Category Archives: Technology and Games

You’re no longer the key demographic, it’s an event about the platform not the games, and all tech announcements tend to be met with cynicism.

Those things are all true, but let’s get them out of the way because it doesn’t stop the criticisms being true either.
The new Xbox One is supposed to be “simple, instant and complete” however in reality it seems to be “instant”, at best. When you’re setting out a bold new preposition to sell your new, expensive electronics box, it’s probably best to give people a reason to buy one over their perfectly usable existing Xbox.

So if we accept it’s no longer just about games – and judging by the time spent on it last night – it’s all about entertainment. That’s fantastic, I spend much more time using the video-on-demand services on the 360 than gaming, but am yet to see how the new Xbox considerably improves on that. There’s voice commands, which just reminds me of a scene from 30 Rock where the TV turns itself off because someone said it on a show. It’s a silly thing that decent technology could prevent, but people watching the announcement last night reported that it kept cutting off as each time the video showed a voice command, their original Kinect was listening and trying to do it. That really bodes well from the future.

Pressing “TV” and “HDMI” on my remote is hardly a difficult experience that needs revolutionising, and besides, you need a separate approved tuner box to provide the TV source, it suffers from the same issues as Google TV where it can’t really control the recorder on a tuner so you still need to switch back on your TV AND this isn’t even coming to the UK at launch. Simple, instant and complete.

The all in one system… if ‘one’ means requiring a new console, Xbox Live subscription and set top box.

How else do they plan on improving that experience? Personalisation and recommendations. Lovely, but they probably should have gotten round to that already. You’ve got basic multitasking with the ‘snap’ feature to have a browser or app alongside your TV viewing – but people have already decided how to do that with their phones and tablets, they’ve moved on. How does having the extra things on the TV screen inherently improve it? That’s yet to be proven, and this is just playing catch up.

Multifunctional consoles are great – but for that to thrive they need a more open ecosystem for apps (not mentioned) and those functions to be considerably better than how they work on my 360 to justify a replacement! And I may be biased because of my involvement in it… but why not try attracting the radio industry? If they’re all about woo-ing big partners, there is more than just sports and TV out there.

It’s early days for the announcement, but it’s not early days for the console. Microsoft and Sony’s attempts to wrangle a last year or two extra out of their consoles has led to some stagnation – we’ve seen some great games, but everything’s slowed down in anticipation. There should be more ready to reveal. People’s interest has moved on, and elsewhere.

And that’s what worries me – If you’re going to do entertainment, do it well. Big expensive development on games needs a bigger audience, and other things can help drive audiences to games (see: phones). Build up an app ecosystem, truly link together video services in a useful way. Don’t just add more voice control and act like that really is what people are after. People don’t need a console, make them want it. Make them want to spend the considerable amount of money replacing their existing console with a better one. And the earlier the better – not in three years time, where media and technology will have moved on elsewhere too.

At least the showing of Forza and Call of Duty means they’re aware they still do need to actually do things people want – you need to keep the existing audiences happy, absolutely – you need to go further to get people who aren’t still buying those. And I’m not just talking about Kinect. Maybe we’ll see that at E3. I’ll wait and see, and suspect some of this mess may become clearer. More features. More games.But after this long waiting for the console itself, we shouldn’t really be up in the air this much. There’s always going to be unanswered questions at this stage but there’s a need for more clarity – see the mess over preowned games and sharing with friends. Their attempts to clarify the situation have clarified very little.

But hey, simple, instant and complete. Maybe it feels like that for them. Just not for everyone else yet.

With all the excitement (and bile, there’s exaggerations both ways) over Google Glass now it’s in the hands of “explorers”, I was starting to feel a bit jealous.

So I decided to make my own.

For the radio show Connected, we’d already turned Instagram in to glasses, FIFA 13 in to Monopoly and Curiosity in to a home toy. So we’ve proven our ability to bodge things together in the name of technological development.

This time, I took the Instaglasses – and added an 808 car key micro-camera. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to make heads or tails of how it works and aiming it seems to be an artform science has yet to understand.

The idea was that they should try and slip away, it be subtle and not too obvious… But mysteriously everyone noticed them and kept talking about them.

So here’s my… creative attempts at photography. Introducing, the home made Google Glass project.

Turns out, a lot of work, money, research and development are actually necessary. Who knew.

There’s been endless discussion about the tone of discussions on social media about recent events in the news and it’s getting tiring.

So to address that, I’m adding to that discussion. By writing about the discussion. I’ll let you make your own Inception jokes.

In the last week, there appears to be two major themes when a breaking news story hits Twitter. First – there’s the people discussing an event. Second, the people discussing how you’re allowed to discuss it.

