Please someone give me a single reason why you fools all want to degrade your already crappy camera phone picture quality with unnecessary filters and color effects. How did this become a thing? What need or want did this fill? Why is some shitty app such a big deal? This isn’t so much a post or a rant, but a serious although antagonistic question to gain an understanding of the lesser minds of the smartphone universe. I know this may be a difficult request for all you instagrammers out there to formulate complete sentences and actually explain the thought process you clearly didn’t have to arrive at your photo butchery, but for my sake and my ability to actually figure out what I am clearly missing, do try.

Stop telling me that loud music damages my ears every few days. Did you ever consider that I hate my ears and they deserve to be sonically abused and bled to death from punishing metal blast and unstoppable breakdowns? You are not my nanny, my mom, my otolaryngologist, or my neglected conscience. You are my phone and my chosen instrument of auditory destruction. Obey my ear drum destroying commands and bring on the metal! Do any other phones do this? Does it piss you off when companies tell you dumb shit you already know? Sound off below regardless of the fact that I can’t hear you due to loud music or hearing loss. Pick one.

Simply by using the term “Post-PC” you are inherently perceived as this guy.

So this term “Post-PC era” has been thrown around a lot recently and I don’t think it has any merit. It was something some blogger randomly pulled from the deep recesses of his Microsoft hating ass in a frantic moment to remain relevant in a world drowning in blogs and people who will write for free.  The problem is, no one ever defined or described a PC era.  If we want to do this arbitrarily, which most periodization is, we could say that it started with Windows, but that would be to impose our understanding of the PC onto an older generation of technology.  To go ahead and shed some collective perspective on you, the wonderful readership, I share this.  Now with this understanding of the PC, it doesn’t just fall to Mac OS versus IBM-compatible or even windows, unless you believe the Apple brand computer falls under the original sales price being too high to be useful for the individual for which I couldn’t really blame you.  Either way, armed with this knowledge and understanding of this definition I seek to lay down a new periodization paradigm on you excellently intelligent folks.  I want to promote the idea of the “Mobile-PC Era”.

If you actually read the definition in my link earlier you have a better understanding of my argument.  A personal computer is just a device that is feasibly owned by the average consumer and does not require remote server support to operate.  By this definition tablets, smartphones, laptops, and some wristwatches fall under the category of the PC.  Now traditionally these devices, once only immobile desktop type products, began to be mobile in the age of laptops.  As processor technology and solid state memory devices advanced we were suddenly able to take these products on the go with us everywhere.  Does this sudden change in the geolocation of your Personal Computer or PC make this product suddenly fall outside the category of PC?  I don’t think so.  Apple computers are PCs too. No matter how much you argue, with nothing but marketing to back up said argument, you will still be wrong and your Apple computer will still be nothing more than an overpriced, underspec’d PC.  Either way the only fundamental change that has occurred on the PC market has been miniturization and mobilization of the personal computer.

To this end, I endorse the term “Mobile-PC Era” despite what the uninformed blogosphere will have you believing.  Buzz words get popular because of what they imply and not necessarily their inherent accuracy.  So please, for my sake and the respect of your peers, the next time someone uses the term “Post-PC” punch them square in the throat so hard their grandchildren will struggle to breathe for the first few months of life, and use the time they are gasping desperately for air to explain to them exactly why they are a douche bag and are undeserving of the right to speak in public without proper nomenclature.  This has been a public service announcement by Mobility Digest and Me on not being a complete idiot when talking in public about technology.  Thank you for improving your intellect to acceptable standards and good day.

For those of you that don’t know what Reddit is, please acquaint yourself with the front page of the internet before we can continue.  If you managed to make it back after checking out that link, then I’m impressed.  Reddit is basically a place anyone can post links or media to a web page.  You can view these links and either vote up or down on them.  Links rise or fall on the web page based on these votes.  The exact same thing occurs with comments on these links or media.  Just about everything funny or interesting on the internet starts out by getting popular on Reddit.  So I’ve been looking for a way to get my fix on the go.  I’ve been using one of the first Reddit apps that came out on Windows Phone, called Alien News.  The app was great at first and I even paid for it to remove the ads and possibly support development.  Sadly, not a single shit was given and my Reddit app was lost and left behind in lack of mango functionality.  So it eventually sent me on the search for greener pastures.  Enter Baconit.

