Entries Tagged 'Soapbox' ↓

Instead of just being that fluffy chunk of moisture that glides along in the sky, the ‘cloud’ is promised as being the next big step that comes after the World Wide Web.

I use Gmail extensively, not just for my personal emails, calendar and contacts, but also for work, simply because I’ve yet to figure out how to get Lotus Notes to work the way I want it to. One colleague  writes his submissions almost exclusively on Google Docs, again for the simple fact that he can resume work from home right where he left off if need be, without having to copy the document to a thumb drive, for example, and have to remember to re-copy the completed article back onto his work machine.

However, when the internet (or said email service) decides to take an unannounced break, there’s the sinking feeling that five minutes ago might be the last time I see my email. That’s exactly what went through my mind when Gmail went down for nearly three hours in late February this year.

If you’re a proponent of backing up your data online, Carbonite very recently lost about 7500+ customers’ data, claiming faulty hardware as the culprit.

And in a case of the extreme, bookmarking service Ma.gnolia suffered a data meltdown early this year, with data corruption and loss taking out a large chunk of their users’ bookmark data.

Web-based services aren’t exactly new. Flickr, Picasa, Gmail, SkyDrive or even Carbonite; all these services basically require you to chuck your data on their physical servers, and hope for the best. Whether keeping your data from catastrophic loss (why hello, corrupted database!), or even keeping prying eyes from taking a peek at what you’d thought was secure, once you’ve committed your data to the cloud, it’s literally out of your hands.

Let’s not even get into the issue of keeping all your backups and uploads synchronized across the many services you use. For example, you could upload a stack of images to your Flickr account, but having them all appear simultaneously on your blog, Facebook, Picasa etc involves a great deal more effort than most care for.

Some argue that relying solely on the cloud isn’t very smart, preferring to rely on a combination of having copies both in the cloud as well as on local machines, hard drives and the like. After all, you can make only so many backups, and there exists the chance, however small, that all your backups might just fail one after another. Dead hard disk? Cloud service shut down? Corrupted backup files? The list goes on and on.

Better yet, if you happen to live in a country with craptastic internet infrastructure – Malaysia (thanks, TMnet) for example – your access speed to the cloud will be literally cut off at the knees most times.

Bottom line, the only real way the cloud will work is if two key issues are tackled: getting reliable access to the cloud, as well as the availability and reliability of the cloud services in question.

How do you store and access your data online? More importantly, would you trust your data to a third party?

The rumours that had been floating around for months about the iPhone’s arrival have finally been proven true.

Maxis is bringing the iPhone to Malaysia but the data plans are quite clearly ridiculous.

Are Malaysians seriously going to cough up that amount of money? When the iPhone 3G’s been on the grey market for ages?
And in a time when people are counting their pennies, do they really want to spend all that much on a model that will likely be updated in the next few months?

What was Maxis thinking? Seriously.

Note to Nokia: this would be an excellent time to push, push, push the excellently priced 5800. It’s affordable, it works, and you can get that price (RM1499) without being forced into bondage with Maxis.

But people are still going to lust after the Nokia N97 anyway – let us hope there’ll be enough software for it. We suggest judicious whipping to ‘motivate’ Symbian developers.

But in other news, Apple fanboys may rejoice at the coming of a preview of the latest iPhone OS 3.0.

We’ll never be rid of you, will we, iPhone?

So yeah, a couple of hours ago, the Apple store went offline. Which obviously meant that something was up, usually a new product (or more) being added to the store. Lo and behold, Apple went and introduced a new iPod Shuffle. Cue outpouring of oohs and ahhs. Which is to be expected since, hey, you’ve got to admit it looks pretty damn good.

While the older Shuffle features a literal rainbow of colors, the new one only comes in silver and black. It’s been elongated a little, and the clip at the rear has been retained. You get 4GB of storage on it too. The best part about the iPod Shuffle is it’s totally minuscule size – it’s literally smaller than your thumb. What’s more, Apple’s introducing a new feature called VoiceOver, which is basically the Shuffle telling you the song title, as well as who’s the artist singing said song. Better yet, VoiceOver supports multiple languages, with the current count at 14. If you have a song with a Spanish title, the Shuffle will pronounce the title and artist name in, doh, Spanish.

So what’s the problem?

Take a closer look at the pic above. Notice that the primary playback controls are located along the bundled earbuds’ cable. This is significant because despite the hold and shuffle controls that are located on the Shuffle’s body, unless you use Apple’s bundled earbuds, you have literally no control over volume or playback. This also happens to give Apple an excuse to sell more third-party accessories with built-in controls, leaving users who already have perfectly serviceable third-party earbuds out in the cold.

Then again, for the asking price of US$79 in the US of A (S$128 here in Singapore, and RM309 over in Malaysia), its doubtful that anyone who buys iPod Shuffles would actually bother spending probably the equivalent amount of money on a half-decent pair of in-ear buds.

What’s also interesting is that the idea of shoving the remote control onto the earbud cables isn’t all that new; just about every Sony Walkman sold today has that feature as standard.

Not quite the smartest thing to do in times like these, but hey, Apple’s pretty much made a habit of taking the path less chosen.