Gadgetory

hey guys its Jill with pocketnow.com we all like new stuff right new stuff is cool but new stuff turns into old stuff and old stuff well just isn't that cool until it gets really old and then it becomes retro and then for some reason it's cool again don't worry we're not going to talk about that instead what we're going to talk about is what happens when something is so new it's got its own set of problems and you find yourself with the curse of the early adopter and it's contagious but don't worry you're not alone there may be a cure that's what we're going to talk about in today's edition of the android guy weekly so over here at pocketnow.com we get to play with a lot of new stuff a lot of new stuff and we go through we try it we evaluate it we have our hands on it for some times as much as two weeks I know that doesn't sound like a lot but there's so much new stuff coming out we got to get through it really fast and usually the people who send it to us kind of want it back no guys we don't get to keep this stuff which kind of makes some of our reviews a little bit biased now we don't intend for them to be biased we go to great lengths to try them out and put ourselves in your shoes and give you a fair and realistic rating for lack of a better word and our views on the experience with the device which sometimes is even more expressive than just the raw numbers that you see in the reviews themselves but it's not fair now what do I mean I don't mean it's not fair that we get to play with cool stuff what I mean is we're not investing our money like you are to go out and buy this stuff on a whim you're doing your research in all honesty that's one of the main reasons you're here and thank you for being here by the way but you're doing your research before you invest your money to see if this particular product or that particular product is the best place for you to invest that money notice I'm not just saying spending saying investing because you're going to have this device well then that's a smartphone or a tablet or a Google TV or whatever the case may be for hopefully at least a year if you're on a contract that might even be two years before you get another one so it's got to be a good investment you're putting a lot of time and effort into it and before you're expending your own cash you're thoroughly vetting that product I'll let pocket now sometimes these products are just given to us for a week or two we play with them we evaluate them we try and give you our session of them and then we send them back but it didn't take any money out of our pocket but it did what I'm trying to say there is pocket now is unlike a lot of the other websites that I've been to a lot of these sites do nothing but evaluations of products that are sent to them maybe they do more than that but it seems that way we'll give them the benefit of the doubt pocketnow is a little bit different when one of us reviewers sees a device that we really really want chances are we're going to go out and get it we're going to spend our own money on it and we're going to risk that and it's going to come into what we call our daily driver something that we have on our hip or in our pocket all the time and we used our own personal money to buy this that's how it worked with my galaxy nexus i had that thing imported from overseas before I'd even held one in my hand my own money because well I'm an early adopter so what's this curse that I've been alluding to perfect example the Nexus Q you guys know what I'm talking about right it's the big black ball thing really really heavy plugs into your TV in your stereo and that's about it google announced it at google io 2012 and they just kind of brushed over it saying hey this is really cool looking player media on your big screen TV and it's really high end and oh by the way we made all this stuff in the united states of america because we could because we think that people might want that so it's kind of an experiment in that and you should buy it we're not going to be able to ship them for a month but if you want to preorder it you can go and do it now and of course all of us went whoa I don't even know what this thing is but it's round and it's made in America and it's google and it it does something and I want it so some of us put down money and a lot of money at that for a big ball of who knows what it does a couple hundred bucks that ain't cheap 260 was it well what was it and what does it do nobody really knew we knew it kind of played movies and music and stuff we knew that you could control it with your Galaxy you know whatever with NFC and it was cool because you had party mode and you should get it because it's cool we didn't know what it did and that was a problem and when people started getting this device to review it well it turned out that people started saying yeah this doesn't do much it'll play your youtube videos and your play music not play music but your music from play music I don't know why Google aimed at that but they did and play movies from play movies same thing I don't know why they named it that way don't blame me i'm just the android guy anyway you can play any one of those three it was great but all of your content had to be Google you had to own it on you know you play music you had to own it on play movies or rent it as the case may be or YouTube because you know everything's on YouTube anyway right except all that paid stuff which