It’s Time To Make Standardized Ratings For Gadgets

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5625746/gadgets-should-have-standardized-ratings-too

Earlier today, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed off stickers that would give car buyers standardized info on a particular model’s fuel economy and environmental impact. Gadgets should have standardized ratings, too.

When buying gadgets, comparison is paramount. There are inevitably a hundred TVs that fit the general requirements you’ve set out, a few dozen Blu-ray players, and a handful of smartphones. In many cases, it ends up being a process of elimination, and standardized gadget ratings would ensure that that process was a fair and informed one.

As our society comes to terms with the direness of our energy situation, and as the idea of “green” transforms from buzzy marketing bullshit to something that our gadgets actually have to be, it will be essential to have real, digestible data on how the electronics we use impact the environment. Some considerations here could include:

• Power consumption: how much gadgets use when they’re plugged in and operating; how much they use when they’re plugged in and not being used.
• Materials: how environmentally friendly are the materials used in a product.
• Supply chain: under what conditions were the products manufactured, and from what countries did their parts originate.
• Durability: how many use cycles a product can be expected to last for.
• Disposability: how long a product, or its packaging, will take to degrade in various situations.

Some terms and standards for addressing these issues are already floating around. “Vampire draw” is a more colorful way to talk about the power our gadgets quietly suck while they’re plugged in but not in use, and since 1992 Energy Star has been giving consumers a vague notion that their products were gobbling up a little less energy than they could be. But if you walked into a Best Buy and asked the people inside—the people buying things and the people selling them—what standards were required of any given product for it to bear the Energy Star sticker, how many of them would have any clue? Not very many, I imagine.

Specs

Green stats are just the start; similar standardized ratings could overhaul the way we evaluate all our devices’ specs. Sure, many of the ones you might consider when buying a new gadget are objective: Megapixels. Processor speeds. Screen sizes. But why do we blindly trust the companies that make our gadgets to faithfully report things like battery life? Why do we have to rely on websites to run benchmarks for every new machine that comes out? Here are just a few things that could be tested by a third party:

• Battery life: standardized tests for various usage scenarios. For a music player this could mean playing straight through, on shuffle, or selecting particular songs and scrubbing to a particular moment.
• Benchmarks: tests for CPUs and GPUs.
• Power on and shut down times: tests that would show how long various models take to turn on completely, shut down completely, go into a sleep state, wake up from a sleep state, etc.
• Display: a standardized test for brightness, color reproduction, etc.
• Wireless reception: how strong of a signal devices get with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.
• Noise: how loud larger products like desktops, appliances, etc. are while operating.

Things like stock specs and Energy Star standards are a start, but only that. Establishing standardized tests for aspects of performance and power consumption—and, perhaps, as the EPA has suggested for the auto industry, assigning a letter grade based on those numbers—would help keep consumers informed and companies honest.

GetSet Helps You Discover the Cheapest Way to Travel

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5619276/getset-helps-you-discover-the-cheapest-way-to-travel

Using available travel data cost data from sites like Kayak and Greyhound, GetSet estimates how much it’ll cost to travel from one location to another and suggests the cheapest method.

If you’re making a trip from Los Angeles to New York, chances are flying is going to be a lot cheaper. Boston to New York? That’s definitely a bus trip. GetSet is very simple in its operation. All you really do is choose where you’re headed and where you’re coming from and it’ll figure out the rest for you. GetSet outlines your three options—flying, busing, and driving—and their costs based on data it finds online. While the results might not always be exact—if you’re traveling for the holidays but searching now, for example—it’ll give you a good idea of what to expect.

Asian Countries Too Humid for iPhones?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5619440/asian-countries-too-humid-for-iphones

Apple’s been slapped with many lawsuits for overheating products in the past, but over in Asia, iPhone owners are finding out the hard way that 95 per cent humidity isn’t the best treatment for the temperature-uncomfortable phones.

The South China Morning Post yesterday commented on the ever-increasing cases of iPhone owners having issues with voided warranties due to water damage, saying that Asian message boards are populated with stories from those who found their iPhone’s liquid indicators were affected by humidity.

Indeed, it appears even in the US there have been problems with positive readings on the iPhone’s moisture indicators, with one woman filing a class action suit earlier in the year.

While Apple’s website says the indicators, located in the headphone jack and base of an iPhone, “are designed not to be triggered by humidity and temperature changes that are within the product’s environmental requirements described by Apple,” it could be that Asian countries that see above 95 per cent humidity just aren’t suited to iPhones.

Drawing on the example of Hong Kong resident Justin Hayward, the SCMP paper quoted him as saying “If the limitation is over 95 per cent humidity, they ought not to be selling the product here. I find it quite unbelievable—a real piece of corporate greed or a great oversight.”

While his network agreed to replace the iPhone for a fee, Hayward is staying strong and sticking by his claim that he hasn’t done anything to void the warranty—and that Apple should be testing them more thoroughly in places of high humidity. [South China Morning Post - Thanks, William!]

