Column: the Sony Clie PEG-NX70V

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

Loose Wire: A Delight to Behold

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 19 December 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Sony’s newest PDA casts a love-at-first sight spell with its stunning good looks and exciting multi-media features. But will you still love it tomorrow?

Sony has long mastered the art of ensuring you fall in love immediately with its products. I’m not sure how it does it, but when I set eyes on the very first VAIO notebook computer five years ago, I had to have it. With its smooth metallic finish and purple trimmings, it still looked good when I had to dump it years later. Since then, the love-at-first-sight syndrome is certainly true for Sony’s new personal digital assistant, or PDA, the Clie PEG-NX70V [$600]. Its magnesium casing, large screen and swivelling clamshell top are awe-inspiring, and you feel yourself instinctively reaching for your wallet. But would the love affair last?

I’m still in two minds about it. This is definitely Sony’s most ambitious PDA. It offers a very high-resolution screen [320 by 480 pixels, or dots, to be precise] that makes Palm’s look miserly, an MP3 player, a built-in keyboard and a voice recorder, as well as a camera, a video recorder, a 200 megahertz chip, the latest [version 5.0] Palm operating system and a slot for a wireless card to hook the device up to a wireless network. Extraordinary stuff for a gadget that weighs eight ounces and measures less than 3 inches wide by 5.5 inches long. At first blush, it’s the answer to all your prayers: It’s a fully fledged Palm-powered PDA, with all the bells and whistles your work requires, and it doubles as a modest but usable camera, will play back music and record interviews and meetings.

Now for the cautionary tale. First, Sony has a reputation for building sturdy and beautiful products [even if the product-naming department should be forced to name its offspring the way it choose names for its products, which are invariably nonsensical combinations of letters and numbers]. But computing, in my view, is still not Sony’s strong suit. The bundled programs to unlock all these features are a mixed bag and, after numerous requests to reboot my computer, I wasn’t quite sure what I had installed and what I hadn’t.

Another downer: In theory there’s enough that comes with the Clie to get you on the road, but you won’t get far without at least one widget that doesn’t come with it — a Memory Stick. These chewing-gum lookalikes are Sony’s proprietary memory cards that you see happy young people in Sony ads swapping between computers, MP3 players, cameras and video recorders. That the Clie doesn’t come with one [a] reflects Sony’s somewhat arrogant assumption that everyone is already bursting with Memory Sticks and [b] means that unless you are already a Sony convert you can’t make use of the most interesting features of the device. [The PEG-NX70V comes with 16 megabytes of memory but five megabytes of that is already taken up with Clie programs].

Bottom line: Expect to shell out $100 or so for another 128 megabytes of memory if you want to take photos, video, or use the audio features.

I encountered other snags that tested my passion for the PEG-NX70V, or Peggy V as I started calling her. Being in the entertainment business, Sony is still somewhat schizophrenic about the MP3 revolution — where folk can convert CDs and whatnot to a very slimmed-down, portable file format called MP3 — and it shows on the Clie.

MP3s have scared the living daylights out of the music industry because there’s nothing stopping anyone swapping their CD collection over the Internet with any Tom, Dick or Harry — for free. Not surprisingly, the bundled software for moving music onto Peggy V from your computer converts the MP3, or CD, into Sony’s own format called ATRAC3, which [you guessed it] limits what you can do with the music.

The result: A silly mess that will alienate users and further muddy the waters. Solution? Buried in the manual is a workaround, which basically allows you to move MP3 files directly onto the Memory Stick, which you can then listen to on Peggy V without restrictions.

My verdict: Aesthetically delightful, Peggy V might not be the companion she promises to be. Palm would do well to copy the Clie’s screen design, whereby the scribbling pane doubles as part of the screen itself, but overall the PEG-NX70V’s extra features aren’t quite as seductive as they first appear. It won’t stop me holding onto mine as long as I possibly can, but I’m not ditching my MP3 player, my voice recorder, or even my Palm Tungsten, for the time being.

