Matter/Anti-Matter

In honor of Earth Day, let's look at a once-commonplace feature that has almost entirely disappeared from today's consumer electronics. To illustrate my point, here's a picture from my gadget archive, a perfectly ordinary Sony radio Walkman of mid-90's vintage:

(Credit: Adam Richardson)

(Credit: Adam Richardson)

(Credit: Adam Richardson)

What does this have to do with Earth Day? A couple of things:

1. Screws facilitate repairability

Screws allow easy disassembly without potential for breaking housing parts. Without disassembly, easy repair or replacement of internal parts is more difficult, and pretty much impossible for the everyday user. What do you think that does to the likelihood the product will get repaired, or parts of it re-used for another product?

(Nerd note: Most CE devices today are either snapped together (and snaps are purposefully hard to take apart without breaking), or are fastened with a process known as ultrasonic welding. Essentially the plastic parts are vibrated together at very high speed causing the plastic at the edges to melt and fuse together, making a very strong bond. This also makes them impossible to get into, kind of like that clear plastic "blister" packaging that a lot of small products come in where you have to take a chainsaw to get it open and you destroy it in the process.)

2. Shift from "fix it" to "junk it"

Looking beyond individual products, screws are symptomatic of a gradual but persistent shift away from the mentality of repairing products, both for manufacturers and consumers. Products just get thrown "away", but of course there really is no "away", it's just out of sight and out of mind.

On the Walkman shown here the screws are clearly illustrated with arrows that almost encourage one to get into the guts. Today the equivalent product -- the iPod -- is hermetically sealed and we are explicitly kept out of understanding how it works or from thinking that it can be repaired.

Companies only profit when we buy new things, not when we get them repaired. And the costs of repairing or servicing old CE devices have approached so close to the ever-reducing cost of new ones, thanks to Moore's Law, global supply chains, and constant price pressure from mega retailers. Many people, for example, buy a new inkjet printer whenever they need to replace the ink, since the cost of the printers themselves (often sold at or below cost since profits are made on the cartridges) is barely above the new cartridges. Therefore most consumer electronics are designed be disposable, not repairable.

This is an unsustainable system. We have to break ourselves (as consumers) from the disposable thinking, and manufacturers also have to find ways to facilitate and profit from repairs, not just new product sales.

Sony Alpha 900

(Credit: Master Chong)

Continuing their march upward in digital SLRs, Sony has for the first time allowed a hands-on look at a prototype of their Alpha 900. They had previously shown it "under glass" at photo shows.

There are a few noteworthy things:

Sensor: Holy moly, a 25 megapixel full frame sensor! Be sure to bring lots of memory cards, because you are going to fill them up fast, especially if shooting RAW (and as a pro, why wouldn't you be?). This is twice as big as the 12.2MP sensor in the competing Nikon D3, currently the darling of the photo forums. There's got to be some serious computing horsepower going on inside the body, too, to process those enormous image files at a frame rate that is required for a pro-level camera. Presumably there are multiple card slots in the body, and perhaps extras in the optional battery grip.

Size: If there's one thing I learned in design school, it's to take photos of handheld products using someone with hands that make the product appear the size you want it to be. In other words, small hands make a product look bigger, and vice versa. Well, either the person holding the camera in these shots has small hands, or this is one gigantic camera! Hard to tell how it scales compared to the big Canons and Nikons, but it's clear it's a beast. No doubt stoutly made, however, for its intended professional use. Unlike Nikon and Canon, Sony have opted not to build the battery grip into the body, so that may actually allow for a lower weight than the competition if you don't need the grip all the time.

Live View: Sony's implementation of Live View in its entry-level A350 has been widely reviewed as the best approach so far, making it truly useful. (Lots of people dismiss Live View on a DSLR -- "That's what the viewfinder is for!" they say -- but the fact is that looking at a screen from a distance rather than up against the viewfinder does have its uses, even for pros who often have to hold cameras above their heads to get a shot through a crowd.) The A900 brings Live View to a pro model camera in a similarly useful way.

