It has been a very Mac few months for me. First I take the plunge on a mac book pro, then I get an iPhone 3g and here I am with a shiny new 3G S I picked up the first day it was on offer. Why did I plunk down some hard earned cash for the new phone? Well not really to have the new phone (thought that is a nice side effect). I recently joined the ranks of iPhone developers and hope to release some apps and perhaps if I am fortunate make that money back (and more???). When developing for the iPhone it helps if you have some dedicated testing equipment. I decided I wanted to be able to play with the phone specific features so I got the new phone so I could make my old one a test unit.
Initial thoughts:
For those holding on to a current 3g phone and wondering if they should take the plunge? Well the short answer from me is that for most folks there really isn't a reason to go plunk down for the new phone immediately. This is definitely an evolutionary step for the iPhone and the changes are mostly small. Is it faster? Yes, but while noticeable it isn't an earth shattering increase. The speed up is most apparent in more intense applications. Video loads noticeably faster, it is easier to swipe between images, resize etc... Heavy gamers will likely find more benefit here than typical phone users. Also you get a higher quality camera and are finally allowed to record video without resorting to a jailbreak solution.
Think of it this way... the difference between the 3g and the 3g s is similar to the difference between a Subaru WRX and WRX STI, Mustang GT and Shelby Mustang, 3 series BMW and the M variant. In other words it is the same phone with a turbo charger and some bells and whistles. For day to day 'driving' its the same experience and the changes don't show up until you push the limits.
Bottom line, If you are buying new then get the 3g s. It is worth the 100 dollar difference to step up from the 8gb 3g. And if a 100 bucks makes that big a difference to you then I would ask why you are picking up a phone with a 360 dollar a year data plan commitment on top of your phone line/ msg'ing options. For existing 3g owners... wait till your can renew and honestly it might be worth it to wait for the next step. Most likely Apple will go dual core on the CPU and the difference should be far more dramatic.
The Bad: Sure the iPhone is a great device... but it still has its warts.
Still no micro SD expansion slot? Seriously Apple solve this one. Make a dual SIM/SD holder in the top or something. This is so ridiculously overdue it is silly.
plastic body. Don't get me wrong I don't think this is low quality or chintzy. I just think Apple is missing a bet here with materials. Make this phone a 'unibody' phone with an aluminum or other metal (titanium?) block design. It is stronger and more solid in the mac book line.. why wouldn't it be for the phone? It is less prone to scratching and would do more to set the phone apart. Perhaps there will be an iPhone Pro ? While we are on the subject... drop the damn gloss. It looks great on TV and when it is sitting there all untouched. But these puppies live in your oily greasy hands and in 2 minutes that wondrous glossy look becomes a smeared smudgey mess. Design a phone that looks as good after a good day of use as it does fresh out of the box.
Battery capacity. A basic phone will generally be usable for days. An iPhone charge lasts you more than a day only if you use it like a phone. Heavy usage tops out around 3-4 hours, longer in non screen intensive uses like listening to music. I have no real sense yet if the 3g s eeks a bit more life out of its battery than the 3g or not but I doubt it is a significant difference if there is any. Most likely it is much hungrier when you actually use the new capabilities that make it stand apart. Capacity in comparison to other smart phones is solid... this is a problem across the whole genre of phones.
Push Notifications / lack of true multitasking: The iPhone is in many cases a conundrum. Take AIM chat sessions for example. You cannot chat and check e-mail at the same time, or browse the web while your favorite event based app of choice (say mlb) monitors something going on. I applaud Apple's dedication to ensuring the iPhone interface maintains a uniform level of responsiveness but I still can't get over the fact they will not let users opt out of this artificial application limitation. The new push notification system is a poor substitute for multitasking apps.
iPod dock/charging connector: Normally I am all for consistency. And the iPod dock connector provides so much in the way of accessories I have a hard time saying this thing should go. But it should go. Mini/micro-USB should be on the table. Smaller hole to get gunk in and works with more things. Docks and accessories can be used with adaptors until they catch up. As a bonus they should include the ability to be a usb host. If Apple wants to come up with a new proprietary connector that gets my vote I recommend a mag safe style mobile connector for data and power.