Image Credit: South China Morning Post

Why Are You Still Subscribing to Cable Television?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5619637/why-are-you-still-subscribing-to-cable-television

Boxee. Google TV. Apple’s iTV. BitTorrent. All this stuff is supposed to be killing cable television, but according to a New York Times/CBS News poll, 88% of respondents are still paying for cable. Fess up! What’s keeping you cablin’?

Here are my suspicions, based on my own content consumption.

Certain shows can’t be watched elsewhere, at least not live.

I’ve given over to my passion for HBO’s True Blood, despite that it wasn’t the serious look at vampirism that I was first expecting from Alan Ball—and despite that every time Tara comes on screen everyone in my house looks at each other and starts flapping our lower lips around whimpering Suuuhhhkie, faux-emote ourselves into near cataplexy.

But you can’t watch True Blood on Sunday night as it is broadcast without cable. You can download it the next day from legal and less-than outlets online, but you won’t get to talk about it over the apocryphal water cooler until Tuesday.

Channel surfing is actually sort of fun.

Part of the reason I don’t keep cable television in my house is because I am too inclined to plop down on the couch when I’m bored and mindlessly flip through channels. Since television consumption just continues to go up and up, I suspect that for many the steady drip of mediocre content that allows one to turn off the brain for a while is actually worth the hundred bucks or so that cable television costs each month. No judgement from me—I certainly can’t argue that the hours and hours I spend each day on the web reading pointless tech news is any more fundamentally gratifying to my soul—but I’ve got enough addictions in my own life to succumb to the lure of a thousand channels.

Sports.

The only time I’ve been a cable subscriber in the last couple of years was during World Cup. If I were more into other sports, I would almost certainly have to be a subscriber. Fortunately the only other sport I really like to watch on television is football and I really like to do that in a bar with other fans.

Watching streaming content is often a pain in the ass.

I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report nearly every evening. Jon Stewart is my Johnny Carson. But I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve sat down on the couch, opened up a browser, and then had to fiddle with something to try and get the stream from TheDailyShow.com (or previously, Hulu) to actually start. Flash might crash. The quality of the stream might be degraded. The show might cut to commercial, then puke out when trying to load back.

And I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my television, which is a lot more robust than the experiences I’ve had with devices like Apple TVs or other XBMC-based media centers like Boxee. When it works it’s great, but it’s not exactly optimal, especially when much of the content I want is on different web sites. Services like Hulu were supposed to ease the pain by putting all the content in one place, but then some content providers started getting cold feet and keeping their shows on their own sites. Search and subscription methods from within media players can help, but it’s still not as fire-and-forget as using a DVR from a cable provider.

Along those same lines, it’s also possible that using a mouse and a keyboard on the couch still feels weird for people. It’s fine for me, but I’m a dork.

Enough about my own pet theories, though. What’s holding you back from canceling cable entirely? And can you see yourself ever dumping it for another pay service like iTunes or Amazon? What would it take for your family to go all internet for your television?

Image: Boxee.com

Xbox 360 Commercial Pulled, for Using PS3 Footage of Same Game

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5615540/xbox-360-commercial-pulled-for-using-ps3-footage-of-same-game

Ha! Hahahaha. Sorry, please excuse my laughter—I just find it hilarious that the advertising agency employed by Microsoft thought they could get away with showing PS3 Final Fantasy XIII scenes “Wot, it’s the same game, innit?”

Sparked by an eagle-eyed British viewer, who dobbed in the commercial to the Advertising Standards Authority, the commercial was swiftly yanked following a comparison of gameplay between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.

The ASA commented that “we noted that there was a discernible difference in the picture quality of the two—the PS3 image in video sequences appeared sharper and colors were more vivid than those of the Xxbox 360.”

Due to the potentially misleading nature of the ad, it was pulled from telly and won’t be given the light of day again. Much like that advertising agency, I imagine. [The Telegraph via Kotaku]

Earn Points for Trying on Clothes or Entering Stores With Shopkick App

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5614837/earn-points-for-trying-on-clothes-or-entering-stores-with-shopkick-app

Granted, it’ll take a lot of clothes trying-on, or walking-in-and-out of Best Buy branches to actually earn enough points to redeem against an iPod Touch or Facebook credits, but this Foursquare-like app sounds like a lot of fun.

Having teamed up with a bunch of US chains like Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, Macy’s, and The Sports Authority, users of the free app receive credits (or “kickbucks” as they’re known) just for entering participating stores. Further kickbucks can be earned by trying on clothes, scanning a barcode on your iPhone, or even just picking up an item in a store.

It could get messy for store assistants, having to fend off Shopkick users who are obviously just trying on clothes to earn more points, but I imagine they’ll quickly become accustomed to pointing out the chancer in a line-up.

Kickbucks can be spent as credits on participating stores’ wares, or as credits on Facebook, on magazine subscriptions, song downloads or even donated to charity. It sounds as though it’ll take a lot of check-ins to earn enough to get a freebie, with 1,250 kickbucks earning a $5 voucher to American Eagle Outfitters—that’s a lot of visits to a store (which earns you 35 kickbucks), or a lot of walking-past-a-store (which earns just 2 points).

