Left Android behind to go with an unlocked iPhone, and while I really like the iPhone, I wouldn't be opposed to going back to Android if the Voice app does callback.
Does it do callback now, or is it still direct dialing out through a random assortment of routing numbers?
Does it do callback now, or is it still direct dialing out through a random assortment of routing numbers?
You forgot:
Screw the marketing, get it in the hands of more people - You can blast all media forms with an advertising blitz for Bentley, but at the end of the day, very few people can afford a Bentley in the first place. $600 is a steep starting point. Drop that price and the sales numbers will grow.
Help out early adopters - The Nexus One wouldn't be here if it weren't for the G1 users carving out a platform for Android. Make the N1 available for current first-gen android users at a cut rate to reward their loyalty and, more importatnly, their loud mouths (word-of-mouth marketing). Another sales boost.
Open it up to all plans - People use Android on T-Mobile because it gives them a wide-open, malleable device on the cheapest plans available. Binding them to a single plan snuffs the desire for a lot of potential buyers, and limitation is anti-Android/anti-Google.
To put it another way, Google should feel free to do to the cell phone industry what it did to the personal GPS and email client industries.
1. Fixed my mother-in-laws washer/dryer unit, when the dryer wasn't turning on and the light was't coming on. Noticed the door made a funny noise when you opened it, so I guessed - blind guessed - that it was a faulty switch. $15 dollars later, a fully-functioning dryer.
2. Learned how to repair a broken iPod screen and battery to keep my 3g iPod working (loved that model, btw, with all its button-y glory)
3. Learned how to replace surface-mount components with a standard soldering iron in order to fix the hold switch on my iPod 3g that I broke replacing the screen and battery.
4. Solar water heater for the pool using an old radiator.
I'm not particularly inventive, but I follow instructions well. Yay, instructables.com
In the business publication company I work for, we get a ton of emails coming in and we shoot a lot of emails out. Everyone else in our industry, customers and clients alike, are in the same boat and a lot of emails get overlooked.
For us, phone calls lay the ground work. They're the introduction and they set up the person on the other end to be looking for our mail. Once that has been established, email becomes the preferred method of communication to hammer out terms and verify information.
On the other hand, an intro email can help get past a heavy-handed secretary who's screening for her boss. Saying "I'm calling in regards to an email..." will get you through more often than not.
My advice? Call the company/person first and set up the preferred channel of communication, then go from there. I hate talking on the phone - I don't think as clearly speaking as I do writing - but sometimes it can really help you out.
@JanetCarol: If you have pets, now is the time to start setting some boundaries (keep cats out of certain rooms, get dogs used to not jumping up on people). Also along the pet lines, figure out the baby's room and keep the cats out and no more handling litter boxes. Make him do it.
On the home improvement front, it's never too early to baby-proof. It's also not a bad idea to check window seals and stuff like that - don't want to put a baby's bed next to a drafty window.
On the financial side of things, friends with children have told me to buy a pack of diapers every week once you find out you're expecting. It helps soften the budget burden that hits with the baby's arrival. Also, make sure your health insurance has a maternity rider to cover you in all the extra doctor trips as well as the new addition.
Of course, some people feel that to make any preparations to a room or house prior to the baby's arrival is bad luck, so your mileage may vary with this advice.
One final thing I will say is that most couples are unaware how high the failure rate is with first-time pregnancies. Without going into it any further, I'll say hope for the best but be at least aware, if not prepared, for the worst. Nature throws a mean curveball sometimes.
I need resume/interview advice.
I work in the writing/editing field for a small, niche publication. For lack of a better phrase, I run the editorial department. I am the editorial point-of contact for all inquiries, I ready the magazine for press, I'm the last set of eyes on the final copy and I am solely liable for any editorial error. However, the publication's masthead does not list me as anything different from my coworkers in the editorial department and my name doesn't appear first among editorial staffers - there is nothing to signify my role to outside observers.
How do I handle this on a resume/interview? My duties/credentials aren't immediately verifiable due to the structure of the magazine and the masthead, and calling my office to verify information would tip them off to the fact that I'm looking.
@kettlewhistle: Ran into the same issues before I was married. Everything looked gaudy or feminine.
Ikea still puts out some stuff that can be mixed and matched to make a bed look guy-nice (is that a phrase? I find it appropriate). Also, Ty Pennington has a line of stuff at Sears and it doesn't actually look bad, even though he's a douche.
Android 2.1 build for the G1 and myTouch3g
[forum.xda-developers.com]
More involved (needs a new SPL and your MicroSD card must be partitioned) than a typical Cyanogen install, but it works and it works well. For most users, this install is faster than factory or Cyanogen builds of Android 1.6.
Also a great example of hackers doing what Google and T-Mobile refuse to.
#tips
Now what industries does this strategy apply to? I ask because I have backgrounds in the retail, legal and writing industries, and I was fairly certain that ignoring your work and assigning all tasks, both important and menial, to others/subordinates was the best method to implicitly assert your authority.
Make my calls, pick up my dry cleaning, go put gas in my car, find out where I spent $237 in Houston...all these things are jobs for others once you get a leadership position, right?
See, I dream of issues as simple as this. I work in an office where we have no tech policy about which browser we use. I just end up updating and fixing problems on all the machines, one of which is running Netscape Navigator, two are running Firefox 2 and the rest of them run IE8. I've got copies of everything on my computer here just to see what's out there.
Do you know how hard it was to find a copy of Netscape Navigator last year when the boss got a new PC?
@jason liang: I'm not a multi-national industry giant. Google is. It can be done, they just chose not to do it.
More relevant to the story, everyone that was in the market for this phone also knew what Google was capable of, and were so underwhelmed by what was actually offered that they held off, and now the sales numbers suck.