isn't so that was all it did no netflix no pandora no this was not some kind of a funky google TV thing no it was just those three things and that was it there was really no user interface to it at all it just played and that was all and a lot of people just like yourselves went I don't know if 250 260 bucks is you know something i'm going to pay for a ball that lets me watch you tube and that's it so google said oh crap and they said we're going to go back to the drawing board and do what you guys really want now what do we really want I don't know maybe make it into google TV and a ball something like that or maybe a tablet in a ball whether the screen is your big screen I don't know they'll do something with it but in the meantime they said hey all you guys who put money down on it we're going to go ahead and send it to you for free and it's great and I have one downstairs and I've used it twice and that's it so another example 3d now in the world we live in it's 4d I know most people don't include time as a fourth dimension but it is they told me that in physics class in college and I got a diploma and it said so I think and we talked about quantum physics and they said that everything we learned in physics was wrong so I might have just lied to you but that would be a space-time paradox and we're not going to get into that because that always messes up movies but anyway back to 3d and movies it's a good tie-in what about 3d was cool well 3d movies have been around forever they've come into and out of vogue quite frequently and there's one thing that you can always count on with 3d movies when they come into vogue they're going to go back out a vogue again soon I think I used vogue there more times in that last ten seconds and i have my entire life vogue but three this time looked like it was around to stay because hey it was digital and they were making stuff well in 3d with these cool stereoscopic cameras stereoscopic is a cool word means 3d but they were doing these cool high-end big-budget movies and honestly some of them were amazing and suffer more crap I'm not going to mention any names spy kids but excuse me there some of them were crap and they were made just because they could be made and because they could sell a premium or charge a premium for their tickets however hey this 3d trend this craze it's here to stay so let's put it in TVs and now let's make it so you don't even have to wear those funky glasses to be able to watch it in 3d you can just look at the screen into it hey you know what has screens smart phones you know what we could do we could put a 3d screen on a smart phone wouldn't that be cool Oh that'll be so cool you know what we could do we could put one of them funky stereoscopic cameras on the back of it you could take 3d pictures you can take 3d movies everyone knows what you're going to be using for 3d pictures and movies yeah the flowers in my front yard because it looks so pretty in 3d don't they everybody loves the flowers in my front yard in 3d the screens were crap they were really real well resolution I mean you guys complain over pentile displays I don't know maybe I just don't see it but I have to trust you if you think pentaiah looks crappy it doesn't to me but if it does to you don't get it get you know something else but 3d screens super crappy super super crappy even though you could see 3d stuff and not everything was in 3d the operating system wasn't in 3d some of the launchers had 3d bits in them but unless you're watching a 3d movie weren't gonna do it but hey YouTube YouTube has 3d movies you can upload a 3d movie to youtube so it's here to stay right nope it's gone we talked about that before I'm pocket now put a nail in its coffin it's dead if you were an early adopter of a 3d compatible phone one of the two that i can think of off the top of my head you have a nice phone and your movies take up twice as much space as they would normally and your pictures take up twice as much space as they would normally oh and you can't watch them on normal devices you have to process them and it's a pain in the neck because of the curse of the early adopter so what the Nexus Q and 3d we kind of knew what we were getting into and we went into it it was really knew there wasn't anything like it on the market and hey we wanted it just to say that we had it just to see what it did just so we could hold it in our hands and see exactly what this new technology was all about and yes we paid a premium for it except for a nexus q which we got for free but we were going to pay a premium for it okay so that's one thing how about some of the more subtleties let me give you a few examples how about paypal pay here if you heard of that or paypal here or i don't know what they ended up calling it essentially it's like square or into it where it's a little device thing that you swipe a credit card through that plugs into your headphone jack it lets you swipe a card and pay for stuff right there using your internet connection you can process money really really cool concept I was nearly adopter I signed up for the paypal pay here program and while that was a tongue twister and I said it really fast or a baby buggy bumpers but I didn't get the reader for a long time because it was a limited trial still is but eventually I got it and you know what works great and then my galaxy nexus got an update to Gingerbread and you know what I'm sorry not ginger bread jelly