Let me give some perspective on the whole “review” angle here, because I think that a history with smartphones and phones in general might tint the experience a bit.  I was late to the cellphone game by my normal early-adopter standards, getting one when I first moved to the Twin Cities in 2002.   My first cellphone was a Nokia brick which I could basically run a truck over and have no trouble with.   After a few years, I was getting a bit more advanced, I got a Samsung SGH-509 which was my first camera phone.  It was super thin which I was happy about.. people were commenting on the thinness of it a decent amount.   I think I had another phone in between but it was just a basic flip phone from AT&T.  I went from my super thin phone to a G1 when it came around, my first jump into the smartphone area.  That was 2 years ago (actually a little bit longer now) and now I am up for a renewal of my contract, which means some serious subsidies on a phone.

I picked up the iPhone first, and it was immediately awkward in my hand.   It felt about as thin as my SGH was, which is pretty damn thin.  I know it isn’t because the specs don’t match up, but the G1 is a weighty phone in your hand, you really cup it.   I have also been told I have reasonably sized hands, so maybe bigger phones are just for me.  The other thing I noticed was that it was all glassy.   I usually don’t like glassy, because I do tend to drop my phone about once a week.   My G1 has held up admirably to the drops, landing mostly on it’s back but sometimes on the screen.   I’ve seen some horror pictures of the glass on the new iPhone breaking but wanted to hold judgement.  It may hold up to more abuse than it feels.    I took a look at the screen, and it might just be because I am nearsighted, but I didn’t really see an immediate difference from the G1 that I am currently using.  I went to the browser and zoomed in a bit just to see a smooth curve or something.. then I zoomed out and I kindof saw what people were talking about with the higher resolution, but it wasn’t immediately like “wow this will make my life better”.    I’m also a guy who likes to code with Profont 9pt on a 1600×1200 or better screen, with coworkers regularly coming by and asking how I can even read the code that I’m writing, so it’s not like I don’t like me some high density display.  It just wasn’t something that I was going to drop $200 on.  On top of these, though, I can’t seriously consider the iPhone 4.  It’s not because of AT&T (which is atrocious here) or because I’m an Android fan, but because if I’m going to buy an phone that’s practically a computer, I want to be able to program stuff for it, and the last Apple computer in my house got sold a month ago when it broke down.

So I walked around the corner (no really, the stores are about 50 feet apart) and picked up the Samsung Vibrant.  It was much weightier in my hand, but it is still thin.  It wasn’t as much hefty and large in my hand as it was just weird to hold the phone with the crazy security device that they had on it.  I’ll give something to the Apple store, their security straps really don’t get in the way of you checking out the phone.   The iPhones were held down with a small, silver sticker thingy on the back.  All the phones in the T-Mobile store had the old stand-type security devices, meaning that if you want to hold it, you have a 1.5″ pipe sticking out the back of the phone.  Not exactly the best way to see if it’s the right size for your hand.  I wasn’t serious enough in my designs to ask a clerk if I could hold one without a security thingy on it.  It still seemed large.  The other thing about this security device thing was that it made it seriously hard to find the hold / on button on the phone.  It’s on the side, in a not so bad place actually because you could activate it with one hand and still be able to swipe your pattern in, but it was almost covered by the security thingy.

Enough complaining about the phone display quality. The Vibrant itself was quite snappy.   Faster than my G1 by far, and the screen was bigger, but it doesn’t seem to be the same increase in resolution as size.  I browsed to some of the same sites on the Android browser and did the multitouch zoom to the same curve as the iPhone 4, and it looked just as curvy as I had seen just minutes prior.  The Vibrant display was more… well.. vibrant as well, it seemed like the colors were brighter and the backlight a bit brighter.  It wasn’t any easier to read, mind you, just brighter.  I’d probably turn it down in real life to save battery.   It looked a lot like an iPhone 3, with a curved back and a nice big screen covering everything.  It’s a good style, and I like it possibly more than the iPhone 4′s solid lines and such because it makes it easier to cup it in the hand.   There was one big turnoff for me about the Vibrant though, and it was the useless tinkering that Samsung did with the launcher / home screen thing.  It wasn’t overbearing or anything but it was obviously different.   The most jarring was the browser, which had a new “home screen” which I wasn’t pleased with, and the browser was renamed “Web” which I have nitpicks about.  Anyway it was a good phone, but it was also above $100 (there’s a deal for $150 that I know about) and I wasn’t ready to drop that kind of cash for what amounted to an upgrade.

That’s the deal with these phones now.  The jump for me from a Nokia brick phone in 2002, to a flip phone in 2004, to a cameraphone in 2006 were just small steps in cell phones for me.  Each phone had just a small difference that was completely approachable compared to the previous one.  This one is easier to carry.  This one has a camera.  This one is thinner.   They were all basically the same device though, a phone.    The switch from a cameraphone to the G1 was such a change in how I conduct daily life it isn’t even comparable.  It was a revolutionary change in my computing style.  I carry a single device that handles my email, music, reading, todo lists, and on-the-go browsing.   It’s a small computer, and that’s the problem with the new phones I was looking at.  It’s just an upgrade from what I have already.   Switching to an iPhone 4 now is not going to change my life again, even if it has a screen with 300 dpi.   Switching to a Vibrant now isn’t going to change my life again, even if it is two times as fast.  Those changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary.  An upgrade is much less appealing.

Eventually my G1 will stop being upgradeable.  (I’m currently running the 2.2 software on it, and it’s pretty snappy)  Or maybe I’ll drop it and it will actually be broken one of these days.  Then I’ll buy a new phone.  Until then, I’ll continue having a great experience with a truly revolutionary phone, at least for me.

