"Murdered-Out." Engadget Podcast 131

Engadget podcast numero 131 was a pretty light-hearted affair.  paul miller was out sick; in his stead, chris ziegler provided some cell phone insight.  also in this episode, sweet sweet vindication for josh and nilay.

first of all, I'm going to get a whole bunch of blackberry stuff off my chest. I know that cell phone reviews are in no way created for me, so it doesn't really matter, but I still want to say that I have a hard time paying attention to bberry reviews. I had two of them, and no matter how easy they may have made it for me to get work done, I didn't develop loving relationships with either one. my hatred of their browsers made it nearly impossible for me to like either of them, and the fact that they failed so badly at browsing is what makes it so hard for me to take any review seriously. furthermore, a lot of what nilay and josh say about the similarity of specs between models and the mind-boggling proliferation of bberry form factors hit home with me.


josh loves this photo. normal day at chris ziegler's house (self-described cat-lady of cell phones).
courtesy of engadget.com


when I entered the ranks of management in my previous corpworld, I was given a bberry. as I anxiously awaited its arrival, I went online to see if I could figure out which one I would end up receiving. I wanted one with a camera and a decent browser. I thought that guessing which model I'd be assigned would be as simple as estimating how up-to-date my IT department might be, but that optimistic idea evaporated with my first search. I was shocked to see how many versions there were. there was no way for me to figure out which one I'd be getting, so I closed my desk-top browser and patiently waited for the box to come to my cube.  imagine my sadness at how crappy the curve's browser was (I had the one pictured right underneath the 8900 in the photo, above). at the time, my personal phone was a little nokia brick, and while I loved it, I sort of envied my husband his iphone. I figured that this work bberry would fulfill my smart phone lust. how wrong I was. I'm pretty sure that my curve's browser was just as bad as the one on my nokia. actually, I ended up loathing my bberry to such a degree that when I moved into my current role (different corpworld), I asked that I not be issued a bberry at all. my curve ended up representing the shackles of my job, and nothing more than that. I was resentful of it, even when it wasn't mysteriously crapping out on me (take the battery out and put it back in, power back on). the tactic of not carrying a bberry at my new job worked for a while, and then I was told I was receiving one. sigh. this time, I didn't even look around at coworkers to see which one I'd end up with. I just didn't care.


photo grabbed from tinh te review, posted to youtube.


I ended up with the bold on the left, in the photo, above. a friend received that one on the right from the same company on the same day. I don't know if her supervisor cheaped out on her, or if I just drew the newer straw, but despite having the latest bold, I still didn't care all that much. the first thing I did was to check the browser and it still sucked. what? why? how???? if I was in the stock market and had rim shares, I'd drop them as soon as I heard the CEO state that "buggy cell phone launches are the norm." how disgustingly apathetic. am I being too harsh?

but the pleather back? I liked it!  my curve had a plastic back, so the upgrade to pleather was great. denim? really? nilay, I am so right there with you when you asked, "denim? like stonewashed?" I shudder to think of all those who may have been walking around in denim shirts, denim jeans, and denim bberries. now I am being too harsh.

I know the iphone isn't perfect, but once my current company went the way of apple, and I was able to replace my bberry with the iphone 4, I cancelled my personal cell phone contract and stopped thinking about blackberries at all (that is, until I began this blog project). yes, at&t's network sucks and sometimes I wait in vain for my phone to sync or receive emails, but you know what? I can always get where I want to with my browser, and for me, that's what matters when it comes to my cell phone device of choice. yes, perhaps I am a sad, little, limited person, but there you have it. that's my bias. like paul, I prefer a digital keyboard, and no bumper. for the record, I've been keeping auto-correct on, just to try it out, since everyone besides me swears by it. I still find it frustrating, but now also I find it fascinatingly awesome by equal measures. and I keep thinking of things I wonder if suri could do for me, but I don't have ai technology...

first gen kindle, image via widipedia


I can't help but wonder if this is the kindle that josh is trying to buy as this pod is casting.  I was picturing the second gen version in my head, but that's because I had no idea that the first gen even existed. it's way cooler than the second release, and I can see why josh might become totally enamored after getting over his initial aversion. 