Where Alien News was bland and just text based, Baconit takes it that one step further to make it truly embody the design values of Metro.  It brings lots of functionality into a small window and allows you quick access to many of the most used features on Reddit, like upvoting and downvoting, that wasn’t present in Alien News.  It also offers the slickness of minor animations to let you know things have been activated, which is better than the barely perceptible click animation that is in most applications.  Coupled with this slick beautiful sexiness is loads of functionality that would make a snap-on convention look useless.  The cooked in mango-ness also allows you to share articles and other stories with friends through sms, email, social networks, or whatever your flavor of electronic communication may be without having to reload the damn app every time.  Talking about how awesome this app is feels like I’m taking away from the content and awesome that Reddit can bring to your life.  Go out there and become a good Redditor.  It will definitely enhance your life in every way possible, or your money back.  By the way, it’s free.

Video games pretty much kick every variety of ass available.  This is just a fact.  The best video games do far more than put the boot to proverbial butt.  They will eat away those tiny minutes of your day you feel like don’t matter until they bleed together into a four to six hour a day habit you can’t seem to kick.  This is one of those games.  Maybe not for everyone, but this game is currently the monkey on my back and I’m loving every second.

So what you’ve got here is a classic RPG game in the vein of your original Final Fantasy and other 80′s and 90′s games.  Throw together a band of 4 adventurer’s from 7 different classes and you’ve got a recipe for awesome.  You’ve got Cleric, Sorcerer, Paladin, Juggernaut (Bitch!) Theif, Archer, and Warrior.  You can make up any combination of these you would like, even picking two or three of the same character class.  As you play through, each of these characters have special abilities and variations in stats and their advancements from each level.  This gives you a lot of variety in how you approach combat based on your team building skills.  I roll around stomping epic amounts of various monster ass with a Paladin, a thief, an archer, and a sorcerer.  There are other good sets but this is just what I prefer.  Each character class has their own armor and weapons, although some are shared depending on the item, so not only are you upgrading by leveling, but equipment grants ability bonuses too.  Of course you have the traditional array of skill sets: Strength (damage done), Speed (how many attacks and who goes first), Vitality (how many hit points), Focus (how strong magic is) and Spirit (how much mana you have to cast spells).  There are items galore from scrolls (to cast spells once) spell books (to learn spells) potions of various kinds, pieces of the creatures you’ve killed which you bring to this one weird person in every town that collects random animal parts and gives you gold and xp.  On to gameplay.

This is a turn based adventure game, so you can pretty much still play it when you’re black out drunk.  A big win for me and a good portion of our staff.  It also enters a bit of strategy in selecting who to attack with what character.  You align your team into an order.  People at the top get attacked more frequently.  Characters with higher speed go before slower characters.  You select one person to target with an attack, spell or ability.  If the person you’ve attacked dies and you have attacks remaining, they fall automatically on the first enemy available.  This could mean spreading a little of damage out across lots (up to 8) of attackers, or taking out two or three of them, so they don’t get attacks on you next round.  You have to input all your character commands at the beginning of the round also.  This means estimating how much damage each character can dish out a round to maximize whatever strategy you’re using.  It can be the difference between taking out every opponent in one round and taking over three times more damage due to a small misjudgment.  I’ve been playing for more than two months now and I’m still not finished with the main story line.  The map is huge and you have random encounters as you’re exploring the terrain.  You have different kinds of terrain, which doesn’t effect combat but does vary things visually, keeping things fresh.  Even after you finish the main quest, there is a dungeon in one of the towns that changes to something completely random every time you enter and it also levels with your characters, giving this game nearly limitless replay.

If I give you guys any more information on this game, it’s going to turn into a strategy guide, so I’m going to leave it with this and tell you this game makes even bee’s knees feel jealous of its incredible awesomeness.  The game gets regular updates from the developer so you should be seeing more improvements, new areas and items, new character types, and other awesomeness that can not be conceived of.  Give it a shot.  It’s free, but there is also a paid version without ads at 6.99$.  I gave the man some money, not because the ads were intrusive, but because this guy deserves some serious dough for bringing such an incredible title to Windows Phone.  Get the app here.

