Tag Archives: Evo 4G LTE

Belated updates to this year’s stories

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You don’t have to run a correction when a story changes after you’ve written about it–but it is polite to follow up. Here’s a not-so-short list of updates to stories I’ve done this year.

Old stories sepia toneWhen I wrote that Google’s new, unified privacy policy would almost certainly be recast to let users opt out of having the company assemble a detailed portrait of them based on their use of separate Google services, I was wrong; that has yet to happen.

Sonic.net’s groundbreaking fiber-to-the-home service–a steal at $69.95 a month for 1 billion bits per second–seems to be off to a fine start in Sonoma County, but the planned expansion to San Francisco’s Sunset District is still on the way. It hasn’t shown up as an advertised offering on this Santa Rosa, Calif., Internet provider’s home-services page either.

Remember when adjacent-friend-discovery apps were going to blow up after their moment in the sun at SXSW in March? Didn’t happen. Facebook bought Glancee (and has yet to do much publicly with its technology), while Highlight seems to have fallen off the map (maybe I’m not hanging out with the right crowd?).

The ethics of outsourced manufacturing, fortunately, have stayed in the headlines since I wrote about them in March for CEA. And we may even be seeing legitimate progress, to judge from the New York Times’ story earlier this week recounting upgrades in pay and working conditions at contract manufacturers Foxconn and Quanta’s Chinese factories.

I’m still waiting to see comparable progress in liberating e-books from “digital rights management.” The sci-fi publisher Tor/Forge–a subsidiary of Macmillan–went DRM-free in July, but other branches of the major publishing houses have clung to this self-defeating measure. 

After saying so many good things about the car2go car-sharing service–and seeing that story get picked up in a few other places–I have to confess that I, ahem, haven’t used the service since. Capital Bikeshare is even more convenient and cheaper for trips under two miles, plus I need to make my way into the District to jump into one of car2go’s Smart fortwo vehicles.

I tempered my praise for Sprint’s Evo 4G LTE by wondering how long its users would wait to get Google’s software updates. Answer: almost six months, the time it took HTC and Sprint to deliver the Android 4.1 release Google shipped in June.

I was pretty sure I’d buy a Nexus 7 tablet after liking it as much as I did in July. But now that I own an iPad mini, that purchase seems like it would be redundant. Am I making a mistake there?

After teeing off on Apple Maps in the first chapter of my iPhone 5 review for CNNMoney.com, I have to give Apple credit for fixing the two worst flaws I called out. It now lists the correct address for the Kennedy Center as its first search result and provides a route to Dulles Airport that don’t cross any runways. But it still doesn’t know about Yards Park or the new 11th Street Bridges across the Anacostia–and the latter omission means its directions will now send you on a closed stretch of freeway.

My upbeat review of Samsung’s $249 Google Chromebook noted some build-quality concerns, in the form of a loose corner of the screen bezel. I found out the hard way that it’s more delicate than that; its LCD is now broken, and I don’t even know how. (We do have a two-year-old at home, but it’s also possible that I dropped something on it.)

My advice about enabling multiple-calendar Google Calendar sync on an iOS device by setting up your Google account as a Microsoft Exchange account will soon be obsolete. Effective January 30, Google will no longer support Exchange syncing on new setups (although existing ones will still work). Fortunately, it’s also posted instructions to enable multiple-calendar sync without the Exchange workaround.

3/23/2013: Updated the link for the car2go review after the post vanished in a site redesign and, for CMS-driven reasons that escape me, could not be re-posted at the same address. 

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Large reviews for tiny gadgets

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I’ve spent most of my career writing within a pretty narrow range of word counts. My Post tech column started out budgeted at 25 column inches, or 950 or so words, and then got whittled down to 22 inches, some 750 words. At Discovery News, I’m allotted 500-plus words per post; my CEA blogs have a 700-to-800-word limit; USA Today’s tech site expects 700, tops, per Q&A column.

(Writing a solid 2,000 words of reported feature for Ars Technica could have been some sort of remedial boot camp for journalists, except it was a hell of a lot more fun.)

But maybe I haven’t been writing nearly enough. A few days ago, I thought I’d compare the word counts (as measured with DEVONthink’s free WordService plug-in for Mac OS X) of four recent reviews of Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G LTE.

My post for Discovery News clocked in at 583 words. That’s about 200 fewer than I once would have considered a minimum, but after almost a year of blogging for Discovery it now seems like a natural length.

Over at PCMag.com, however, my friend Sascha Segan (in a prior millennium, he worked at the Washington Post’s online operation) devoted 1,388 words to reviewing the same device. The Verge’s David Pierce cranked out 2,458 words in his own assessment–which also included a photo gallery and a video review. And the staff of Engadget outdid both of those writers by producing a 2,841-word opus that included its own multimedia accompaniment.

I’m not going to say that 600 words is the right and proper length for a review. That limit forced me to leave out details like the Evo 4G LTE’s hidden microSD Card slot and its frustrating lack of international roaming. And in terms of strict market success, I’m quite sure that the page-view stats for the Engadget and Verge reviews utterly destroyed mine.

But I could do without many of the cliches of the extended-review genre: the throat-clearing intro “Does this measure up to [its promises/its competitors/our expectations]? Read on after the jump to find out!”; the digressions about the varying plastic and metal components of a gadget’s exterior; the table of detailed performance benchmarks without equally detailed battery metrics. Are that many people interested in this sort of long-form tech journalism?

Better question: If they are, what other sorts of long-form writing would those readers appreciate?