chinese crested (dog) via rate my k-9.com

a long time ago, I thought that I only liked big dogs. which is really kind of funny, since I never even had a dog in my home. like josh and the kindle, once I let go of my disgust, I found that I really wanted a little dog. various breeds come and go from my short list, but the chinese crested always rates in the top five wants. what I'm saying is that the first amazon kindle is ugly in the way that certain breeds of dog are ugly. they're so ugly that they're completely charismatic and ultimately, super cute. chris ziegler "flipped" two kindles on ebay, for which josh calls him a jerk. it's ok, josh apologizes for that.

in the beginning of the episode, nilay talks about why it's unlikely that apple will sue palm over the technology used for the pre's touch capabilities. josh just wants to be reassured that nothing will hold up the pre's release (nor the watchman's). nilay is happy that he has the opportunity to talk patents with his best friend and to set the record straight both on air, and in (digital) print. josh uses this passage to segue into the sectera edge / blackberry confusion issue. he crows over the fact that obama is shown with a blackberry in a photograph. not that he cares. no. but just in case I didn't make it clear in my last entry, the blackberry whatever and sectera edge are two, separate entities.

oh and last but not least, "murdered out." I don't know how to properly commiserate over how sad I feel about myself that I'm picking up "cool" slang terminology from a geek podcast that's over two years old. sigh. have I ever mentioned that I used to live in manhattan and hang with the cool kids (for example, I used to regularly see acts like borbetomagus and the boredoms at the cooler, & etc.)? now I'm in a suburb of a lesser city and so uncool that almost every day I don't care that I don't live in manhattan, or in one of its hip boroughs. anyway, "murdered out" is an awesome phrase and I am so happy that I learned it. thank you, engadget podcast (now vergecast).

"Steve Jobs...Is Dead." Engadget Podcast 129

oh, was that in poor taste? or did it just seem like the facts? back in 2009, it was an interruption comment made by paul miller that seemed to make nilay and josh pretty uncomfortable. paul blurted it out, deep voiced and dead pan. I imagined that after he said it, he was freaking out, making silent crazy faces, waving his hands around, being like, "what did I just say???" this is what I picture in my mind because the comment is so out of character (at least paul miller podcast character) that it reminds me of the time I dramatically mocked my third-grade teacher (who happened to be a nun) in front of her and everyone. I played her like she was a crazy, finger-shaking, bent-over old crone. for the first two and a half years of my attendance at that school, I didn't say very much, and then blam, I was lining up for a spanking (not really, but I did get sent to Sister Mary Margaret for some very stern words).

podcast 129 is nearly one-half steve jobs, and what his resignation might mean to apple and to the industry. the second half is about windows 7. there's a smidgen of CES 2009.

is this a man who has fanboys? I don't know, but he looks pretty cool to me. image via businessinsider.com

I like to read as much as the next guy, but biographies of the recently deceased don't usually make my list. I do, however, plan to read the jobs biography soon (why doesn't my public library own a digital copy of this book? seems like the ultimate oversight to me. I would like to meet the digital contents librarian to discuss improvements to the current purchasing scheme). I'm no apple fanboy, but the fact that one ceo/man can inspire so much hubbub/fanaticism/conspiracy theories/etc. is fascinating. that he reputedly generates a "reality distortion field" is also interesting. I can't believe I haven't seen pirates of silicon valley yet.