Column: the problem with online music

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire: On-Line Music’s Jarring Notes

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 14 November 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Big media’s flirtation with the Internet may be over soon after it began. At least that’s how it looks to a bunch of music enthusiasts who have been subscribing to an on-line service called EMusic (www.EMusic.com), which allows users to download songs in the compressed MP3 format for a flat monthly subscription fee (a princely $10 for most). The four-year-old service was going fine — about 65,000 users, 230,000 tracks available, revenues rising 30% in the first half of the year — until late October when several subscribers were told their accounts had been terminated, due, EMusic said, to “unusually excessive download activity.” In a nutshell, they got bumped because they downloaded more music than EMusic reckoned was fair. One or two have since been reinstated, but most haven’t, leaving a very sour taste in the mouth of EMusic’s once loyal fans.

This is all sad, and in my view unnecessary. EMusic has done a wonderful job in bridging the gap between the illegal world of Napster file-sharing and the old world of buying expensive CDs in a shop. But it has shot itself in the foot and raised fears that the entertainment giants behind such sites are no more committed now to distributing music over the Internet than they were pre-Napster.

For those of you not in the know, here’s some history: A few years back pimply youths discover MP3, a computer-file format which allows them to convert a CD into a size small enough to send over the Internet. Other youths discover ways to share such files with other users, suddenly making shops and the CD somewhat redundant. Lawyers swoop and Napster, despite being bought out by one of the big media giants, is now a redundant “work in progress” (www.napster.com).

Into the gap, among others, leapt EMusic (which started out as GoodNoise), with a sizeable stable of music for easy download. Deciding wisely not to tamper with the MP3 format via security features that may prevent users from doing what they want with the music they buy, the service quickly grew. Last year it was bought by Universal Music Group and later folded into the new Vivendi Universal Net USA Group, Inc., along with other music-oriented sites like www.rollingstone.com and www.MP3.com. So far, so good. EMusic has proved to be an excellent source of interesting, if not mainstream, music from classical to hip hop. In the past month I’ve become a big fan too, dipping into some great ambient and electronic stuff I otherwise would never have found, finally ditching those Dolly Parton records I’ve been listening to for years.

However this recent move casts a heavy cloud over the service. EMusic appears caught between the scepticism of its owners and the natural desire of users to make the most of their subscription. Ahead lurk some difficult decisions: Reuters last month quoted sources in Universal as saying a verdict would soon be made on what music Web sites would be sold off and which would be kept, probably as part of some integrated Web site.

So what to do? I can quite understand that EMusic wants to protect its assets. EMusic public-relations chief Steve Curry says EMusic must pay royalties to both the music publisher/songwriter — via a flat-rate fee per track downloaded — and to the record label/performer — from what’s left in the pot after EMusic takes its cut. In short, he says, the business model will only work if it doesn’t spend too much on paying the former, leaving none for the latter. If one person downloads a lot of tracks, most of the money will be paid in flat-rate royalties. “That is why we’re very concerned about monitoring and preventing large-scale abuse of our service — to make sure members are keeping it to ‘personal use and enjoyment,’ not ‘I wonder how many tens of thousands of MP3s I can possibly download in a month.'”

Fair enough, but EMusic’s own press releases hardly discourage such practice. The most recent states that “EMusic is a revolutionary new music discovery service that allows fans to download as much MP3 music as they desire for as little as $9.99 a month.”

What’s unnecessary about this is that every subscriber to EMusic knows they could find the music free on file-sharing services like Grokster (www.grokster.com) and Kazaa (www.kazaa.com). But they choose to obey the law and cough up. To me this is proof positive that most Internet folk are reasonable and law-abiding and want the artists they listen to to get some money for their work. And most would probably be happy to cough up more if it meant EMusic survived.

