Why Android 'Honeycomb' Matters

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show was packed with a number of tasty gadget announcements last week, but the biggest news came courtesy of Google at Motorola's press event. Android 3.0 (codenamed 'Honeycomb') has finally been unveiled, and it's headed straight for smartphones and tablets in March. 

One of my biggest complaints about the Android OS has been the lack of a consistent user-interface design and an over-reliance on hidden menus to reveal basic functionalities. I'd heard last year that Palm's Matias Duarte (an industry veteran in mobile UI design) jumped ship to Google, and I was very interested to see when Duarte's work would manifest itself in Android's user experience. The results of months of UI development can be seen in Google's preview of Honeycomb.

For starters, there's a brand new art direction coming to Android; with Honeycomb, we can see a clear shift to a futuristic, 'authentically digital' aesthetic, reminiscent of the futuristic art design in the new Tron: Legacy film. In fact, the new gesture action for unlocking a Honeycomb device involves a glowing, Tron-like circle in the center of the screen.  

Current Android phones and tablets rely on physical buttons that are fixed into the hardware - Home, Search, Back, and Menu. In a few months, we'll start to see some devices do away with those hardware buttons, as Honeycomb will have a Windows-like 'taskbar' with Home, Back, and Menu buttons displayed on the touchscreen. 

The tablet build of Honeycomb will also come with a new dedicated Gmail widget, as well as a spruced-up calendar view that will let you scroll through calendar events from the home screen. Oh yeah, and there's also a sexy new 3D panoramic Youtube app, a powerful new Chrome-like web browser, an improved touchscreen keyboard, Gtalk-integrated video chat, and an incredibly elegant multitasking solution that will allow users to see what apps are running at all times. 

A slick new way to surf Youtube

Bottom line, Honeycomb looks stunning. While it's currently unknown as to how many of the new improvements will make it into the phone version of Honeycomb, it's very clear that Google's put a lot of work into making Android a more consumer-friendly OS that will scale beautifully to a variety of tablet screen sizes. The fact that Honeycomb will enable electronics makers to put out actually-good tablets with very competitive prices is an incredibly exciting prospect; based on what was shown by the various makers at CES, 2011 is going to see a massive armada of iPad-hunting Honeycomb tablets. 

Somebody needs to port Starcraft onto one of these. I'm dead serious - somebody do this before I storm the offices of Blizzard with a briefcase full of stolen cash. 

Holiday Special: Staff Wish Lists - M. Butler

This week on WordsFinest, our talented and sexy writers reveal what they're hoping to unwrap this holiday season.  Last minute shoppers take heed as Butler gets the ball rolling!

In Defense of the New Nook

By Aaron Ting

Barnes & Noble announced a new Nook reading device this week, featuring a full-color 7" LCD display and a slick touch-optimized interface built on top of Google's Android OS. Tech journalists and bloggers from all corners of the interwebs pounced on it immediately, all-but-declaring the device dead on arrival.

Sorry, but most of them are forming irrational, idiotic arguments. Their reasoning goes like this:

1) Ditching the first Nook's E-Ink display was a mistake because true reading enthusiasts prefer E-Ink displays. Amazon's Kindle is proof of this.

2) Adopting a color LCD display was a mistake because it places the Nook in competition with Apple's iPad and all the other touchscreen tablet computers on the market.

The problem with a lot of these journalists is that they're so immersed in the fringe of bleeding-edge technology news that they most often evaluate the merit of products based on technical offerings like their RAM or pixel density. It's utterly amazing to me how often they fail to consider consumer mentality and the product's actual position relative to its competitors. 

It's the reason most tech bloggers in 2003 failed to predict just how decisively the Nintendo DS would defeat the Sony PSP. On paper, the PSP should have been a clear winner. The PSP was a much more powerful device with a larger high-res display, sophisticated multimedia functionality, and a more trustworthy brand on the box. The popular opinion was that Nintendo had lost its mind; it was crazy to be putting out such a simple, underpowered handheld to compete against a multimedia powerhouse like the PSP. Fast forward, and the DS has outsold the PSP by nearly 3-to-1. How is that possible? Because unlike these incompetent enthusiasts (myself included), Nintendo wasn't counting RAM or clocking processor speed - they were paying attention to what consumers would actually buy. 

