Tablet War: Why do I need a tablet, anyway?

Wallet Moths:

Motorola Atrix 4G

Motarola Atrix Lapdock

OK. for thise who've been following with bated breath, you'll know a week or so ago I got the Motorola Xoom in anticipation of the iPad 2 release. I've had an iPad since day one last year and I've really liked it. But since then, I've been curious as to what the upstarts (Android) can do.


I gravitated from an iPhone to the Samsung Captivate last summer. I liked the promise of Android and aspects of the Captivate, but at the same time, the phone was buggy and frustrating from day one. I wanted to throw it against the wall most of the time. But when I upgraded the phone to Android 2.2 it got better.  Not good, but better.

The Xoom has better specs all around than the iPad 2. Android doesn't have the ecosystem of apps that Apple has. So I picked up the Xoom with every intention of returning it after i played around with it a while. And return it I will. At this writing, there's no other option in purchsing the Xoom other than buying the 3G version for $800, even though I have no interest in 3G. There is a wifi version coming out in a couple weeks, but that's going to be $600. Still more specs than the bargain basement iPad at $500, but still the same problem in terms of the apps and usefulness. I know that the Android Marketplace will catch up eventually, but what am I going to do with the thing until then?

That question got me thinking: What the hell do I need a tablet for anyway? The iPad is cool and I've used it, but my real hope was that it'd become an extension of my studio and a real boon to on-the-go writing and, well, it hasn't. It's a fun toy and great for surfing the web (but not as great as the Xoom). My daughter uses it more to play games like Big Buck Hunter (don't ask) than I do. What I use it most for is taking quick notes in meetings and such. Is that really worth $500?

Then I got to thinking. I hate my current phone, I like the Xoom. Motorola just came out with the Atrix, which is exactly the same as the Xoom inside, but is a phone. If I could convince the folks at ATT to let me upgrade early--really early--then I could solve all my probelms, because the Atrix also has waht they call a "Lapdock." It's this 11.6" super thin laptop shell that is powered by the phone itself. You can access all the functionality of the phone, including calls and texting. You can access all the apps. And the Lapdock uses a Webtop interface when paired to the phone to access a really limited bunch of apps and Firefox.It's a barebones setup, but compellig because it kills two birds: I have to have a phone but I also want to be able to do work with a lighteight, portable interface. Honestly, while using the keypad on the iPad was fine most of the time, it wasn't ideal and i'm not sure it ever will be. For one thing, as a writer, I cursed the burying of the quotation marks on the second screen of the keyboard. It made it impossible to do serious work on the thing. I found a couple apps that change the keyboard, but they had their own problems. I did like to edit on my iPad though, for some reason.

So yesterday I was at the mall for a few errands and I stopped into the ATT store to complain more about my Captivate. And I took a look at the Atrix. A very sweet phone. Comparable to Xoom in terms if speed, etc., although I like the unadulterated Honeycomb OS of the Xoom better than the Motoblur of the Atrix. Then my ATT guy (I know, weird I could say that, right?) jacks the phone into the Lapdock. It boots right away, like, in a few seconds. There's the phone. There's Firefox. Seems cool. I'm more than intrigued.

Let's get this out of the way: minutes before I'd bought a $100 gift card at Best Buy to reserve an iPad 2 when the next bath comes in (I was shutout on launch day because of personal issues beyond my control). But before that I was bemoaning to the wife how in many ways a netbook is more attractive to me than a tablet, especially if the idea is productivity. Now, I have no desire for a netbook. But there in the ATT store was what amounted to a netbook that I could power with my phone. If I could convince the ATT folks to let me upgrade after only 8 months with the Craptivate.

So I asked my guy what I could get out of the store paying  for the phone and the Lapdock. Out of contract, the phone is $600 and the dock $500. No way. And supposedly you have to add tethering to a data plan to the tune of $45 all tolled. Also not happening. I thought my dreams of trying this combo instead of the iPad were dead. But then my ATT guy worked some magic and I walked out of the store with the Atrix and the Lapdock for $500 and no tethering plan. It was black gadget magic. Pretty slick.

So now I'm typing this blog post on the Lapdock. The Lapdock is powered by my new phone (which is awesome) and it is nice to use a real keyboard while watching round one of the Tournament. Could I be using the Macbook resting three feet away? Yes, but this is compact and light. I said IT'S COMPACT AND LIGHT!!!!

Is it an iPad killer? No. But I think its also a harbinger of the future. As phones get more powerful, they will subsume the other devices, making the iPad obsolete, until the head of Steve Jobs in a glass jar invents the iPaper.

The Lapdock is good enough, but not full featured. It's balky in performance and ultimately won't offer enough performance to justify keeping it, just like the Xoom. But it is a device worth noting.