Pentaprism: The A900 sports a decidedly retro looking pentaprism (the block of mirrored glass that sits above the lens and sends the image into the viewfinder) that iconically takes the old angular turret look of famous pro cameras like the Nikon F3 and plops it onto a modern ergo-curvy body. It's a rather odd combination, and doesn't work to my eyes. Many people will probably say, who cares what it looks like as long as it takes great photos? And there is something to that. But for a tool that is about creating aesthetics, I've always believed that the tools themselves should be beautiful. And if you look at the classic cameras of the past, even the professional ones, they were always beautiful in their own way (F3, Leicas, Rolleiflexes, Canon T90, etc.). Beautiful doesn't have to mean Ferrari-sleek, but it does mean that the designs are coherent and have a sense of "inevitability" about them. The A900 does not have that, it looks cobbled together.

It's good to see Sony sticking with the SLR business though, there was a lot of skepticism when it bought out the Minolta range and re-badged it that they would have the patience required for this market. Check out more photos at Master Chong

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET Networks)

Amazon has announced its entry into the eBook reader category with Kindle.

It's not in many people's hands yet or mine (CNET's reviewers have some first impressions), so these will have to be preliminary remarks. But I can say that I find it a schizophrenic device and hard to understand what it is trying to accomplish in its current form. It's easy enough to see where it's going, but ambition seems to have got ahead of what Amazon could actually deliver in the near term, and the ambition was not updated for reality. As a result, it comes across as very much a work in progress that lacks the elusive sexiness that can carry interesting yet unfinished products when they first come into the market.

First, it seems geared toward book geeks and authors, not the mainstream mass market. The price is too high for the hardware, and the price of downloaded books (nicely handled it seems, sans PC via cell phone network) is not that much less than what you will find the same book in hard copy on Amazon itself. More on that later.

The value proposition seems to be about carrying lots of books around in a device that does not grow physically in size, and for spur-of-the-moment purchases achieved through the wireless capability that does not require a monthly subscription. But much of Amazon's legacy has been built on delayed satisfaction--in other words, paying less to wait for delivery, rather than paying more and going to get it at a brick and mortar store right away. And they've been very successful at that, so it's unclear whether a mainstream market is really hankering for getting a book right now. Book geeks and authors, perhaps, but not most people.

OK, so perhaps the device has other compelling capabilities that outweigh more conventional books? The screen looks pretty good, a black on light gray "e-ink" type display that has high resolution and good contrast and supposedly works well outdoors. It looks like the screen in the Sony Reader, so it has competitive parity there. Battery life is supposedly days in duration, again similar to Sony's. However, because there is no backlight you cannot use it in the dark, so Amazon anachronistically offers an accessory clip-on reading light just you would use for a book!

But it's in the look and feel where things really fall apart. The industrial design is, frankly, ugly. It has none of the visceral "gotta have it I don't care what it costs" appeal of an iPod or iPhone. The Sony Reader is rather bland but it looks good next to Kindle (the Reader is also smaller and lighter with the same size screen). There is a gray grippy area on the back with a random pattern of embossed letters molded into it--an amusing detail but not particularly iconic. The whole design is unresolved and dated looking, with unsophisticated form, surface, color, and graphic detailing. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the goal was to make it nonflashy as a design. Well, mission accomplished there, but it goes beyond nonflashy to be actually unattractive, at least to my eyes.

The keyboard on the Kindle is a real puzzle--it looks '80s old school and not at all up to scratch in a BlackBerry and Treo world. It is also very large and fixed in place, but if you're reading fiction and light nonfiction, then there's relatively little need to type. A slide-out keyboard like IM-centric slider cell phones have would been far better.

A keyboard is much more useful for blog and newspaper reading, and the ambition of providing a "BlackBerry for blogs," as Guy Kawasaki calls Kindle, is compelling for heavy blog readers. But here, the ambition overreaches the realities of the shipping device, as blogs without color photos, embedded YouTube videos, and links to external sites are far less interesting (since there's no general purpose wireless data connection, normal Web surfing is impossible). And for the privilege of reading an inferior version of a blog, you actually pay 99 cents per month per blog.

The large buttons along the side of the device for flipping pages also look pretty old school in an iPhone world and seem like they will be easy to hit accidentally. There is a huge "Next Page" button on the right, and a large "Previous Page" button on the left, following the left-back/right-forward convention...except there's also a small Next Page button on the left too. Schizophrenic. Is Jeff Bezos left-handed?

