not have supported apps yet, which means you’ll have to run UberTwitter or some other client. And Google apps run smoothly, though I’ve found I prefer Bing’s mobile app. Screen resolution could be higher, but the Torch’s screen is bright and pretty.

In all, RIM did exactly what it needed to do with this device: It stepped up the game and proved it’s still a major player in the smartphone market — one capable of creating gadgets that aren’t just good for the corporate world, but are also enjoyable for consumers.  This is, without a doubt, the best BlackBerry ever.

UPDATE: A couple of other little downsides:

To unlock the Torch, one need only press a single button at the top of the device. Unfortunately, that’s a little too easy, especially if you leave the Torch holstered most of the time. It seems to come unlocked a little too often when you don’t want it to.

RIM has gone from two custom convenience buttons to one. It’s not a huge problem, but those who’ve gotten used to two buttons will be forced with a difficult choice to make.

Call quality is good…sometimes even excellent. But from time to time, there is a small tinny sound. It’s bad enough to be a bit annoying, but not a dealbreaker.

I admit it: I’m addicted to my iPod Touch. I love having a tiny computer in my pocket. I love having the ability to check baseball scores, surf the net, watch YouTube videos, monitor my e-mail, plus listen to music and watch video any time I want. If I’m bored, I can fire up a game of Fruit Ninja and I’m good.

A couple of weeks ago, I awoke to find my beloved iPod dead. It wouldn’t turn on at all. The battery was at 75 percent the night before, so I was surprised, but not alarmed. I figured the battery had drained overnight. No big deal. I plugged it in to charge, took my shower, got dressed for work. But when I went to grab the iPod, it wasn’t charging. It was still dead, though now hotter than blazes from being on the charger for the past hour.

I tried charging it in the car and at work. No dice. It wouldn’t do anything. It was a brick. The computer didn’t even recognize that anything had been plugged in. Heartbroken and frantic, I went online. I googled. And googled. And I found that I wasn’t alone…the web is teeming with iPod Touch issues. And no solutions that I could find.

So I checked Apple’s website. I tried everything it suggested. Still no luck.

I’ve heard for years the talk of Apple’s legendary customer service, so I figured I’d give it a try. Maybe call someone, find out if it’s a known issue with a quick fix. But after logging in, I was informed my iPod was no longer under warranty. A phone call from a “Genius” (the supposedly know-it-all help desk folks) would cost me $29 — not to fix the problem, but for the phone call itself. That’s $30 just to talk to someone, with no guarantee that they can help at all.

No thank you. I decided to go to the local Apple store and talk to a real-live “Genius.” It’s not far from my office, so I figured I’d drop by on my way home from work. I talked to a polite young man who informed me I had two options: Wait an hour and a half for the next appointment or schedule an appointment for later. Now, all I wanted was for someone to listen to the symptoms and tell me whether it was fixable. But, alas, they wouldn’t talk to me unless I waited or scheduled an appointment. I left.

On Monday I made an appointment. I got there early, and again was met by a nice young man. As I expected, the appointment lasted fewer than five minutes. He plugged the iPod in. He shined a flashlight into the  ports. He cleaned the ports and plugged it back in again. The verdict?

“It’s fried,” he said. “We can’t do anything with it.”

He told me the problem is not uncommon. And since it’s three months outside the warranty, he offered me two choices: I could buy a used one for $100 or I could buy a new one, and they’d happily give me 10 percent off.

Ten percent? My iPod Touch is the 16 gb model, which Apple no longer makes. If I buy a new one, I can get the 8 gb version for $199 or the 32 gb for $299. So I save either $20 or $30 — a small (very small) attempt to make up for a product that failed long before what I considered life expectancy. I told him I’d think it over. See…I’m not about to spend $300 on a device I know will be outdated this fall, when I expect Apple to release a new iPod Touch that comes with a camera or two and supports all the bells and whistles of the new iPhone.

I also remembered that the iPod was a gift from my parents, who wisely purchased it with an extended warranty from the store (not Apple). I made a couple of phone calls and was put in touch with a CSR. She took down some information, but couldn’t find a record of my warranty. What she said next, though, surprised me.

