Month: June 2010

…and 5 reasons why I bought a Dell Streak again.

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Last week I explained why I returned the Dell Streak I purchased on a 24-month contract. In this post I explain why I bought another yesterday on a device-only deal.

1. It’s more fun.

You can customise pretty much everything with the Android operating system. You have to resort to shenanigans to customise your message tone on the iPhone, whereas it’s trivial to get some great sounds on the Streak. There’s widgets and weird and wonderful stuff. 🙂

2. The screen is just gorgeous.

Granted, I haven’t seen the screen on the iPhone 4 in the flesh, but the Dell Streak’s screen is so… well, touchable. The high-resolution screen is backed up by an extremely fast processor and enough memory to make flicking between apps easy.

3. The contract was part of the problem

Who wants the same phone after two years? I’m planning to wait until the earliest opportunity to get my Dell Streak unlocked and then go on an Orange SIM-only contract. Why Orange? It’s the only network that offers 3G where I live and my broadband is flaky due to our semi-rural location.

4. I’m online more than I talk

The default orientation of the Dell Streak’s screen is landscape. And that’s because it’s meant to be held like a PSP most of the time. It’s thin enough not to be heavy but substantial enough to feel solid in your hands. I like that.

5. The camera

The combination of large, hi-res screen, 5-megapixel camera and in-device editing functions feels luxurious, it really does.

There’s an active community for the Dell Streak over at http://streak.modaco.com and you should read this Techradar review which is both comprehensive and fair! 😀

Productivity: choose your friction.

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Introduction

I see people making poor decisions every day. To be more precise, I see the results of the poor decisions people make every day.

It’s easy to make bad decisions. In fact, as human beings we’re fairly spectacular at rushing into them or, at the other end of the spectrum, agonising over them for so long that we become paralysed. This is because we haven’t chosen our friction.

What is ‘friction’?

My thinking about this was prompted by an excellent session at the Thinking Digital conference by Richard Titus. He reflected on the fact that friction isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Friction can cause frustration, mental effort and spending an inordinate amount of time thinking around a problem. This is a bad thing if you’re talking about navigating the menu system on your TV, but a good thing if you’re a programmer hoping to achieve something that nobody has before.

That’s why we need to choose where we’re willing to accept friction.

Choose your friction

Choosing where you find your friction in life is fairly straightforward. It’s a decision based on how much the thing you’re considering matters to you in the long-term. It’s a question of weighing it on your life-scales, so to speak.

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Italy. There’s two ends to the continuum: plan everything yourself, or let someone else do it for you. Obviously doing the planning yourself is going to result in a lot more friction: it’s going to cost you time and effort getting everything how you want it. But let’s say it’s your honeymoon, possibly the most important holiday you’ll ever go on. It therefore weighs heavily on the life-scales and will massively affect your decision one way or the other.

Or, in an example closer to home, you’re deciding which phone to buy. There’s a plethora of options but there’s still a continuum from extremely easy-to-use up to bleeding-edge features requiring some hacking. If you’re a developer or someone interested in the future of technology, the latter might be where you’re willing to find your friction. My mother, on the other hand, would opt for as close to the beginning of the continuum as possible.

Conclusion

We all need friction in life. We need it because it adds value and meaning to our lives. Overcoming difficulty is one of the best stories we can tell ourselves and others. But you need to ask yourself whether you’re experiencing friction in the right places.

Would it be better to spend a little more money so as not to be frustrated by poor design?
How about cutting down on the number of possessions you have so there’s fewer to maintain?
Who else is in your ‘friction field’? Seek them out.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Joseph Robertson

Things I Learned This Week – #24

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

This week I learned that not being contactable is actually quite nice sometimes, to always back up the contacts on my SIM card, and too much stuff to list here from ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever. 🙂

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW24

Tech.

Confused/annoyed with Apple’s recent decisions (e.g. about Flash)? Aza Raskin’s recent post about the history of Apple (and his dad’s role in it) is a must read.
LED-powered lights with built-in speakers for wireless music in every room? Yes please!
Boxcar has launched a free, ad-supported, version of its push notification service for iPhones and iPads. It allows you to get instant notifications of everything from Twitter replies to emails.
Been under a rock or on a different planet this week? Here’s a rundown of what’s new in Apple’s new iOS4 operating system (which is powering the new iPhone 4 and, presumably, future devices)
Again, if you’re not aware, the football World Cup has just started in South Africa. Google has made its Street View imagery available inside each stadium as well!

