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The will to reconnect January 13, 2010 in Music Business, Uncategorized,
mobile tech | View Comments It doesn’t seem right to have the purchase
of a new device be the reason for me to return to a long form blog post
here on PIBC. I’d hoped it would be a return to art, music or poetry;
still, an opportunity to share my thoughts about this needs to go beyond
the restraints of micro blogging and, though long dormant, I still pay
for this space. Right before Christmas, my long suffering Blackberry
Pearl 8120 went on a trip around the inside of an HE washer. Saturated
and well spun, it took a few days for the moisture and confusion to
begin departing the chassis. Like an elderly man, it recognized the
media card, then didn’t, then did. It froze like a potted plant in Calgary.
When it began to work again it would reboot in the middle of calls,
the middle of words. I spent more than a few years traveling the world
with the spartan operating system, yanking out the battery on crashes
and freezes, using other peoples workarounds in order to attempt to
be real time with those on laptops and other devices. I can’t begin
to tell you how amazed I was with the Blackberry push technology, the
speed and reliability it had for email. I once found myself within a
Roman Coliseum in Pula, Croatia in 2007, sending an email from my laptop
and hearing the whoosh of the Apple Mail notification followed in one
second by the vibration of my Blackberry. Think about the routing for
a second; My laptop to the production office wifi to the local Croatian
telco to the internet to Google in the states to Blackberry in Canada
to Tmo to the cell provider in Pula to my Pearl in about one second.
That’s insane. The sad part began as the real time revolution began,
some of us using Google Talk to follow our Twitter stream through a
mysterious and legendary myth called “Track“. This would be May 2008
and I stood in Dublin, Ireland at the RDS Arena, an equestrian center
used for concerts for many years. I put a few keywords into Track that
day and watched in amazement as realtime tweets came out of the 20,000
people in front of me and into my phone. In experimenting with certain
keywords in certain newscycles, I was able to crash my phone in some
spectacular ways. Well, now Track is just a story early adopters tell
their grandchildren when they want them to fall asleep but it was a
clear sign to me of how underpowered handheld devices were for the oncoming
data stream. The Blackberry became clearly web challenged as the first
iterations of the iPhone showed that the phone was (clearly) the least
of its features. I, like many felt attached to the microscopic keyboard,
the ability to have multiple conversations going on, IM, Text, Email,
photos going out and coming in. I got to a point when I knew a crash
was coming, a flash site locking the hourglass in an endless topple,
the battery removal and reinsertion just another keystroke, doing it
all without looking, the reboot period just a commercial break of sorts.
As contrarian as I was about the iPhone not being what I needed or wanted
and ATT being what it is, I bought an iPod Touch last year for a two
fold reason. First, I was going to use it as a Skype phone around the
Pacific Rim (I did and it was quite able) and also so that I wouldn’t
be totally ignorant of the OS experience. It’s a great media player,
logical, small and reliable. The App aspect was slow to become as important
but it was rather remarkable to have the mobile experience of getting
the software you need when you needed it. Oddly, I ended up using the
Blackberry on my Pacific trip for 2 things and one was remarkable and
the other, expensive. The Wifi/UMA section of the Pearl made it possible
to turn off the cell broadcast antenna, hit free wifi on the streets
in Australia and Japan and make all the free international calls I wanted.
Find a McDonalds, stand outside, join the hotspot, wait for the red
UMA indicator and dial away. The other was the casual data access I
made in Australia over the cell system, which for YEARS in Europe never
got metered or billed and created a wallet breaking roaming charge I’d
never incurred before. Expensive lesson. So here I am a week into my
Android experience, comparing it to my BB experience (the Jensen Interceptor
of the internet, minus the speed) and to my Apple knowledge (not a deity,
not a demon, just a really well crafted only show in town). In my industry,
we deal with multiple operating systems from many vendors. We have some
standards like MIDI and some formats that became prevalent so that the
competition would include it just in order to be used. The real parallel
is to the digital rack gear of the 80’s and 90’s, when companies like
Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Lexicon had very clear ideas of how you were
to navigate through the endless pages of parameters with a 2 line LED
screen and a scroll wheel and “enter” button. It wasn’t unusual to work
for people who stayed with one kind of gear because trying to figure
out the OS was just such a waste of time. The use of the Atari ST computer
along with the early Macs began to bring a more uniform GUI experience
to musical gear. As music software for sequencing, programming and recording
evolved, the Mac desktop became the palette that many techs and musicians
became comfortable with (to be fair, some of the best keyboard techs
I know were multi-platform and did a great deal of work on Windows,
due to the huge market share they held in those days). I mention this
because there were moments back then when you had a moment of “oh,
so THAT was what the programmer was thinking when he did it this way”
when you went from a Yamaha piece to a Roland piece. I’ve had a few
of those with the Nexus One and the Android platform. There were early
moments when the lack of uniformity and shortcuts built into the desktop,
the browser and a few of the apps began to sour me from the N1 as I
compared it to the soft key dance of the iPhone/iPod. “Why move the
clutch and the brake? I’ve always driven this way…” In Formula One auto
racing, the controlling of gear shifts have gone from the old school
3 pedal manual H pattern experience, to semi-automatic, sequential shifting
to hand controller, computer clutching gear selection. The steering
wheels on these cars are more like high end game controllers…
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