If EMusic survives it’s going to be down to whether its owners reckon it’s going to make money in the long run. If it does make money it’s going to be because its fans continue to sing its praises to others, in turn feeding more subscriptions, and, most importantly, the readiness of artists and labels to contribute their catalogues to the EMusic library. None of this is going to happen if EMusic treats its users like potential shoplifters.

EMusic, change your subscription model (there are some excellent suggestions on the newsgroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/emusic-discussion) so that heavy and light users are catered for, but don’t drive away the very people who have helped proselytize your service. Otherwise they’ll slink back to illegal file sharing and I’ll have to root around in the dumpster for my old Dolly Parton records.

Column: Love Online

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire: Looking for Love on the Net

By Jeremy Wagstaff

I’ve been suspicious about the benefits of linking computers and romance since the late 1970s, when as a gangly teen I joined an acting tour of New England schools. The stated purpose of the exercise was to bring refined English culture to the colonial heathen (although it wasn’t expressed so explicitly), but we young fellas were really only interested in using our posh English accents to melt tender American hearts. When, prior to departure, we were asked to fill out a computer punch-card form for a ball halfway through the tour where we were promised a bevy of girls matching our vital statistics, we felt sure the trip was going to be a runaway success.

Of course it wasn’t. Our first night on U.S. soil saw us thrown out of an ice cream parlour by a waitress unimpressed by our accents and empty wallets. And when it came to picking up my badge and list of matches at the ball, I quickly realized that I had been a little too honest in the questionnaire. As I wended my way through the room glancing at badge numbers, I couldn’t help noticing that all six of my matches looked like they were part-time shot-putters for the East German Olympic team. Torn between leaving and spending the evening in the toilet, I dumped my badge and tried to convince a couple of cheerleaders they were my matches. Needless to say they poured punch in my lap and I ended up in the campus shrubbery with a slightly moustachioed hammer-throwing exchange student from Leipzig.

Twenty years later, not much had changed. Single and newly returned to Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, I signed up for a dating service. For a fee, you got to submit your profile for others to peruse. You, in turn, could check out their profiles. In tiny cubicles in a dingy office subscribers flipped through brochures, trying to stifle gasps of horror at the gallery on offer. I cancelled my subscription when the only woman I could find who didn’t seem to have some significant drawback — a contagious disease, six previous husbands or Joan Collins hair — rebuffed my mediated approaches.

Now, on-line dating has taken off in a big way. I counted half a dozen new sites launched in the past two months alone. Most let you browse what’s on offer for free, but charge you, either via subscription or a credit system, if you want to contact anyone you like the look of.

Setting up your profile has got a lot more sophisticated than punching a card. At uDate (www.udate.com) you can fill in detailed forms right down to whether you eat Chinese food or read the Helsingborgs Dagblad. The British-based site boasts 11 million members and made $2 million profit last quarter. One new site, DateCam (www.datecam.com), lets you use Web cams — cameras hooked to your PC — to flirt on-line. That should make those awkward early exits easier: Instead of feigning food-poisoning to escape your undesirable date, you could just blame your modem.

Of course, there are downsides. In some circles there’s a stigma attached to folk who apparently have to resort to matchmaking services. Another problem is that you can’t be sure who you’re dealing with on-line, leaving you vulnerable to liars, stalkers, philanderers and criminals: Japan reported almost 800 crimes related to on-line dating sites in the first half of 2002, almost double last year’s figures.

Still the more people who sign up, the less stigma there’s going to be, and the more choice folks will have in selecting a partner. Indeed, sites such as Lavalife (www.lavalife.com) offer a huge array of choices, even in a place like Indonesia: I was particularly taken by a lady who’s opening line was “Come to mama, big boy!!!” Another lady cheerily confessed she has more shoes than she can count, and her picture seems to catch her in a moment of happy abandonment at the end of a lively evening.

So does all this work? Lavalife reckons so. A survey the company commissioned said that last month more than half of Americans believe they stand a better chance of meeting someone they like on-line than in a singles bar.