But let's be honest, when the call comes that my iPad 2 has arrived, this thing will go back to the store and the iPad will take its rightful, if not reluctant place in my bag as the best of a bunch of imperfect devices out there. If Moto and others really wanted to compete with Sensei Jobs, they'd do a better job of matching price points and concentrate on a few products and making them great instead of many that remain underdeveloped. That's how Apple dominated the market. Others who wish to compete need to learn the lesson.

iTunes is a terrible music player. Is there a decent one?

There, I said it. I've felt this way for a long time, but I feel like I have to say it again. iTunes sucks. The interface isn't intuitive, cover flow is an unnavigable and unimaginative joke, the program won't crawl through your various media folders to find what you have on your system, the fact that you have to make a playlist to burn a disc is ludicrous and the Genius feature is anything but. How much of a genius can it be if it keeps shuffling around the same 25 songs when I want it to pick new songs. I can make much better playlists by myself, which defeats the purpose of this feature to begin with.

Let me say at this point that I've been an Apple guy for the better part of twenty years now. My first computer was an Apple and I have always preferred them, but I have never liked the iPod (at least not the early versions of the OS) and iTunes has not taken the leap forward that iOS has in its recent incarnations. The UI is still clunky and boring and doesn't capitalize on the latest in software possibilities for interactive and interesting interfaces.

And Ping? Please. That's a half-assed attempt to do something Facebook like in Apple's closed little playground and, well, we have Facebook, so who cares. Go away, Ping. You bother me.

And none of this has even touched on the Apple Store, which I don't even want to get started on. I can't understand why people buy anything from this store. They were the first to market? How long does that have to last? I've long contended that subscription-based music is the only way forward for the music industry. Recorded music is no longer a product in the way it was ten years ago. The best way for the industry to survive is to allow unfettered access to as much music as possible and divide the royalties in the same way ASCAP, BMI, et al have done for years for radio airplay, etc. As a musician myself, this is what I want to see. I want people to be able to get ahold of my music and listen to it without having to make a commerce decision. But Apple's store perpetuates the old model of ownership. And it's the way it works now.

So, now you're asking where one might find the forward thinking software and business model that I speak of? Napster? Ugh. I tried Napster's new iteration and the streaming quality was terrible. If you want to download a sing at higher quality and listen at home, you have to, you guessed it, buy the MP3. You can download up to 100 songs onto a mobile device, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

Rhapsody? Pandora? I haven't tried Rhapsody, but I get the sense it's very similar to Napster. Pandora is cool, if you want to listen to the radio, but you can't listen to a record..

Emusic? I was an Emusic subscriber until about a month ago when they went from a subscription-based point system to, you guessed it, a money-based system. Sure, the pricing structure was about the same, but I get the sense that Emusic sold themselves out to get the big Universal catalog they'd been coveting. I can feel the slippery slope from here.

So where does that leave us? What service offers an unlimited subscription-based music consumption model with a really slick desktop client that finds all the music on your computer and network as well making suggestions from the marketplace to go along with what you have in your collection and then plays them all together when you use the genius-like smart dj feature?

Wait for it....

Zune

That's right, for my money, Zune is the best music player and online marketplace out there by far. For $14.95 a month you have unlimited access to everything on the Zune Marketplace--that's decent quality downloads, not streaming--plus a desktop client that really looks beautiful, integrates artist pictures as the music plays, has multiple themes to choose from, offers a dashboard quickplay screen where you can pin your favorite stuff, find the new stuff you've added, or look at your history.

In every way, the Zune model is exactly what iTunes should be but isn't.

So why isn't the Zune wildly popular? The players are pretty slick, and I've already told you how much I like the market and software. One word: Microsoft.

The folks in Redmond, Washington have a burr under their saddles and have had for a long time. They're the smart, awkward sibling in this technology family. And they can't seem past their own anger and frustration. Instead of realizing they have a great model here and selling that model to any and all takers, forsaking the hardware for market penetration across platforms, they force you to buy their Zune player to take the music out of the house. And in this day and age, who wants to carry around another device when smart phones are perfect for music listening and apps give you the opportunity to listen in multiple ways. No, Microsoft wont even write a Mac version of the software, stubbornly continuing the hardware wars that they were winning ten years ago, but have become completely irrelevant in recent years.

Pull your head out of your backsides, Microsoft and sell the service, port the software, and let people experience what a great product you have, especially compared to the savants at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA.

We have 5 iPods (1st gen Nano, Shuffle, iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4) in this house, three Zunes (one lost, one broken and one pink). If I could download the Zune app on my phone tomorrow I'd re-up for the subscription service right now and download until I couldn't download any more. I'd try new music that I wouldn't buy. I'd consume like a bear getting ready to hibernate. But as it stands, I have to limp by dissatisfied and frustrated because one company is the victim of its own arrogance and another is a victim of its own blinding pride and vanity.

And who loses out? We do.