E-mail inbox management: Sure OS 3 brings search to e-mail but damnit, every other freaking e-mail client in the world allows you to sort your inbox by date received, to/from, subject etc... so why in *_(#*$&_(*@&#_$(* does the iPhone e-mail client still not allow for this? Unified e-mail inbox and/or the ability to switch directly between inboxes (as opposed to swiping back to the list and back into the inbox), tagging or some form of folder management capability and NO cap on how many e-mails are accessible on the device. Multiple item selection needs to allow for multiple actions such as mark read/unread etc... not just delete.
AT&T Restrictions: The iPhone has brought the smartphone and its attendant data hungry nature to the masses. It takes a lot of backbone guts to serve millions of iFart apps, twitters and facebook pokes. AT&T can be forgiven for underestimating the data appetite of iPhone users to begin with. But we are now 2+ years down the road and the iPhone still isn't allowed to send MMS messages because AT&T is afraid the traffic will melt their servers. Apple provided them with a phone that has sold 17 million units of which a large percentage are new AT&T customers holding expensive unlimited data plans. The revenue from those customers should be enough to have built a dedicated iPhone infrastructure by now. Don't get me started on the debacle that is MMS and Tethering.
The So So:
Compass. Not real sure if this is going to amount to anything. But it works as advertised. Most obvious area of use is static pointing information to integrate with GPS usage.
New screen coating. I'll grant this is better than the 3g screen as far as cleaning it goes (less smearing when cleaning) but it is still finger print city. Get the apple anti-glare smudge resistant screen protectors. They are REALLY finger print resistant and make swiping, scrolling much easier. There is a slight loss in sharpness but at least in my opinion it is very very worth it. It is far better at being smudge resistant than it is at preventing glare.
Voice Control: If you ask me this is a feature box they can final check when compared to most other phones on the market. In my opinion this is something they were right to disregard initially. Voice control is a cool concept that remains a gimick due to how finicky it is. One day perhaps this will be sorted out. But considering massive purpose built computing rigs can't do this well I just don't see it showing up in mobile technology anytime soon.
The Good:
OS 3 brings a slew of new goodies that are not specific to the 3g s but the addition of cut and paste and a device search capability are both very welcome additions to the iPhone... and both are needlessly late. Another small change but extremely welcome is the addition of many more applications that make use of the landscape keyboard. I can type fast enough in this orientation to take meeting notes as long as it consists of relatively simple bulleted information. I hold out hope that one day they will design landscape modes for every thing in the root OS.
Tethering is now built into the OS rather than only possible via jailbreaking and ugly network sharing hacks. Just pair and go ala typical Apple easy peasy operation. Granted AT&T still has this nerfed but the capability is there. It should have been there to start with as it is on other phones of this calibre.
Class leading Capacitive touch screen. The hardest to swallow aspect of the new iPhone was and still remains its touch screen based interface. The spec bumps just make it even more responsive and the 3g was already pretty snappy on all things touch related.
Tight Design. Devices worth the better part of $1000 should not have the feel of dime store trinkets as do many high end phones. These phones are solid and the buttons are sparse but useful. You will use all the buttons on the device routinely which is not always the case in other phones.
The camera spec boost: I am not a huge fan of cell phone cameras. But I have found a lot of use for mine as a poor mans scanner. White board session snaps in particular are the 'killer ap' as far as my needs go. 2mp is barely adequate. 3mp is very capable. Of all the spec jumps this is the one that will be most useful for me in comparison to what I would have been stuck with on the 3g.
Third Party Software: The app store is to Apple's success with the iPhone as Office is to Microsoft's success in the desktop OS world.