image via imdb.com

I just dug out my macbook pro purchase receipt to find its date of purchase. it turns out that I bought this laptop on November 10, 2010, which means that I must have purchased my dud of an hp pavilion sometime in the early part of 2009. after hearing this podcast, I am sad that I didn't know there was a beta version of windows 7 available. I never bonded with vista, I hated the pavilion, I was upset over the purchase decision I'd made, and I would have jumped on the chance to see if windows 7 could have improved my user experience. my hp isn't just slow, it's disobedient, and it suffers from short-term memory loss. every time the machine regains consciousness after being asleep or shut down, it "forgets" that we have a wireless signal and audio capabilities. therefore, every time we use it, we literally have to restart it once, if not twice. why? we haven't been able to figure that out. we thought that maybe it had something to do with the gazillion windows and hp updates the operating system was receiving, but after restoring to previous versions, barring automatic updates, and reading forums online, we still haven't been able to figure out what the problem is. it also has a really interesting, "I'm going to wake up with my fan on at 6am if I've been asleep, but still open" function. I'm willing to accept user error as the reason for my woes, but user error didn't cause the battery to die an early death. the computer only works if it's plugged in. am I ranting? YES I am! sorry. this is all to say that listening to the enthusiasm of the 129 podcast crowd makes me sort of nostalgic for the days when I was a pc. I use a pc for work, and I work a lot, but my work machine is still running xp (and a massive host of other outdated products - I can easily write another rant about this, but I'll refrain), so I don't get to play with any cool, new features.

that's me, speaking out of my cube. technically, I'm still a pc at work, but that doesn't really count.

nilay found and purchased the #1 crap gadget of the 2009 CES show (found in the depths of the international gateway, which is also the first part of CES that sounded totally awesome to me. I would love to work for a gadget blog once a year, just to cover the international gateway) from a chinese lady who harassed him in her native tongue, then yelled, "one dollar" a few times.

it glows! for all you fantasy fanboys out there. image via endgadget.com

he almost didn't buy the dragon controller, but then regained sanity and forked over the bill. josh called him a cheap jerk (really) for not buying a controller for everyone. paul loved it so much that nilay gave it to him. paul renamed it awesome gadget, which is what you need to use as the search term, if you're going to look it up on the engadget site. josh waxed about his favorite crap gadget from 2008, the miniphone, "it's just like a regular phone, except that it's a little bit smaller."

josh's mini-phone photo. image via endgadget.com

it occurred to me, while nilay was talking about his experience of being yelled at in chinese by some lady, that she may not have been yelling at him at all. some chinese people seem to be all lathered up and potentially bomb-like as they spit tiny foam flecks at you and hold forth at an insane volume, when from their point of view, they're making normal everyday, lovely conversation. my parents had one male friend who would actually make me wince when he was just saying nice things to me. we also had to wipe down our telephone mouthpiece anytime we allowed him to use our telephone.

bsod = black screen of death, and I was very proud of myself for knowing that. paul was deemed unfit for gauging the performance of his vista machine, since he "doesn't push it very hard," (his words) and only "uses it for zune and rhapsody," (nilay's words). he has played counterstrike on it once, however, as well as civilization IV. why does every male I know seem to have been devoted to that game at some point in their lives?

josh almost talked about the palm pre, but then decided to save it for next week. he did, however, mention that it uses the same battery as the centro. very interesting, right?

"we are going to get so professional on you" Engadget Podcast 128

so, I was totally wrong. I had not seen the back of ces 2009. podcast 128 is another wrap-up episode, this time guest-starring thomas richer, an (ex) engadget senior editor, or lone wolf and self-acclaimed "old man," from the netherlands. he was apparently responsible for this bit of photoshopped handiwork:

image via switched.com

I agree, it's slightly disturbing to see mac guy's face on the little girl body, but the imagery is pretty far from reaching the "block it out" end of my horror-meter. I'm continually editing my impressions of each host persona, as I listen to the podcasts (my impressions of josh and nilay are still somewhat plastic), but I'm becoming fairly sure that my general idea of paul isn't going to change. the man is an innocent. he's sensitive. that isn't to say that he's fragile, or anything like that (I wouldn't know from the podcast, thank goodness), but he's definitely easily disconcerted. he's someone that I would probably have the urge to be extra profane around if I knew him personally. in a fun way, of course!

the very cute feature of this podcast is that everyone is super loving each other. it's like post-show haze love. and you know what? I was right about the snort-level giggling. there is slap-happy commenting going on in this podcast. first to come is thomas richer love: paul describes himself as glowing in the mornings after he gets up and reads thomas' posts. later on comes the group love: thomas richer initiates a conversation about how much everyone loves the opportunity ces gives the engadget staff to hang out with each other.


maybe when they hang out with each other at ces, the engadget staff are like tech-loving care bears.


before the conversation devolves into wackiness, there is some deadly serious discourse about the status of net books, consumer behavior (are there really people who don't know what to do once their desktops are full of icons?), the palm pre, and palm-the-company, and "the childlike joshua topolsky."