Forbes put out this article yesterday, shedding some light on the subsidized cost of software licensing a Windows Phone.  Keep in mind, Microsoft is charging about 20-30$ per phone so this comes in at a whopping 200$.  Now this isn’t an exact science because this obviously can’t include support, marketing, or manufacturing costs of these devices but that means you’re looking at making about 200$ per handset to get into making a Windows Phone.  You still have actual device cost but most manufacturers are getting that down to around 2-300$ in pure hardware.  This means you’re breaking even or seeing very good profits for what phones are sold (regardless of how few), due to this cash out.  Is there any way that this is a smart business model?

Microsoft has a great product.  They just need to get mind and marketshare.  Even our resident kool-aid drinker came away with a review that sounded like he was thinking of cheating on his second love.  But a great product is never enough to make total success.  Especially when your consumer image is about as clean as the stage at a Vegas strip club.  So in order to overcome this Microsoft is dipping into that 50 billion dollar cash reserve fund to get this stuff to market.  This will probably look like an investment blood bath, but Microsoft is facing a really different challenge than what Android had to overcome.

When Android was releasing it was the second modern smartphone (as I define them based on capacitive touch, and not a blackberry storm for obvious reasons,) operating system out there.  They were in a field with themselves and Apple.  Every handset maker, to compete with the new mobile world wonder that was the iPhone, only had the option to grab onto Android.  Even in those days there was not much hope for Windows Mobile, regardless of its vastly superior functionality when compared to iPhones and Android handsets.  This new generation proved form over function (a lesson that many current Android manufacturer’s have forgotten but that’s another article.)  These handset makers poured all their own resources into this manufacturing and marketing because they had no other streams of revenue.  Microsoft is not blessed with this conundrum, coming into the market after Android had already been a boon for most of their hardware partners.  HTC was dropping phones on the market just as bad as Microsoft had been dropping the ball.  So now, with a third way for these handset partners that Microsoft had taken for granted, they have to spend a little cash to get it out there, and that’s exactly the task for this fiscal year at Microsoft and its primary handset partner, Nokia.

Will this be enough to get Microsoft out of the hole, and back into the minds of consumers?  Will it at least start to merge the successes of Windows 7/8, Xbox, and Windows Phone to change consumer’s perceptions of Microsoft as bland and boring?  And does anyone else think that Ballmer should smile more, because he just looks creepy as shit when he doesn’t?

I’ve been watching the yearly Consumer Electronics Show (CES) since I was in middle school.  I remember getting incredible pumped and excited about seeing tons of new technology and prototypes that would be on the cutting edge of every field and every type of electronic device I could imagine, and many that I never could, springing to life before everyone else’s eyes and my computer screen.  However, it seems as the years have progressed from the Playstation and milk with school lunches, to beer between classes and whatever the hell that thing Nintendo is supposed to be releasing next year, I have become jaded to this whole technological spattering of prototype tech.  I think it is also highly possible that CES this year just sort of sucked.

So let’s examine the “me being jaded” angle first.  I work at Best Buy and I see new gadgets coming out all the time.  The usual plethora of goods shown off at CES don’t make their way to the big box retailers for a year or two, depending on the prototypedness of the device being shown, but what I’ve seen out of this years CES show has been nothing impressive or all too different from the current selection of goods and services out there right now.  We saw a slew of new tablet manufacturers, woo-freaking-hoo, cramming the same Mobile OS’s into slightly bigger screens with mostly lackluster results.  We saw Android crammed into a rear view mirror with basically no practical uses so far.  To me, CES almost seemed like a giant promo shot for every device that was shown, saying “Wait until the smaller and more targeted trade shows before you can see anything cool.”

For me, this is not a problem.  I’ve been way more impressed with the technology brought to bear in shows like the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, in the past few years anyway.  I believe this is indicative of a major shift from a giant and singular electronics show, where devices can be lost in the sea of booths and swaths of enormous PR events from heavy industry giants like Microsoft and previously, though not this year or probably any time soon, Sony.  There are major shifts away from this singular event to more targeted trade shows like MWC, E3, or Photo Marketing Association (PMA).  Here these devices can differentiate themselves more from similar products on display at these shows.  Along with the draw these more directed shows have for smaller manufacturer’s the larger companies are also starting to bail out too.  Apple pulled out of CES several years ago and now CES big kick off company, Microsoft, is also ditching the trade show to focus on these more directed shows.

