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Monthly Archives: August 2010

Review: Rdio

If it isn’t obvious by my job in radio, I like music.  In fact, I like a large genre of music since I’ve learned to get rid of prejudices of genre and what-not (Although making fun of country music is still a good hobby of mine).  However, discovering music is something that’s I’ve found a little hard to do.  Studies have shown that radio is still the number one source that people discover new music by a wide margin, but locally I’m limited to either a mild adult contemporary station or a country station.  A lot of times, I resort to listening to non-local stations streamed over the internet to get an idea of what’s new and interesting in all the other genres I enjoy.  Still, it would be nice to get something along the lines of a Zune Pass up in Canada – a flat subscription fee to allow unlimited streaming of songs.

Enter Rdio.com (Pronounced r-dee-oh), a website I actually discovered via an episode of TekZilla.  This takes the concept of the Zune Pass and moves it to the cloud – all of the music is streamed via a web browser, desktop application (That is actually dependent of the web browser anyways, but more on that later), or via mobile devices.  Since I don’t have a supported mobile device, this review is simply going to focus on the desktop side of listening, as well as the size and quality of the library and service.

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“Apple Tax”

With the fact that the new Mac Pro preorders started yesterday, I thought I’d play a fun game called “Guess the Apple Tax”!  In short, I’m going to get a list of comparable PC parts and see exactly how much of a premium you’re paying for the Apple brand.  Going into it, I was actually a little on the pessimistic side and guessed that there would be a $2K difference – it seemed reasonable for a server/workstation machine like that.  But, here’s the final tally (Click on each image for the respective totals, and note that they are both in USD).

Apple Mac Pro 12 Core.

The Comparable Custom Built Windows Server 2008 Machine.

In case any of you don’t want to do the math, you’re paying over four thousand dollars more for the Mac Pro versus building a comparable machine yourself.  Crazy!

Forced Data Plans

Saw an interesting story on Twitter from @acedtect about a story where a guy wanted to simply use an older BlackBerry Pearl due to a regular feature phone breaking.  He only wanted to use it for talking and texting, and not for data usage, yet AT&T told him that because it was a smartphone, he needed a data plan or he could use the phone.  The whole ordeal is documented here if you really feel like listening to the AT&T bashing.

When I read the story, it seems like there are two positions you can take.  You can take the “Well, it is a smartphone and thus most features need data access to work” side, or you can take the “Well, it’s his phone, and as long as data is blocked than it should be a problem” side.  Both are legitimate arguments – if AT&T has it in their contract that all smartphones need to have an accompanying data plan, then they really can’t be held at fault, but at the same time you should have the freedom to not have to pay for something you don’t intend to use.  In all honesty, I was leaning towards the former until I read a comment below the article:

I lost the same argument when I asked them to remove the data plan on an iPhone I was handing down to my kid. All I wanted him to have was a phone, and he could use wifi when it was available. NO DICE. They were happy to inform me that for a MONTHLY FEE, they would allow me the privilege of additional parental controls on his phone.

This would be a perfect example of when smartphones without data makes sense.  As feature phones slowly start dying, smartphones are going to become the only option.  If you have kids, it would seem like a perfect idea to be able to give them a phone where they can download apps, games, etc. without having to worry about them racking up a ridiculously large data bill, since they’d be locked down to Wi-Fi only.  Realistically, smartphones are becoming better computer replacements anyways, and now it’s more focused on applications than simply data and websites visited through a browser.  And hell, even Wi-Fi access is becoming more and more prominent.

I think that to some degree, feature phones are at a technological dead-end, so it only makes sense to look at ways to create that same functionality with currently existing phones.  I’m sure that if carriers thought hard enough, they could find ways to give them incentive to do it, even if it means forcing the customers into the longest contract possible in order to not need a data plan.  Alternatives and options are always a good thing to have, and that’s how you separate yourself from the competition and gain public notice.