Bob Schwartz

October 18, 2012

Android: Eat Dessert Last

 


On October 29, Google will introduce a new mobile device based on Key Lime Pie, the latest and likely sweetest version of the Android operating system.

This is great news for some. But for many Android users, who are looking for a little more sugar, it is somewhat strange.

The strangeness is that a number of high-end and upgradable devices sold just within the past year are still waiting for the last two Android upgrades. Some running on Gingerbread have been waiting for much of this year for Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0). Ice Cream Sandwich devices have been waiting months for Jelly Bean (4.2). Before all that happens for many devices, Key Lime Pie (4.3) will be a delicious reality—for some, but hardly for all.

The cause of the backlog is what has come to be called Android fragmentation (there’s no cute dessert way of saying that). As an open OS, Android is adopted and overlaid by each device maker for selected devices, and the various providers also get involved in the Android experience for each device they choose to carry.

This three-way would be complicated enough if Android were a static OS. But Android won’t stand still—those robot legs may be stubby, but they sure can move. Android is less than five years old, a relatively low-maturity but quickly-developing OS. The striving of the developers is admirable, and they are in the process of evolving Android from good to very good to great.

But every upgrade demands that Android, the device makers and the providers essentially go back to square one, determining which devices are suitable, testing and tweaking so that users will have a positive experience that reflects well on all involved.

That’s the ideal. The reality is that Android and the other players hype the improvements, but then are forced by dreaded fragmentation, and whatever other interests are involved, to make users wait.

It’s not that a piece of Gingerbread isn’t sweet and satisfying; it’s actually a pretty solid OS. And for the luckier ones, they’ve been happy with an Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s just that standing in front of the Mobile Sweet Shoppe, nose pressed to the glass, it’s tough to watch the customers inside scooping out all those colorful Jelly Beans. And now, insult to injury, the shop is passing around slices of Key Lime Pie. Not even lemon meringue, for goodness sake, but Key Lime!

We know, or hope, that dessert is really on the way. It’s just a little frustrating watching someone else eat it.

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October 18, 2012

I Read Newsweek Today, Oh Boy

 


If we hold a wake for each print publication that dies or goes digital-only, we’d be drinking all the time (which is not a bad response). Newsweek today announced, in spite of recent protestations, that it was indeed ending publication of its print edition this year.

Volumes have been written about this phenomenon, and more will be on the way. You can read them on your computer, e-reader, or mobile device. In the meantime, an observation.

Print media are in fundamental ways different than their digital counterparts as tools. Not better or worse, just different. This is not the conceit of old-school anachronists who defy the new guard to take the paper magazines or books from their (sooner than later) cold, dead hands. To understand how that could be so, read the increasingly unread Marshall McLuhan. The message of the medium is the message is that each medium is particular in granular ways (not sure if McLuhan would have loved, hated, or wished he had coined that buzzword). Those ways are not just meaningful, they are some of the most important meaning. If you can’t make a long list of conceptual, non-practical ways that identical content is deeply different in paper and digital form, you aren’t thinking hard enough, and you haven’t read McLuhan.

Suffice it to say that in ways that matter, the Newsweek that doesn’t require electrons is different than the one that does, even if the content is the same.

After saying all those important and noble things, a small confession of complicity. There was a time when a mailbox full of top-tier magazines was both a sign and a source of erudition. Many news junkies got their start when their parents subscribed to the newsweeklies—one, two or, if you were lucky, all three. Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report every week, highly anticipated and absorbed cover to cover once they arrived.

The arrival of paper magazines is still a thrill. But one by one, the subscriptions were allowed to dwindle. It wasn’t just access to free and instantaneous alternatives; as far as expense, many print magazines priced themselves ridiculously low. It was like a relationship that lapses and fades, even if you know you might well be better off in keeping it alive. It was just the times, the way of the world.

Maybe Newsweek and other print editions would have lasted if subscribers had been willing to make an effort and work on the relationship. But they didn’t. We may look back and see these print magazines as the ones that got away, but we shouldn’t have let them. Just because it’s the way of the world doesn’t mean it’s for the best.

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