Now that the Droid has been out for over a month this review might be a little questionably useful for early adopters, but I’m going to go ahead and write it anyway

In short, I like the Droid a lot. It’s the first smartphone I’ve ever owned (after 2 years of living on an iPod Touch mostly happily), and lives up my expectations.

Fake Q&A with myself:

How is the Droid as a plain old phone?
Call quality is excellent, better than any other phone I’ve ever owned. It also gets a stronger signal than my previous phone (an env2) did in a lot of places. Granted I don’t make a lot of phone calls, but in over a month of use I don’t think I’ve dropped a call once.

How’s the battery life?
In a word: OK. In a day of average use I drain the battery to about 15%. For me, ‘average use’ means maybe 10-15 minutes of actual phone calls, and the rest of my use is on the data side. Browsing the web, using apps, maybe a bit of GPS navigation, etc. But for a real power user who wants to rely on more battery-intensive tasks like GPS for all day use, the Droid’s battery simply won’t cut it. Invest in a car charger and a docking cradle for your desk. I have both of those, and have managed to get myself into a routine of charging the Droid whenever I’m not using it.
Incidentally, I love that the Droid uses a standard mini USB plug for charging. This is the first time in my life that I haven’t had to buy all new chargers when upgrading a phone.

How’s the screen?
It’s a thing of beauty. I never thought my iPod Touch screen was anything to sneeze at, but it looks downright blurry next to the Droid. I can read much smaller font sizes on the Droid than I ever could on the iTouch.

How’re the apps?
I’ve found an app for almost everything I want to do on the phone. See this post for some of my favorites. My favorite thing about the Android app store is that I can get a refund on any app for 24 hours after purchase. So trying out new things is very easy & risk free.

How’s the physical keyboard?
The buttons are closer together than is ideal, but I got used to it quickly. I have tiny fingers, so others might not like it as much as I do. I should also note that I’m the only Droid user I’ve heard of who uses the physical keyboard whenever possible – everyone else I know prefers the on screen one. The on screen keyboard is fine, I just find I can type faster on the physical option.

How’s the browser?
Mostly good. It does some strange things with auto-formatting text for a mobile screen. This is usually helpful, but sometimes screws things up a bit. Much fuss has been made over the Droid browser’s lack of multitouch. I don’t really miss it as much as I thought I might – double tapping to zoom in works just fine.

Alright buddy, this is a glowing review so far. What don’t you like about the Droid?
There are definite shortcomings. The camera is one of them. It’s supposedly a 5 megapixel camera, but I would never guess that from the results. Any photo not taken in very bright lighting is grainy. The autofocus works well, but the interface for changing focus options is terrible and difficult to get to quickly. The camera has a LED flash, but it’s pretty useless for taking pictures. I get far more use of the LED as a flashlight than an actual camera flash.

Media syncing is entirely user-unfriendly. I’ve been spoiled by using iTunes to get music onto the iPod Touch, and miss it dearly. I’ve found some third party solutions to sync music & video onto the Droid, but none work well enough that I want to endorse them here. Google needs some native software for this, and pronto.

Media playback is kind of mediocre. Again, spoiled by iPods. It works, but the interface isn’t nearly as well thought out as Apple’s.

There’s no bluetooth voice dialing. A small thing, yes, but also something that has no excuse for being left out. My last three phones all had it, and not having this feature makes it technically illegal to make a call while I’m driving in North Carolina – even with a headset.

Let’s counteract that with some good: What are your favorite things about the Droid?
Running apps in the background is amazingly useful – far more than I expected it to be. Swapping between different apps on the Droid is far faster and more convenient than on iDevices.

The GPS driving navigation feels like it fell out of a time machine from 10 years in the future. Melissa and I were in DC recently to see a Swell Season concert. I spoke into my phone: “Navigate to the Swell Season concert in Washington, DC”, and it knew where I wanted to go! Behind the scenes it used the web to figure out the venue of the concert and direct us straight to the front door. It also pulls in live traffic speed info, which more than once has let me plot a detour around upcoming traffic jams.

Full integration with Google Voice is extremely promising, and I’m inches away from converting over to a GV phone number for daily use.