Over 600 individual stores, and 100 malls across the US will be installing Shopkick devices inside the walls, which detect the presence of a nearby Shopkick app. Users of the app can use the map feature to see exactly where the Shopkick stores are within proximity, and even see if their friends are inside a store—not just near it. [Shopkick via NY Times]

The Kids Are Texting a Frightening Amount

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5614899/kids-are-texting-a-frightening-amount

It goes without saying that texting is startlingly popular—but what does popular even mean? Mashable has an infographic illustrating who’s texting the most (hint: teen girls), where, and how far we’ve come since the advent of the SMS. [Mashable]

Tiger Woods Game Sales Fall By A Third

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5591354/tiger-woods-game-sales-fall-by-a-third

According to the most recent NPD sales data, numbers for this year’s annual Tiger Woods golf game franchise update were down by 32%, as gamers seemingly washed their hands of the dirty dawg golfer and his waitress-hassling ways.

But there are “a lot of factors” for the disastrous collapse of sales for this year’s Tiger Woods PGA golf game, according to publisher EA, including the way the previous update was given away for free with Nintendo’s Wii and slower sales of Wii itself. But surely the biggest factor is that Tiger’s now a rather unpopular sex fiend? [NYT]

Apple’s Brewing Sh*tstorm

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5588146/apples-brewing-shitstorm

Dave Winer—the father of blogging and the RSS—has published this article on Apple’s current situation. His prediction: The Reality Distortion Field bubble is “about to burst” and Apple is going to suffer the ugliest shitstorm you’ve ever seen.

I’ve been lucky to be in the middle of a number of Internet shitstorms in my life. They’ve been absolutely surreal, unfair, cruel. No one will listen to your side of the story. People you thought were friends join the pile-on. Etc etc. And then it passes, and eventually you go back to life as it was. I don’t want to re-litigate any of them, please — but I just want to say I know what it’s like.

Now Rex Hammock, who I admire as a friend and as a pundit, wrote a piece about Apple and the crazy situation with the iPhone 4. He’s right, but he doesn’t quite go far enough in his analysis.

I don’t think the problem is with the iPhone 4. I think what we’re seeing is Apple’s charm wearing off. The Reality Distortion Field bubble is about to burst. Their run as the Exceptional Company is about to end. And they’re going to be the last ones to figure it out. And it’s going to be the ugliest shitstorm you’ve ever seen.

Why will it be so ugly? Because Apple’s hype has been steadily inflating since 1997 when Steve Jobs returned, and it’s never taken a dip. They’ve risen from being written off to being worth more than Microsoft.

It’s also going to get ugly because we’re fed up with corporations. It was remarkable that there were no ads for oil companies on the World Cup broadcasts (at least the ones I watched). Can you imagine listening to a pitch from Exxon or BP saying they are working for our energy independence, or to clean up the planet or all the other lies they were telling us while they were taking huge unnecessary risks with the ecology of the oceans? They’re smart enough to know now is not the time to be spouting bullshit at us.

It will be ugly because Apple is going to let it get ugly. Because unlike the oil companies they have no experience with PR disasters. When I read their first public response on July 2, the one that said the problem was the meter measuring the strength of AT&T’s signal, I couldn’t believe this was meant to be taken seriously. It’s the kind of story The Onion might have written on a bad day. Or Jon Stewart. That a corporate PR team wrote this says how unseasoned their people are. That they thought this answer was going to satisfy anyone says how out of touch they are with the world they are in.

“We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”

Apple has no concept of what’s it like to be disbelieved, untrusted, seen as an American corporation and nothing more.

I wonder how Apple is going to deal with their first serious virus. Microsoft, when they had to deal with malware, was in denial for years. They thought it was the users’ problem. Until they finally saw people switching to Macs (as I did) just to get away from all the crazy shit that was attacking Windows users.

In 2007, I couldn’t believe Apple, a company that was selling itself as the more secure computer, wanted to keep my failed hard disk, one I had paid full price to replace, insisting it was theirs to refurbish. I couldn’t accept that they would let all my personal information fall into the hands of who-knows-who, but that’s what they proposed to do.

Apple is a company that desperately needs to grow up and wipe the smile off its face, and roll its sleeves up and start to appreciate that they’re no longer the upstart, the underdog, the Crazy One in the Richard Dreyfus ad. They are The Man, the Boss, the one who, from now on, everyone is going to be taking shots at and shits on.

I use Macs. I’m typing this on a new 27-inch iMac. I stood in line to buy the iPhone, in the sweltering summer New York heat. I was pleased when Apple people came out to bring us bottled water. More of that Apple. More care and concern for the people who give you not only their respect and adoration, but also their money. The rules that apply to The Rest Of Us are about to apply to you. Time to get ready for it.

BTW, I am an Apple shareholder.

Dave Winer is a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

You can follow him on his blog and Twitter