“I’m sending you a UPS label,” she said. “Just send the iPod in and we’ll have it back in seven to 10 days.”

“I’m sorry…what?,” I asked. “I thought you didn’t have any record that I have a warranty.”

“That’s okay,” she answered. “We’ll take your word for it.”

“So…I send it to you and you tell me what it will cost to fix it?”

“No. You send it to us and we send it back when it’s fixed.”

At that point, it seemed like my last best hope. So I mailed it in, free of charge. Four days later, it was returned. I plugged it in. It came on, charged up and worked…almost.

I noticed trouble connecting to WiFi, and the battery seemed to be draining quickly. The next day, I called a number they’d provided. They didn’t put me on with a CSR this time…they put me on with the guy who actually did the work. We chatted briefly and agreed I’ll send the iPod back. His promise? He’ll have it in perfect working order before I get it back again. But he told me a lot more than that.

He told me he’s surprised at the number of iPods he fixes after Apple Geniuses tell customers they’re beyond repair. In one such recent case, and Apple Genius told a customer they’d need a new iPod because music would only play through one side of the headphones. Corey fixed it in minutes, just by soldering the headphone jack.

So here’s what I learned about the Genius Bar: It’s a sham. Apple Geniuses aren’t really there to fix your problems. They’re certainly not real technicians who, as Apple claims, know your product inside and out. In fact, they’re the Apple equivalent of the Geek Squad. And their goal is to fix your issue by selling you something else. Sure, while I was at the Apple store, another Genius was helping an older man sync his iPod with iTunes and led him through the process. But that’s simplistic help. It isn’t the line we’ve been sold.

Apple’s customer service model is pretty easy to dissect: It’s based on marketing, not talent. Like Best Buy, Apple markets Geniuses as highly trained technicians who can help with any problem. If you’re under warranty, that’s easy — they give you a new one. If you aren’t under warranty, that’s easy too — they tell you to buy a new one. There’s nothing technical about that. But people leave the Apple store feeling content anyway. Why? Because they believe they had no choice but to spend $300 on a new iPod. A Genius told them that was the only solution.

In my case, the Genius was either lying or flat-out wrong. Not only was the iPod not fried and not beyond repair, it only needed one simple part — a battery. Apparently, that simple fix took more than a Genius to figure out.

It may be piling on, but I can’t be quiet about Facebook anymore. I don’t want to be there and if I could, I’d have been gone ages ago. But if you can get out, I suggest you do so now…before it’s too late.

Let’s break it down:

Back in the beginning, Facebook seemed so…friendly. It was an exclusive club, open only to students. And it felt so much cleaner than the MySpace cesspool. Everyone was eager to join Facebook, and as soon as Zuckerberg opened the doors, millions streamed in. Now Facebook is the biggest, baddest social network on the block…a nation of 350 million unto itself. Problem is, this isn’t just a social network of your friends, and you aren’t just sharing your photos, antics, likes and dislikes and your bathroom habits with your buddies. You’re sharing them with Facebook itself. And Facebook isn’t laughing with you or consoling you; it’s making money off of you.

We knew that, didn’t we? I mean, Facebook is a business. But it really hasn’t been apparent to most of us just how Facebook was going to make money outside apps and ads. In plain English: Zuckerberg is selling access to your “private” information to other companies. There’s no “stupid” or “blind” ad network serving up ads. Facebook is a recon mission; you are the target. It’s a brilliantly executed social engineering plan, wherein Facebook earns your trust, gets you to tell all your dirty secrets, and then sells you out. So…basically the Linda Tripp of social media platforms.

That should scare the crap out of you. Especially given Zuckerberg’s track record with private information.

On Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, he lists his personal interests as “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.” That all sounds pretty good, right? But how open is Zuckerberg? Let’s just say his profile updates are generally about his company, and he has a total of 40 pictures uploaded on his account. He wants you to share things that he won’t. That says a lot to me.

I count myself lucky that I’ve never been a fan of oversharing. My own Facebook account has precious little on it…a couple of pictures, a few updates, a sparse bio…and that’s how I wanted it from the beginning. I can’t trust a service that wants too much access to my life and, frankly, neither to the hundreds of “friends” one can accumulate on Facebook in a short period of time. But it only takes five minutes browsing lamebook.com to realize there are a bajillion Facebook users who have no problem posting anything and everything they can think of. And as the entire web becomes a Facebook application, even more of your information is going to be stored in the Facebook brain.