Conclusion:
Contrary to popular belief (or at least Apple marketing) the iPhone is not a revolutionary handset. There is not one thing that it does that another handset was not capable of a year or two before even the iPhone 1 showed up on the scene. Web browsing, mobile applications, GPS, e-mail etc... had all be done. But none of them managed to break out of the geek crowd to mainstream audience. Particularly with regards to unlimited level data plans. Many folks bought smart phones purely for stand alone PDA capability without bundled data plans. The iPhone managed to take that existing capability and wrap it all up in a package that sold 17 million individual units with the large majority of those being people new to mobile data usage. In that sense the iPhone was revolutionary. But it got there by building a better mousetrap... not by inventing the idea in the first place. The 3G S is a very very nice mouse trap and it is a very nice step forward from its predecessor. But ultimately it is just keeping the fire alive... not taking it to new heights.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Review: Star Trek
Ok.... First my take is this. Good Flick, BAD Trek. Still was enjoyable and I look forward to another swipe taken by JJ Abrams with this cast.
Don't keep reading if you haven't seen it and don't want to hit any spoilers:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
First off lets get the Bad Trek out of the way. First up? Time travel. This device of story telling is pretty much always going to be bad. There are very few examples of good time travel stories and this isn't one of them. The use here is just plain fraught with problems most of which concern the Villain. Spock fails an attempt to save Romulous from a super nova. A random Romulan mining ship guns for him in an act of revenge for his failure. As a part of this encounter both Spock and the mining ship to fall into a black hole accidently and get zipped back through time to emerge 25 years apart? That is bad. The idea that a random Romulan mining ship would be damn near invincible a few decades in the past just takes it from there. The idea that Vulcan and Earth had ZERO other defenses than that provided by the scrambled academy cadets truly stretches this whole mess to the breaking point. This element of the story is dog meat. It is a plot device pure and simple to accomplish two things. Drive the crew of the Enterprise together, and give them a clear slate for future stories without the baggage of the Trek franchise history. It accomplishes both so despite being dog meat it is at least useful dog meat.
Alternatives? All pretty messy. Personally I would have suggested leaving Nimoy's Spock in his own time. Give him a role in the cause of the events leading to the destruction of Romulous significant enough to drive a surviving Romulan element a reason to go after him personally... and via time travel since the idea here was to give Trek a new slate to work from. At least an intentional run to the past by an advanced Romulan military vessel would have explained its nigh invulnerability to older technology... as opposed to the invincible mining ship we were subjected to. A super nova as the cause of the destruction of Romulous was probably a poor choice. They set the table for a social revolution led by Spock in TNG and it could easily have been something that backfired into a destruction of that world by civil war. They even had set up Romulan technology to be centered around controlling singularities which could have been spun to time travel with some liberal techno babbling. All wasted... oh well.
Next up on the bad? The silly(er) use of transporting. Rodenberry was pretty honest about the transporter being a device of convenience and it was a technology he specifically limited in his stories to avoid having it become an impossible story element to deal with. They blast people willy nilly all over the place in this movie at levels they didn't use even in the far future of the Trek universe. In the end I suppose it did what Rodenberry originally intended it to do. It moved the story along without tedious travel by ship. However this particular use of the transporter has plot killing implications for ANY story JJ pursues in his new cannon.
In addition to the transporter use problems they have a serious continuity issue with the time it takes Enterprise to reach Vulcan and the time it takes to get back to earth. Apparently the Villain ship is at least as fast as the Enterprise as it can't catch up before it reaches earth. The trip out seems to take a matter of minutes once the ships leave Earth at Maximum warp. Yet all kinds of convoluted shenanigans happen before the Enterprise even goes in pursuit of the enemy ship headed for earth. Yet they apparently arrive only shortly after the enemy ship plunges its mining laser of doom to Earth.
Alternatives? Don't kick Kirk off the ship in the first place... go ahead and let Scotty be on the ship already and as I already suggested there was no need to put Nimoy's Spock into the alternate universe timeline. As for the continuity of timing, it would have been simple to show the trip out to Vulcan would take a while. This would have provided time to show the crew getting to know each other on the ship doing their duties. Additionally establish that the villain ship was slower thus allowing time for the power struggle between Kirk and Spock to determine the course of action for the Enterprise.
