Here's a thought:

Apple made iPhone 6 for iPhone users, and iPhone 6 Plus for those switching from Android.

If I haven't already lost you, hang in there and hear me out. 

Based on the reviews I've seen so far, and my own personal experience with impressions, the current iPhone user base is largely in the iPhone 6 camp. They're firmly rooted in the 4" is the perfect size category, and don't want to go bigger, but want Apple's latest. And they firmly agree that iPhone 6 Plus is just too big - it's just a small iPad mini. 

Meanwhile, there's another crowd that seems to believe that Apple will be able to create an entirely new class of devices with iPhone 6 Plus, and it'll be unlike anything we currently have. It'll merge the best of tablets with the best of smartphones, and we'll just completely ignore that Samsung has basically been doing this for years. It seems to me that this opinion is generally held by tech savvy individuals (MG Siegler) and/or tech reviewers (Jon Rettinger) who aren't overly fan-boys (David Pierce): essentially, people who frequently use larger Android devices tend to prefer or acknowledge the benefits of iPhone 6 Plus. 

And that leads me to my thought: perhaps Apple made iPhone 6 for Apple people, and made iPhone 6 Plus to woo switchers. 

There are other reasonings too - 6 Plus has more big name specs (even though they're essentially meaningless) OIS, 1080p, two day battery life, 5.5" screen, NFC (kinda). iPhone 6 is more about "look, it's pretty and fairly priced and better than last years in a few ways." Apple people tend to buy the new iPhone because it's pretty and slightly better. Android people want the best thing readable on paper. Make sense?

Let me know what you think in the comments below. Do you want an iPhone 6/6 Plus? 

What comes first, iPhone 6 Plus (chicken) or Apple Watch (egg)?

Apple watch imagines a world in which interaction with a smartphone becomes a much more intentional action, much the way that interaction with a tablet today is a very intentional action. You don't just whip your iPad out of your  pocket whenever you want to check the time or notifications; you take your iPad out when you want to do things on your iPad. Apple watch will allow you to do this with your iPhone as well.

(In fact, iOS 8 in combination with OS X Yosemite as a whole will allow you to do this on a greater level than before - "this" being using the right device for the job: using each device with intention. However, for the purpose of this post, I want to focus on Apple Watch, because I think it's more relevant to my point.)

The thing is: iPhone 6 won't be so inconvenient to take out of the pocket that it will necessitate Apple Watch. iPhone 5S and older models most certainly aren't inconvenient enough to necessitate Apple Watch; we've been taking them out of our pockets twice every minute since 2007. iPhone 6 Plus will be that inconvenient, however. So perhaps Apple Watch would do better in a world where iPhone 6 Plus is already out and common place.

But on the same note, perhaps iPhone 6 Plus cannot succeed until Apple Watch is available. People won't understand, won't get, the massive screen size until they don't have to use it all the time. I think that the massive 6 Plus will start to make sense and grow in adoption rate when people have the luxury of only taking the phone out when they intend to actually use it for something.

I don't know what the answer is, but we'll see what the market says when the numbers are out. Let me know what you think in the comments.

The perfect phone

Wireless charging and a good camera. That's it. That's all that's holding me back from buying the HTC One M8. It's a great phone - stylish, all day battery, unobtrusive software, and solid build quality - but it's missing those two absolutely killer features.

Better software and wireless charging is all that holding me back from buying an iPhone 6/6+.

I would put up with the LG G3's lesser build quality and would almost put up with their downright ugly software just to gain wireless charging and a less bad camera. Even though the HTC One M8's camera isn't that bad, and the LG G3's camera isn't that good.

That's how convenient and important wireless charging is to me.

I guess I am also really waiting for Google to provide a legitimate iMessage competitor. Google Voice is close, and so is Hangouts, so it's time that those merge.

iPhone Mindshare > Apple Watch Mindshare

Living on a campus made up of university students, I expect to hear plenty of talk about upcoming consumer tech products, particularly phones.

I've been incredibly surprised, however, with just how much I've been overhearing about iPhone 6 and 6 plus. It seems like every phone conversation is about just how big the 6 plus is, and how there's no way that they would want that. Or, it can be about how cool the new iPhone 6 is, and just how thin it is.

The thing is, I don't hear that kind of thing about the recently announced Galaxy Note 4 or the innovative, albeit gimmicky Galaxy Note Edge. I definitely don't hear anything about the new Moto X, despite that being one of the coolest phones announced so far.

At least on my campus, Apple has the main mindshare, and that's crazy.

What's potentially bad news for Apple, though, is I haven't heard a single person mention Apple Watch. I personally am conflicted about it, but I haven't heard a single other person who tuned into the keynote here mention it. That's definitely not going to help Apple win the smartwatch war, nor is it going to help legitimize the concept.

I'm not even hearing that Apple Watch is stupid, useless, or whatever. When iPad initially launched, many people including myself openly mocked it and wrote it off as "just a really big iPod Touch." We were wrong, but it had mindshare. People had heard of iPad, and had a strong opinon  on it. I haven't heard anything about Apple Watch, and I think no news is bad news in this case.

