Paul’s musings of the moment
I’ve found that when Android and processor speed reached a certain level my interest has tended to wane. There’s only so much more we can cram into the space of a phone that isn’t already there, and what adds on now is data speed, telemetry, and actually using some of the features that have been in phones for years now.
In the GoodAndEVO days I was always looking at potential and at Android N I’m looking at a mostly realized mature OS. It’s pretty great, but it didn’t come on the hardware I started on. It evolved over time and required better hardware and countless hours of programming and new devices to handle needs nobody thought of being related to a phone.
But what drove my interest in phones was that potential. I may have recently unwittingly placed my “potential blinders” on some products in the past year or two that were undeserving, and that realization has me looking at the review sphere and seeing it’s not just me. I’ve been thinking on this the past month as I did a couple of reviews.
In ye olden days, product was released and it was good or it was bad, or it was good and it broke easily and became bad. Today we have a product. It’s probably not going to break, and if it does that’s probably an aberration in manufacturing or user issue, however the performance can’t be estimated due to firmware updates and the fact that no product is released finished any more.
We’re now buying product based on what it can potentially do and the hope that updates will follow through and not turn the thing into a slow piece of garbage that we can’t go back from. While this has been the case with phones for a while now, it’s moved on to routers, headphones, smart things of all kinds as things are released and then we hope they’ll have the bugs beaten out and the features added in that you expected when you purchased them in the first place.
I’m playing with several routers now. I’ve got high hopes for one of them following through and next to no hope for the others as I fear their business models won’t entice enough people to subscribe and pay for the programming staff to add the rest of the feature set.
I’ve got smart gadgets that do neat things and they have no programming staff any more so the bugs with newer OSes are never going to be resolved. I’ve got an inbox of companies asking me to review their half-finished products, products I’m reviewing with fifteen pages of “it’s coming,” notices from PR reps and an internet of half completed things that I hadn’t expected post 2014.
I’ve watched about two years of this. Product released and the software or the firmware weren’t quite there although the hardware was and then eventually they stopped saying that a fix was coming and moved on to work on the next product, essentially abandoning a product that could have been great.
So that’s what I’m going to have to assume these coming days with products – if it’s not done, even if it looks great, it’s got a really good chance of never getting any better.
All reviews on devices with firmware updates became a moving target review. I guess this is how things have been in the PC and game markets for years, but somehow enthusiasm put little blinders on me and all I saw was potential.
Perhaps we can get some companies to commit to a schedule of updates and time placed on post-release development. I’m not entirely sure what the solution is.
On CES 2017
I’ve been going to CES now for a few years. I do not think I’m going in 2017, mostly because after 60 days of waiting on a 10 business day approval response and three times contacting their customer service, I’ve still got no answer on whether I’m in or not.
Probably not. I don’t think they particularly liked my live blogging of how their security they touted was not functioning in the least (seriously, hundreds of people were walking in the exit doors avoiding security, which was letting unbadged people in). Although it could simply be that our current numbers on Pocketables put us pretty far back.
Also at less than two months to go airfare and hotels are going to be way too expensive to handle at this point unless someone wants to put up with the annoying Pocketables guy for a couple of days.
On Pocketables
As daily posts dwindled so did traffic. It’s on an upswing now that the other authors are posting things, but I think we dropped below radar of the site owners as I no longer receive responses to my emails. Time to send a nastygram I guess.
There’s also just so little root development these days that we cover that a large segment of what we did doesn’t come any more. Eh. C’est la vie.
What’s this all mean?
Not much. Just adapting. Will be reviewing solely on what a product can do, now what it might be able to do someday. I’ll be out of the tech loop a bit since I most likely won’t be at CES, which I may have been anyway just as the babies tend to screw with that.
It’s a bit hard to be enthused with tech at the moment, but that’ll come again I’m sure. I think I may have been the only one completely underwhelmed by the VR revolution, so that left me out of some of this year’s exciting goodies.