Next up, neither Vulcan or Earth have any defense in this movie other than academy cadets manning whatever ships are left due to a frontier conflict the federation is involved in. This already in-plausible small force is swiftly reduced to just the freshly constructed Enterprise. And I mean there is NOTHING else. This is a somewhat largish hole in the PLOT and considering the action nature of this movie it seems odd they did not take advantage of the opportunity to show more big splashy combat sequences. Of course having the mining ship fend off all comers would have simply exacerbated the whole problem of just why it was invincible. To make it worse it appears it would not have really taken that much to take the laser drilling thing out as despite the ships invincibility to federation ships, the laser itself is apparently easily taken out with handheld weapons once Kirk and crew do the ultimate sky dive to reach it at Vulcan. Lets not talk about why exactly they had to use the mining laser in the first place if the actual weapon being employed was a black hole... all you would have to do with that is get it close enough to the ground for the gravity to start pulling it in. All of this is fine for a no brainer action flick. But that is not the history of the Trek franchise. Trek has, for the most part, established good chops in using 'science' to underpin its story lines through the various incarnations. This particular pile of crap would have been bad on the infamously weak plots of the wrung dry Enterprise series.
Alternatives? Assuming we went with the idea that the Romulan bird was an advanced military vessel from the future then there would have been little problem with having massive defensive struggle with stopping it. The ticking clock could have been provided by some convoluted process needed to spit out a black hole to destroy the planet with. Think Borg episodes in TNG where it went to sector 1.
So how can I say all this and still say it was a good flick? Because it was. There are numerous holes in pretty much any Sci Fi movie and past Trek (even the good ones) have been no exception. For example there was nothing here much worse than say Star Wars, or Chronicles of Riddic etc... It was action packed fun. It just did not capture Trek very well in terms of what was driving the action. However the casting was good. The acting was good. And it sets up a true blank canvass on which to move forward. Doing any Star Trek movie was going to be hard. Doing one that basically took all that has gone before and saying 'Do Over' was a very tall order. Yet I say for the most part mission accomplished. It was messy, and it was fun. Long term I doubt this film will fare well... but if they fire out some good Trek on the now blank Canvass then I think its shortcomings will be overlooked in light of the new opportunities it hopefully has opened.
Don't keep reading if you haven't seen it and don't want to hit any spoilers:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
First off lets get the Bad Trek out of the way. First up? Time travel. This device of story telling is pretty much always going to be bad. There are very few examples of good time travel stories and this isn't one of them. The use here is just plain fraught with problems most of which concern the Villain. Spock fails an attempt to save Romulous from a super nova. A random Romulan mining ship guns for him in an act of revenge for his failure. As a part of this encounter both Spock and the mining ship to fall into a black hole accidently and get zipped back through time to emerge 25 years apart? That is bad. The idea that a random Romulan mining ship would be damn near invincible a few decades in the past just takes it from there. The idea that Vulcan and Earth had ZERO other defenses than that provided by the scrambled academy cadets truly stretches this whole mess to the breaking point. This element of the story is dog meat. It is a plot device pure and simple to accomplish two things. Drive the crew of the Enterprise together, and give them a clear slate for future stories without the baggage of the Trek franchise history. It accomplishes both so despite being dog meat it is at least useful dog meat.
Alternatives? All pretty messy. Personally I would have suggested leaving Nimoy's Spock in his own time. Give him a role in the cause of the events leading to the destruction of Romulous significant enough to drive a surviving Romulan element a reason to go after him personally... and via time travel since the idea here was to give Trek a new slate to work from. At least an intentional run to the past by an advanced Romulan military vessel would have explained its nigh invulnerability to older technology... as opposed to the invincible mining ship we were subjected to. A super nova as the cause of the destruction of Romulous was probably a poor choice. They set the table for a social revolution led by Spock in TNG and it could easily have been something that backfired into a destruction of that world by civil war. They even had set up Romulan technology to be centered around controlling singularities which could have been spun to time travel with some liberal techno babbling. All wasted... oh well.