If you’re romantically sidelined, I’d recommend dipping a toe. UDate has the most options, but it’s untidy, and member profiles aren’t particularly illuminating. Lavalife is the best laid out, in my view, and they make it very easy to add photos, personalized text, and a more private Web page that only folk you invite in can view. I only ran into trouble when I tried to remove a photo of myself by the pool which, on reflection, was a bit too racy for the public section. As far as I can work out it’s still there, which probably explains why I haven’t had any responses yet. Even from Leipzig shot-putters.

Column: MP3 burning

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire — Burning for An Eternal Flame

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 17 October 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Those of you who spent your lovesick adolescence painstakingly making compilation tapes for your paramour, wasting hours hunched over a record deck deciding on a perfect segue to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin exhaling their way through Je t’aime . . . Moi non plus, I’m happy to report that technological advances now make the process a less exacting experience. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary, but recent improvements in software and hardware have made compilation CDs something you can create at home, quickly and easily. Here’s how.

What you need are a CD writer, some music and some software. For Windows users I’d recommend Cakewalk’s new Pyro 2003 ($25 for a download version from www.cakewalk.com/ pyro), but you might also try Ahead’s Nero (about $40 from www.nero.com) or Roxio’s EasyCD Creator (about $90 from www.roxio.com).

First, the music. If you’re using CDs, programs like Pyro will convert them to a format that can be stored on a PC. These are either MP3 files or rival Windows Media Audio (WMA) files — a compressed format that loses a little of the original sound quality — or a wave file, which retains all the original range of sound, but makes for a whopping great file. Want to use your LPs, or a cassette? Pyro will handle those too, basically by having you plug the relevant machine — turntable, or tape player — into your PC, and playing the track so the PC can record it. Pyro can also remove any clicks, pops or other sound quirks that were either on the original, or which appeared during the transfer to PC.

Pyro does all this quite intuitively, which is why I’d recommend it over other more feature-heavy, but less user-friendly, programs. That’s not to say Pyro isn’t powerful; Cakewalk made their name in music-recording software for pros and Pyro is a spin-off from that technology, so you’re in good hands. Once the tracks are in a format that Pyro can deal with, you can view them graphically as waveforms, like the jagged signals on heart-monitoring equipment. This is great for arranging the order of songs, and sorting out how you want them to follow on from one another.

Once again, Pyro makes this very easy: Click and drag a horizontal line over the waveform to set the volume of each song, and drag the ends of the same line to alter fades in and out. Drag the song’s waveform to alter the gap between each song, or overlap them for that wild party feel. In my day you could only do this with two turntables, fiddly cassettes, a mixer and a lot of patience, and if you got it wrong the first time there wasn’t much you could do about it except curse Serge Gainsbourg.

Once you’re happy with sound levels, segues and the overall brilliance of your compilation, it’s time to burn it to CD. This is also pretty straightforward, though I ran into some minor problems, probably as a result of my CD burner more than Pyro. Pyro could have done better on the error message, which ventured little more than something like ‘You’ve got a problem, dude.’

On balance, though, this is an excellent way to make CDs and it’s not as time consuming as it sounds. If halfway through you decide to add a song from elsewhere, Pyro handles it without any kerfuffle. If I had any complaints, I’d like to see better contextual help, which though innovative is too patchy to be helpful.

Programs like Pyro also make sense for the growing number of folk downloading music off the Internet, whether it’s from the dark and illegal world of post-Napster file sharing, or the uncertain, but legal, world of on-line music subscription. If you haven’t tried the latter, I’d recommend Emusic (www.emusic.com), which, for a monthly fee of just $10, allows you to download an unlimited number of MP3s from its sizeable library. You won’t find everything you’re looking for, but it’s a great way to check out new stuff, or come across some forgotten favourites. This isn’t for hi-fi perfectionists, but it’s a worthy successor to the grab-bag tapes of old.