Now I am very excited about this years MWC.  It hasn’t disappointed since I’ve been following.  CES has had a slow slippery slide into lameness in the past three or four years.  E3 has even failed to ignite my interest despite being an avid video game player, but I’m guessing this is merely do to my desensitization and anticipation from Skyrim, but this year will reveal the truth.  So am I the only one that got absolutely no excitement from CES this year?  Do you think CES is becoming less relevant in the face of the growing number of specialized trade shows?  Let us know in the comments.

I don’t know why, or even when I realized it, but I can’t stand voice controls.  In part because of its inherent limitations and also because it just doesn’t work very well for me.  Some people complain about voice controls not understanding colloquial accents and I, hailing from southeastern North Carolina, can totally understand how dialects can confuse the hell out of any OS but the thing is I have an extremely neutral tone.  I have no southern twang in my speech and no discernible regional accent to speak of.  I have been told that I mumble occasionally but I always feel like unless the microphone is situated directly against my vocal chords inside my throat that it’s about as useful as a sandbox in the Sahara.  Before you get into the whole “Windows Phone voice controls just suck,” argument let me cut you off and slap you with the fact that it isn’t just Windows Phone.  I’ve used voice controls on almost all platforms from Android and even old-school WinMo days, all the way through IOS and Siri.  Screw them all.  Local processing or server side doesn’t seem to help.  The only thing that gets me any closer to proper results is changing my voice to sound like Microsoft Sam, which doesn’t appear awkward or anything when I’m trying to illustrate voice commands to customers.  This isn’t my only gripe with voice commands though.  There is a small functional problem with the implementation of every voice control I’ve seen on a mobile device.

Why in the hell do you have to press a button to start voice commands?  This seems like a massive flaw.  When you market voice commands as the “Use the phone without having to press buttons” sort of thing it just doesn’t make any sense.  Then you have commercials of blind people using Siri to somehow manage a phone that has a grand total of two physical buttons?!? Yeah, no.  Recently there was an article that explained how Siri was Apple’s broken promise to their customers.  I don’t think it matters who it is that’s implementing these voice command solutions, as it never pans out as expected.

Does anyone else out there hate voice commands like I do?  I’m interested because maybe, to voice command, I do sound like I have “Diabeetus”.  But I’m wondering if anyone else does too.  Should there be a command word to make the phone start listening for voice commands like most devices (GPS, PC’s, etc.) have to avoid the use of buttons entirely?  Is Wilford Brimley still funny?  I think the resounding answer to all of these questions is yes.  

Handset manufacturers have a great deal to do with your mobile communications experience, especially on Android handsets where these guys are essentially designing your included UI.  We’ve seen a great deal of different handset manufacturers enter the fray but there are a few that stick out as primaries in the growing age of smartphones, while others are becoming less and less relevant.  I’m going to lay out how I see the hardware market changing in the past two to three years and see what you guys think of my evaluations.

I’m going to do this by individual manufacturer and I’ll start with my own.  HTC has been one of the major players in smartphone manufacturing from the beginnings of all current platforms and even some defunct OS’s as well.  They have always had a solid formula that combines solid and reliable hardware with mediocre cameras and excellent GPS locking.  Some have argued against HTC’s battery life which isn’t amazing however I haven’t had the same experience myself.  They have never been known for drastic variations on style and hardware except for the inclusion of keyboards, tilting screens and the occasional stereo speaker setup (i.e. the Surround) and don’t stray far from this formula.  HTC used to have the best screens in the business, but has fallen behind in the wake of AMOLED technology, thanks in part to Samsung.

Samsung is a mixed batch.  They have great potential and a lot of underlying technological benefits.  Specifically they own a pretty wide swath of AMOLED manufacturing which has pretty much locked most handset manufacturers out of using this tech, because of Sammies booming handset business.  The success of their Galaxy S line have their lines pumping out screens like copyright infringement lawsuits.  Samsung has taken the Iphone approach and limits their hardware variation more than anyone else I’ve seen.  They bank on the success of one hardware model which makes the margins higher and the prices cheaper.  Not a bad method in the grand scheme of things.  Samsung’s major problem is fixing issues that arise after the handsets are actually manufactured.  GPS issues have plagued a number of handsets, including the Captivate; AT&T’s first solid Android offering that was marred by these issues.  Samsung isn’t the most transparent company when talking about hardware fixes or OS updates which is very frustrating for the end user.  However, if Samsung can manage to produce a handset without any serious faults that need attention, like the Galaxy line, then they can be among the best smartphones one can own.

