MG Siegler on B&N potentially spinning off the Nook:
At the same time, they’re in a bit of a Catch 22. The brick and mortar stores are probably their greatest asset for selling the Nook. But the more Nooks they sell, the more irrelevant the brick and mortar stores become.
And when they start to close those stores (which will happen), where are people going to buy the Nook? Barnesandnoble.com is not Amazon.com. That’s a huge problem.
I hope they can figure something out.
December with the Nokia Lumia 800
Found via Daring Fireball, this is a great review focusing on the experience of using the new Nokia flagship Windows Phone 7 phone rather than picking it apart point by point like normal reviews. (Microsoft still needs to work on that OS name. That's a mouthful.)
I soon realised that my geeky 11-year old self would have hated this phone. There are almost no options to play with. You can change the “accent colour” in the UI. That’s about it. Maybe this is a problem in that the techy early adopter crowd won’t really appreciate the phone and thus recommend it to their less geeky friends. However, the busy 27 year old me appreciates this. This phone has good defaults. It just worked, and I didn’t have to worry about messing around with it.
I've definitely followed this same path. When younger I only wanted devices I could tinker with. Now I enjoy tinkering, but only on the devices I don't require to be reliable and useful with minimal effort day in and day out.
The rest of the review is similar: simple language that gets across the point: This is a mobile OS to be used out of the box. It's not perfect, but then no OS is. (I may be an iOS user and fan, but there are plenty of things in it that can be improved--some dramatically so).
My only criticism of the OS is that sometimes the graphical style makes it hard to tell what is “click”able and what isn’t. There’s some fancy UX term for this but I call it “you keep tapping and sometimes nothing happens”. I don’t think they would have to lose much visual simplicity to have some kind of consistent visual cue that something is “click”able.
On the People app:
each person’s latest activity across Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, all their contact details from the above, my history of communication with that person, their photo, their job title, their address, their photos from Facebook and more. Not in separate screens but a single, cohesive, contact record. Like the ultimate CRM for all my friends, all presented in a very slick interface. This feels like a great way of working.
This sounds awesome.
He concludes:
As something to build on, the new Windows Phone seems to be a pretty solid foundation.
Honestly, with the awesome software and great updates Microsoft has made for the Xbox 360 over the years, and now this, it's clear MS is trying to do the right things. This makes me optimistic for Windows 8 as long as they take the right influences from their consumer product branches.
I really hope it's not too late for them to turn Windows Phone 7 into a solid platform. Once we get the Lumia 900 over here in the states (sadly, it looks like only T-Mobile is going to carry the 800, if anyone at all will be) I won't hesitate to recommend it to people looking to get their first smartphone. The only people I would hesitate for would be people already invested in the Apple ecosystem or people who already know of specific critical apps they want which aren't available in the Windows Phone 7 store.
Misconceptions about iOS multitasking
Frasier Speirs:
There is one iOS "tip" that I keep hearing and it is wrong. Worse, I keep hearing it from supposedly authoritative sources. I have even heard it from the lips of Apple "Geniuses" in stores.
Here is the advice - and remember it is wrong:
All those apps in the multitasking bar on your iOS device are currently active and slowing it down, filling the device's memory or using up your battery. To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are caveats to this but anyone dispensing the advice above is clearly uninformed enough that they will certainly not be aware of these subtleties.
Thank you. I can not stand when "common knowledge" is wrong in such a way that it causes most people to do more work than necessary for absolutely no gain. Speirs explains with technical detail exactly why this is. I can not tell you how many times I've tried to explain this to people, technical and untechnical alike. Thankfully, I don't need to explain it any more, as he does so perfectly. If you want to know the details of why, read his post. Otherwise, the intro should suffice along with his conclusion:
Put simply: you do not have to manage background tasks on iOS. The system handles almost every case for you and well written audio, GPS, VOIP, Newsstand and accessory apps will handle the rest.
Barnes & Noble Reports Record NOOK Sales
During the nine-week holiday period ending December 31, 2011, NOOK unit sales, including NOOK Simple Touch™, NOOK Color™ and the new NOOK Tablet™, increased 70% over the same period last year. Sales of NOOK Tablet exceeded expectations, while sales of NOOK Simple Touch lagged expectations, indicating a stronger customer preference for color devices.
So, Barnes & Noble's only e-ink device, the second largest competitor in the space after Amazon's Kindle, saw lower sales than expected while their tablet (generally agreed upon to be a better actual device than the Kindle Fire supported by a lesser--but improving--store) beat expectations. Enough so that B&N is considering spinning Nook off as a separate operating segment.
Once more I'll say it:
E-readers are probably doomed because they just won't make the kind of money these tablets and integrated stores are capable of bringing in. Some day in the not-so-distant future, B&N and Amazon will drop their e-ink readers. When that happens I'll hold on to mine until it dies unless someone pulls it from my cold dead fist.
If I end up having to eat this prediction, though, I'll do it gladly. Anything based on today's LCD technology, or anything similar to it will never advance in such a way that I'll prefer the actual act of reading full books on them to reading them on the Nook Simple Touch I have in my bag right now. I'd love to see e-ink displays look even more like high quality paper than they already do.
HBO stops providing discs to Netflix
The Verge's Nilay Patel:
The move is said to be "largely symbolic," as Netflix still owns whichever discs it purchased previously and can still legally purchase future HBO discs from other parties and rent them to customers under the copyright doctrine of first sale. (Indeed, Netflix says it will continue to offer HBO DVDs and Blu-rays, although it's never had any HBO content on its streaming service.)
Netflix will now be in direct competition with HBO when it starts airing its self-published shows. This kind of thing reminds me how bad it is for the consumer when content providers and delivery channels are the same entity.
This reminds me of EA and Valve having a spat over EA's games in the Steam store only after EA opened its own Origin store. It's interesting that my gut is to give Valve a pass on their integration but having a bad feeling about Netflix producing their own content. Maybe it's because Steam has already become the defacto PC store and is free to access (you only pay for the games you want to have on it, not a monthly fee), while anyone wanting to watch Netflix produced "television" who doesn't already have an account will have to sign up for a paid service they don't already have.
That might not be it, though. I'll have to ponder.