I really love that apps can play nicely with the browser. For example, I installed a great app called GeoBeagle to use for Geocaching. When I click on a link to a cache on Geocaching.com, an option pops up – would I like to load this link in the browser, or save the cache it points at into GeoBeagle? Similarly, clicking on a podcast feed asks me if I’d like to subscribe to that podcast in Google Listen.

Widgets on the home screen are extremely handy & useful. I can control music playback, check the weather, change screen brightness, toggle wi-fi, turn on the LED as a flashlight and more without launching any apps or going into any settings menus.

Summary?
The Droid is a great smartphone. I’m very happy with it and it fits into my daily information needs very well.

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This Wall Street Journal article touched many nerves for me: Publishers hold back e-books.

So hold on, I’m going to get a bit ranty and this’ll probably be a long post

Summary: Two major publishers have decided that they’re going to hold back e-book versions of their titles for months after the hardback release.

From the article, here’s their justification:

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

A much better (and more profitable) course of action would be to simply embrace the e-book world and figure out how to adapt to this new ecosystem. Change is coming, and burying their heads in the sand isn’t how publishers will survive.

Some publishers try to make the argument that people have had the choice to buy a hardback immediately or wait for the cheap paperback for decades. And surely placing an e-book release between those two options just extends this model, right? They have this nonsensical vision that people with e-book readers will run out and buy hardbacks instead when their e-books are taken away. This could not be more wrong. Here’s what’s going to happen instead:

Meet Consumer Bob. Consumer Bob invested a lot of money in a Kindle. He obviously bought the device because he wants to read books on it, right? So Bob hears about a new book on TV and thinks he’d like to read it. Bob can’t find that book for his Kindle. At this point, Bob will do one of two things:

A)If Bob’s tech-savvy he’ll pirate the e-book he wants. Publisher gets no money.
B)If Bob isn’t tech-savvy he’ll buy another e-book to read, and probably forget the first book ever existed. Possibly a different publisher gets money.

Bob spent $250+ on his Kindle, and you better believe he wants to get use out of it. After plunking down that chunk of change, buying a paper book can feel a bit like wasting money. As a Sony Reader owner, I feel this sometimes myself. But Bob is also used to instant gratification and instant delivery of e-books, and doesn’t want to wait for the print version to arrive by mail or a trip to the store. Bob likely isn’t going to change his habits.

But let’s go back and look at part of that article quote again:

“…we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

What? Consumers are finding something new they want, and your response is to deny it to them? How does that make any kind of business sense? With that attitude you deserve to hemorrhage money.

Another article quote:

“Even as the retail price of many new hardcover novels creeps above $27, Amazon and Barnes & Noble boast many new best sellers for only $9.99 in the e-book format.

Increasingly, publishers have come to fear that the bargain prices will lead consumers to conclude that books are worth only $10, or less, upsetting the pricing model that has survived for decades.”

You know what? They’re right. A DRM-locked e-book simply isn’t worth $27. It’s barely even worth $10. I’m not going to pay the same amount for an e-book that a paper copy would cost me, when I can actually do LESS with that e-copy than the print: I can’t loan it, resell it, or donate it. So I will never ever pay full price, or near full price, for a DRM-locked e-book. Ever. And anybody who does hasn’t thought things through. I’d only consider buying DRM books with a massive (something like 75% or more) discount over the print version, unless the e-version has some other equally massive advantage.

But publishers even shoot themselves in the foot when they stumble on an e-gold mine. Stephen King’s new book, Under The Dome, is over 1000 pages. I don’t want to lug that back-breaking monster around with me, especially on the bus. I want to have it on my phone or e-book reader. This is a case where an e-book has clear convenience advantages over a print version, maybe even enough to overlook DRM issues. I was planning on buying it.

But King’s publisher, Scribner, has decided to shoot the e-book in the head. And not once, but twice. First the e-version won’t be available until 12/24, a full six weeks after the print version was released. Second, they’re charging wholesale prices for the e-book to distributors (like Amazon and B&N) of $35.