This leads me to the last of what I see as the major handset manufacturers; Motorola.  Now in Google’s pocket, Motorola has had a wild history of ups and downs as a handset maker.  The success of their Razr line, in the pre-smartphone world helped fill their coffers and keep them chugging along while they weren’t really doing dick else until Android hit Verizon.  Motorola subsequently released a marketing onslaught on everyone’s face and confused the hell out of the general public with their model names and OS choices.  Droid, Android, whatever.  These terms are essentially lost on the general public and is cause of much confusion with these devices.  Motorola has a track record that includes good design materials, good battery life (for an Android set), and a host of accessories that truly encompass and eclipse ass kickery in every form.  The utility of their home and car docks have impressed me from their first Droid handset.  Since then they have also diverged and have a great range of hardware options and offerings including screen size and hardware keyboards.  With all they are doing properly they have still managed to suck like a rent short prostitute, holding a dyson vacuum, being pulled into a quasar on their handset reliability.  Random restarts, force closes, and Motoblur which is essentially a UI abortion poster child, have marred their other successes entirely.  As of now I see Motorola existing on the strength of their marketing campaign and consumer identification with the term Droid.

Other companies have faded into obscurity and shame like LG, Kyocera, Pantech, and others who have played an integral part in the phone market at some point or another.  On our current horizon of smartphone domination, I don’t see a way for many of these manufacturers to break back into the market without drastic and dire changes in the market or these companies innovations.  Another company that many of you have been holding onto and were just waiting for this article to be over so you can say “BUT YOU FORGOT NOKIA!!!”.  No I didn’t.  They fall under the same shame and obscurity as LG and Pantech.  Oh but they make more phones than anyone in the world, blah, blah blah, partnership with Microsoft.  It all doesn’t really matter.  If tomorrow the automobile maker Geo, yes maker of such fine motor transport as the Metro and the Tracker, suddenly released some press saying that they’ve teamed up with Aston-Martin, Maserati, and Mercedes-Benz to release a new line of luxury vehicles it wouldn’t be relevant at all.  You can put as much lipstick and lights around a big steaming pile of shit, but it just makes it a weird looking, irritating, and epileptic seizure inducing shit pile.  Not something worth having.  Will they make a good handset?  They might.  Will most people care?  Not really.  They’re going to be getting another HTC or another Samsung windows phone.  That is about all there is to it.  They don’t even offer anything compelling as at least the Dell Venue Pro did.  It was the only handset with its hardware feature set and they made decent inroads into being a viable handset manufacturer.  Nokia has no standout hardware when compared against the backdrop of other quality Windows Phone handsets or whatever OS they decide to cram into their phones.  And I also didn’t talk about Apple because seriously, who cares?

So who is going to be making your next mobile handset?  Is it amongst these major manufacturers, or are you delving into obscurity because of some random feature or promise of awesome?  Is it because one of these other handset makers took a giant crap on your life when you needed or wanted something simple like an OS update or a GPS that wasn’t too busy sucking to tell you where you are currently located?  Let us know in the comments below.

Sitting around with a proverbial thumb up your ass instead of mangoes?  Yeah, I was too.  This gradual roll out business can be bypassed using a little bit of force.  If you haven’t received your OTA update notification then all you need to do, assuming your phone is actually in an update roll-out (so if you have a DVP or something similar this doesn’t work), then cram your USB cable into the respective slots on your phone and PC and it should fire up Zune as usual.  From here hit up your settings menu in the top right.  Once you’re in settings you’ll see a category for phone up top.  Click that.  This will go to another settings menu and should have an update category on the left hand side.  Click that and then you’ll see a button that says check for updates.  Mash that bitch and hold on for your dose of awesome, which consequently can take like an hour or two depending on how much data you have already on your phone.