FightingIrish said:
Besides, sales of digital media players, including iPod, are dropping. They could someday be totally obsolete. When a typical smartphone (from Apple, Android, etc.) does virtually everything an iPod or whatever does, who needs the extra device? My Android phone works phenomenally well playing portable files.
Shoot, I WISH my phone that does everything could at least do SOMETHING well
! It plays all kinds of formats, but it doesn't work 1/10th as well as my old mp3 player, nor does it sound quite as good. FLAC and m4a files (90% of my collection) are jerky and skippy on the phone, but play fine on the dedicated music player.
The problem with our trend towards everything migrating to the phone platform is that these devices do everything but none of it well.
The iPhone is considered the premiere multitasking device on sale today. Yet it, like other smartphones, is notorious for having a poorer cellular transceiver than your run of the mill freebie feature phone. The music player has tons of bells and whistles but is a second-rate (at best) choice for those seeking audio fidelity or the easy management of thousands of individual songs not tied to albums. Android's stock player is even worse, and my personal experience is that, even with the EQ fiddled-to-the-max it barely eeks out 70's era transistor radio quality through the headphone jack. The stock browser and pretty much every one in the market(s) are slow, clunky and never seem to render full websites correctly. The camera on the iPhone is nice (
especially the new one on the 4S) but trying to take a quality photo holding something that's 1/8" thick and 5" long is pretty hard unless you're super-dexterous. There's also no optical zoom or high quality lenses on most "smart" phones. None of the platforms are immune from viruses, trojans or just the effects of poor coding. Which is to be expected (WHY!??) on modern devices but when it may cause you to lose all your data or be unable to call 9-1-1, it can be a real headache. And don't even get me started on all the stuff that exists "in the cloud" now, which is great until your internet / 3G connection goes out. Mine's out at home at least once a day (and this is the most reliable internet I've ever had in my life) and the 3G here is as spotty as a dalmatian. Once it's out, you lose access to everything.
True, having all-in-one in the palm of your hand is awesome, but aside from hands-free talking navigation I'm really not seeing a whole lot that this phone does that my ~2005 SonyEricsson Walkman phone couldn't do almost as well. Its music player wasn't as polished but the sound quality and EQ were actually much better. The radio does RDS and AF and is actually not a joke despite being wedged into a device the size of two chunky Kit Kat bars. It could make phone calls without crashing and took good pictures, even if they were only 2 MP. And because it had heft and a quality focusing mechanism, photos were rarely blurry and white balance rivaled the new iPhone 4S's promo photos.
And sure it was tiny and could only load one Java program at a time, but even back then it had 16 GB on board via add-on card, which held tons of programs and music. The 4x3 phone keypad was just right for lightning fast text messaging, and I can still bang out a novel on it faster than Swype or virtual keyboards on flat screen devices, or phones with actual QWERTY keyboards
! And it could do all this all day on one charge. I have to religiously charge my Android phone daily or I'll be stranded. I've actually gone from 100% battery at noon to 15% battery by 9 pm while really using it to its full potential.
As much as I like my little tricorder, I do miss the days when the phone made phone calls
and did it well…
When the radio tuned in radio stations but not streams or satellite feeds
and did it well…
When the music player played music in high quality and left videos and surfing to the PC
and did it well…
When the camera took pictures because that is what it was meant to do,
and it did it well…
Now here's where I make it about radio: HD has been a failure from the standpoint of "it just works", cuz it don't. Like a smartphone, it tries to add value to an existing device (radio) but it just isn't competent at the job. Sort of like the hundred and nineteen apps on my phone right now. They all purport to make the device more useful but most of them fall short in some way or another. They crash, or have bad functionality or just are poorly designed. HD is all of those things to radio.
Unfortunately, as the future becomes streaming audio, it appears the radio companies are going down the same wrongheaded path. CBS Interactive's "Radio.com" player is the only way to stream CBS stations on the Android platform. The newest version is so buggy it's gotten literally thousands of bad reviews in the Android Market. Have they fixed it? "Oh hell no," as little Ryan Seacrest is known to say. You can listen to their broken HD feeds or listen to their broken streams on your phone. (And if you try the Yahoo! Radio app, it's also made my CBS and also has the same problems. Finally there's Tunein Radio, which is awesome but CBS pulled their feeds from them with the relaunch of Radio.com's app.)
And that's another gripe. Radio tried to balkanize the airwaves with HD radio and it didn't work. But now they're finding better luck on the mobile platforms. This leads to problems, though. Some apps work on Android and iPhone but not Blackberry or feature phones. Some only work on iPhones and some stations don't allow mobile streaming at all
! The idea of equal access to anyone with a "streaming device" is still a pipe dream. Moreso for video streaming than audio, but it's still a headache.
This is progress?