This is the problem with how many journalists are approaching the new Nook. They're forming irrational conclusions that completely disregard actual consumer demand.

E-Ink is a great technology, and the Kindle is an awesome device. But there is a general consensus forming among all the major technology players that black-and-white E-Ink reading devices are not interesting to consumers. Apple and HP have mentioned in the past that they looked at E-Ink and determined that consumers would want a more versatile, full-color device. This year, several companies have announced that they're already pulling out of the E-Ink reader market because they haven't been able to generate a viable business. Yes, Amazon is doing great in the dedicated e-reader market. No one's denying that. So what is B&N doing? They're withdrawing from a dying E-Ink market in which there is already a dominant competitor. That's stupid? No...that's actually good business sense.

They also weren't stupid to give the Nook a full-color LCD. So what if it's basically a tablet computer in a different form factor? We're getting to the point where every slate-shaped object is a tablet PC in a different form factor - regardless of whether it's a Kindle or an iPad. The question should be whether people want it, and whether it has better competitors.

This new Nook doesn't really have a good competitor right now. What is the new Nook doing? It's a $250 reading-optimized, full-color tablet with a web browser, apps, and a large digital book store. It's half the size and half the price of an iPad. It's like comparing a Moleskine-size notebook to large spiral notebook - both of these form factors are going to co-exist because they exist for different purposes and don't compete with each other.

And where are all these other competitors? It's not competing with the black-and-white E-Ink Kindle - Kindle fanboys are constantly happy to point this out. Its closest rival is the upcoming $400 Samsung Galaxy Tab, a 7" Android tablet that [so far] will only be sold with a two-year data contract from a cell phone carrier. Even if you want to call them rivals, I'm betting on whatever product doesn't force you to sign another contract with AT&T. 

Bottom line, the Nook is aimed at people who are looking at all these touchscreen devices and want to be able read books, listen to music, and occasionally browse the web - but don't want to cough up $500 or would rather carry something the size of a Moleskine than a spiral notebook. It's naive to think those people don't exist. I know it because after using an iPad for five months, I'm one of them. 

Sure, the NOOKcolor might still fail. But if it does, it won't fail because it isn't powerful enough or doesn't offer enough features to compete against its rivals - there are no other rivals yet. And unlike a certain writer at CrunchGear, I'll play with one for a while before I decide whether it has a place in the market.

Experiment: Seven Days In The Browser

By Aaron Ting

I embarked on an experiment recently to see whether I could make it a full week using only the web browser on my PC. To be clear, I promised you readers that I would not use any locally-installed applications. The advent of full browser-based computing with efforts like Google's Chrome OS raises an important question: Does the internet offer web-based solutions to every task I perform on my computer?

The answer: Not yet, but we're close.

Music
Ditching iTunes was a pleasure. To be clear, I pretty much hate iTunes. It's a bloated and frustrating experience, like having to store your music inside the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

I usually mix it up with Windows Media Player, Zune Player, and VLC. For the past week, I abandoned all of those programs and dusted off my Pandora and Last.fm accounts. Both are extremely versatile, but I started getting tired of 'recommended' music; for the record, Taylor Swift should not be played on my Train station. Also, I dislike commercials - even if they're implemented sparingly.

I also checked out Grooveshark, an interesting Pandora alternative which allows you to save and retrieve songs in a traditional playlist. I played with SoundCloud for a bit, which is an awesome platform for discovering a lot of independent music.

Unfortunately, I just couldn't find a decent cloud-based service that provides on-demand music. Spotify needs to come to the U.S., because until I can pick the actual songs I want to listen to, Pandora and Last.fm will only be an alternative to playing stuff out of my own music library - not a replacement. They're great for discovering new music, but aren't well suited to my musical ADHD. I'd like to see a web service that allows me to upload and play my personal music library from the cloud. I hear HP might do something like this.