Cullect was very focused around sharing your list.  It had a number of options for sharing to services like twitter, del.icio.us, facebook, whatever you could think of.  That is fine for sharing individual items, but the real gain would come from sharing a whole list.  You see the importance rank can work for you: it will make the best items from all time come to the top.  In this way, you put Cullect to work as a curation tool, hiding things that are irrelevant, and recommending items that you would like more of.  As a bonus, you can have multiple people who are curating a list, recommending and hiding items as they see fit.

Now we get to the skitzophrenia though, because a list couldn’t serve two purposes at once.  If you have a reading list, you would hide items as soon as you had read them, because you’ve already seen the information.  Even if it’s the most important item tomorrow, you won’t want to read it again.  If you’re curating a list however, you never want to hide the most important items, making it a pain to skip past the ones that you’ve read every time.  Even on the most active topics, the most important items are static for hours or days.   If I’m curating a list, I always switch to the latest feed, so that I can look at the newest items and bump them up by recommending them if they are good.  Multiple curators make this an issue though, because my fellow curators may hide items that I could recommend.

You have two tools: a great reader that you can just sit down at and read for 10 minutes and know you’re reading new, interesting, “important” things, and a excellent tool for showing the best content in a particular area.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too though, which might be a feature that could push it over the top.   You can fix this by splitting the “read” and “hidden” flags in the database, so that curators can choose between the “important and not read” view and the “important all time” view.  You might even extend the concept to allow a user to decide how to time-limit the importance view.  This type of time-limiting is a powerful tool – you could build feeds that only show a single item from each day (or week.. or month), just the one that is most important.

This “concept problem” has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, but it’s still not fully formed for some weird reason.  It could indicate that I’m just not seeing the forest for the trees, or that I’m getting a little too hazy on the problem because there is so much which was done right with Cullect.

Next, I’ll talk about a feature that I’ve been wanting for a while in any reader, that seems like a slam dunk for Cullect.

The first of these features, and the one which was most visible and that I want the most, was the way that it made reading a lot of feeds a trivial task.  This was because it included a recommendation system that would rank the stories that you hadn’t hidden (which is somewhat, but not exactly analagous to “read”, a topic I’ll take on in a later post).   It used the fact that you liked some feeds better than others to put those at the top.  I don’t know the whole algorithm, but there was a hidden social aspect as well – if some other people “recommended” the story, then it would get more importance.   This was brilliant, because you could spend ANY amount of time looking through your feeds, sorted by importance, and be sure that you weren’t missing the big story of the day.   When you got bored with the stories, you would just leave, knowing that you wouldn’t be missing anything that was more important.

Some other aggregators would like you to think that they have something similar, sorting by something like times recommended, or amount of comments, or votes, but they are not the same.  Importance score was tailored to each post, and to each Cullection (a set of feeds).   This made it personalized to you, and presented the things that YOU wanted the most.   Unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons Cullect ended up shutting down was because recalculating all of the importance scores was very CPU consuming, and it was taking too many resources.

Since the takedown of Cullect, I’ve been using Google reader as a passable replacement.  Recently (as in, like the last year?) they added a bunch of new features, including “liking” a story, sharing stories with friends (another thing which Cullect excelled at), and “Sort by magic”.  It’s not exactly the same as sorting by Importance I am sure, but it is the most likely the closest thing out there.   It seems to have a little more in common with the “popularity” indices that other aggregators are using, but I was happy to see something at lease somewhat similar show up in the reader that I ended up using as a replacement.    Still, I hope that Cullect can come back in some form in the future, as it was hands down the best reader that I had ever used.  That’s not to say that there weren’t problems with the site, though.  I’ll cover some of it’s disconnects in part 2.

Garrick is still making cool new properties.  I’m using kernest on this site to get fonts that I like out to every modern browser with little effort.

Because I love the iPad, it’s such a great piece of tech.   I can even buy into the “new world” of non-multitasking (noone really multitasks anyway) and non-filesystem world.  I can see building apps for it, but I don’t want to work in the closed system which is the Apple universe, where everything is gatekeepered by a process which has been opaque at best.  It’s all of the arguments against the iPhone’s development model, except on a larger scale.  There were companies who wanted to develop software for the iPhone that were niche apps – things like warehouse inventory systems.  The iPad is larger, it’s about the perfect size to walk around with and read stuff off of.  10 hours of battery life means it lasts through the whole workday.

Of course, there is a back door into most of the new apps – the web browser.  The best part of this may be that you can use it perfectly as a portal to a web app that can build you anything you need. Apple may be getting what they wanted at the start for the iPhone with the iPad.  We all remember the few months before there was an SDK when the party line was that you could do everything with web apps?  It’s much more likely with a nine inch screen and a blazing fast browsing experience.  Web apps are also the end-around of all the restrictions that Apple places on their “approved” apps.  You want a picture of an iPhone in there?  It’s just a GIF.  Want to put some “adult” content in?  HTML5 video to the rescue!  The only thing you can’t do is background processing, but you can’t even do that with real apps.  There’s no API bugs to work around.  It’s not exactly the same as a real app for low-latency things like gaming.

At any rate, I’m still going to develop web apps, and I think that the iPad will be the kick in the pants that the industry needs to make a decent tablet.  Android phones are getting better, and accelerating, in large part because the iPhone changed the smartphone ecology forever.  If the iPad does the same to the tablet market, it will be a very exciting future.

@cullect seems to be having issues again #

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@cullect seems to be having issues again #

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