Drop the Kool-Aid and run.

Facebook is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. That’s because the second you upload or post anything, Facebook owns it. And now Facebook’s Open Graph API means Facebook even owns your online habits. I’ve been stunned over the past few weeks to hear folks talk about leaving Facebook, deleting all their embarrassing pictures and disabling their accounts. But disabling and deleting are not the same thing. If you’ve disabled your account, you can still be tagged in photos and notes, you still get update e-mails and if you log back in at any time, it’s like you never left. If you want to delete your account, instructions are here.

Adobe has finally come out with its official response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ now-famous Thoughts on Flash blog post. In reading it, one gets the sense the Adobe is very angry, but fears defending itself. Instead of the milquetoast response, Adobe should have gone point by point to counterattack Jobs’ claims.

Since Adobe won’t, I will.

1. First, there’s “Open”. Jobs says Flash is 100 percent proprietary, and therefore doesn’t fit into Apple’s version of what the Internet should be. And though Jobs admits Apple has proprietary products, he doesn’t admit that the vast majority of Apple’s products are proprietary — so proprietary, in fact, that Apple’s license agreements don’t allow users to run Apple’s operating system on anything but an Apple computer. And Apple has updated iTunes several times to keep users from synching the Palm Pre to iTunes. Jobs cannot argue that he is now or ever has been a proponent of “open.”

2. Second, there’s the “full web”. In answer to the claim that iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users don’t get the full web, Jobs responds by ignoring the point. He says there are plenty of places to get video from, and that although Flash games aren’t playable on his devices, there are plenty of games available in Apple’s App Store. Perhaps. But he ignores the large volume of rich content residing on the web that was built in Flash. Not just videos and games, but whole websites, advertisements, photo galleries and more. On the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, you’re barred from that content — not because it isn’t possible, but because Steve Jobs has decided it isn’t necessary.

3. Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. Jobs says Flash is full of security holes and bugs, and therefore not trustworthy. Know what else is full of security holes? Mac OSX. As was recently widely reported, Macs are more susceptible to viruses than PCs. Fortunately for Apple, market share is still so low that malware developers just don’t bother writing malicious software targeting Macs. Jobs says Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. That surprised me, particularly because I’ve heard that Macs never crash. But if we take Steve on his word, wouldn’t that make Apple partly responsible? Wouldn’t the team at Apple want to figure a way to work with the plugin and create a more stable OS?

4. Fourth, there’s battery life. Jobs says using Flash will drain batteries. Again, Jobs defaults to the video argument. Frankly, I don’t disagree that video is better served in h.264, and if that means longer battery life, all that better. But Apple could better serve its customers by allowing customers to control their own experience. If it means battery drain, so be it. The user learns something. But the bigger point — getting the full web — wouldn’t be a substantial draw on battery life. Video here is the straw man set up to redirect attention from the essential parts of the web that are missing.

5. Fifth, there’s Touch. Jobs says much of the content developed in Flash does not interact well with touch devices. For that, he blames Flash. But I believe the opposite is true. Flash was around long before the iPhone. The fact that Apple hasn’t figured out how to handle simple things like rollovers is not Adobe’s fault. In fact, it shows a huge lack of understanding about how people use the web. It isn’t the Internet’s responsibility to live up to Jobs’ vision; it’s Apple’s responsibility to deliver the content people are looking for — whether Jobs like it or not.

6. Sixth, the most important reason. Jobs says Apple won’t let iPhone and iPad developers build apps in Flash because it will lead to clunky, slow, bloated and substandard apps. And, according to Steve, it’s important to protect the user experience. In response, I’ll say that I own an iPod Touch. I use it daily. I’ve downloaded plenty of crappy apps that crash and freeze, games that nag you to buy the full version or just don’t work at all. And if Jobs wants to talk about bloated, slow, substandard apps, he needs look no further than the PC version of iTunes. Without a doubt, it is the absolute worst, clunkiest, slowest piece of software I have ever run. Ever. Even last night, it halted the download of my daily podcasts and would not resume the downloads. I couldn’t even close iTunes without using my Task Manager. The point is that Jobs is only concerned with user experience when it suits him…and it suits him in this case because his team can’t figure out how to get the iPhone to run Flash.