My moral outrage from their pricing issues aside (there’s no way they’ll ever convince me that it costs the same to print and ship an e-book as a print book), I REALLY don’t want the massive print version. No matter how discounted it is. So I’m left with just one option to acquire the book legally: Buy Under The Dome as an e-book on 12/24. This is the exact same end result as if the book was released the same day as the print version, 11/10. All Scribner has done is provided me with 6 weeks to forget that I want the book. 6 weeks to find something else to read, or maybe run across negative reviews and decide I don’t want the book after all. A thousand things could make me change my mind about buying the book. Forcing me to wait gains them nothing, and only introduces unnecessary risks into the question of whether or not they’ll get money from me.

And meanwhile I hate to break it to them, but despite Scribner’s best efforts Under The Dome is available as an eBook right now. It’s been pirated, of course. A quick search of the web shows a pirated version, likely scanned in by a large cooperative group, freely available all over the web (and with no DRM!). So Scribner has created an ecosystem where piracy is literally the only option for potential customers who would otherwise line up to give them money, AND that piracy delivers what’s actually a superior product with no DRM. King is a high profile writer with die-hard fans who want his book immediately, not six weeks from now. What are they going to do?

The sad thing is that Scribner will likely use this piracy situation as supposed evidence of how the e-book system doesn’t work and is killing the publishing industry. And they’ll never even see through their own fear, uncertainty, and doubt to realize that the root causes live in their own backyard.

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About a month ago I finally joined the smartphone world. Verizon released the Motorola Droid phone, which runs on Google’s Android software platform. I’m 95% satisfied with the phone, with only a few minor quibbles. I’ll get into those in another post. But first, here’s some of the 3rd party Android apps I’ve used most often:

Aldiko: An e-book reader, every bit as good as Stanza is on the iPhone. And that’s high praise.

Android Scripting Environment: This one’s just a bit of nerdy programming fun, you can write quick python scripts to do things on the phone – speak words, read your text messages, scan & process barcodes, etc.

Astro: A great file browser & manager, a category which Android oddly doesn’t have a default app for.

CardioTrainer: Keeps track of your workouts via GPS. I use it on my bike with great results. Kind of like Nike+, but free!

DockRunner: Kicks the Droid into its alarm clock nightstand type mode, which usually can only be accessed by placing the phone in its official Motorola docking cradle (and that cradle costs $30).

Listen: Google’s podcast downloader & organizer.

Mototorch LED: Turns on the Droid’s camera flash LED for use as a (surprisingly powerful) flashlight. Plus as a bonus, you can use the LED as a strobe or to send morse code flashes – always handy.

Pixelpipe Lite: For some reason the Droid’s built in photo uploaders strip all EXIF data out of the photo while uploading – including date stamp and rotation info. Pixelpipe is the only Flickr & Twitter photo uploading app I’ve found that preserves this data.

Twidroid: This app’s latest update took it from a good Twitter client to a great one.

That’s it for now! Look for a more in-depth Droid review at some time in the semi-near future.

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The summer is often my most productive time of year, especially when it comes to special projects. This summer I put my time into developing a mobile version of our website. I’m excited to announce that it went live last week, and I’m extremely happy with the results.

The mobile site is at www.lib.unc.edu/m

First, please note that it may or may not work quite right on standard desktop browsers. But take a look at it on an iPhone/iPod touch, Android phone, or Palm Pre. Any of those should work just fine, though some bits & pieces are optimized for apple’s devices. There’s also a plain text version at www.lib.unc.edu/m/plain, which any mobile device anywhere should be able to process in some fashion.

The fancier version was built with the iUI framework I mentioned previously. I’m amazed by how easy it was to develop with the framework – it really did all the heavy lifting of formatting and animation, leaving me to merely write the content.

But it wasn’t quite so easy to get what I consider the centerpiece of our mobile effort up and running: our mobile catalog. That was actually the whole reason I started a mobile site plan in the first place – I (and a number of users I informally talked to) wanted to be able to look up books while wandering the stacks. Our non-mobile catalog functions on a small mobile screen, but it was very much less than ideal and a bit tough to navigate. After exploring a few dead end avenues, I got lucky and discovered that our Endeca-based catalog has a built-in method for returning search results in XML. Using php I recrafted that XML into a mobile-appropriate page.

