Lost and Found for iPhones

You’re having “one of those days” in which you are rushing from one thing to another and barely have time to think. At some point in the day, you reach for your cell phone and it’s not there!

Panic ensues. Did you in your haste to get out the door in the morning simply leave the phone at home? Is it sitting in your car attached to the charger? Did you put it down at one of your stops and forget to take it? Did you drop it somewhere? Most important is it simply lost or has someone walked away with it?

Apple just created a solution as part of its recent iPhone 3.0 software update: “Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe.”

It does just what the name says: it will locate your iPhone and if necessary wipe all your private data from it. It also allows you to send a message to your iPhone that will cause the unit to sound an alert and flash the message (typically you would use it to provide information on how to return it to you).

The service works via Apple’s MobileMe Internet network and uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS capabilities. Aside from its practical values, it also has great show-off capabilities because the process is highly entertaining.

Users log into their MobileMe website, navigate to account settings (as an extra security measure, they will be required to supply their passwords a second time), and then click on the Find My iPhone button. That brings up a Google map in which a circle shows the phone’s location. Apple refines the GPS data so the experience is that one usually sees the circle centered somewhere in the general vicinity of where the phone might be; then the circle nudges itself into a more exact position.

When I tested this from my home, which is near the Charles River, the first data placed the phone on the other side of the river. Then the refined information slowly moves the location across the river, then moved through some adjacent property, and finally although not pinpointing my exact apartment does center on the building’s front door – which is close enough for me. In fact, any closer and I would start to worry about Apple taking the microtargeting concept to grave extremes.

Curiously Find My iPhone was little publicized in reviews of the 3.0 software update and latest generation of iPhones. Perhaps this is because the MobileMe service cost $99 per year and had major glitches when it was launched a year ago. But many of the new features that got more attention, such as cut-and-paste text capabilities or video cameras on the new iPhone 3GS aren’t especially innovative. BlackBerries and other smartphones have had those features for years.

Find my iPhone is an important innovation, one that will become even more important as people and companies fully appreciate how much sensitive data we actually carry around with us on today’s cell phones. I expect this to be a trend setter and the odds are high that other cellphone makers and cellular service provides aren’t even now as we speak kicking themselves for having failed to think of it first.

Expect MobileMe to be challenged quickly by Me, Too.

Tuning in on HD Radio

Cellphones went digital. Broadcast TV is going digital. So where’s digital broadcast radio?

Well, it’s here. But you might not necessarily notice it.

Four AM and 20 FM channels in the Greater Boston area are offering HDRadio, which provides digital signals. But unless you have radio equipped to receive them, you wouldn’t know they are there.

HDRadio came to my attention only because a receiver was bundled with the navigation package in my car and because of a David Pogue column in The New York Times. (Disclosure: I mention Pogue mainly because I don’t want the Plagiarism Police to pounce on me for observing some of the same things that he did.)

For example, I, too, am bemused by the fact that the “HD” in HDRadio doesn’t actually stand for anything. Indeed, iBiquity Digital Corp. – the electronics company that invented it – takes the unusual step in its PR materials of pointing out that the designation does not mean, as one might guess, “high definition” or “hybrid digital.” It’s just a brand name.

The way it works is that digital information is embedded in a HDRadio station’s standard analog radio signal. The overlay can simply be a digital version of the normal programming or may contain up to two additional channels. A HD receiver will detect and decode the information and switch over to digital mode. This means that with a home or office radio there is a discernable delay before the digital broadcast kicks in. When the radio is in motion, as in a car, your broadcast will shift back and forth between modes depending on how good the signal is.

Polk Audio loaned me one of its iSonic ES2s, a combination HDRadio and iPod speaker system, for this test. Like all one-piece systems, its stereo separation is limited to its width. Polk engineers decided to work around that by mounting speakers front and rear to create a 360 soundfield that would sound OK no matter where in a room you listen. I give them partial credit – the 360 effect is there, but the sound lacks some depth. At its original list price of $500, the ES2 was frankly not a good value. Recently the price has gone down to $400, and you can find them for a more reasonable $350.

The combination of HDRadio and iPod docking adds another feature: iTunes “tagging.” Information about the song that’s being played is also embedded in the radio signal. When the song is one that’s in Apple’s iTunes Music Store and you have an iPod docked in the device, a button on the radio illuminates. Push the button and the song information gets stored on the iPod. When you next sync it to your computer, a playlist of potential purchases is created in iTunes. While mainly a marketing ploy, this is an interesting marriage of modern music technologies that consumers likely will see more of in the future.

Polk’s PR representative warned me that antennas and antenna placement (two different kinds of FM and one AM antennas are included) were going to be a key factor in getting the HD signal. Indoor radio reception, especially in urban areas, always is a hassle. This is compounded, though, with HDRadio because the digital stream is pretty much all or nothing. As it turned out, the supplied antennas did just fine, and I was able to pick up almost all the local HD stations.

Alas the technology’s pluses do not rise to “must have” magnitude. The HD signal is clear and static-free, which makes for a nice improvement on FM and a spectacular one on AM. But it’s still the same old programming. Even when the station uses the multi-channel option, it’s usually just more of the same.

I found only two of the 24 local HD stations doing something that was worth noting. WBZ 1030, the AM news and talk station, truly profits from HD mode. The newscasts are clear and crisp instead sounding like they are coming from a closet. PBS station WGBH-FM uses all three possible channels and does so to good effect, delivering, for example, classical on one, jazz on another, and news on the third. Unfortunately they are the exception rather than the rule.

So while HDRadio may be the wave of the future, that future isn’t here yet.

Photo Pizzaz

Usually this column’s concept of software “find” is a nifty bit of shareware (try-before-you-buy programs from small vendors) that offer a helpful function for small dollars. Alien Skin Software’s products are nifty enough, but not small dollar items. But they are so nifty, they are worth a look if you are at all serious about digital photography.

In recent months, the North Carolina-based company has rolled out three new releases of key products that have impressed me a lot:

- Image Doctor 2
- Blow Up 2
- Snap Art 2

These all are “filter” software that plug into Adobe Photoshop and also Photoshop Elements, both for PCs and Macs. Unfortunately they have list prices of $200-$250 each because they are aimed at graphics professionals, which puts them out of reach for most consumers. An Internet search for better deals will help you save some. But I don’t want anyone to think that this is an inexpensive undertaking.

Nevertheless, what the programs do is so helpful – in pretty much the order of priority shown above – that consumers might want to consider them.

Image Doctor (which I have seen priced a low as $125) is an invaluable retouching tool, which has a number of components that let you retouch old, scratchy photos (really, any physical print you have digitized) and cover-up blemishes and defects. Two functions I use the most are “JPEG Repair” and “Smart Fill.”

The former deals with the fact that to reduce file size, the JPEG format discards some picture information and as a result when you look at a highly compressed picture there will be visible defects in the form of visual “noise” – pixels that are the wrong color or are grainy. The repair tool extrapolates the JPEG data and produces a smooth image.

Smart Fill, which I use all the time, lets you select an offending part of your picture and make it disappear by covering it over with the adjacent background. For example, I came back from a trip to Arizona with a pretty landscape of the signature red hills of Sedona – with power lines cutting across the sky. To make it something I wanted to print and put on my wall, I used Smart Fill to hide the power lines and show only clear blue sky.

Blow Up, as you would guess, lets you scale up a picture to a larger size. It is not as essential a tool as Image Doctor, but if you are fond of buying poster-sized prints from your photo vendor, Blow Up helps a lot. If you only want to print a section of the original photo, you can very easily wind up with a cropped photo that does not have sufficient resolution to sustain acceptable quality for oversized prints. Blow Up 2 lets you crop and increase the resolution to fix the problem.

Snap Art, I must confess, is not a “must;” it’s just fun. Basically it takes a photo and converts it to look like artwork: oil painting, watercolor, pencil sketch, even impressionist painting. The new version 2 adds a much wider range of presets than the original and also produces much more convincing results. Turn your family picture into a family portrait. Make the landscape photos from your last trip into landscape paintings.

Maybe not the most essential thing on Earth, but it will transform mundane snapshots into something with more visual impact.

Trouble in medialand

A major media organization is struggling with dismal financial results, expecting new rounds of layoffs, and it’s future is highly uncertain:

Yahoo!

Oh, did you think I was referring to The Boston Globe? Well, them, too.

Obviously, the newspaper business is going through hard times, which I take personally. One of my prior employers, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver just folded. My sense of regret there being compounded by my view that its owner, E.W. Scripps, has left a trail of dead newspapers in its wake for years – starting long before the Internet ever became a threat to traditional media.

The fact of the matter is that it is tough to make a buck selling content. Intellectual property is ephemeral and as a result companies tend to focus on some kind of tangible deliverable as their “product.” So it is the physical newspaper that newspaper companies sell rather than the words on the paper. Along comes the Internet and suddenly customers can get the words without buying the paper. Similarly, Yahoo! peddled its visible web presence rather than its mix of search results, portal (home page) content, and advertising. Along came Google, which blended those components more effectively and kept adding new products into the mix, and Yahoo! became an also-ran.

Different products. Same result.

We are so accustomed these days to think about how technology drives social and economic changes that we forget that the reverse is even more important: social and economic changes create a niche that new products and services will fill.

To stick with newspapers, my career dates back to 1969 when I started an evening shift general assignment reporter with The Patriot Ledger. While the Internet has been one factor in what has happened to the Ledger since then, it isn’t the only factor or even necessarily the most important one.

In 1969, the Quincy shipyards were still open (albeit troubled) and Massachusetts was still a manufacturing center. There were local department stores and local food stores. Auto dealers had one or two stores, not mammoth chains. The Ledger was an evening newspaper the delivery of which was based on the traditional sequence of delivery boys and girls getting out of school just in time to get the papers to the homes of workers, from the shipyards and elsewhere, who were coming off the day shift. Local merchants were the core of the paper’s advertising base. The story was much the same for The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence and for thousands of other newspapers.

Then the world changed faster than the papers could keep up.

The traditional manufacturing industries went into decline while local businesses were bought up or failed. An increasingly white-collar audience preferred morning delivery to evening. Suburban papers had to fight more intensely with metropolitan papers for ad dollars. People’s lifestyles became fast-paced and they found it hard to make time for such things as long newspaper articles.

Technology for a time was actually the newspaper business’s friend as computerization eliminated many skilled jobs and generally cut costs. It also enhanced the product. The Eagle-Tribune, for example, led the region in the introduction of color printing for the daily paper – doing so long before USA Today was even created.

Now technology is seen as the enemy: a way to get newspaper content without paying for it. But, in truth, all the Internet really has done is make obsolete a business model that dates back to the 19th century: a product printed on paper that is financed primarily by advertising, with some share paid by the subscribers. Nothing says that this mix has to be immutable. Perhaps subscribers should pay more. Or advertisers should. Maybe cost structures should be based on using electrons instead of dead trees. Or maybe even a formula based on the special characteristics of the new medium.

In my last column I wrote about the tradeoffs between privacy and using the Internet as a data repository. Walter Bender, the former head of the MIT Media Lab, has theorized that tradeoff could itself be the basis of a new business model for the news industry. People pay more for content if they want anonymity. Or they can pay less but share personal information so that advertisers can more profitably target their ads.

Therein may lie MSM’s (“mainstream media”) last, best hope. Google has pretty much locked up the invade-your-privacy-so-we-can-target-advertising-at-you market. “Pay to play” (subscription only) has been a failure. The tradeoff approach is one that has yet to be tested.

And it’s not as if the newspaper business has any better idea to try.

Upgrade or downshift?

An economic crisis can put many things in an entirely new light – even routine software upgrades. Consider, for example, some recent releases from Adobe and FileMaker.

Adobe’s flagship product is its Creative Suite 4 graphics, web design, publishing, and multimedia packages, which cost several hundred dollars each. However, it also offers a consumer collection, Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7 for Windows, which has a street price of about $120. (The two are available separately, but the bundle is the best deal.)

No, the Elements software doesn’t do everything, or even most of the things, that the CS4 packages do. Photoshop Elements is a picture cataloging and editing program aimed at non-professionals. Premiere fits the same niche for video camera users. Most consumers – myself included – find that Elements fits their needs precisely.

There have been people, though, with a high-end camera or videocam who believed they simply MUST have the full versions of Photoshop or Premiere and perhaps even a CS4 bundle that includes them. In happier times, that was an uncomplicated indulgence. Today, not so much. Not when discretionary incomes are tight and – equally important – when the Elements package has evolved into very cool software.

The early editions of Elements were essentially copies of Photoshop or Premiere with key features disabled. The 7 versions have adopted distinctive and more user-friendly interfaces than the pro versions and automate some key tasks. In truth, Elements let you do your tasks much more quickly than the pro varieties.

The same principle applies to Mac users with FileMaker’s Bento database program, now in Version 2. The update adds a couple of features I find essential: the ability to import Excel files (which most users employ for databases until they step up to a dedicated database program) and to include mail messages in your database.

More to the point, it is a database that doesn’t look or feel like a database. Its look is intentionally modeled after iTunes or Apple’s mail and calendar programs, which set industry standards for ease of use. To create a relational database in Bento (a powerful database management tool that ties one set of data to another) you don’t do any complex programming as you do with more elaborate database software. You simply drag some data from one Bento file to another and – poof! – you’ve got a relational database.

Bento does not have anything like the power of the company’s professional FileMaker Pro 9. But then again its street price is $45 compared to $261 for FileMaker Pro. There are times for business use when I simply have to have FileMaker’s capabilities. For personal use, however, Bento has all the database capability most of us need.

In these times, taking a step down in software power can be a step up in sensible computing.

In the pink

Speakers, like a baseball glove, need to be broken in before you get the best performance from them.

Simon Côté of Audio Plus Services, the North American distributors for the Focal XS system I recently reviewed, gave me a shortcut for doing that: “pink” noise.

No, I hadn’t heard of that either. But this is the Internet age and Googling “pink noise” not only gives you an explanation -- basically pink noise is a jumble of all frequencies -- but also sample pink noise sound files. Open a file in your computer’s music player, set the player to loop endlessly, and then head out the door because the static sound is awful to listen to. Do that for up to 48 hours and your speaker system will be broken in. You would get the same effect after using the speakers normally over time; this just speeds up the process.

Côté says what happens is that the suspension parts in the speaker loosen up and let the components that vibrate to generate the sound do so more easily. The practical effect with the Focal system was that its initial brightness (excessive high frequencies) went away, proper frequency balance was achieved, and the XS delivered smoother, more natural sound.

So now you know: pink is the answer.

Stick THIS in your ear

Sticking things in your ear used to be something you outgrew somewhere between kindergarten and the first grade. But then along came the iPod and its earbud headphones, and the universe of in-ear audio devices expanded.

Apple’s standard earbuds (which rest in the users’ earlobes) deliver good sound. Doing better requires an audiophile earplug-type design which you put in your ear canal. Developed originally for musicians, in-ear phones both deliver high fidelity sound and also shut out outside noise.

A lot of people like that design, but I hated it. The feeling of something stuck inside my ear was uncomfortable and kept me from wearing them for any length of time.


Shure, which long has been a leader in this market, has changed all that.

Its magnificent SE530 earphones (above) set a new benchmark for the earplug-style design. These have three drivers (the devices that makes the sound) for impressive fidelity across all frequencies. They are one of the few earphones I’ve every heard that matches up to conventional over-the-ear headphones in sound quality.

But the Shures add something more: They set a new standard for comfort. Through a combination of smart design (the tube that channels sound into your ear is kept small) and smart materials (new foam tips that slip into your ears easily and then fit themselves to the ear canal), the SE530 can be worn a long time with full comfort. I even have drifted off to sleep while wearing them.

This Fall, in fact, they were the solution to my neighbor-with-the-loud-annoying-laugh problem. Said neighbor was routinely out on her balcony committing noise pollution in late evening when I was trying to doze off. I put in the Shures, which blocked out the annoying laugh and provided some lovely bedtime music.

Some serious comparative shopping is in order here. Prices on headphones vary widely from vendor to vendor -- and even at the same vendor. Just in the course of researching this article, I have seen prices swing up and down by 30% or more.


The list price for the SE530 is $500, but street prices range from $450 to as little as $275. If that’s still too steep for your taste, take a look at the Shure SE310 (above) – list price is $250, with street prices $50-100 lower. This is Shure’s top single-driver earphone. It delivers excellent sound and matches up well with iPods. Still too pricey? Then go with Shure’s SE210 or SE110, with street prices in the $130-140 and $75 range respectively.

Added bonus: Shure makes a Music Phone Adapter (street price is about $35) with a microphone that lets you use your earphones with BlackBerries, iPhones, and other major music-enabled smartphones. It also provides excellent voice clarity on phone calls. Users can answer calls by tapping a button on the adapter, which also doubles as a play/pause control when listening to music. There are two different adapters, so make sure you get the one that works with your phone.

There are various all-in-one earphone/microphone designs out there for smartphones (Shure even makes one itself), but they do not offer the same sound quality or utility.

And now, for your listening pleasure…

Getting high-quality computer speakers at a relatively affordable price is always a challenge. Until now.

(I should note that I started the product testing for this piece before the bottom dropped out of the economy. So these items are markedly less “affordable” than they were earlier this year.)

There are an endless number of pretty good speakers for $100 or less. Then there are a few $400 systems from such companies as Bose that are somewhat disappointing – better than mainstream systems but not so much better that the extra expense seems worthwhile.

The past year, however, has seen the arrival of two alternatives to meet the needs of discerning listeners without being totally outrageous.



France’s Focal-JMLab has introduced the Focal XS system (above - $600), a sleek silver and black three-piece system (two satellite speakers and a subwoofer) that matches the styling of Apple’s current generation iMac computers and – just in case you didn’t get the idea – includes an iPod dock in the right-hand speaker. It has its own onboard audio circuitry, bypassing the noise of PC or Mac circuit boards, and plugs into your computer via USB.

California-based NuForce Inc. has produced its Icon component system, also USB-based. This one is a la carte – the Icon amplifier (below, right) is $250. You can use it with small bookshelf speakers of your own or with NuForce’s purpose-built S1 speakers (below, left -- $250 for the pair). That puts its price below Focal’s. But it does not have a subwoofer – and in my testing, the sound lacked depth without one. That adds about $100-$150, and NuForce also recommends an upgraded power supply ($45), bringing the total price up to nearly $700.

On the esthetics side, the edge goes to Focal XS, which is sleek and compact and complements most modern PCs and Macs. NuForce S1s have uncovered speaker cones (some will find that a high-tech look, some will see it as garish) and the speakers are large bookshelf-style designs that take up a lot of desktop real estate.


Sonically – which, after all, is the object of the exercise – it is an even battle. What you are paying for here is clear, accurate sound that reproduces a wide range of frequencies and does so at all volume levels.

Both systems deliver. Strings sound like strings. The twang of electric guitars and the punch of the drums are lifelike. You can hear vocalists who actually enunciate sound out their syllables. (A favorite test: in Bob Seger’s anthem “Like a Rock,” can you hear the emphasis he puts on the “k” in “rock”?) At low volumes, the clarity makes for a pleasing listening experience, and you also can crank up the volume to room-filling levels without distortion.

In reviewing audio components, I rely a lot on jazz recordings from Mapleshade and classical from Telarc -- both labels are known for their almost obsessive high fidelity engineering. These recordings have a you-are-in-the-room quality that is an acid test for good sound, and both speaker systems passed.

Which one sounded better depended entirely on the particular recording I was playing, in many cases on the specific track. If pressed, I would give the Focal XS a slight edge in clarity while NuForce had better sound staging (spatial placement of the music – you hear sounds coming from left, right, center, not some muddled mix).

As for added features, as noted the Focal XS has the iPod dock that allows you to sync with your computer as well as play from the iPod. However, it only has an iPod dock connector; there’s no auxiliary jack for other sources. It lacks a headphone jack, so users cannot benefit from the USB sound system when they want to listen privately. The Icon, in contrast, bristles with connection options: there’s a headphone jacks, plus in addition to the USB link to a computer, it will accept RCA inputs (to connect a stereo component) as well as an auxiliary jack (for music players). A large knob on the front lets you choose the input source.

All-in-all, the Focal XS is probably the better choice to set up next to your computer while the Icon is what you want if you need a multipurpose audio system.

Bear in mind that speakers of this caliber are a total waste of money if you do not have high-caliber audio sources to play. I converted a big batch of my CD collection to Apple’s “Lossless” format using iTunes. Microsoft also has a lossless format, and there is the free FLAC lossless format. All of these cut file size down to roughly 50% of a CD but preserve all audio information so the sound is identical to the CD. So a XS or Icon can show off a full frequency range. If you are using MP3 or like formats that compress files by discarding some data, however, that lost data can negate the speakers’ higher fidelity.