Who knows. Maybe a year from now it'll be a different story. Let me know what you think in the comments.

(Disclosure: I go to UND, not exactly the tech mecca that other places are. We're much more full of average consumers.)

RIP iPod and the music culture of yesteryear

So, just today I was reading a solid article over on the verge called "The iPod is gone, but not forgotten." I definitely recommend giving it a look, but I really found the following excerpt to be powerful:

" 'Looking at someone’s iPod was like looking into their soul. In their music you could see who they were. You could tell if they were sophisticated or rough. You could see in their playlists the moments they fell in love and the moments they fell back out again.' "

"But now, the iPod is a relic of the past, and everything has changed. The notion of a music collection has been obliterated by the fact that we can stream nearly any song ever recorded and released, for free, instantly. Spotify and its ilk have fundamentally changed the way we interact with music again. In some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse: "

'Soon there will be no such thing as your music library. There will be no such thing as your music. We had it all wrong! Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be a commodity. It wants to be packaged into apps that differ only in terms of interface and pricing models. It wants to be rented. It wants to reveal nothing too personal, because we broadcast it to Facebook and we should probably turn on a private session so our boss doesn't see that we listen to Anaconda on repeat and think we’re high at work.'

"Don't get me wrong. I don't want to go back to syncing my music with iTunes over a USB cable and being annoyed if I forgot to load up the new album I've been loving. It's great to be able to access anything I want, whenever I want. But I can't help but miss the days when I laboriously curated my MP3 collection, taking nearly as much delight in a well-organized collection of MP3s as our parents might have taken with a shelf full of vinyl records."

"I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that."

 It's crazy to think about how much our culture has changed with regards to music just since the launch of iPod. I definitely remember the time when anytime you saw someone with an iPod in school, you had to take a scroll through their music collection, and that's how you decided who they were. That was how we defined ourselves. Music was important.

Right now, Spotify/Rdio/Google Play Music playlists or Pandora/iTunes Radio stations don't hold that same clout that the iPod library did. We post them to Facebook so that everyone can see, but nobody cares to look. Music is just a thing: free and always there, and we all listen to different things. Or the same things. Nobody cares.

Honestly, right now I feel like the streaming service that you use says more about you than anything. Oh, you use Google Play Music All Access or iTunes Radio? You're a fanboy. You use Pandora? Congrats on only listening to crappy top-40 pop. You use Spotify? Wow, I guess my music just isn't cool enough for you. You use Rdio? That makes one of you.

I don't know. I think it all is interesting, especially considering that we're also seeing a resurgence of vinyl in the marketplace. Let me know what you think in the comments.

What I want from tech out of the coming months

The tech world is in turmoil right now. There isn't one platform to rule them all and one platform to follow, and that's a problem. 

Two things have to happen before I call a platform for myself. 

1) Convincing smartphone launch with wireless charging, good camera, nice looking UI (in combo with usable UX), and reliable battery life

2) The ecosystem products need to be there, and be ready. I need a set top box that can handle gaming, media casting, and native media well. I need a watch or other societally acceptable wearable that works, has good battery life, and looks acceptable. I need a laptop OS that has good hardware (software' basically been solved). And I need everything to work together seamlessly. 

Apple Watch Impressions by MKBHD

This. This video right here is how I feel about the Apple Watch right now:



Watch, enjoy, and leave me a comment with how you feel about Apple's Watch announcement and everything else they announced at their event on September 9th.

Apple takes on Google Now on the wrist?

One of the biggest questions that I had for Apple Watch is how they would make the device a smartwatch, and not just a notifications hub like Pebble.

Google answered this with Android Wear through deep integration with Google Now. More so than being for notifications, Android Wear is about putting the power of Google on your wrist, and in doing so, receiving context relevant information only when you need it.

The problem for Apple is that they haven't really done this with their existing devices. They have Siri, sure, but you have to know what you're looking for to use Siri, whereas Google Now will tell you what you need to know, even if you didn't know you needed to know. Apple also added "Today" view to the notification center in iOS 7, and that displayed widgets with information. The problem was they were the same all the time, not context driven.

So naturally, I was surprised when I was reading "Here's how you use the Apple Watch" today and saw this:

"...One of the biggest UI paradigms on display here is Glances. These are little widgets of information that are quite similar to the Google Now widgets found on Android Wear devices. When you swipe up from the bottom of the watch face, you can cycle through these glances — the usual suspects like calendar notifications, music controls, message notifications, and so forth. Tapping on a Glance will open the full app on Watch."

Apple, it would appear, is taking on Google Now cards on Android Wear with what they call "Glances." This is certainly intriguing, and also makes me wonder if Apple will produce more of their own widgets for iOS 8, or if we might see a full app like an Apple style Google Now in iOS 9. However, you will notice that Glances doesn't sound particularly context driven, and I can't speak on how it compares to Google Now cards until the device actually launches and I have a chance to use it.