Tis the season for fake gifting: In which I buy a Nook Color for the wife and use it myself for two weeks

One day soon, I'm going to write a long post in which I explore why I think I'm so inclined toward buying gadgets. It will be a deep and cathartic exploration and we'll call come away from it feeling as though a great weight has been lifted. But in this post, I'm going to focus on one of the ugly symptoms of said disease: Fake gifting.

Now, fake gifting is maybe not the right way to put it. I mean, when I buy these gifts, I fully intend to give them to the person they are intended for. And usually said gift is something I think the giftee will really enjoy. But I wouldn't be a thorough gift giver if I didn't try the gift out first to make sure it's in perfect working order, right?

Case in point: The NookColor I bought for my wife as an Xmas gift a few weeks ago. My experience with ereaders has been a little spotty. I got a Sony Reader for myself last Xmas and used it a good bit, but ultimately, the e-ink screen was too dark to read indoors without Klieg lights at the bedside and the interface was clunky. And there was no wifi. I never understood how much that would matter until I was in bed, finished with a book, wanting to read another and I had to get out of bed, go plug the thing into the computer, etc., etc.

And yes, the wife likes to read. At first I was thinking Kindle, but the e-ink (which I think is a ridiculous boondoggle of a technology) made me hesitate. If I wanted e-ink, I could just give her the Sony, and I wouldn't wish that on my enemies, let alone the woman who feeds me. I have my iPad and I read on my iPad. But there's no way she was going to let me buy her an iPad and there was no way I was giving her mine, so when the NookColor came out I thought it could be the best of both worlds--within the price point that she would let me spend and back lit LCD tablet optimized for reading and purchasing books.

So one evening after a dinner out, I convinced her to drive to the Mall so I could grab one for her. I got the last one in the store. The Barnes and Noble folks there acted like I just got the last piece of pizza on earth. I was pleased with myself. Of course, when we got home, I broke it out right away and started fiddling with it, purely for quality control's sake. I would have to, I told her, run it through its paces before I could give it to her as a gift. So I charged it up and went to work testing it out.

The interface and form factor are both pretty nice. The screen is as bright as you need it to be and I found myself liking the sepia-tone pages on a slightly dim setting. The NookColor was more comfortable to hold while reading than my iPad. It was easy to cradle in the palm of my hand and it had a nice soft-touch rubberized backing. The interface was responsive and the reading experience was fine. We read a lot in bed and I found that I could read it in the dark with the brightness turned down and experience no real eye strain. There are a lot of people who say the LCD screen cause eye strain when reading, but I haven't had that experience. YMMV.

Both of us already buy Kindle books for the iPad/iPhone/Andriod phone and I was anxious to see how the Barnes and Noble bookstore fared against Amazon's selection. Sadly, not well. the first few titles I looked for were not there, including The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards this year. Not a good sign. I looked for more books and my success rate was hit and miss. As a control, I looked for the same stuff on Amazon and found every single book. Sure the selection will get better over time, but I'm interested in what is, not what will be. This is a $250 gadget here. I want the world! In the continuum of ebookstores, I put the Barnes and Noble store in between the Sony Reader Store (which seems to be geared toward readers of romance novels) and Amazon, which is a full-service store with just about anything you could ask for. I finally found a book I wanted to read from the BN store (Into the Forest by Jean Hegland) and read it in a day or so on the NookColor. All in all a fine experience.

So far so good, right? Well, not so fast. Yes, the NookColor is just about the best ereader I've had my hands on. Yes, it does run Android (1.6?!?! Really?). Yes, the reading experience was pretty good. Yes, it could be a fully functional tablet as well. There are apps (Pandora being the only one worth even opening). But it's not great. Not in the way it needs to be at that price point. Too many disappointments.

After the initial blush, I fell out of love quickly. The little glitches in the OS grated on me, the clunkiness of trying to access the web became tiresome. Even the cute little "Nook Hook" design element bothered me going into week two. The NookColor has been described as an in between device, as in in between a tablet and an ereader. And I agree with that assessment. Unfortunately, that also leaves it in between being worth the $250 price tag and not. It's a nice bauble and it comported itself well, but when $250 is a chunk of change that makes you think twice before you spend it, the NookColor just ain't worth it.

"But wait," you must be saying . "You bought it as a gift. What did your wife think?" Honestly, she never even touched it. At the end of my trial I asked her what she thought and she said, "I'd rather have a new phone."

So there you go. On the "Stuff I Don't Need rating scale," the NookColor gets a "Shrug, pretty cool, but not all that" from me and an "I'd rather have a new phone" from our co-judge, my wife. The NookColor went back to the store and the wife is now sporting an iPhone 4. More on that later.

Seriously, if you have the dough to spend and read in darker environments and you really want an ereader, this is the best one out there. Just be warned, that ain't saying much.

Wallet Moth rating: