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The Declining PC Sales, Follow-up

Last year I posted a couple of comments to the ongoing discussion of declining PC sales (in May and September). Since then, sales have remained unchanged low, but then again, the drivers for demand are unchanged too.

I am not surprised that the recent end of support for Windows XP hasn’t changed much. Any private users who didn’t worry before, probably doesn’t worry now either. Time will tell if there will be one big security exploit that will cause a rush.

Vacation on the EDGE

I just returned home from a week’s vacation with wife and child in a cottage in Thy on the Danish west coast. Lovely place, excellent cottage and great to be together with the family.
One thing that set this trip apart from other recent trips is that out on the moor near the sea, the connection to the wide webbed world is through EDGE network. A shake one. So no catching up on all the interesting Web stuff that I keep in Pocket for vacation reading (will Read It much Later now). No deep diving into new apps and no steamed media. Only enough bandwidth for news headlines and a couple of critical mails – everything else being a pain.

And that has been great really. So much less distraction and little things that need checking all the time. Instead full attention on being where I was and with whom; the whole experience so much more intense (in the way that eating a pre-season ice cream in a fishing town is intense).

So maybe next time I travel I should go to faraway places and hotels with no Wi-Fi, celebrating the high roaming costs. Then again, maybe not. But it has been a great vacation on shaky EDGE.

Paying my Lunch

I generally try to do “the right thing” most of the time. That includes enabling the lock screen of my phone and tablet, which is the right thing to do when you sometime leave it on the desk at work while getting coffee or happen to lose it in the train or airport (ahem…).

Using lock screen pattern is cool, but not really secure, so doing the right thing means PIN (my wife also uses the phone once in a while,so face recognition or finger print is not an option). Still, having to enter PIN every single time I use the phone at home is tough. And enabling the screen lock whenever I leave home doesn’t even look probable on paper. The app “Unlock with WiFi” was a perfect solution. It enables the screen lock, unless the phone is connected to my home WiFi (or any other WiFi/Bluetooth network I choose). $5 is cheap convenience.

A few days ago I got the message that Unlock with WiFi would no longer be supported, instead it had been rewritten and the new incarnation available as SkipLock, which could be bought again from the app store. Suddenly the happy customer was a grumpy customer.

Then again, it is a great app – one that adds great value to my devices and a crucial part of keeping them safe, with all the email and other personal information I got stored on various accounts. I want that to be taken good care of. I want someone to take it seriously to provide me with that service.  I want to be able to trust that such an app doesn’t snoop my address book or harvest other personal info without my knowledge. Then I’ll rather pay a modest amount to have a professional developer provide a professional solution.

You don’t get a lot for free, and the better the lunch, the more suspicious one should be. Or, as a friend once told me: If a product is free, then YOU are the real product…

Silverlinings

My wife’s phone recently started running out of storage space, making most app updates impossible. It was not the right time to shop custom roms, so the solution was to swap phones. Farewell to HTC One, Hello to old Desires and great expectations to the 2014 lineups.

With launch events and actual availability quite a while away, next step was to get the best out of my “new” phone, an HTC Desire X. It looked like a good deal when it came out and we were looking for an Android phone with dual core and 4″ screen. Nice price too. But also flaws, first and foremost the 4GB internal memory that filled up surprisingly and disappointingly fast. Nothing that can’t be fixed by installing a custom rom with support for the excellent Link2SD app though. Unfortunately, I found no good AOSP based rom, but then I had an opportunity to revisit MIUI in a newer incarnation. Interesting and quite a polished, different experience. That could all have been good, if only the earphone sound quality had been better: I have a forty minutes daily commute by train, so that matters. Maybe my unit was faulty, maybe it is a general issue with this device. I suspect the custom roms I tried had an issue with Beats Audio. In any case, I started carrying another phone too, just for the sake of Music.

So my old Desire S was turned on once more, running CM7.2 Gingerbread well, but looking dated. Great to find out that much more recent rom versions are available too and eventually I ended up with a 4.2.2 Andromadus build. Great. Still, I know of why the device officially only runs Gingerbread. The minimalistic CM UI still doesn’t run entirely smooth, and as more apps and accounts were added, the phone would start freezing more and more often. Specs do matter, but having tasted Jelly Bean I am not going to downgrade. Instead, this slightly underpowered device is quite an interesting test platform to see him when different apps affect system performance, with any bad performer being able to tip the balance and make an acceptable experience useless. First app to go was Facebook, the next LinkedIn followed by Google Hangouts. It seems everything that touches the contacts list has trouble running on a low resource system. Not surprisingly I guess, since the contacts list is far more complex than a more list of names and phone numbers. And when several social apps are added to the system, each with its own list of contacts with contact info, photos etc, and the contacts list trying to handle duplicate contacts, it makes sense that an overstretched system gets in trouble.

However, it turns out music is more important to me than social network apps, so now the Desire S is my private phone of choice (got a BlackBerry Curve for work too). Well, metal beats plastic too and the Desire S is a lovely device IMHO…

So several lessons learnt here. They may not beat having an HTC One, but I am as happy an Android user as ever. And there may be more to come. There is some still one Desire left in the drawer – an original Bravo. It did not handle Jelly Bean well, but its 576MB RAM is more than the minimum required to run KitKat. The first pre-alpha builds are already out there, so perhaps I may even get there before Wifey.

PCs and Diversification?

It has been a while since my last post about Windows 8 and declining PC sales. During this time, the debate first seemed to settle down, probably because everybody was happy that the start button will return in Windows 8.1. Now that the Windows 8.1 release date has been announced, it is reported that PC sales keep declining. I am not surprised, but will be happy to be proved wrong eventually.

As written, hardware improvements can’t keep the sales up. Enthusiasts may buy the latest stuff no matter what, otherwise the performance gained by upgrading to the latest generation of CPU won’t make a big difference when reading mail and browsing the internet.

And what do you get when you buy a PC? A box with a standard Windows installation, perhaps a trial version of antivirus and MS Office, plus a bit of bloatware from the vendor.

It is all very generic. I don’t remember how sales of Apple’s Macs are developing compared to Windows PCs, but if you pick an Apple, you get something special,

And two points in that sentence says it all:

  1. It is Apple or Windows, not Apple or Asus or HP or…
  2. I believe that Apple is special. I have never owned one and don’t plan to get one, but I am certain that the Apple owners are getting something different and that the difference matters to them.

Compare that with the to the mobile phone market, which has many contenders, some big some small. Here it is not just Apple vs. Android vs. Windows Phone vs. BlackBerry vs. etc. It is Apple vs. Samsung vs. Nokia vs. HTC vs. LG etc.

Why this difference in product perception? Well, consider these three: Hardware, Software and Branding.

Hardware
Buy a desktop PC in a store and you go home with boxes made out of plastic or metal, which is not particularly pretty and it looks the same regardless of the vendor. If you buy a mobile phone, each vendor has a special design that goes across the product line. One reason for buying phone X is that is looks good.

Software
A new PC comes with standard Windows and trial versions of third party software. Additional software provided by the vendor is seldom useful, poorly documented and the user interface reminds you of the wild days of Win 3.1. Buy a smart phone and the vendor will provide special versions of core applications for email and browser, and often bundle a good, free office suite; as well as a number of popular third party apps like Facebook. In fact, the amount of vendor software bundled with Android phones has reached the point where several top models are also being sold in a special Google version for anyone who wants to see the standard Google version.

Branding
The new Samsung Galaxy is not just a smart phone, it is a Life Companion. The HTC One is a Changemaker. With an LG Optimus you Live without Boundaries and Connect & Share Like a Pro. A PC is a PC is a PC…
I don’t believe total PC sales will change a lot if vendors started diversifying like smartphones have, but I do believe that a vendor that provides some special extra will fare better than those that don’t.