Nick Bergus Thoughts on what media do, and can do better, and other things

Marco Arment’s response to Boris at ReadWriteWeb’s question “Is it time to say goodbye to Siri?” prompts me to add more to my chronicle of chronic Siri struggle.

First, Siri’s response when I tried to use my wife’s phone to call my own. Yes, I tapped the phone number Siri offered and labeled “mobile” and she gave me a map of Mobile, Alabama. Obviously a bug of some sort, but how is that anything but seriously broken and embarrassing? Isn’t this exactly the sort of task Siri was built for?

Then another short-term memory failure. In moments like this, Siri bears a striking similarity to Leonard from Memento.

These aren’t reliability issues and these aren’t managing expectations issues. These are basic issues that a marquee feature of a marquee product of a marquee company.

At least right now. Really.

I can’t figure out how to get her to reliably e-mail my wife. I’ll ask her to e-mail “my wife” or “Laura” and she’ll start reading off the addresses I have for her, which itself is a long and involved process as she carefully enunciates every letter and every piece of punctuation in all three addresses and there is no way to mark a single address as the default (at least she’s past asking which Laura I want to e-mail). Then I’ll tell her which address I want and then she’ll tell me she has no idea what I’m talking about. And then there’s a moment when we both realize that we’re interrupting each other so we both stop. And wait. And then I realize neither of us is saying anything.

And then I do it again until she either gets it right or I give up.

It’s a joke in my family that whenever I ask Siri to call someone, she screws it up. Because she does. My old Android phone had no problem finding and dialing the number for the local public swimming pool. Siri, on the other hand, thinks she’s got the right number, but it turns out that she’s dialed the recreation center downtown. Or she gets confused and apologizes because she can’t search for businesses in Poland (or Italy). Then there was another time that, well, I’m not exactly sure what happened or what Siri thought I wanted.

I’m gotten wary of using Siri to call anyone, really, because I’m not sure how to abort a call if Siri announces who she’s calling and starts dialing (because while she’ll take five minutes to doublecheck which e-mail address I want, she won’t do the same for phone calls) and it’s clear she’s misunderstood who I want to reach. In a panic, can I starting shouting “CANCEL! CANCEL! NO, SIRI!”? Do I have to get my phone out of my pocket and jab a button? Or turn on the screen and tap the Siri microphone> Can I squeeze the magic button thingy attached to my Apple-provided headphones? I’m not sure, so I usually try to do all of them at once. So, you know, she’s no longer a hands-free assistant.

Maybe she’s great if you’re dictating e-mail messages or tweets or text into some input field, but to me, that’s not Siri. She’s pitched as an assistant. I don’t count dictation. She’s supposed to do things for me. And right now she’s an assistant who not only doesn’t anticipate my needs, which would be asking a lot and is fine, but she needs an awful lot of hand holding.

To be fair, she works pretty well for reminders, though. Except when she’s being oddly anti-Semitic.

Embattled (there’s a journalism cliche I’ve always wanted to use not really) University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen G. Bloom told Jim Romenesko:

“I’m at an undisclosed location. I left because I don’t want some of these crazy people who are reading everything they want to read into my story to know where I am.”

Ten bucks says Bloom, a man I’d consider a mentor, is on pre-planned holiday trip.

Marco Arment, I assume snarkily:

Developers target iOS first, and often exclusively, because we’re fanboys.

Fanboy isn’t a helpful term when discussing or arguing anything. But isn’t one part of the success of iOS, and the App Store, that developers build quality software for iOS because they themselves like to use — one might even say the developers are fans of — iOS?

If you’re a media executive who’s at least partially responsible for a newspaper in one of the last remaining two-paper towns, it’s a hard to make yourself look good as it is. If you do the following things, it will only make it harder to avoid looking like a jerk:

• Layoff 165 employees
• Two weeks before Christmas
• Refer to remaining employees as “content generators”
• To the reporter from your own paper who has to write the story

See? Easy.

Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”
Ken Doctor’s The Newsonomics of Anton Chekhov

I was first struck by this Chekhov quotation in the theater program: “Russians glory in the past, hate the present, and fear the future.” It’s not easy to find that exact quote on the web, but it certainly sums up much of the playwright’s work and his assessment of the national character into which he was born in 1860.

That thought also seems to say too something about news industry today. Those halcyon days of monopoly dailies weren’t as wonderful as the rose-colored rearview memories recall. The present is an unending struggle — the near future, at least, looking as bad or worse than today.

via Steve Buttry

After using the original Motorola Droid for two years, I just ordered a new phone. I snickered for those couple of years about the limits of iOS and the many purposeful ones Apple imposed. But I ordered an iPhone 4S.

I never would have considered the move if I hadn’t won an iPad. (Thanks, Patch of suburban Virginia!) It quickly replaced my laptop for many of my daily personal computing tasks and got me comfortable with iOS. (iPads and iPod Touches are both great gateways to iOS that Android, Windows Phone 7 and webOS have never been able to replicate or complete effectively with.)

The original iPad (running iOS 4.whatever) and the original Droid (updated to 2.2.something) are the only two real data points playing into my decision. I’ve been mostly happy with my phone; most of the disappointments are related to the fact that it’s a two-year-old phone in area seeing rapid progress. Nowadays, its single slow core and a minuscule amount of RAM feel ancient.

So here’s one Android user’s pro-and-con list.

Things I think I’ll miss

The seamless Google integration. Turn on an Android phone, plug in your Google credentials and you’ve just set up Gmail, Google Calendars, Google Talk, Google Maps and any other Google service whose app you install. iOS isn’t too bad, but if you want to set up, say, Google Voice, you need to give it credentials there, too, even after you’ve plugged then in for Mail and Calendar. And God help you if you want to use multiple Google calendars or sync contacts magically with an iOS device. Now you have to set up the same account as an Exchange account and manage it through Google’s Sync We app.

