We are finally back. After recording an admittedly terrible podcast about a month ago, we decided to scratch it, and wait for something we were a bit more passionate about. This isn’t our most heated podcast by any means, but we do come to an interesting fork in the road for the future of Android. Give it a listen and let us know how you feel about the recent developments in the Android camp.
The Mobile Ping - Podcast 12 (.mp3)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
We have an exciting announcement for this week’s podcast: it’s video! We haven’t even started editing, and we’re working out the details as far as how we’ll run it on our feed. In the meantime, why don’t you check out some quick snippets we recorded on our phones to test out and compare the video quality.
We’re all home safely from E3, and sleeping off the excitement from our trip. While the lack of cell phone games was dissapointing, our experience with doing everything over cellular data networks gave us some amazing insight.
We met a lot of awesome people, had a lot of not-awesome food and beer, and had an absolute blast. After we get rested up and detoxed, we have a few changes to the site, so keep up!
Here’s our wrapup podcast for our E3 2009 trip. We recorded this in the car driving up I5 at 78mph. It sounds like shit and there’s a weird garbley low frequency sounds, but anyway you get the picture. I uploaded this over a mobile broadband connection at 150kbp/s while driving. Amazing.
The Mobile Ping - E3 Day 3 Podcast (.mp3)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Eric and I got a one on one two guide through Codemaster’s Operation Flashpoint, and I have to say, I’m impressed. The game is incredibly visceral, and the world is huge. It’s a first person shooter that also features squad based combat. I have a few qualms, but the experience of that 20 minute playthrough has left me begging for more.
Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that we’re twittering as much as e3 as possible while we’re here. We’ll also have our podcast later in the night to followup the events of the day.
Update: You can now read our twitter on the right widget! ——–>
Hello everybody, Eric here on my G1 letting you know that Scottastic, Jared and I are half-way to E3 and will be updating you with nightly podcasts about the high points and low points of the convention.
Waking up to 50 emails on my phone (and those were just the ones it was showing me) was not a pleasant experience. Since we are being spammed, I have temporarily disabled comments unless you are a member. Sorry!
Hey guys, just making my first test post with postbot on my g1 now running android 1.5. It is the UK version so somethings are slightly different but it definitely is an exciting update.
We have a brand new color scheme and images going up on our site in the next day or so, you may see some of the changes already. I just wanted to give a huge shout out to J-Dubb for the awesome image work.
Seller’s Dilemma is our regular series discussing the qualifying and selling of phones, features, and accessories to consumers.
Most consumers know exactly what kind of phone they want, they just need a little information as to which phone that actually is. You want to edit spreadsheets, read your email, and connect to your exchange server? Windows Mobile. Listen to your music on your phone but no interest in the internet? Sony Ericsson.
But what if the customer has no idea what they want to be able to do?
Eric and I are no longer on speaking terms. He can explain the situation himself, but suffice it to say that he is the luckiest SOB on Earth.
And yes, I say this in jest.
Until very recently, pricing across all carriers was very similar. If someone changed providers, it was for reasons such as coverage, choice of devices, employee discounts or parking tickets. Now, there are some very compelling reasons to leave your cell phone company in the dust.
There have been some terribly troubling tremors terrorizing the technology trade. What does it have to do with alliteration? Not unlike the nettlesome nature of continual consonants, this show of greed and backward-looking thought is repetitively repulsive and reprehensible.
When the interwebs internet was in it’s infancy, users would pay by the minute to be dialed into an ISP. Every time you loaded a page of text over your 28kbps connection, you could viscerally feel the money draining from your pocket. Sure, you would try and keep yourself online as little as possible, maybe just download your emails for the day and log off. But as the content became richer, and the convenience became clear, you just let that money slip from your fingers as you sent messages to your virtual colleagues in a sort of substitution cypher consisting of numbers and symbols.
Finally you thought: wouldn’t it be great if I could just pay one price and have unlimited access all the time? Someone else agreed with you, and this is now how we pay for our internet.
But not for long…
We thought it might be useful to the reader to see what devices the two of us have used throughout the years. I don’t have all of them, but this is my current collection in no particular order.
However, if I wanted to put them in an order, this would probably be mine.
Palm Centro
T-Mobile G1
iPhone 2G
Blackberry Pearl 8100
The Nokia 6030 is just my old beater for when I go to the beach or something. As we get some reviews out on these devices and more the order that I placed them in should make more sense (I’m looking at you Centro).
I’m looking forward to adding the Palm Pre and a S60 phone to my collection. A final note is that I used to have a Blackjack 2, until I went on a drunken rampage and poured a pint into it’s open battery compartment to see if it would turn on after that (which it did, and during it’s final moments it displayed a beautiful pulsing rainbow of color).
Disapproving Rabbit does not approve. This past Tuesday, Apple claimed that they ran a “popular IM client” on a Windows Mobile, an Android, and a Blackberry device, cutting the standby time by 80%.
I don’t know what client Apple used, but I used AIM on my Blackjack 2, which clocked in at just under 32 hours standby time. For a phone that gives me less than 60 hours standby time with nothing running, this isn’t too bad. 47% drop by my math.
Seller’s Dilemma is our regular series discussing the qualifying and selling of phones, features, and accessories to consumers.
This is the phone that I constantly am asked for: something simple, reliable, and powerful for little to no money. It’s a very odd development in the general user base of mobile phones. Asking for a phone that is simple, reliable and powerful is like asking for a perfectly aged prime rib dinner, complete with potato, greens, a glass of wine and desert.
In a word, predictable.
The iPhone finally has most of the things it’s competitors have had for years and most iPhone users have been begging for. To me, this new update is not entirely exciting. It provides some nice additions, but it isn’t necessarily a game changer when comparing the iPhone to other, more “true” smartphones. Considering that iPhone has a huge lead in the market, there’s probably not much incentive for Apple to innovate. Rather, they’re probably better off combating the small issues that deter some people from getting the phone (MMS, copy and paste being the major culprits). Having Apple call 3.0 an innovation that makes the Palm Pre obsolete before it’s inception is a ridiculous claim. The Palm Pre is still the most exciting device coming to the market, 3.0 should be called iPhoneOS 2.5, at least for the consumer. For the most part the features that they added don’t change the way you look at the iPhone the way 2.0 did. I assume this will be a general consensus among the community, and unfortunately this train of thought will probably end up underplaying the huge improvements to the SDK that they have made.
TMP on Twitter!