I like how the childlike version of josh topolsky is still ready to slam right into curmudgeon mode at the drop of a hat. for example, as everyone chides him, and he agrees that he's beaming (somewhat prematurely) over the promise that the pre holds, he says, "what, I don't deserve to be happy? is that what you're telling me?" or something like that. that quote was actually an approximation.

I was ready to write a whole thing about the [personalization of] and [identification with] one's computer and william gibson and jean baudrillard (I had a crush on some of his books when I was an undergrad), but I'm going to replace that sure-to-be-pedantic paragraph with this:  During a weekend visit, my mother-in-law asked my husband if he would help her with her computer. my jaw nearly hit the floor when she said that she wanted him to help her delete some files. uh, what does that even MEAN????? this is a smart and independent woman. she was a vp of hr when she retired, and she still practices hr on a volunteer basis for her church and the penn foundation. she uses her computer for various work-related tasks, and I assumed she was at least on intimate terms with basic comupter functions. as she was answering my husband's pointed questions (what kind of files do you need help deleting? has your computer's performance slowed recently? & etc.), all I could think was, "hey, if you have too many icons on your desktop, it might be time to get a new computer!" in the end, my husband told my mother-in-law that she needed to figure out how to delete items by herself and to let him know when she was having real issues with her laptop. harsh, right? will I completely forget how to interact with technology when I'm old? is that an automatic response to aging?

everyone tried, but no one succeeded in getting thomas to say the word, "kiosk."

"MAIL MERGE!!!!!?????/? + CES" Engadget Podcasts 124-127

124 = macworld and ces day 1
125 = microsoft and day 2
126 = palm pre and day 3 (pre)
127 = last day wrap up, hungover

macworld must have been boring because I can't even muster the energy it would take to look up the correct spelling of phil shiller. honestly, the most interesting thing about apple is steve jobs. sure, there was an entire company behind the man, but so what? it's steve jobs who was credited with awesome comments such as,

"Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." - The New York Times January1997

"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it." -Fortune March 2008

AND he had something to do with the creation of Breakout, one of the best atari games ever. anyway, there is banter that makes the rehashing of macworld much more interesting than it would have otherwise been. can you imagine sitting through the boredom of listening to people retell tales of looking at 17" macbook pros? I don't care how unremovable a battery is. to me, that's just not news. josh had one great quote where he was talking about the lack of buttons on the macbook pro's trackpad, "I don't find the lack of buttons to be more useful. Do you know what I find to be a really useful tool for getting work done on a computer - and it has lot's of buttons? The keyboard, that's what."

I think that it was during 124 that nilay mentioned the gizmondo ceo who "chose" to crash his ferrari. I looked that up, and it was ugly. but the funny thing is that the car crash probably wasn't the worst disaster in this guy's life.

enzo into a tree? where's the tree?

the gizmondo itself is the punchline. it was apparently a bonafide clunker. here's an excerpt from the wikipedia article about the gadget:

"With fewer than 25,000 units sold, the Gizmondo was named by GamePro as the worst selling handheld console in history. By February 2006, the company discontinued the device and was forced into bankruptcy. In 2008, founder and CEO Carl Freer announced that he had reached an agreement with the liquidators, and planned to re-launch Gizmondo as Gizmondo 2." 

the gizmondo, via gizmodo

at the end of the podcast, josh gets all loopy and predicts that the microsoft ceo, steve ballmer, will execute a karate kick onstage, pump his fist in the air, and introduce a zune phone by having someone call him on it while he's on stage so that he can pull it out of his pocket while saying, "woa, I can't even answer the phone because I'm jamming to so much music."

oh one more thing - it was during this macworld that apple announced it would use a tiered pricing scheme for its itunes store. 69cents for "bargain basement" songs, 99cents for a "regular" song, and $1.29 for a "premium" song. I'm sorry, I know that I'm particularly scrimpy when it comes to media purchases (I've never paid for anything in itunes, nor have I ever purchased an application for my iphone), but I would NOT pay $1.29 for a song! I looked, though, and most of what I'd want from the itunes store is 99cents. I had to search around for $1.29 songs, and luckily, I'm not into the bieber. paul miller thinks that yacht rock is a prime example of bargain basement. maybe some of it, but I don't know, I'd say bargain basement is more like ratt or deo.