Productivity & Inspiration

Sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand. Leo Babauta urges us to just stop being busy.
Alain de Botton thinks we need to go on an information diet from time-to-time:

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Want to write effective blog posts that people engage wth? Check out this list of ideas.
Do you have procrastination hotspots?
Need a simple, elegant to-do list? Clutterpad might help!

Education & Academic

I like the sound of Trebor Scholz. Not only has he got a sweet name (geddit?) but he rejects the ‘digital natives’ label and gets students even in large lecture classes to produce publication-quality books. Awesome.
Futurelab has a new resource called the Futures Thinking Teachers Pack:

Education is about the future. Educators aim to prepare young people for the future and to support them to fully participate in all aspects of civic, cultural, social, intellectual and economic life. It is therefore important for young people to be given opportunities to think carefully about that future and their role in it.

The Futures Thinking Teaching Pack supports teachers and learners to develop approaches to exploring the future that are not about making predictions, but about considering possible, probable and preferable futures in order to support action and decision making in the present.

The pack, which is closely linked to National Curriculum requirements, engages Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 students in grounded inquiry into current trends and possible futures. The activities in the pack encourage students to critically examine their place in the world, the structures and features that bring about the societies they live in, their own beliefs and their agency in shaping their preferable future.

So another talented teacher’s leaving the profession. To be fair, I would have resigned as well if Stanford offered me a PhD in Curriculum Design. Congrats, Dan Meyer!
David Willetts, universities minister, wants to separate teaching and assessment. Stephen Downes thinks this will cause the island to explode end higher education as we know it.
I need to read it again, but this heads-up over at Bunchberry & Fern about Humanitics, hypergogues, collaboration, cognitive load has some interesting stuff on instructional systems design.

Data, Design & Infographics

This visualization of the state of European countries’ economies is a great use of something familiar to tell a story at-a-glance! (the key is almost redundant)

Bing maps now allows you to make that ‘how to get to my house’ map look like a treasure map. Which is useful. Me hearties.
Most things aren’t about money or virtue, they’re about design. I loved this part of The Evolution Will Not Be Individualized:

Repairing the world is not about individual virtue; instead, it’s a design problem. Bacigalupi wouldn’t have to fly to the American Library Association meeting if America had decent, comprehensive high-speed rail (which is certainly not zero-net, but is less harmful than flying). People wouldn’t pour so much surplus income into goods if they could jaunt down to the Neighborhood Share Center for shareable tools or toys or camping equipment.

The World Cup, with the huge amounts of data it generates, is a gold mine for designers and those who love to visualize data. Check out, for example, what the New York Times has done, as well as Adidas Match Tracker and The Visualizer from MintDigital.
Ever wondered how much energy you use when you perform a Google search? There’s an infographic for that! (click to enlarge):

(Image Created by Wellhome.com Insulation and Energy Audits)

Misc.

If you’re thinking of starting an online business then Leo’s got some advice for you.
Looks like something I’ve noticed with this blog is true of major websites too. People are more likely to come from social media sites than via search engines.

My wife and I finished watching the last episodes of Lost this week. We’ve been watching it most of our married life and tend to like to watch it in a concentrated period of time after obtaining the whole series (we’ve done the same with 24, Prison Break, Flash Forward, etc.) I’m delighted, therefore, to find out that there’s going to be an epilogue on a forthcoming DVD about how Hurley deals with being the ‘chosen one’ on the island! 🙂
From the random-but-made-me-smile department comes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I liked this one in particular:

open source blindness
n. the tangerine-slice glow of summer sun through closed eyelids, which is your body’s way of telling you that the drawbridge obscuring your emotions from the world is about as effective as peekaboo.

Like the bar chart above, this is something that should probably go in the design/infographics section. Kayak have got an awesome mashup that shows you visually how much it costs to travel to various places:

Quotations

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. (Martin Luther King)

You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We’re organized like a startup. We’re the biggest start up on the planet. (Steve Jobs)

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work. (Michael Jackson)

The smaller the mind the greater the conceit. (Aesop)

Your life is what your thoughts make it. (Marcus Aurelius)

Image CC BY CLF