Bottom line: Adobe was essential to Apple’s rise from near death a decade ago. Products like Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator were (and are) considered standards for the creative class that kept Apple afloat. Apple owes it to Adobe to be more open, more cooperative, more forgiving, than perhaps it would be with any other company.

If I were running Adobe, my response would have been more simple, more direct, and have greater impact: I would announce that Adobe is no longer developing Mac OS versions of its products, because Mac OS is not open, Apple does not support the “full web” on its products, Macs are too vulnerable to security breaches, Apple’s mobile devices do not offer sufficient battery life, Apple product developers don’t understand the way users interact with the Internet, and Apple doesn’t care about user experience.

I’m sure the Windows crowd would accept that in a heartbeat.

By the time you read this, I’m hoping to have fewer Twitter followers.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed you over to Atomic Tango, and Freddy’s wonderful tongue-in-cheek post about scoring more Twitter followers. If you haven’t read it yet, do so. It’s one of the truest, funniest and most interesting things I’ve ever read about Twitter.

It was funny at the time, and it made sense, but I wanted to put Freddy to the test. See, his contention is that you score more Twitter followers by doing slimy little things…and really, you do them to accomplish one slimy big thing — amass scores of fake Twitter followers so you can, well, brag about how many Twitter followers you have. And then get more Twitter followers.

Step one, according to Freddy: Keywords. Use enough of the right ones, and you draw the attention of Twitter zombies and spammers. The right keywords? Things like “MLM,” “network marketing,” “downline,” and “wealth.” And you can throw in SEO, SMM, SEM and any other buzzword used by the slimiest spammers on the net.

So I tried it out. I posted one simple tweet, packing it with keywords. I was in my office at the time, it was the end of the day, and I was headed home. Between posting that tweet and getting into my car, I gained seven new followers. On the drive home, I gained three more. Over the next couple of days, I posted five more tweets, packing each with keywords. I’ll add here that none of the tweets could have been construed as serious. In fact, I was brazen about calling out “my zombie friends” to make sure the follow process was automated. In short order I picked up about 60 new followers. I say “about” because I screwed up at first, and didn’t follow the zombies back. Those I didn’t follow dumped me within 24 hours. Lesson learned.

Those I did follow sent me automated direct messages almost immediately, offering to sell something. Awesome.

Then I realized what I had done. I ruined Twitter.

Now my stream is polluted with SEO experts, get-rich-quick schemes, automated tweets about blog posts from months ago and lots of ways I can use the Law of Attraction to make my life better. I don’t need Twitter for that; I already have an e-mail account.

Before this little experiment, Twitter was a pretty good news feed. I follow news outlets, tech journalists, local people and folks I consider experts (not people who call themselves experts) in fields that interest me. Sure, I’ve built a couple of lists to pull them from the haystack I created, but that just didn’t work for me.

So now I’m going to tell you the real secret of Twitter: Follower counts don’t mean anything. Nothing.?The only folks who have a lot of followers are celebrities and liars. That’s it. Why? Because everyone on Twitter believes they’re a leader; nobody wants to be a follower. We’re obsessed with our own follower counts because, well, what’s the sense in posting anything at all if there are only three people listening?

The sense is here: If you use the methods above and score 97 more followers than the three you used to have, there are still only three people listening. Zombies can’t hear you and won’t respond.

Want to get the most out of Twitter? Stop thinking about who’s following you and start concentrating on who you follow. There are brilliant people (like Freddy) posting brilliant things. And don’t worry about whether they’re following you back; follow them because you’re interested.

You get the most out of Twitter not by talking, but by listening. And if you’ve got engaging content to put up, do it. Talk to your followers. Respond to those you follow. Have a conversation. But don’t do any of it for the numbers. That’s the secret.

So…

I’m headed over to my Twitter account. And I’m unfollowing all the spammers, zombies and slimeballs.

I’m better company than that.