I’d like to particularly note that a mobile catalog would be impossible if we didn’t have Endeca as our catalog front end. III/Millennium, our underlying ILS, locks up our catalog and provides no easy way to get at the underlying data. And on a related note, while compiling a list of mobile-friendly database/article interfaces from vendors themselves I was appalled at how few exist. Ingenta, IEEE, and Refworks were the only three major ones I found. This is a plea for openness to ILS providers and other library vendors – if you’re not going to build these things yourself, please give us data-level or API access to the sources we’re paying you for. We can build some pretty cool stuff, if only you’ll let us.

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Back in June I picked up a Sony e-book reader when Borders had a sale too good to pass up. It ended up being about half the price of a Kindle (at the time – the Kindle is a bit cheaper now). I don’t regret the purchase one bit! I’ve had a bunch of hands-on experience with a Kindle 2 at work lately, and in many ways I think the PRS-505 outdoes the Kindle.

Screen contrast is comparable to the Kindle, if not slightly better. The 505 supports many more formats than the Kindle, including the one most popular to me – epub. Epub has been growing in popularity lately for authors who like to give away their work (or samples of their work) online. So there’s plenty of free content out there for me to read! It’s an open standard too, which is a nice bonus. The Kindle 2 can read epub files after a conversion, but in my experience that conversion is imperfect and introduces a number of formatting errors to the text. The 505 also reads PDFs without any conversion, which is a MAJOR boon for any researcher who finds themself awash in a pile of journal articles from library databases.

Of course, the 505 lacks one major feature of the Kindle: wireless web and book store access. The 505 requires a USB connection to a computer or memory card to add new books. I don’t miss the wireless connection though – if anything the lack of distraction helps me focus on actually reading! And considering that I saved so much money over a Kindle, I don’t mind the absence one bit.

The 505 is missing one feature that I dearly wish it had – built-in search. I can’t search through the text of a book on the 505 for some reason, which to me is a primary advantage of having text in electronic format to begin with. I can search in a book via Sony’s desktop software, then bookmark a location to load up on the reader, but that doesn’t help me when I don’t have access to a desktop PC. However, this lack bugs me less than I thought it would. In 6 weeks of frequent use, only once have I wished I could search for something. I guess the lack of this feature is because the 505 lacks the keyboard of the Kindle 2. But I still think some sort of text entry via a toggle button would have been better than none at all. Incidently Sony’s newer model, the PRS-700, adds search via a touch-screen keyboard. But I saw a 700 in a store recently, and wasn’t impressed at all. Adding a touchscreen overlay to the display makes it appear muddled and blurry.

And both readers are hobbled by official book stores which only sell books locked down with DRM. I say this a lot, but: I won’t buy any books from Amazon or Sony’s stores until I know that I can at the very least loan them to friends or donate them to a good cause when I’m done reading. Both stores’ prices are currently far too high, often equivalent to or nonsensically more than the print version, to justify the tradeoff of losing those ‘features’ of a book.

And there’s one final, less concrete reason I prefer the 505 over a Kindle 2 – the 505 doesn’t feel like it’ll fall apart in my hands. It’s made of metal, and feels much more solidly built than the plasticy Kindle. I actually dropped the 505 once, pretty severely. I had to snap the power button back on, but otherwise there was absolutely no sign of injury. I’m very confident that a similar fall would have killed off a Kindle 2.

Incidentally, check out Calibre! It’s a great piece of software designed to manage eBook collections on a reader. http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

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A little over a week ago I presented on “Low Effort, High Impact Mobile Web Development” at the Triangle Research Library Network’s annual meeting. I had a lot of fun putting it together and presenting, particularly because I got to highlight the really cool iUI framework. iUI is a nifty set of CSS and javascript files that do the heavy lifting of coding a website designed for an iphone. You get snappy animations and a nice emulation of standard iPhone navigational elements from writing little more than standard HTML list tags.

My other favorite thing about iUI is that it degrades pretty nicely into a format that’s more generic and not tailored to an iPhone – simply by removing the CSS and javascript links. So any mobile device can use it, and we don’t have to duplicate development efforts!

