HTC’s Latest – Good, but Good Enough?

When it comes to smartphones lately, Samsung and Apple have sucked most of the air out of the room. Today, HTC showed their latest top line smartphone, the newest HTC One, and is tacking towards Apple in an effort to differentiate from Android rival Samsung. Most noticeable are the beautiful aluminum case, with obvious cues taken from the iPhone, and the great screen. Taking another page from Apple’s playbook, specs weren’t really highlighted…instead it’s Blinkfeed…which automatically live updates content feeds, as well as their Ultrapixel camera with better low light capability. The HTC One hits stores in March, just as Samsung rolls out the Galaxy S-4. Time and buyers will tell if it’s good enough to carve out some space for itself…something Nokia, Blackberry, and Microsoft are also all grappling with.

The X Phone

Could another player be readying a game changing smartphone this year? If so, it may be Google. Through their Motorola Mobility division, they are working on what’s called the X Phone. Along with the usual improvements…better camera, longer battery life, and so on…the X Phone is reported to feature software that’s never been installed on a smartphone. According to the chief technology officer for an Australian wireless provider, it could be a game changer for Apple and Samsung. Adding to the intrigue, Microsoft has delayed it’s Surface phone and Amazon has also put off a companion phone to its tablet. Of course, this wouldn’t be the 1st phone from Google, but it it has truly unique software that people will love having, that may be enough to grab substantial market share. You can bet that the folks at Motorola Mobility…as well as those at parent Google…are hoping for something along the lines of the original Razr.

Free WiFi

How would you like FREE wifi that’s more powerful than any available now…able to get through concrete walls and clear hills and trees? You would? Then you obviously aren’t a wireless carrier! For the rest of us, a proposal from the FCC sounds almost too good to be true. They are talking about buying back unused television spectrum from TV broadcasters, and building free WiFi out in virtually every metro area and most rural areas. This would be a boon to cities, schools, people traveling…again- everyone but the wireless providers…who wouldn’t be able to sell their lesser coverage to us when we could get something better for free. Expect a big fight from them, but on our side and the government’s…Google and Microsoft have already weighed in.

Pay Tube?

No, they’re not going to start charging for everything, but You Tube is set to launch some paid channels this spring. They’re trying to lure some content producers along the lines of lesser cable channels and makers of TV series to the site. Apparently they will have pay per view, or monthly fees to watch these more commercial channels…ranging from a dollar to five dollars a month. A Google spokesperson says they’ve been looking at doing this for quite a while now. It remains an experiment…they aren’t sure that even with professional content channels at the level of cable TV that large numbers of people will pay to watch….especially on a site that’s been built on free content.

Videos Now the Fruit of Twitter’s Vine

Something new besides Tweets and pictures is just out from Twitter. It’s from a company they acquired, and it’s called Vine. Vine lets you upload little 6 second looped videos. Yes, that’s short, but from a company that gave us 140 character Tweets, no surprise. Twitter says it will encourage creativity…and apparently lots of editing to cut things down to 6 seconds. Right now, Vine is only available on iPhone and iPod Touch from the Apple App store, but Twitter says versions for all the other mobile platforms will be out soon. Some users had trouble logging in with their Twitter credentials early on. The problem is supposedly cleared up for all now. Here’s a word of warning…if you’re prone to drunk texting or Tweeting, you might want to pass on Vine!

Microsoft’s Surface Pro Finally Coming

After months, Microsoft has finally announced a release date for the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, and a price. They will start selling it on February 9th, and the Surface Pro will run you $899…a full $400 more than the Surface RT that’s already out. If you really want a good Windows tablet, this might be the ticket…it runs the full version of Windows 8, so you can do actual work on the Surface Pro…the hardware is said to be equal to that of an ultrabook. The Surface Pro will be available at Microsoft stores, Best Buy, Staples, and online at microsoftstore.com. You can add the cover with flat keyboard for another hundred, and even though it has a touch screen…if you really have to have one, there’s a mouse!

We Still Use Phones More Than Tablets

You’d think tablets were taking over the world, but at least in data use, they’ve got a ways to go before catching up with smartphones. A survey is just out, and of the top 10 data gobbling devices, 7 are smartphones, and 3 tablets. Technically, one is a phablet, but that’s really just a big smartphone. Researchers at Arieso, the mobile data analytics company, found that iPhone 5 users really burned through the data, downloading 4 times as much content as iPhone 3G users did. All the flagship smartphones…from Apple, Samsung, and HTC showed greater data use than tablets. With all the outrage when phone companies have threatened to throttle data hogs, they found that 1 percent of users chew through 40 percent of downloaded data.