Productivity

In my last piece, I was pretty honest about my fear of having to use Google Docs. I've had bad experiences with it in the past, but I decided to give it another shot. I have to admit, Google Docs has improved a ton since I last checked it out. I liked the ease of having my documents made easily accessible on the cloud without having to use a middle-man solution like Dropbox. Unfortunately, Docs still lacks a lot of richness that the standard Office suite provides. A lot of extras are available like footnotes, tables, and paragraph alignment, but none of them felt as precise or customizable as your typical Microsoft Word program. Similarly, creating detailed presentations and spreadsheets with Google Docs is totally plausible - but it just never felt preferable.

I also checked Microsoft's Office Web Apps - a suite of very simplified Office programs that run in the browser. Two major problems:

First, Microsoft blocks you from trying to use these web apps unless you're running Internet Explorer. This was ridiculously frustrating as I almost never use Internet Explorer. This was an incredibly incompetent implementation choice on Microsoft's part, and they need to resolve it if they want to become a serious player in the the web-based productivity war. If Office is available for Macs, then its web-Office should damn well be available to Chrome users.

Second, this web-based version of Word is pretty limited. It's like using Microsoft Office 95 - it just doesn't have enough rich functionality, which is unfortunate because that's really the best thing going for Microsoft's standard Office suite. I didn't get a chance to try out the beta of Microsoft's upcoming cloud-based Office 365 suite, which will replace their Web Apps to compete more closely with Google Docs.

Communications, etc.
Google Voice is great. Video chat quality was excellent, and making free calls and sending free text messages was spectacular. In fact, I really prefer it to Skype, but I'm going to continue using Skype until Google Voice becomes mass-adopted. Put simply, Voice isn't fun if you don't have as many people to talk to.

I really hate the clunky/buggy feel of Facebook's built-in chat and prefer using a separate IM client for chatting with Facebook friends. To replace my local instant messaging clients, I used Meebo. It's a decent browser solution for doing IM with Facebook and AIM contacts. Likewise, I ditched Google's locally-installed Talk client and just used Gmail for IMing my Google friends. I'm still not sold on browser-based IM. Meebo was pretty decent, but Facebook's built-in chat tool is so terrible and buggy. It really shouldn't be that hard to implement something better. Seriously, Facebook's own site shouldn't be offering the worst Facebook Chat experience on the internet.

I used a few other web services like Scripped and Adobe's browser-based Photoshop tool. In general, I was pretty impressed. I'm still looking for a good browser-based video editing tool.

Verdict
Sorry, Google fanboys, but I don't think the internet is rich enough yet to support exclusively-browser-based computing. There's a ton of stuff you can do in a browser these days, but I don't think we're at the point where you'd prefer to do a lot of this stuff on the web. Services like Picnik and Google Docs show that we're definitely headed in that direction. Running programs through the browser should be happening, because there are a ton of benefits. The consumer can gain a lot in regard to ease-of-access, software costs, and performance. Being able to edit heavier media like photos and sound files without having to leverage any of my own laptop's resources is fantastic - I really wish we could see more browser-based video editors to give Final Cut and Premiere a run for their money.

But until these offerings mature and provide benefits which eclipse the functional richness and high performance of locally-installed programs, we'll be stuck using Windows and Mac OS for a while.

Seven Days In The Browser

Today begins a seven-day experiment, loyal reader. For seven days, I will compute exclusively in the web browser. 

I was talking with a friend at dinner about how aggressively the internet has matured, providing countless browser-based solutions to tasks that used to require the installation of large programs on your computer. Basic photo editing, for example, used to require heavy (and expensive) tools like Adobe Photoshop. Today, there are a number of excellent sites like Picnik that allow you to upload and edit photos quickly and easily - all without having to create an account. The notion that computers would one day run exclusively in the web browser (meaning no other local programs installed/available) has been proposed countless times; Google's Chrome OS is an aggressively toward that vision of the future.