It’s overwhelming – don’t tweet this, don’t tweet about that, don’t tweet in that tone. While there’s no problem with the occasional reminder of tone (and some people clearly need it), it’s becoming dominant.

With the death of Baroness Thatcher, the instant reaction included telling us they were switching off Twitter because of what was to come – and telling us what we can and can’t discuss. Maybe it says more about who I follow, but I didn’t see this predicted barrage of vile without looking for it.

While with the terrible events of Boston, thankfully there was no such expectations of hatred, my feed still became self aware and discussed what was not allowed to be discussed until further notice. I appreciate the sentiment, but sometimes feels a bit much.

And we all know repeatedly telling people they can’t write something is a foolproof tactic on the internet.

I’d hope that despite generally often sometimes occasionally being a bit of an idiot, I’m not going to be as tasteless or insensitive during an issue like that. Sure, it’s not aimed at me personally (or at least, I’d hope so), but having tweet after tweet in my feed directed at the reader saying what they’re allowed to write, how dare they say such things, what you’re supposed to do next… it feels like I’m being accused.

That’s not to say this is intentional. The ‘Twitter mob’ is an interesting phenomenon, particularly because of their unorganised nature. Many people individually come to the same, sometimes reasonable opinions, but because everyone shares them you end up with a mass of messages that feels like an onslaught.

Because it’s easier to hear people you can actually get a sense of scale. Perhaps more people could search and use the retweet button? If you agree with the sentiment, just share it, so there’s less of a chance of annoyance through duplication. The power of numbers can be a very effective tool, but in these cases it’s very effective at winding me up.

Or as the great scholar of communication, Professor Ronan Keating once said, you say it best when you say nothing at all.

There I go, telling people how they should tweet. Ugh. So annoying.

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Google Drive. It’s a great idea. More free cloud storage, linked to my Google account, integration in stuff, ace. But I’ve had an issue getting started with it.

Drive essentially, evolved from Docs. And herein lies the problem. I never treated Google Docs as I would a folder.

My file organisation is poor anyway, but on Docs, well, it was never an issue. A good dumping ground for todo lists. Collaboration. Moving stuff between PCs. And as any GDoc you opened on the internet ever got added to your list, I didn’t feel like it was something to really keep clean like you do a folder. You’d have recent stuff up top and search for everything else, because that’s Google.

So shifting from one to the other just doesn’t sit well with me. They were treated differently. And I think there was a good chance for Google to rethink cloud storage a bit, but they went kind of simple.

And I understand that they may want me to deal with photos through G+, and music through Google Music, but in their integration goal – why isn’t their an automatic folder where I can access the jpgs and MP3s? My phone automatically syncs my photos to Dropbox – and I like having access to the jpgs. It also syncs them to my G+ account, but I have to download them OUT of that if I want the actual file.

I’ve got 26gb on Dropbox so moving off that for 5gb is unlikely, but making it easier to back things up and move ‘em between devices is good. So Gdrive has some work to do. But I hope over time they kick in to gear. If G+ is part of their efforts to bring things together, let’s see that happen with my files.

After two years using and abusing my beloved HTC Desire, time came to get a phone – and this week I’ve been incredibly happy with the HTC One S. It’s a sleek, sexy phone which despite its thin nature doesn’t feel fragile. I’d 100% recommend it, but with my obsession with UI, there’s a few things that bug me.

Essentially – HTC need to know when to stop. The Sense UI, their modification of Android, has certainly been made slicker and toned down since previous versions as it came bloated. It’s great in parts, they add nice little features and elements but it doesn’t feel like it was designed with Ice Cream Sandwich in mind. They’re not ugly – I just know they’re wrong. And wrong for little good reason.

Google’s put together a fantastic set of guidelines which HTC’s designers could really do with looking at. In their own apps, they have decided to do a few weird bits with the action bar – and insist on using a look for tabs from Android a few years ago rather than ones that look nice and are consistent.

Then there’s bits of the OS they ignore. Tweaking the popup alerts for Yes/No. Using green as the accent colour on things when for the rest of the OS is blue. And replacing the quite nice new icons for system apps with ones they’ve used for several versions. Things like that make it quite awkward when you come across bits of the OS that they can’t change, namely anything involving Google.

It’s when you get to that level of tweaking – someone going “make sure we replace those icons” without good reason, “change the alert window”, you know they’re fiddling. And not in a good way. Put your effort in to making good, value-adding extras. I know hardware manufacturers need to stand out and having all ICS as standard phones might not be that but put your efforts to things that matter and actually improve it. And stop designing for Gingerbread, ffs.