Next up on the bad? The silly(er) use of transporting. Rodenberry was pretty honest about the transporter being a device of convenience and it was a technology he specifically limited in his stories to avoid having it become an impossible story element to deal with. They blast people willy nilly all over the place in this movie at levels they didn't use even in the far future of the Trek universe. In the end I suppose it did what Rodenberry originally intended it to do. It moved the story along without tedious travel by ship. However this particular use of the transporter has plot killing implications for ANY story JJ pursues in his new cannon.
In addition to the transporter use problems they have a serious continuity issue with the time it takes Enterprise to reach Vulcan and the time it takes to get back to earth. Apparently the Villain ship is at least as fast as the Enterprise as it can't catch up before it reaches earth. The trip out seems to take a matter of minutes once the ships leave Earth at Maximum warp. Yet all kinds of convoluted shenanigans happen before the Enterprise even goes in pursuit of the enemy ship headed for earth. Yet they apparently arrive only shortly after the enemy ship plunges its mining laser of doom to Earth.
Alternatives? Don't kick Kirk off the ship in the first place... go ahead and let Scotty be on the ship already and as I already suggested there was no need to put Nimoy's Spock into the alternate universe timeline. As for the continuity of timing, it would have been simple to show the trip out to Vulcan would take a while. This would have provided time to show the crew getting to know each other on the ship doing their duties. Additionally establish that the villain ship was slower thus allowing time for the power struggle between Kirk and Spock to determine the course of action for the Enterprise.
Next up, neither Vulcan or Earth have any defense in this movie other than academy cadets manning whatever ships are left due to a frontier conflict the federation is involved in. This already in-plausible small force is swiftly reduced to just the freshly constructed Enterprise. And I mean there is NOTHING else. This is a somewhat largish hole in the PLOT and considering the action nature of this movie it seems odd they did not take advantage of the opportunity to show more big splashy combat sequences. Of course having the mining ship fend off all comers would have simply exacerbated the whole problem of just why it was invincible. To make it worse it appears it would not have really taken that much to take the laser drilling thing out as despite the ships invincibility to federation ships, the laser itself is apparently easily taken out with handheld weapons once Kirk and crew do the ultimate sky dive to reach it at Vulcan. Lets not talk about why exactly they had to use the mining laser in the first place if the actual weapon being employed was a black hole... all you would have to do with that is get it close enough to the ground for the gravity to start pulling it in. All of this is fine for a no brainer action flick. But that is not the history of the Trek franchise. Trek has, for the most part, established good chops in using 'science' to underpin its story lines through the various incarnations. This particular pile of crap would have been bad on the infamously weak plots of the wrung dry Enterprise series.
Alternatives? Assuming we went with the idea that the Romulan bird was an advanced military vessel from the future then there would have been little problem with having massive defensive struggle with stopping it. The ticking clock could have been provided by some convoluted process needed to spit out a black hole to destroy the planet with. Think Borg episodes in TNG where it went to sector 1.
So how can I say all this and still say it was a good flick? Because it was. There are numerous holes in pretty much any Sci Fi movie and past Trek (even the good ones) have been no exception. For example there was nothing here much worse than say Star Wars, or Chronicles of Riddic etc... It was action packed fun. It just did not capture Trek very well in terms of what was driving the action. However the casting was good. The acting was good. And it sets up a true blank canvass on which to move forward. Doing any Star Trek movie was going to be hard. Doing one that basically took all that has gone before and saying 'Do Over' was a very tall order. Yet I say for the most part mission accomplished. It was messy, and it was fun. Long term I doubt this film will fare well... but if they fire out some good Trek on the now blank Canvass then I think its shortcomings will be overlooked in light of the new opportunities it hopefully has opened.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
New AT&T Terms of Use
Recently AT&T made a change to their terms of service for mobile broadband customers. **Edit: and apparently retracted it almost as fast, the section below is from the old and once again current terms, but my rant still applies. The removed verbage was specifically targeted at sling player with the term "user re-directed streams" added to the list of things you could not do** Here is the section of interest:
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing; (ii) as a substitute or backup for private lines, landlines or full-time or dedicated data connections;
This means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition devices is prohibited.