bean gingerbread got an update to jelly bean jelly bean is great it's super fast it's wonderful Owen by the way didn't work with the reader didn't work with the app so now I have this new app I couldn't use just when I needed to be able to use it I couldn't why because say it with me the curse of the early adopter I think they have since got that fixed another case I have a nest learning thermostat yes I really am that geeky and thank you mr. bill you know who you are for recommending that to me because wow awesome I can control the temperature in my house with my smartphone which sounds like it's stupid but really cool but it really has practical applications like hey I'm not going to be home for several hours why is my air conditioner on I can turn it off from anywhere that I have an internet connection really really cool actually what that means is when i get home my house is really really hot but my power bill is significantly lower or let's say i know i'm coming home early from vacation and I want my house not to be hot when I get back so I'll turn on my air conditioner an hour two hours before i get home so when I walk in the door nice and cool Utah's a desert it gets warm here in the summertime just saying so I've got that works great except on my tablet yep any tablet doesn't work why you can install the app just fine no problem put it on there does it installs great no warnings about compatibility fire up the app and it says yes you know sorry you can't do anything because we don't understand your resolution we're not built for it we're not going to let you turn your temperature up or down turn your heater or your air conditioner on or off because you're on a tablet sorry have a nice day I still have the app installed on my tablets hoping someday someday they'll give me an update that will let it work even if its scales even if it's just an up and down button to let me control it on my tablet because please I'm ending up using my tablet very very often sometimes I have it and my phone is in my car or on my desk or I just like to be able to do it for my tablet so that's another thing see if I've got one more how about custom roms and we'll end with this one don't worry custom roms I'm a custom rom er I like cyanogenmod a lot you guys haven't noticed that already hi welcome to the series my name is Joe the android guy this is like episode 27 now but anyway cyanogenmod my distro of choice love that thing fabulous hey you know what else is cool google wallet oh yeah paying for stuff with your phone man I can do that and every time I do it blows the mind of whoever it is that's quote-unquote taking my money as luck paid for it with my phone there's my receipt yes with my phone and then I flash a rom and Bourque my NFC secure element so I can't use it anymore because my secure elements not responding now what does that mean essentially means that Google Wallet doesn't have the key to my NFC secure element so I can't get into my wallet to use any of my stuff ever again not happy you know what the solution is I actually called up Google Wallet support just like the error message told me to their solution by a new phone this time don't rom it don't even root it don't do that it's bad you don't want to do that don't root your wallet don't root your phone so now I have to go out and buy a new six hundred fifty dollar phone just because I custom rom bit and didn't know that that meant that it was going to be thrown away the only key to the wallet thanks google frustrating yes I know I I opened myself up to that as soon as I started thrown on custom roms it was one of the risks that I took and I went into it knowing that eventually that stuff's going to happen frustrating yes unexpected yes worth it holy heck you have you tried cyanogenmod oh yeah but early adopters that's the curse so there's a few of my personal stories things that I've done do I have a cure for it share don't be an early adopter now how do you get around doing that for me I've got a terminal case of early adopter itís it's I'm never going to get rid of it it's incurable but what about you well like a pocket now you've got the android guy or hey maybe you're not even an Android person not a problem we got people who like blackberry like iOS who like Windows Phone and whatever the next thing is that's coming out because there's always some next thing we got you covered will be your early adopter will let you know is this worth it or is this not do you want to hang out and wait even though it may be super cool what risks are involved pocketnow is here to tell you no worries but now it's your turn I want to hear your stories I want to hear how early adoption has come back to bite you in the proverbial keister did it cost you money that it costs you time to cost you embarrassment let us know but please do it over at pocketnow.com in fact if you're watching this on the YouTube channel right down there I'm going to have a link right wait right there over to the article where we got this video embedded got some cool pictures on there too I think you'll like them leave your comments over there so we can all have this conversation together I'm dying to hear what you have you people who are watching the video when pocketnow.com big thumbs up for you thank you comment down below as well right down there let me know your thoughts and your experiences for pocket now the android guy weekly and early adopters everywhere i'm joe levi