Are you excited for Apple Watch? Do you think it needs to be more than just a personalizable notifications dumping ground that tells time? Let me know in the comments.

Notifications, "Today" view, Contorl Center, and Software Interface

The "today" view in iOS doesn't belong in the notifications panel. I think this is something that Android has done well. A down swipe should bring notification center, which quick launches you into apps based on new notifications. The "Today" view should be somewhere else so as to not impede on notifications, nor be impeded on.

Google Now achieves this by a swipe up from the home button (not an option on iOS) or a swipe to the right on the Google Now launcher. I don't think it's the most elegant option, but it's better than iOS's implementation.

Likewise, I don't appreciate Google's choice to include their quick settings toggles (comparable to Control Center in iOS) in the same pull down notification center. It's messy. I much prefer Apple's approach where notification are in Notification Center, and controls are in Control Center. This makes sense for the user.

I really hope that Apple will find a better place for the Today view, and sooner rather than later. I don't want to wait a year for iOS 9 to address it. And I'd love Google to move the quick toggles, but they really have nowhere else to put them, so I don't see that changing any time soon.

Motorola announcement

The new Moto X looks awesome. But I haven't heard anybody say wireless charging in the same sentence of Moto X, and that is unfortunate. There simply isn't the peripheral support for any Android device that there is for iPhone, so I am not confident that a wireless charging case will surface for the Moto X.

The Moto 360 looks awesome too. The only drawback I see is the piss-poor battery life. It's a watch, so it needs to last all day. In real life, it doesn't even last as long as the now old Moto X. My other complaint would be the thickness, I suppose, but that's not a major complaint.

I'm even more excited to see what Apple has going forward.

Console Wars

I checked out both the PS4 and the Xbox One this week, and I have to say that the result of my testing this far has been to skip this console generation.

Source: http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/341/d/2/
console_wars_cartoon_by_buddycomics-d6x0wmk.png

The Xbox One undeniably is packaged better. The controller also feels generally better, especially the feel of the triggers. The use of disposable batteries is a drag, though. Also, the Xbox One itself is big and bulky, even including a separate power adaptor. Ain't nobody got time for that. The Xbox One is the far more innovative console, in my opinion (at least initially). I think Kinect, and specifically voice control, could have been a game changing (pun intended) feature. Microsoft's idea of having the Xbox One be the entertainment device was also an innovative idea, even if it doesn't fit into my ecosystem. The user interface is cluttered, and not intuitive, though, and Kinect is no longer bundled with every console, nor did it ever work that easily to begin with. Even if Halo and Titanfall are awesome, the Xbox One isn't worth the price to me.

The PS4 is packaged poorly, but beautiful itself. Bundling the power adaptor into the console was a great move. The controller feels acceptable (good, even) and I like the built in rechargeable battery. Battery life is awful, though, and I can't help but think that the light bar should have been nixed in favor of better battery life (it is dimmable in settings, though, so whatever). The triggers on the controller don't feel that great, though, especially when compared to the triggers on the Xbox One (though, in testing, I didn't hate them). I loved the 3.5mm headphone jack on the controller as much as I thought I would. Navigating audio settings wasn't the most intuitive experience, but I managed. In general, the interface wasn't perfect, but it was much more intuitive and simple than that of the Xbox One. I didn't care for the circle, x, square, triangle button naming scheme, and I never have; I like my A, B, X, Y, but that's a small gripe, and I got used to it quickly. Sony lacks the history of online gaming community that Microsoft has, and they don't have that many exclusive titles that I'm interested in yet. But it's the better gaming console.

Graphics were good on both of the consoles. Granted, I was running them both on my 720p television, so they weren't working too hard, but there's that. I did experience minor graphics hiccoughs on the PS4, but I'm pretty sure that was due to the game I was given to test: Call of Duty Ghosts (not a good game). I tested FIFA 14 on the Xbox One, since that was the game I was given, and had no graphics issues.

I also didn't experience overheating issues on either console. I wasn't terribly worried about it on the Xbox One, since the thing is huge and like 80% fans, but I thought the built in power brick and compact design of the PS4 would be a problem. After a 4 hour online gaming session, however, I didn't notice significant heat.

The thing is, playing both of these games, I never felt like I got much more out of it than I would playing the games on mobile. FIFA 14 is a mobile game. And Call of Duty Ghosts might as well have been Shadowgun: Deadzone for all I cared (generic realistic multiplayer first person shooter). The controller and the big screen are the main differentiators, and Android can use both of those easily (iOS can use controllers, but using a big screen can take some tweaking).

Regardless of all of this, I'm skipping this console generation. At least until Microsoft releases an Xbox One slim. Why you ask? Because neither console (and let's be honest, the Wii U doesn't count as a console in this generation) has everything I'm looking for. The PS4 is a better console, but the Xbox One has the better games for me. For you, things may be different. Let me know what you think in the comments.