Google’s built-in apps. Gmail on Android is heads and shoulders above Gmail in Apple’s built-in Mail app (threading, labels, marking as spam or important are all easy and well done on Android). Google Calendars on Android is heads and shoulders above Google Calendars in Apple’s built-in Calendar app (sure hope you didn’t have more than a single calendar to display on your iPhone). Google Maps on Android is heads and shoulders above Google Maps in Apple’s built-in Mail app (turn-by-turn and public transit information on Android are great). Google Voice on Android is heads and shoulders above Google Voice on iOS.

The blinking notification light. Without having to wake the phone up, I know at a glance if I’ve got a new e-mail, Twitter mention or something else waiting for me. Simple, but really nice to have.

Swype. I’ve been using the alternative keyboard for something like a year and it really does work like magic. I can type long messages with a single thumb in bright daylight. iOS’s multitouch keyboard and autocorrect are pretty good, but not magical, and they’ll never be available on iOS.

Single browser field for search and URLs. The single field is my favorite feature of desktop Chrome, and I really like having in on my Android browser as well. Safari and Mobile Safari should adopt it.

No LTE option. I get the tradeoff. 4G LTE eats battery. But I’m not buying a new $200 or $300 phone every six or 12 months. Verizon has been aggressive in rolling out LTE coverage and has it in Iowa City and elsewhere. I worry that I’ll feel stupid when I’m still poking along on 3G in a year.

Things that might be better, might be worse

Notifications. On iOS 4.whatever on my iPad, the notifications suck. They interfere, they pop up and get knocked into oblivion when another comes in immediately after. They aren’t collected in one place, only as little red dots with white numbers scattered across app icons on various home screens. Perhaps the Android-like notifications in iOS 5 will be an improvement. I sure hope so.

The file system. iOS doesn’t have one that’s visible to its users, which I think would be great when I’m poking around, seeing all the cruft from old apps on my Android phone. But other times, when I’m moving a podcast’s audio file from my downloads folder to a special folder for my podcast app, I know that won’t be possible on iOS. (Idea: a podcast player that integrates with Dropbox to allow you to add one-offs and other audio files to a podcast playlist.)

Background tasks. It’s great being able to set my Android podcast app to download new episodes every day at 10 p.m. when I’m home, on Wi-Fi and charging. iOS won’t allow that, so I have to manually open then app to get it downloading. Same with Instapaper. The tradeoff, of course, is random apps aren’t sucking down battery throughout the day.

Design. The iPhone 4S is a sexy piece of hardware, but that glass back scares me.

Things that I’m looking forward to

A better e-mail client. In addition to Gmail and Google Apps accounts, I have my Exchange account for work. While I like having a completely separate app for my work e-mail, Android’s non-Gmail client is atrocious: it can’t be searched, it forwards e-mail as attachments, it occasionally forgets my credentials all together. (I have never gotten the well-regarded K9 mail app to work.)

Better apps. The best apps available for iOS are, without a doubt, better than the best apps for Android. And Google doesn’t seem to be pushing for better itself. Example: on my iPad, I use Reeder all the time to access my Google Reader subscriptions, but on Android, despite the existence of an official Google Reader app, I continue to use the Web app because I find the native app annoying, particularly the way it continues to not indent blockquotes.

Universal apps. I’m looking forward to being able to buy single copies of most apps that will work on my phone and on what has become my primary personal computer.

Better networking. Whether the problem is my employer’s network or Android itself, I’ve never been able to reliably connect to the Wi-Fi there. The same is true of the network at the university. My iPad hasn’t had issues connecting or getting data in either place.

Faster, better camera. I’ve never been the type to carry around a point-and-shoot or a DSLR camera, but I do like having pictures to look at later. Since having a decent camera in my pocket at all times, I’ve started taking many more pictures. The iPhone 4S’s camera takes great looking pictures pretty quick. (Having them show up on my iPad automatically will be great, too.)

Twitter integration. My iPad has had problems with the Twitter for iPad (formerly known as Tweetie) bookmarklet not sending links to the app from Mobile Safari. It seems like a problem only for a small number of users and my complaints were answered with “we’re working on it,” by which Twitter meant the deep integration with iOS 5. Being able to post links to Twitter easily is nice and I do it a lot. Android allows users to share links directly to an installed Twitter client, but only copies over the URL, not the page’s title or other helpful information.

Remote wipe. As far as I know, there is no way to locate, lock or wipe an Android device remotely. I don’t think I’ll need it, but that it’s there on iOS is a relief.

Things I don’t really care about

Siri. Maybe it will be really slick, but I rarely use Android’s built-in voice search for much more than basic queries every few weeks. I really don’t want to be the dork carrying on a conversation with my phone.

I’ve been watching the West Region Area Derby Action Playoff  Tournament, or whatever WFTDA wants everyone to call the western regional now, and the announcers keep shouting about five-point grand slams.

It drives me crazy.

A grand slam in roller derby is always five points. Referring to it as a “five-point grand slam” is like referring to a six-point touchdown. But the term “grand slam” is problematic by itself. In baseball, the term grand slam refers to a home run with the bases loaded. It scores, without exception, four runs. (It’s also fairly uncommon.)

Derby can do better.

The general consensus is that Amazon will, in the relatively near future, sell an Android-based tablet computer. There’s no way Amazon brands it with Android, even if it clearly runs Android apps from Amazon’s Appstore for Android.

Fixing the NYT with a redesign in a blog post is like posting a few spinets of code and saying that you've fixed Palm's webOS.

July 26, 2011 7:56 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bergus

Nick Bergus

An oblique reference to a redesign that seems to makes some bad assumptions about the problems it’s trying to fix.