Is this the new look of "print"?

The possible future of print turns out to be something that could have been the future of the print media.

Last holiday season, Amazon.com unveiled its “Kindle” reader – a trade paperback-sized electronic reader. Since then sales of the device and of content for it are, according to numerous published reports, growing at a solid pace. Amazon does not disclose sales figures, and a spokeswoman responding to my inquiries probably got a little tired of repeating that. However, she did provide an interesting factoid: “Of the 135,000 books available on Amazon.com as a physical book and on Kindle, Kindle books already account for over 12 percent of units sold.”

Therein no doubt lies the commercial success of Kindle where Sony and others have failed. Amazon brings enormous content resources to the reader – books, newspapers, magazines, specialty publications – without which Kindle would just be an expensive paperweight. The unit comes with a built-in high-speed wireless service (using Sprint’s network) for downloading content directly to the device. There’s also a USB cable for getting content from a computer.

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The $360 device will not win any design or beauty contests. It’s a slab of white plastic with a mini-keyboard at the bottom, and big tabs on either side of the screen for changing pages, and a scroll wheel for working the unit’s control menus. It was not the most user-friendly layout of all time. The menus are clunky to use, and there is an extra “next page” button to the left of the screen (the main one is on the right) that I inevitably hit when I actually wanted the “previous page” button above it. It’s very much a “1.0” product. (In fact, gadgetry web sites have been showing pictures recently of a purported second generation Kindle that’s a little sleeker looking.)

Limitations aside, I tested one for a couple of weeks and found it to be a very capable book substitute. The experience was little different from reading a paper version, with the added advantage of being able to blow up the text size when I didn’t feel like using my reading glasses. Content delivery by the wireless service was fairly reliable. (Like anything cellular, there always are dead spots somewhere.)

Kindle was less successful for newspapers. The 6-inch (diagonal) screen seemed cramped for that use, navigating through sections was awkward, and the newspapers’ Kindle versions were short of graphics. Magazines fell somewhere in between – heavy text publications came closer to matching their print versions that such periodicals as newsmagazines that have more photos and graphics in print.

Still, Kindle was a very attractive alternative to lugging a stack of books around on a trip or finding a place on your bookshelf to store books after you’ve finished reading them. The unit has a slot for postage stamp-sized SD cards, which can be your “bookshelf.” Another enticing feature is that you can sample the first chapter of books or get a short subscription to periodicals so you can try before you buy. It isn’t hard to imagine that a couple of evolutions from now, this kind of device is the way you read “print” publications.

At the heart of a Kindle is a screen made by Cambridge-based E-Ink Corporation. It uses encapsulated pigment particles to form text and images. Unlike conventional computer displays such as LCDs, E-Ink’s “Electronic Paper Display” consumes much less energy and, equally important, remains highly visible in bright light.

Equally as interesting as the technology, though, is E-Ink’s back-story. In the ’90s, a consortium of major news organizations partnered with MIT’s Media Lab to create the “News in the Future” program intended to help publishers and broadcasters adapt to the challenges of the then-nascent Internet. In retrospect, the project developed a lot of technologies that did help commercialize providing content on the Web. Unfortunately for the news business, it was companies such as Google and Amazon that commercialized them.

E-Ink came out of MIT Media Lab research, and some of its founders were researchers and officials at the lab. Of the many media partners who might have wanted a piece of this action, the only one that is currently an E-Ink investor is the Hearst Corporation, whose properties include WCVB, Channel 5 in Boston.

One issue the News in the Future project grappled with was finding some kind of electronic substitute for paper.

For newspapers at least, one of the considerations was whether it made any sense in the electronic age to undertake the costly capital expense of building new presses or replacing existing ones. Lab experts calculated that it could well be less expensive for a paper to instead supply its readers with some electronic device instead.

I attended a few meetings of the consortium on behalf of my then-employer the Times-Mirror Company (now part of the Tribune Corp.) and saw researcher struggle not only with the technological issues but also with resistance from its media industry sponsors to major departures from their business models.

That Amazon is the company profiting from E-Ink and Media Lab wizardry while my former newspaper company is defunct speaks volumes to me about the state of the news business today.