I think paul got one thing right though; he predicted that subscription services would become the big thing for music. spotify is seriously ruling my world (the free one, of course - thank you again, dj reef!). I mean, it has changed my life. I can't imagine buying another record or cd again. well, I take that back. of course I can, because a lot of what I'd like to listen to isn't on spotify (drag city), but then, so much is there that I really don't care about what I can't hear on it. right now I'm digging some john phillips.

125 is the microsoft day of ces. there is no zune phone. there is no fist pumping (in the air). there is no karate kick. but despite all those unrealized predictions, the retelling of the keynote is pretty hilarious. microsoft had some "ladies" demonstrate a few things, and one was named, janet galore. they also had a child demo a software called, kodu. josh and paul thought that maybe the kid's name was willow, "or one of those names." it was actually sparrow. microsoft billed sparrow as an "actual 12 year old girl."

sparrow demonstrated a really cool software called, kodu. kodu is a programming environment that allows a user to code by going through menus of icons, rather than typing in a language. paul said that had he known about this in his youth, he'd likely not be able to put a sentence together, but he would probably have made some pretty kickass games. for the record, paul accused willow/sparrow of doing some autistic-like mumbling chatter while flying through the kodu menus. someone said that steve ballmer made phil shiller (sp?) "look like a baby." most likely it was josh.

the guys make fun of thin tvs, which apparently, are all over the place. nilay sneaks around on the floor of the show, while paul and josh are on the press junket. there's a lot of security around an lg phone watch, which gets much airtime on the podcast due to the fact that they're making fun of it, except for paul, who thinks that it's pretty cool. when pressed for a reason by josh, he says, "because it's a phone that you wear on your wrist. that's cool."

feel like talking to your wrist? not quite spy-worthy. via cnet.com

episode 126? funny you should ask. it's about day three at ces. while they do mention the sony vaio p (nilay really really really wants one), they (ok, mostly josh, a little nilay) absolutely gush over the palm pre. I can feel josh smiling giddily through the speakers as he's talking to me from over two years ago. scroll forward, however, and what do we find? this is what we find, and it's sad. I wonder if josh ever got a turbografix 16 emulator for his pre.

it's interesting to find out that the pre is named for precognition. nilay mentions that the phone is said by palm to "know what the user wants before the user itself knows." josh responds, "like precognition," but no one is having it. nilay wants it to be like preview, and paul doesn't have an opinion. I'm surprised that there's no mention of phillip k. dick. in dick's books, precogs are humans that can tell the future.

if you haven't read this book, do so immediately. 

it's apparently during this ces that wireless charging (inductive?) is introduced as a truly viable alternative to plugging devices in to charge. nilay mentions that there is a wireless charging alliance. this is the second alliance I've learned of while listening to the podcast. the first was the open handset alliance. at work, we have signs up that discuss hand-washing. the signs have been designed by the soap and detergent association, which is a part of the clean hands coalition. I guess there's a group for everybody.

in 127, everyone sounds hungover. nilay sounds like he's been yelling and smoking all night long. ryan block is in on the action, and for some reason, I'm not remembering all that much about the podcast itself. I was wiped out after listening to so much CES talk. I can't even imagine what it's like to cover the event. I think that there was talk of Dell and its Adamo, but mainly what I remember from that was that they rented out a bunch of rooms for their announcement and that it sounded like a weird scene. oh wait, you know what? there was a bit of talk about some chips. maybe I can't remember the podcast that well because the pre talk blurs the episodes, and who cares about chips? I mean, sure we all do, but really, most of us don't.

aww, but he's so cute!