Finally, suggestions please for what song should follow Je T’aime. I’m considering Eric Carmen’s original of All By Myself, but I’m open to suggestions.

Column: Blue in the teeth

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire — Bluetooth’s Teething Problems

For a hugely promising technology that’s supposed to let gadgets lose their cables, Bluetooth seems more effective right now at causing sleep, weight and sense-of-humour loss

By Jeremy Wagstaff

It’s not easy to tell someone who’s been working on the same thing for more than five years that you think his or her product doesn’t shape up. But Anders Edlund, marketing director for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, took it on the chin when I told him that all the Bluetooth devices I’d ever used had caused me sleep, weight and sense-of-humour loss. [Bluetooth, by the way, is a standard that allows two or more gadgets to be linked without using cables]. “Er, depending on what Bluetooth devices you’re using, the experience can vary,” he said evenly.

You’re telling me. All the headsets, phones, printer adapters and whatnot I’ve tried have ended up in the cupboard along with Aunt Thelma’s Christmas presents. Er, yes. Turns out those predictions of 100 million Bluetooth devices out there by 2002 are closer to 35 million, Edlund says, and he’s reluctant to make a prediction for this year.

OK, all this isn’t really fair, given that Edlund’s job is to sort out some of these teething problems. His nonprofit group is trying to make it easier for some 2,000 manufacturers to get Bluetooth up and running in their products. “The sole purpose is to ensure that when you open a Bluetooth product, when you get it out of the box, it is in most cases ready to be used in five minutes,” Edlund says.

I’m still sceptical. I’d hoped that once Microsoft jumped aboard Bluetooth, it would be plain sailing, the thinking being that if you can integrate the software that runs Bluetooth into Windows, it should be as easy to use as, say, the infrared that every laptop comes equipped with. Sadly, this hasn’t happened. Microsoft has recently released an upgrade to Windows XP that includes Bluetooth, along with their first Bluetooth products, a keyboard and mouse. Installing the upgrade takes way too many coffees and reboots, in my view, while using the keyboard required a special dongle [about the size of a lighter] that will then transmit to your wireless keyboard and mouse. After hours of fiddling, I had the keyboard working for about a day and a half before it gave up and I switched to a wireless Logitech keyboard — which eschewed Bluetooth in favour of the old infrared. That still works.

This is a shame, because the potential of Bluetooth is huge. Some folk are already there: Hand-phone-maker Nokia is about to launch N-Gage, a phone, MP3 player and gaming device wrapped into one: You can play others through the phone network, or your nearby friends by Bluetooth. Expect to see Bluetooth keyboards for hand-held devices in coming months, as well as portable MP3 players that will wirelessly connect to the nearest hi-fi system, feeding music to whichever room you’re in. Saab’s 9-3 car has a built-in Bluetooth phone which allows you to send data from your palm device or laptop wirelessly.

Bluetooth does not intend to replace Wi-Fi, a wireless standard for connecting computers to a wider network. Instead, think of Wi-Fi as the big hook-up with the outside world, and Bluetooth as the link between the devices in your immediate area. The two complement each other well. United Parcel Service, for example, is installing a worldwide network using both: Bluetooth will replace the cable between a waist-mounted terminal and a hand-held scanner, while the terminal will use Wi-Fi to send the data — in this case, tracking information from packages — to the UPS central computer.

The future? With Bluetooth chip prices falling — from $25 to $5 or below — there’s no reason most peripherals connected to your computer can’t dump their cables for Bluetooth. And you could configure your DVD recorder, alarm clock or microwave, for example, on your palm device screen via Bluetooth. Can’t find the car keys? Type “find keys” on your PC and it could send a beep to the Bluetooth-enabled key chain that’s fallen behind the bookcase. We’re some way off, but when this starts to happen, I promise to stop giving nice folk like Edlund a hard time.