Most people probably pick up on the idea here that you can check e-mail but not download a movie via bit torrent or limewire or something. The thing I think a lot of people don't get (fellow geeks aside) is just how bat shit insane these terms are. You see AT&T's network does not give a flip if you are downloading e-mail or said movie from a torrent. Both cause a transfer of 1's and 0's across the network from a given source (remote server) to a given destination (your device). The only difference in this particular example is one of volume. E-mail typically consists of a relatively small amount of data where a movie represents a relatively large amount of data. So why doesn't AT&T just say you can't download more than X amount of data? Because the plans these terms are referring to are 'unlimited' data plans (such as the iphone). Thus in effect they are saying you can download unlimited e-mail and no movies.
So here is the true insanity of this... the amount of data represented by 'unlimited e-mail' is .... wait for it.... unlimited. So if data is data then why does it mater if I download x amount of e-mail data versus the same amount of movie data?
Whether the source of the data is a Youtube server, E-mail server, Webpage or from a sling box makes no difference to your mobile device or to the AT&T network. In all cases this is delivery of content from a server to your mobile device. The only difference is the IP address where the content is coming from. The only aspect which may vary is the bandwidth required between the two sources.
Here is another nugget of insanity. They explicitly state downloading legally obtained music as a legitimate activity. However they explicitly state that streaming audio is not a legitimate activity. What is the difference between streaming and downloading? As far as the AT&T network is concerned, Absolutely nothing. Again as far as the network is concerned it is sending 1's and 0's from a source to a destination. The only difference here is how the device handles the data. Streaming data is played as it arrives. Downloaded content is played after it arrives. AT&T's concern is that users will 'stream' more content than they will 'download'. For example how many songs would you 'download' from itunes vrs 'stream' from XM? Again the crux of AT&T's problem is not what you are accessing but how much you are accessing. Technically speaking listening to a song via 'streamed XM' IS Downloading a legally acquired song assuming you have an XM account that allows access via the web.
So lets do this again. If I can download an unlimited amount of legally obtained songs which represents an unlimited amount of data... then why is X amount of play after I download content any different from X amount of play as I download content?
I could probably come up with a 100 different ways to say the same thing here... but ultimately this all comes down to pure "Troll Under the Bridge" stuff on the part of AT&T. Only to make it worse, in this case, you have already paid the damn troll for permission to cross the bridge and they are telling you what you can carry with you across the bridge. If you consider the 'no tethering* clause' then they are telling you what you can carry across the bridge and where you can go with it once you get across.
The FCC needs to step in here under concerns of false advertisement. The word unlimited should not be allowed if there is in fact a limit. The term should be consistently defined as 24/7 access at a given rate for the term of the contract. If the carriers want to create limits on how fast a device can transfer data across the network that is fine. Also, In addition to stipulating carriers adhere to the concept of net neutrality**, the idea that the provider has any say in where the information goes after it reaches my device (tethering) needs to be criminalized. If I access by means other than my contracted device the carriers have a beef, if I remove speed limitations and exceed the rate I pay for the carriers have a beef. But accessing data via the device within the access restrictions of my contract should be all a carrier can regulate. Not what I access or how I distribute it for my personal use.
*tethering is when you access the internet on your laptop (or any other device) via your mobile device. In effect this is turning your mobile device into a modem. Mobile carriers contend that there is a difference between accessing information on your mobile device and accessing that same information via your mobile device but displayed by another device. If the laptop connected directly to their network this would be true. However, in a tethering setup all transactions with the network are handled by the mobile device. To illustrate let us use an example. Using an I-phone to view a youtube clip and an iphone tethered to a computer viewing the same youtube clip. As far as AT&T's network is concerned the same information was transferred. The information was accessed by your iphone in both cases. The only difference is that when you view it on your computer the iphone passes the information along rather than displaying it on its screen.