Lastly we come to pricing: $399 for the device itself on its face seems expensive given the quality of the hardware compared with what you get in less expensive MP3 players and cell phones that do, for the lay person, basically the same thing if not more. Book downloads themselves on Kindle cost $9.99. Compare that with an average price of about $15 for the books on Amazon's Best of 2007 book list, and you'd have to buy 80 books to make up the difference in price between hard copy and Kindle reader, plus downloads. That's a lot of books, more than most mainstream readers will buy over quite a few years. The capacity of Kindle is about 200 books, and that is more books than some people will ever own in their lifetime. So unless you put a high premium on portability, the hardware price is a big hurdle. Again, the pricing seems set up more for book geeks and authors who will read far more than the mass market audience.

Inevitably the iPod is a point of comparison. It was decried as too expensive when it launched, but it succeeded because it took a systems approach to solving the heretofore complex problem of getting my music onto my MP3 player, and because it looked damn good doing it. James Patterson, best-selling author and endorser of Kindle, claims it simplifies life, but I'm not clear how difficult people find it to purchase a book or magazine in a store, or to order a book online, have it delivered to their house, open the box, and start reading. That would be more OK if the device was so screamingly evocative, so sleek, so thin, so gorgeous, so mind-blowingly innovative to use that you would knock over your grandmother in the mad dash out the door to get one. But sadly, it is none of these things. Instead, it feels like Jeff Hawkins' Foleo--not a bad idea, but 5 to 10 years too late both in concept and execution.

In a video Bezos talks about how much effort and thought went into Kindle. Firsthand experience will have to be the true test, but right now this seems like a half-baked product. At 4:51 into the video, there is the book "Fiasco" prominently shown next to the Kindle. Hopefully this is not a foreshadowing of what is in store for Kindle.

In an posting on Crave yesterday, Sony's SVP of Marketing Randy Waynick feels that, as an industry, high definition TV gets a barely passing grade in terms of how it communicates about its products to consumers.

Let's be blunt: HDTV and the next generation home theater it anchors is a trainwreck. What should have been the next great in-home entertainment experience has been marred by an alphabet soup of confusing standards and protocols and dubiously compatible products that consumers should never have been exposed to.

Anyone that has shopped for a TV recently knows how true this is. It used to be that if you wanted to buy a TV most of what you needed to know was the diagonal measurement. That largely dictated the technology (CRT vs. rear projection), and beyond that there wasn't much to think about aside from a side-to-side comparison to check for nuances of picture quality. Hooking the TV up to your existing equipment was, while a chore, not fraught with competing standards and incompatabilities.

That's all changed with the confluence of HDTV, home theater, digital cable/satellite, DVD's, DVR's and gaming consoles. Together these various technologies have ramped up the complexity by several orders of magnitude for the simple task of becoming a couch potato. HDMI vs component connection? Which flavor of HDMI? Blu-ray vs. HD DVD? Buy a TiVo or get the cable company's box? DTS or THX or Neo or acronym acronym acronym?

Here's a typical type of question from the popular AVS Forums, asking about DVD compatibility for a receiver:

HD and Blue Ray DVD HDMI audio. I do not understand if any post processing is done on the 5.1 Lossless PCM channels from these players. Will DD PLIIx or THX 7.1 apply to these? What are the limitations?

Everyday people with jobs, kids and lives to lead should just not be forced to think about this junk.

According to the Crave article:

Citing a study by Best Buy, 40 percent of consumers that own already own high-definition televisions don't know they need HD channel services or HD movies to take advantage of their TV's high resolution.

While Waynick places the blame for this with TV manufacturers, this statistic actually shows that it is a more systemic problem. It's not just TV's and the botched rollout of HDTV with its too many flavors and confusion with digital TV, but it's a whole range of speedbumps that the various players have put in the way of a pleasant buying experience.

This wouldn't be so bad if the risks for consumers were low, but they are not. Buying a new HDTV often requires upgrades to multiple other components, subscribing to new more costly services, probably even changing the furniture in the room or getting an expensive installation done if you want to hang it on the wall. What's more, technology is moving at such a rate that there is a good chance some or all of what you buy now will be incompatible in a few years, or seriously behind the quality curve. Consumers are not dummies, that's why they are staying neutral in large numbers on the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD debate - they realize they could be seriously in the hole if they bet wrong.

That's why emergent brands like Vizio, Polaroid and Funai, as cited in the Crave posting, have done well: they deliver the cachet of a flat panel HDTV with lower risk due to their lower price point. But if companies really want to open consumer demand they need to do a hard reset on how they design, market and sell the TV ecosystem.