Category: Personal Thoughts

Smart phone owners, I believe that it is high time we take the need for firmware updates out of the hands of the carriers. At the very least there should be some sort of written minimum guarantee when you purchase your phone.

Nearly two years ago, I purchased my Android phone: the HTC Evo Shift on Sprint. Now, I know what many of you have to say about Sprint, but I’m not checking my data cap every ten minutes and I regularly use over 2.5GB of bandwidth, so the service pays for itself. The phone was supposed to be the next chapter in the highly successful Evo product line. But it was destined to fail. Mediocre sales mean the phone saw one update, from FroYo to Gingerbread, then one minor service update.

During my time with Android, I purchased the HTC Arrive, a Sprint Windows Phone 7 device. It has received one update, the Mango 7.5 update, which Microsoft somehow made sure was released to every phone. The subsequent Tango update? Nowhere to be found. The forthcoming Apollo update? fat chance! Sprint officially “end of life’d” the phone.

The iPhone is easier to update because it is not so much a phone or a model, an operating system with iterative hardware. Although it is true that Android has seen Platform fragmentation, and iOS eventually will, Windows Phone 7 was a small enough environment that the updates should have been easy. But alas, silence for my Arrive.

I believe Apple has the best handle on their fragmentation, and being the manufacturer, they have the obligation to support their device. I just hope that the other mobile OS developers take a page from Apple’s book on this one and learn to centrally manage firmware upgrades. There must be an easier way! And even if there isn’t, then every phone yogurt buy should have a minimum of two major upgrade revisions. You should sign an agreement that the phone will be supported at least beyond the box it came in, unless perhaps you intentionally buy a bargain phone! I am hoping Windows Phone 8 relies on the old Windows Update model.

You can tell me that every phone’s hardware is just too different for centralized updates to work. But nothing on earth is more widely varied or open to the creator’s wills than the desktop PC market, yet Windows Update has been working pretty reliably for Microsoft since 1998. If they can make universal updates for a literally limitless combination of hardware components, it ought to be pretty easy to send out a few updates to some simple phones!

I’ve been talking with a lot of people who have recently published e-Books. I’m not sure exactly why I’ve been surrounded by it lately, but it might have been a few short stories a friend released for free by a friend under a pseudonym, or something paid but also hilariously evil, like The Diamond Club:

I would, most likely, do a book of poetry, or possibly short stories… but I’ve done a lot of thinking lately as to whether I would like to do something like this and try to self publish, use a service like Vook, or actually try to submit some work for publication with a “real company.” I’m one of those internet guys who likes to turn norms on their heads and do things my way. Just look at this site! It’s grown from nothing at all to thousands of visits a month… sure, I’m not rich and famous, but I’m excited for what the future is going to bring and I love watching my statistics for the website gradually increase. I’m lucky to have so many interested people, and maybe that means it really is time to try and put something together. But will it be what the people are looking for? We may have to wait and see.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, advertising was non-existent. But it didn’t take long before friendly “link-exchanges” became massive money making advertising schemes. Pay to show your banner ad, to drive traffic, pay-per-click, it all became about getting money in to people’s hands. These days Google is among the biggest and best in the business. I even use Google Ads on my website, and some day hope I’ll get a little something out of it.

But unlike the early days of the internet, where not just your spam emails were about viagara, but every pop up ad on the internet was completely random and might’ve had something to do with your personal disfunction, your love of collecting fine china, or your need for better virus protection. Or, of course, how lucky you were to be the ten thousandth visitor to the website, of course! Everybody thought the birth of the targetted ad was a wonderful thing – finally, something I care about, people would think. People were much happier to see advertisements for movie tickets, or a certain book, or that model of car they’ve had their eye on; it was better than more purple pills and lucky lotteries!

Before long that honeymoon was over, though, and people were suspicious of the advertisers. They know too much. If you really want to be paranoid, you can believe that. I don’t use things like AdBlock Plus because I really think that the few pennies a day that goes to lowly bloggers like myself is a nice gesture (made 3 cents yesterday!). But do I think it’s wrong that Google knows I shopped for a Clear mobile hotspot? No.

What, then, is the problem? It’s how bad that advertising is. It doesn’t work for impulsive people, and it’s really bad for families with multiple people sharing a computer. I was impulsive, and purchased that Clear hotspot. Several weeks ago. But I am still getting ads for it, on every website I visit! Am I reading something on Slashdot? Clear. Gaming news over at Joystiq? Clear. Wedding gifts for friends? Clear.

The perfect example presented it to me when I was previewing this article before publishing it:

How much is clear paying to advertise their product to someone who already bought it? And why can’t I tell the system that I own this item? And where were those ads when I was thinking about purchasing it? They didn’t exist. I bought it on a whim. It doesn’t work for impulsive people! The act is done, it’s in the past, quit reminding me that I should do it, because I already did it.

I don’t have a true solution to the problem, but the ability to click ‘beneath’ an ad and opt-out of certain types of ads, or ads for certain brands, or even provide feedback and say “yes, your advertisement made me purchase this item” would be nice. But once I have the product, and have been using it for two months, you should know when to stop wasting your advertiser’s dollar, because they’re not getting their money’s worth from you, the ad-agency.