Is it possible yet? Does the internet offer solutions to every task I might want to perform on my PC? This is what I'll be investigating for the next seven days. A week of delightful living. A week using only a web browser. 

For seven days, I will only open Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox on my PC, and no other program. I already migrated from Outlook to Gmail a couple years ago, but some other applications will be difficult to replace on a full-time basis:

For music needs, I'll be ditching iTunes and Windows Media Center for Pandora and Last.fm

I consume most video on my PC through the internet anyway, and I'll be making use of the usual suspects: YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix Instant Play.

As a full-time law student, I find myself constantly running various Microsoft Office apps - especially Word and OneNote. Since I do my email/task/calendaring through Google, I'll be trying Google Docs again for the next seven days. This is a bit nerve-wrecking, as I've had some terrible experiences with Docs in the past. I may also experiment with Microsoft's browser-based Office Live suite.

Homework requires me to do a lot of PDF-reading. I'll be ditching Adobe Reader and Foxit, substituting them with Google Docs Viewer.

I use Google Talk and AIM for my Facebook/Gchat/AIM instant messaging. This week, I'll be trying out Meebo, a browser-based instant messaging site that lets you log into multiple accounts at once.

I usually rely on Skype for voice/video calls. This weekend, I'll finally make some calls and send some texts with my Google Voice account.

Screenwriting is a hobby of mine, and I most often use Final Draft. I'll be ditching Final Draft and revisiting Scripped this week. From what I can tell, it's improved a lot over the last year.

There are probably a few other programs that I'm going to have to learn how to replace (or more likely, go without). I'll be back next week to let you all know how it went, and what I learned. And probably bitch about Google Docs. 

Cheers!

Thoughts on Google TV

The prospect of a TV-connected computer in every living room is a frequent obsession in the technology industry. It's been attempted countless times. Microsoft allegedly started the great Xbox experiment in order to prevent Sony's Playstation line from taking over the living room PC experience. Tivo, Roku boxes, and high-end media streamers have been available for years, but all have failed to achieve mass-market adoption. Apple tried a new approach recently with its new aggressively-priced $99 Apple TV, a simple media streamer with access to on-demand television and movie rentals. But even Apple remains skeptical of its adoption, referring to it as a "hobbyist" device.

Google TV represents a pretty ambitious leap forward. The idea is simple: create a TV-optimized operating system with online connectivity and have all the electronics manufacturers design new TVs or external boxes to support this new OS. It's a dream that Microsoft has been attempting for over a decade, and when it comes to mass-adoption, Google may beat them to it.

Taking what they learned from Android, Google created an open-source software platform for television. The possibilities are endless; take all the limitless functionality of a smartphone, and multiply it times the size of your 46" Sony Bravia. Imagine televisions with built-in app functionality. No need to pump Netflix or Hulu through your PS3 - just download the apps directly to your TV. Imagine turning your TV into a live-time CNN news ticker or conducting a four-way video chat from your living room - these are some of the things that become possible. A slick, web-browsing PC running on the largest display in your house. 

But Google TV's often-overlooked potential is in its potential as an integrated gaming platform. Just as the iPhone and iPod Touch are on a war path to obliterate Nintendo and Sony gaming handhelds, Google TV has the potential to replace your Wii or Xbox. While the graphics capabilities of a Google TV box would be initially underwhelming to a current 360 owner, the convenience of downloading games inexpensively and quickly instead of having to go buy them for $50 from obnoxious Gamestop employees is an advantage that deserves the serious attention of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. If Google succeeds and everyone has a cheap box or new TV running the Google TV platform, some families may choose to divest from dedicated gaming consoles - particularly since Google TV will support Bluetooth standards, which would enable a variety of different game controller options. 

There is, however, a major flaw in Google's strategy. Having new televisions come with Google TV built-in is a smart move, but most consumers would likely have to purchase an external box to experience Google TV. This is problematic, since external boxes have typically failed, and companies like Logitech and Sony aren't helping by announcing box prices of $400 or more. Moreover, if Android OS on phones is any indication, Google needs to be extremely wary of how much it freedom it gives to electronics manufacturers. If Google doesn't set proper compatibility guidelines and every manufacturer makes highly-customized versions of the Google TV software, we could see a massive splintering effect occur, similar to what is currently happening with Android phones. Essentially, an uninformed consumer could potentially buy a box that is unable to install future Google TV updates.

Bottom line, the 'smart TV' is coming. Whether it's Google TV, a future Apple TV, or some Windows-packing behemoth, expect this battle to be drawn out and full of fart-sound apps.

The Race to the Perfect Phone

The mobile phone is constantly advancing. The big software players in the tech industry seem to agree that the phone has become the most essential iteration of the personal computer. It's a behemoth opportunity to make an operating system platform that has the same mass-market adoption as Windows does for PCs. Each company has their champion: Apple has iPhone OS, Google has Android, Microsoft has Windows Phone, HP-Palm has WebOS, etc. Each operating system goes a long way to represent the fundamental ideology of its creator, and its creator's vision for the future of mobile computing.

They're all pursuing different routes to achieve market dominance, but the problem is that none of them are doing it quite right. In the last twelve months, I've had the opportunity to play with each of the major contenders in the race to the perfect smartphone, and I haven't found a clear winner. Here's a breakdown of what I liked and didn't like about each platform.

Blackberry OS

This is where I started my investigation a year ago. I found Blackberry hardware to be superb; an excellent keyboard and lots of extra hardware features. The OS is another story. I liked its straight-forward layout and capable messaging tools, but it often felt like an ambitious cell phone- - not always a smartphone. It had some of the ideas of a pocket computer: advanced customizable options, downloadable apps, a web browser, and even some rudimentary file management. But each asset felt like a poor add-on to a regular cell phone. The advanced settings were buried in an illogical network of menus. The apps lacked diversity and quality consistency. The web browser was awful. What it all revealed was a company that had a great understanding of phones, but a poor understanding of software. The race to the perfect phone has become a software race, and though Blackberry is leading the popularity race today, they're going to lose it if they continue on this gradual, add-things-as-we-go approach to their OS.

Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5

In some ways, this is a really underrated software experience. Considering Windows Mobile 6 is ten years old, it's amazing how much of it still holds up as a full-featured smartphone experience. High customization, decent software support, and still the best information management - assuming you use Outlook on your PC. The problem is that in those ten years, it didn't make enough progress - and now it feels incredibly dated.Windows Mobile was conceived as a stylus-operated platform. No part of the OS feels friendly to fingers, and not even HTC's impressive user-interface additions on my Imagio phone could fully solve that problem - it was incredibly frustrating to suddenly discover a menu that I could really only access with the stylus. The other major problem is that as a smartphone competitor, WM6.5 really doesn't integrate the internet very well into its experience: certain apps, social networking feeds, and web browsing were either poorly-implemented or simply unavailable to Windows Mobile. 

Palm's WebOS

This could have been a big deal. The initial demonstration of the WebOS platform was praised by journalists; Palm had created a beautiful, clean OS that took everything we liked about iPhones and gave it many of the things people still wanted: multitasking, less restrictive software support, and a physical keyboard. The whole 'cards' paradigm for multitasking apps in WebOS is brilliant - in my opinion, it's still the best multitasking solution of any smartphone. There were two problems that killed Palm and WebOS: Palm didn't have enough clout to seduce app developers to write apps, and the flagship Palm Pre phone had a horrible marketing strategy involving confusing television ads starring a creepy pale girl being worshiped by hordes of orange-clad Asians. No joke.

Google's Android

Android is doing so many things right that many consumers have placed their bet on Google winning this race. Google believes they can put out a very open operating system that each manufacturer can customize and tailor to suit their specific desires. Unsurprisingly, I found the 'plain' Android to be pretty...ugly. The fonts have an unprofessional Linux-distro feel, there's no color coordination anywhere in the user-interface, and the app organization sometimes felt cluttered to me.  Some manufacturers like HTC have shown the merit in Google's vision. HTC makes excellent phone hardware, and they also have great software developers who crafted the beautiful "Sense" UI - an advanced graphical skin on top of Android that offers a blend of unique functions and aesthetic improvements. The problem is that for every HTC, there's a Sony-Ericsson or LG -- manufacturers that just haven't figured out why it's important to take this extra step in the software experience. This is what could kill Android: it places far too much faith in the manufacturers of the phone hardware. Inthe past, manufacturers haven't had to worry as much about providing their own high-quality software on phones. With Android, they're suddenly all but required to dabble in software, and many are failing to provide that measure of competency. This is creating a splintering effect among Android phones, where some experiences are undeniably better-supported than others; it could be extremely frustrating to buy an Android phone, and then immediately see a sexier souped-up version of Android on a different phone, and then find out that Google's latest Android "Froyo" OS update will not be available on EITHER of these phones.

Apple's iPhone OS

This is a tricky one. I wanted to completely hate Apple's flagship device. But I have to admit, there are many things that Apple has figured out that other developers are still stumbling over. Simply put, it answered my desire to carry just one pocket device better than any other phone. It easily provides the best experience for importing music and photos to your phone. The web browser is pretty impressive, and the sheer breadth of the app catalog is astounding; the idea that I could be carrying a respectable port of Street Fighter IV on my phone is unbelievable. Most importantly, there's a certain visual logic and navigational cohesion throughout the entire operating system that makes even complicated tasks much simpler to perform than on other competitors; for example, conducting a three-way conference call was incredibly easy. BUT there are still some serious gripes I have with the iPhone. It needs needs needs multitasking. The camera features needs to be expanded immensely. Battery life could stand to be improved. The GPS navigation features weren't impressive. On a more personal note, taking it out in public made a false statement about my consumer habits that I didn't appreciate.

OS platforms to watch...
Like I said, there's no clear winner yet. And it's only going to get more hazy as the current OS platforms are updated and new competitors enter the race.

Windows Phone 7: Microsoft went back to the drawing board and came up with a total reboot of their vision for mobile phones. Windows Phone 7 is one to watch because it's being leveraged forced into the market by the richest software company on the planet - and it actually has some pretty innovative design philosophy. In particular, where most of the other competitors are organizing their interfaces with pages and pages of apps, WP7 is all about organizing the stuff you want from those apps into more manageable panoramic "hubs" of content. It's also got Xbox Live. Still, WP7 is pretty late to the party and that could hurt its adoption.

Android "Gingerbread" Update: We haven't heard much about it yet, but like I said: Android's doing a lot of things right.


Blackberry OS 6: Blackberry is at the top of smartphone sales, and although I found its current OS to be pretty weak, there's something to be said about a company that has earned the trust of both consumers and corporate users. Their upcoming OS 6 doesn't need to outperform any of the other competitors; it just needs to add enough to keep current users loyal to the brand.

iPhone OS 4: This could be a big deal, as it answers the multitasking problem in a pretty innovative way - assuming it works. It's also adding some other hefty features, including a social gaming network and some alleged video-chat functionality. Other companies should watch these improvements closely. 

Coming Soon: Wizard Tech

That's right. You all laughed when I said, "Some day, I'm gonna be just like Harry Potter (minus the bad hair, ugly scar, and being a dude)!" Now certain magical objects from J.K. Rowling's world-renown Harry Potter series are making their way to the Muggle world...

Keurig Coffee Makers - "Pants Optional!"

It's exactly like a coffee-gasm in a freshly brewed cup!
There are possibly an infinite amount of things to do with this amazing machine and hot water is only one of the benefits! No, sadly it doesn't turn into some sort of Transformer or even a toaster, but it can make coffee and tea that even the French and British would be jealous!

More after the jump!

Official Launch Date: April 5th

Still putting together the final list of contributing writers. On April 5th, we'll be giving you an idea of what Words Finest is really about.

Thanks!