**net neutrality refers to the concept that internet providers have no say in what information you access.*
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing; (ii) as a substitute or backup for private lines, landlines or full-time or dedicated data connections;
This means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition devices is prohibited.
Most people probably pick up on the idea here that you can check e-mail but not download a movie via bit torrent or limewire or something. The thing I think a lot of people don't get (fellow geeks aside) is just how bat shit insane these terms are. You see AT&T's network does not give a flip if you are downloading e-mail or said movie from a torrent. Both cause a transfer of 1's and 0's across the network from a given source (remote server) to a given destination (your device). The only difference in this particular example is one of volume. E-mail typically consists of a relatively small amount of data where a movie represents a relatively large amount of data. So why doesn't AT&T just say you can't download more than X amount of data? Because the plans these terms are referring to are 'unlimited' data plans (such as the iphone). Thus in effect they are saying you can download unlimited e-mail and no movies.
So here is the true insanity of this... the amount of data represented by 'unlimited e-mail' is .... wait for it.... unlimited. So if data is data then why does it mater if I download x amount of e-mail data versus the same amount of movie data?
Whether the source of the data is a Youtube server, E-mail server, Webpage or from a sling box makes no difference to your mobile device or to the AT&T network. In all cases this is delivery of content from a server to your mobile device. The only difference is the IP address where the content is coming from. The only aspect which may vary is the bandwidth required between the two sources.
Here is another nugget of insanity. They explicitly state downloading legally obtained music as a legitimate activity. However they explicitly state that streaming audio is not a legitimate activity. What is the difference between streaming and downloading? As far as the AT&T network is concerned, Absolutely nothing. Again as far as the network is concerned it is sending 1's and 0's from a source to a destination. The only difference here is how the device handles the data. Streaming data is played as it arrives. Downloaded content is played after it arrives. AT&T's concern is that users will 'stream' more content than they will 'download'. For example how many songs would you 'download' from itunes vrs 'stream' from XM? Again the crux of AT&T's problem is not what you are accessing but how much you are accessing. Technically speaking listening to a song via 'streamed XM' IS Downloading a legally acquired song assuming you have an XM account that allows access via the web.
So lets do this again. If I can download an unlimited amount of legally obtained songs which represents an unlimited amount of data... then why is X amount of play after I download content any different from X amount of play as I download content?
I could probably come up with a 100 different ways to say the same thing here... but ultimately this all comes down to pure "Troll Under the Bridge" stuff on the part of AT&T. Only to make it worse, in this case, you have already paid the damn troll for permission to cross the bridge and they are telling you what you can carry with you across the bridge. If you consider the 'no tethering* clause' then they are telling you what you can carry across the bridge and where you can go with it once you get across.
The FCC needs to step in here under concerns of false advertisement. The word unlimited should not be allowed if there is in fact a limit. The term should be consistently defined as 24/7 access at a given rate for the term of the contract. If the carriers want to create limits on how fast a device can transfer data across the network that is fine. Also, In addition to stipulating carriers adhere to the concept of net neutrality**, the idea that the provider has any say in where the information goes after it reaches my device (tethering) needs to be criminalized. If I access by means other than my contracted device the carriers have a beef, if I remove speed limitations and exceed the rate I pay for the carriers have a beef. But accessing data via the device within the access restrictions of my contract should be all a carrier can regulate. Not what I access or how I distribute it for my personal use.
*tethering is when you access the internet on your laptop (or any other device) via your mobile device. In effect this is turning your mobile device into a modem. Mobile carriers contend that there is a difference between accessing information on your mobile device and accessing that same information via your mobile device but displayed by another device. If the laptop connected directly to their network this would be true. However, in a tethering setup all transactions with the network are handled by the mobile device. To illustrate let us use an example. Using an I-phone to view a youtube clip and an iphone tethered to a computer viewing the same youtube clip. As far as AT&T's network is concerned the same information was transferred. The information was accessed by your iphone in both cases. The only difference is that when you view it on your computer the iphone passes the information along rather than displaying it on its screen.
**net neutrality refers to the concept that internet providers have no say in what information you access.*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)