Apple's Live Stream tomorrow

Here's a gem from Apple's recently announced live video streaming of their mini-keynote tomorrow:
"Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™."
Well, Apple has made a lot of fuss about how fucking great they are because they build on open standards. I think it can be said that Apple itself is acknowledging how full of shit that idea is. I suppose they deserve commendation for that, so kudos, Apple, for showing us the joy of "open standard" systems.

Apple's BS
via Rafe Needleman

Phones, the uber gadget, and dedicated devices

When I go to work it is not uncommon for me to carry my phone, music player, netbook, and iPad; there's never a guarantee that each item will be used that day, but I can't see myself not having each of those items with me. It's not that I couldn't boil that down to two items: the phone and the netbook. It's that I don't want to.
The modern phone is an amazing thing, blending telecommunications usefullness with a smattering of computing utility. I can listen to, and download anywhere, podcasts, music, and video on the phone. But I don't. No, instead of plugging into my 4.3" slab of glass and Android, I plug into my 3 year old white OG Zune. Why? Because it's perfect for what I want.
With the Zune I have a dedicated device optimized for listening and watching content. It has hardware buttons that can be accessed without going through a lock screen, volume that can be adjusted through a pants pocket, and an interface that is designed to do one thing: play shit.
So I find myself very rarely using the much more technologically advanced phone to listen to anything, and I still go through the nightly sync cycle that ensures I have an up to date selection.
My specific situation isn't the only example of a dedicated device that seemingly makes no sense in this modern world. Take the Kindle, a single function devices that is seemingly usurped by the iPad, the do-almost-all ubergadget that I'm typing on right now. While the Kindle can be used to read books, the iPad can be used to read books, write books, watch the movie based off of the book, and play the mobile video-game spinoff of the book. But the iPad isn't perfect. It's too heavy for extended reading sessions, it's display is more tiring to look at than e-ink, and the interface is designed for general computing, but dedicated reading. From a value standpoint the Kindle seems to make little sense (and much less sense when it cost 50% of the iPad), but for usability it's unbeaten.
So now we find ourselves at an odd nexus; increasingly capable and impressive machines that do everything, and increasingly cheaper and better machines that do a single thing, and do it well. While many pundits have called each new ubergadget the killer of this, and the killer of that it's becoming increasingly obvious that single purpose devices are going to continue living on. What the ubergadget is killing, however, are the middling and poorly designed single purpose devices that end up cluttering junk drawers across the country. And that's a good thing.

Phones: A wishlist

iPhone

Cupertino, spruce up your UI. What was revolutionary and clean 3 years ago is stale and uneven now. Notifications are translucent and light-blue, settings are black and white, drop-down menus (such as in Safari) are clunky, with thick, brash borders and lettering. This goes triply true for the iPad. The high-DPI screen on the iPhone 4 makes your sub-HD resolution look even worse; not in video, not in apps, but with any menu item with text larger than 12-pt. It looks pixelated and out of place on the larger screen. Everything else is pretty decent though, including anything that slides. Those buttons are rad. Also your folders suck, but all the mobile folders pretty much suck (from a usability standpoint; parts of the UI are actually pretty neat).

Notifications. These suck, especially with your 1-operation at a time design. Now, to be fair, this is fairly well fixed with multitasking, but that's not out for the iPad yet so I still get to bitch about it. Also, no snoozing? No saving notification for later? No stacked notifications? What is this, a Western Union telegraph? Go steal Palm's WebOS notification system; it's the best on the market.

Hardware: make a bigger screen. Work with an iPhone and a Pre (or Blackberry, or *shudder* a feature phone), and the screen seems plenty big, more than enough for a nice hand-held experience. Work with an iPad and an EVO/Droid-X and the iPhone screen looks like a tiny window into what could be. Imagine, if you can, looking through a tiny window to control a computer and surf the internet; that's what the iPhone is. So don't do a huge bump, maybe something in the 3.7" to 4" size; the EVO and Droid-X's 4.3" screen is too big for many people. Of course this won't happen; they've painted themselves in a corner on this (well not really, but for my purposes...) with their mystic "retina display".

Contact management: you're getting creamed by Android and WebOS. I know you're not a cloud company but neither was Palm and look what they've done. Coming from you it's downright pathetic. And don't get me started on mobile.me. What a piece of shit; not for what it does but for what it costs. Your cloud setup is 3rd class at best.

Android

Go get a consistent UI. You're getting better on this, but c'mon. Also, add flash, add smoothness, add some wow factor to your UI. Look at an iPhone, and to a lesser degree the WebOS phones, and you see slinky orientation changes, soft fades between screens, natural looking UI motion, and other little touches that scream "I have weight!". Android has none of that and needs it; it's Windows 2k vs. Mac OS 10.0. Arguably equally functional, I sure as hell knew which one was more enjoyable to interact with. And don't tell me Sense UI makes up for it. Also, don't let youtube links from your browser be handled by the HTC flash application; that's more of an HTC problem, but MAN does that suck.

On the plus side is your system wide back button; very cool to go from an app to the web and all the way back. Best breadcrumb system ever.

Customization: take a page out of WebOS; it's drop-dead simple to install extensions to WebOS (such as battery percent notifier, software keyboard, etc) from a thriving unofficial dev scene. You're the Open Source OS! Make this shit happen! On the other hand, the incredible capabilities of some of the applications in the Market are awe-inspiring (location based wifi activation?! yes please).

Notifications: good, but steal more from WebOS; provide more information about emails, sms, etc within that notification pane. Also, allow for individual clearing of notifications, not this "clear it ALL!" approach you have now. The widgets are awesome though; kudos on that.

Contact management: you're almost there with the facebook integration (at least on Sense), but you need some serious work on it. Compared to WebOS's integration between Google, Exchange, and facebook your attempt is just lackluster.

Your cloud strategy is good but needs improvement; add in application syncing and application settings and you'd be white hot.

WebOS/Palm

Get some new hardware. Seriously. I have seen 5 WebOS phones leave my house in the last year and have active issues with the remaining hardware. Better processor, more ram, SD card (you aren't Apple after all), slider that doesn't cause the phone to shutoff or Oreo-cookie. And for god's sake get your UI GPU accelerated. This isn't Android, you can spec in GPU support to all of your phones. Optimize the crap out of your integral apps; the phone app, THE PHONE APP, has such horrendous performance you're almost better off using Google voice through the browser. Your gallery app is slower than shit. Same thing goes for Google Maps. Your email client is pretty awesome though; so is your contact management (also the best in the industry). Get better apps; you're doing OK on this part but have huge room for improvement.

You're cloud strategy is pretty legit; if you wipe a WebOS phone and come back to it your apps automatically download...RIGHT WHERE YOU LEFT THEM. That's nice, it's like the iPhone restore form backup, but over the air. Stretch this out with photo backup (stolen from Kin) and you'd be awesome. Your notifications are pretty hot too.

Blackberry:

I don't really give a shit so keep on trucking. Just update the CPU on the Torch, what is this, 2008?

WinMo7

Steal the best parts of the Kin, the Zune HD, X-Box 360, mix with extremely strong Exchange support, add in good twitter/facebook integration (do not take this from Kin), add an API to the Kin spot so foursquare can build an app, allow multitasking, and don't fuck it up. You might be worth something then.