We’ll be using iUI to launch a mobile site for the library pretty soon, hopefully before the fall semester kicks in. I’m not sure how valuable my presentation slides are without my accompanying narration, but here it is just in case:

http://www.slideshare.net/chaefele/low-effort-high-impact-mobile-web-development

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Today Barnes & Noble entered the eBook selling fray. For now they’re not launching a dedicated hardware device like the Kindle. Instead, they’re focusing on providing content for devices (some) people already own – iPhone/iPods, Blackberries, PC and Mac. Sometime later their books will be compatible with the forthcoming Plastic Logic reader too, but for now they’re piggybacking on existing hardware.

At first I was glad to see some competition at B&N’s level enter the eBook sphere. Amazon’s been throwing their weight around to the point that other players like Sony’s eBook store have been almost entirely forgotten. I recently picked up a Sony Reader PRS-505 at discount (review forthcoming, mostly positive!); I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been asked while reading on the bus how I like my Kindle. Amazon has mindshare with the Kindle, just like the iPod brand does among portable audio players, and B&N seemed like the most likely realistic competitor with their considerable clout as an established bookseller. And I don’t like seeing something so fundamental as the (potential) future of reading get locked up by a lone corporation like Amazon. So hooray, we’re saved, right?

Not quite. I’m dismayed and annoyed to see yet another DRM scheme come into play. B&N’s books won’t work on the Kindle or Sony Reader, nor will their competitors’ books work on the Plastic Logic reader. Readers who want to purchase an eBook from any major e-bookstore will be locked into the silo of their device’s manufacturer. So we have an alternative, but not an answer.

I’ll give Barnes & Noble credit where its due – their books will at least be readable on a PC or Mac. If I buy a Kindle book and then lose my Kindle, I’m completely cut off from my texts. If I lose a Plastic Logic reader I can at least still access my books on a computer. Reading on a desktop or laptop screen is less than ideal, but I’ll take that over no access at all any day. That’s a step in the right direction.

But B&N’s scheme still isn’t the answer! All purchased e-books need to be readable on any and all devices before I’ll even consider purchasing my books that way.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about eBook readers and their place in a learning environment. We’re at an interesting point in their adoption right now, with the technology not quite mature. Libraries (and educators in general) need to be taking a look at currently available devices and thinking about what’s coming next.

I’ll be the first to admit that students aren’t using eBook readers en masse yet. In fact I can count the number of eReader devices I’ve seen used in public on one hand. And while I definitely don’t think the printed paper page will ever disappear completely, I do believe that someday eReaders will play a substantial role in students’ lives.

Today’s students are the so-called ‘digital natives’, those who grew up with computers and related technology embedded throughout their lives. As a result they have very different expectations and competencies than previous generations. When it comes to eReaders, today’s students are that previous generation. Tomorrow’s students will be the eReader literate crowd. Ideally we’d take an active role in creating publishing standards and devices while that generation comes of age, but I’m not sure that’s realistically possible. At the very least we need to keep a sharp eye on what’s coming and make our concerns and best practices known.

Meanwhile I’m deeply concerned by a lot of what I see happening in the arena of DRM and eBook readers. But that’s a topic for another post.

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I’ve been much quieter here than I intended to be lately, and hope to revitalize my posting routine in the near future. But first, I have news!

News!

Melissa and I are engaged!

I picked out a ring about 2-3 weeks ago, and had to wait for the setting to come in. I picked it up yesterday and decided I’d better make use of it before I hid it so well that I forgot where I put it

A little while back, Melissa and I built a mini cocktail arcade table out of an Ikea table and an old laptop. She loves it, perhaps even more than I do. Ms. Pac-Man is her favorite game ever, since she was a little kid. I decided to leverage these facts, and modified the game a bit. After the second level of Ms. Pac-Man, there’s a small little animated cut scene that plays. Here’s a low quality youtube version of it that someone recorded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZysHkdC6U

I turned it into this (sorry, there’s no sound in this video):

She saw it, was confused, said "what?", turned around, and there I was with the ring!

Oh, and she also said yes

I feel like the luckiest guy in the world today!

More details, for those who have asked me how I did the alteration:
(more…)

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I somehow neglected to mention here that I’ve started taking a photo each day again this year. Just like my 2005 and 2007 projects. It’s a rewarding experience, and despite some photos that I fully know are lame when I take them at 11:59pm, I always get a few gems. Here’s the full list of this year’s photos, and a couple of my favorites so far:

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