@jason liang:
Parts - covered in the estimate of around $200.
Engineering - it's made by HTC, who makes a slew of phones already. The engineering process to cram in more RAM and a new processor ain't all that difficult.
Manufacturing - all that infrastructure is in place and with third-world labor. Marginal
Shipping - bulk parts carted in by boxcar, and bulk shipped to Google, who drop ships to customers. Again, marginal costs.
If Google wanted to change the world, they easily could have. They got lazy and went corporate on the half-assed Nexus One launch.
@luckybob343: Ultimately, I think had Google lived up to its potential with this device and launched it unsubsidized for slightly above build cost (~$200), no one would have been talking about the iPhone anymore.
AT&T users wouldn't really begrudge the 3G issue because, for most of them anyway, they can't get reliable 3G coverage anyway and it's a more flexible phone than the iPhone. All the early adopters of the G1 and myTouch3G on T-Mobile would be able to immediately upgrade, keeping the fanboy cred Google is currently discarding at a rapid pace. The price alone could entice many featurephone users to upgrade, and the flood of new Android owners would give Google a wealth of people using ITS OS with ITS services and viewing ITS advertising. Yeah these projections are all theoretical but they're also all very feasible given the current state of disarray that is the U.S. cellular industry.
Google could have hit a home run into the cheap seats but settled for a foul ball into the luxury box. If they wanted an overwhelming response, they should have launched an overwhelming product.
Wow...who saw THAT coming? A phone that was marketed and hyped to be a game changer from a company that routinely upends entire product categories that, when launched, doesn't change a damn thing but actually strengthens several bad practices.
- Coulda been free and upended the "luxury" smart phone market, but they launch it at $600 like every other phone out there
- Coulda gone after the existing Android/Google fan boy base and worked out a sweet package, but we've all got about a year left on our contracts with the slow, quirky, never-gonna-see-2.0 G1 or myTouch3G and swapping would cost a fortune
- Coulda put it out on all platforms at once to be used with any package, but you locked down to one with all others told to wait
- Coulda gone data-only and launched Google Voice with VOIP, again upending the entire cellular industry, but launched the phone with one, poorly-priced package on one carrier
Too many of us know what Google was capable of, and what the phone was capable of. The pricing, packaging and launch of the Nexus One was about as half-assed as anything I've ever seen.
I grew up in Alabama and spent eight years in Tuscaloosa. The TV stations in the Birmingham-Tuscaloosa area treat weather like LA stations treat police chases - ratings GOLD!
As soon as severe weather crosses into southern Mississippi, the 1/4-screen map of Alabama pops up in the bottom left-hand corner, stating which counties are under a tornado watch. It doesn't matter which channel you're watching - they all fucking do it. If, God forbid, a stray cloud meander into the state's airspace, the greased-up weathermen interrupt the programs every five minutes to announce "There's a potential for severe weather that can bring fatal tornadoes. FIND A SAFE PLACE!!!" It's obnoxious and it's redundant.
Oh yeah...RTR
@rob, @Jimmy1 and @bobman1235:
You guys realize subsidies exist on all phones, smart or feature, right? Go to cellhut.com and take a look around. The asking price of a feature phone that would be free on a carrier is around $70, which indicates a subsidy/profit margin of $70. Compare that to the asking price of $179 for the Nexus One vs. the unsubsidized price of $530, with a difference of $360.
You guys think its fair to pay $360 more, all of it pure profit and $270 more in profit than for a feature phone, for the "luxury" of owning a more capable device?
Also, I'd like to hear any reasoned arguments that email, Internet access and phone communications aren't necessities today, and how a device that can do all three wouldn't be considered a necessity over three separate devices.
@bobman1235: When AT&T asks for permission to dismantle its landline infrastructure, which they did last week, then the answer to your question is "Yes, phones are on par with food and gas."
As for my occupation, which I'm sure is true of a lot of readers here, a free phone just doesn't cut it. And the current pricing structure of both cell phones, smart and feature, and cell phone packages is inflated to the point of corruption.
To combat your answer in another way, people don't NEED loans, either, but banks are still limited as to what fees they can charge.
@bobman1235: So by your logic, Aldi should charge the same for a bag of carrots as Whole Foods? Gas companies should routinely gouge everyone at the pump?
Monoprice is enjoying success because their business model allows consumers to purchase cabling and adapters at near-wholesale prices, so a $60 HDMI cable at Best Buy can be bought from them for $6. Google had a chance to be just as revolutionary and knock out the over 50% profit margin the smart phone manufacturers enjoy, and instead they joined in.
@jethro1138: Well, from a "Do No Evil" standpoint, they're kinda falling flat.
They lured Google fanboys (and I am most definitely one of those) to T-Mobile with the clunky and underpowered G1, where we were the first to get Android but were locked into stifling contracts. Then they launched all these pretty Android devices on other networks and the G1 owners looked down at their phones, like we got the developmentally-challenged preemie kid. Then, they downright refuse to update/address the software and hardware issues on the G1.
Then Google hints at the promise of a game-changer; a phone controlled and developed by Google that stood a chance to completely get rid of the predatory and evil (there's that word again) practices prevalent in the U.S. cell phone industry. The Google fanboys, still licking their G1 wounds, got their hopes up again for a chance to be a part of THE change in the industry...only to see Google not only pass on the chance to revolutionize the field, but completely join in on the evil practices.
Or at least that's my twisted perspective.
@archer75: And according to the article I linked, it costs Apple $180 to make the current-gen iPhone. So there's $20 right there, plus the cut from any and all apps sold through iTunes.
My point is not that cell phone providers should or shouldn't subsidize the extra costs, it's that the extra costs shouldn't exist in the first place.