Yes, ‘Tis the Season

With really only 4 days until Christmas, the malls around the Bay Area are jumping, shoppers are jamming the roads around them, and it seems to all the world like some of them only get in a car at this time of the year, and have forgotten all they ever knew about operating a motor vehicle!

With rain hitting the area the next 3 days, and a major storm clobbering the Midwest, keep those people in mind as you motor around…whether commuting to and from work, shopping yourself, or sneaking off for a long holiday vacation.

We won’t really know probably until January how good the holiday shopping season has gone, but all anecdotal signs seem to point to a pretty good one. After a rough last few years, don’t be surprised at your local merchants if they seem to be humming strains of Stan Freberg’s ‘Green Christmas.’

SF & Parking

With the World Series in town, here are some observations about parking in San Francisco that just scream to be made. Last night, for game 1, it didn’t look like the scalping parking lots quite broke through the $100 barrier for parking…one lot I’ve used relatively regularly…a 20 minute walk to AT&T Park no less, generally jacks up prices from $13 a day to $30 or $35 during regular season, and no doubt was getting $80 last night and tonight. This is either free enterprise or highway robbery, depending on how you look at it (and maybe both, where the lot is leased from the City.)

Speaking of the fine City and County of San Francisco, it was great the last couple of days seeing the teeming crowd streaming on foot from downtown along 2nd street to the ball park. Lots of people wearing orange and black, smiling and laughing, anticipating a great time at the series. The City, in its great wisdom, is now considering eliminating parking along 2nd, and taking away 2 lanes to make way for bike lanes and landscaping…presumably for pedestrians who have imbibed too much to have a place to relieve themselves, since that seems to be what happens with landscaping during big events. A city spokesperson says they’ll find spaces to make up the parking on the side streets and alleys. Note to city spokesperson…there already IS parking along those side streets and alleys…and it’s always full now!

It’s all well and good for a city to want to be more bike and pedestrian friendly. It’s also well and good that they want to encourage using mass transit. The problem is, there isn’t enough capacity on useable timetables from distant enough areas for many commuters to use said mass transit…so this just punishes people financially and time-wise who commute into the city by car by necessity. It’s likely that a fair number would choose to live in the city if the rent factor wasn’t one of the highest in North America! I would say this is a wake up call to the powers that be in San Francisco, but don’t want to cause too many readers to laugh themselves to death! Enjoy our beautiful city and all that comes with it…and please use the lovely ornate street rest rooms if nature calls!

A Thought on Future Medical Care

With all the great hand wringing about future medical care in this country…from those that see Medicare for all as the best (certainly that would be the cheapest…no overhead for sales and marketing, no profit…and yes, they characterize it differently, but non-profits have ‘profits’ and big bonuses for the upper management) or those who want Medicare privatized in the future (vastly more profits due to a bigger user pool for the insurers, and more money flowing into investment accounts for Wall Street to play with), here’s a thought that may not have been factored in to the equation.

In the past generation, there was a substantial percentage of wives in married couples…whether stay-at-home or work outside the home women…who spent their golden years taking care of their husbands. This is something a lot of us witnessed first hand…without Mom making sure her husband got his 25 pills a day on time, and taking him to the doctors at the drop of a hat, he certainly would have died 15 years earlier than he did. The victim of a stroke, this former surgeon was not capable of doing these things himself. The same was true in my family of an uncle who had a debilitating disease.

The issue is: with half of all adults divorced, and women much less inclined to wait on and attend to men in their later years than before, how will this affect the cost of health care? It’s common knowledge that most men don’t tend to their health the way women do anyway. How will all these either single or married and pretty well on their own men jack up costs when they wait until things are really bad before seeking care? It may not be emergency room care with its astronomical cost, but it will certainly be much more expensive than catching problems early and treating them aggressively.

This could be an unseen bomb just waiting to blow up costs down the road. While I am of the camp that believes universal health care is inevitable…all the developed countries in the world but the US already has it…this would be a fly in the ointment no matter which course we take.