CS and the City

Yes, the RAZR has been an iPod scale hit. ROKR less so , though a step in the right direction. And my personal favourite, the SLVR, has been doing well for itself too.

But Motorola has completely outdone itself now with what they’re calling the Motofone, which is what I’ve been asking for all along: just give me a good, solid phone. No Video taking, Britney Spears playing, light show raving, king of none phone for me. I just want something to store my numbers and sound reasonable.

Motorola realized that I’m not crazy, built one, and then made it pretty, and now they want to charge me $50 straight up, not after handing over my first born to the cell phone companies.

Not only am I going to buy one as soon as it is available, but if there ever was a phone to start a co-op wireless network with, this would be it. I wonder if Nortel would want to donate a GSM tower…

I hate cell phones. It’s unfortunate, because I am a huge gadget fan. I don’t hate cell phones for the technology and shinyness. I hate the bullshit that comes with them.

I hate when people drive while talking on their cell phones. I hate when people talk on their cell phones on the street loud enough for everyone to hear that they’re being dumped. But most of all, I hate cell phone companies.

Disclaimer: I own a cell phone. I have no land line in Vancouver so this is the only way my parents can get a hold of me. It’s a Rogers pay as you go phone. I was given the phone for free and bought the SIM card on Craigslist.

The local Rogers cell phone shop comes by our company every few months to offer employee pricing on plans and phones. I went down and talked to one of the guys who came to the building to take a look at the deals. At first, the deal looked quite reasonable. $20 a month for a quite a few minutes, free evenings and weekends, etc etc. I told the guys I’d think on it and would stop by their shop after work.

A did a bit of digging back at my desk and came up with some concerns. I liked the Motorola L7 they had on discount, but I really wasn’t looking to replace my iPod and for the price I know I’d be happy with the L2. If I wanted to go all out, I’d be looking at the SE 810i because of the 2 Megapixel camera. I also wanted to know what my final monthly bill would be, considering all the various rebates and promotions. I just wanted a single number. I went back to the shop with the intention of buying a phone and a 2 year plan. I left with nothing.

I asked, pointing to they flyer they had given me, “What are these fees you mention here in the fine print?” The guy I was dealing with said flat out, “Don’t worry about those.” Now I wish I was quicker on my feet because I should have said “So you’ll cover them with the deal then.” But I just stood there, awestruck. I mentioned I’d be looking at the L2 and I actually had to fight with him to stop trying to sell me the L7. Instead he just wanted to sell me the POS phone they were almost giving away with the plan, one that I wasn’t really looking forward to hauling around. I was told shouldn’t worry about needing caller ID or long distance either, just go with this plan now and then figure out later what I might actually need. After 15 minutes of trying to get straight answers from numb nuts, I thanked him for his time and left.

I know used car salespeople that aren’t that pushy. In fact, I don’t know one that is.

What kind of industry needs to bind their customers in 3 year terms in order to make profit? Why are customers so desperate to leave that they have to be legally tied to stay? How come looking for a cell phone carrier is really just a competition to see who sucks less? All of this frustrates me to no end. I’m a gadget guy, I like the idea of cellphones, but I cannot bring myself to deal with the high pressure scare tactics that the carriers employ on a daily basis.

I think car salespeople used to be synonymous with this kind of consumer experience, but they’ve grown past this stage. It’s time for a new provider to adopt the Toyota model. Or the credit-union model. Someone please give me an alternative to the lesser of three evils situation I’ve got right now.

I wonder why it is that Windows apps have brutally straight forward names like MP3 Tagger and Windows Journal and Mac apps have names like Tangerine. Do Mac developers strive to make their names as unrelated as possible? I have to know these things if I’m going to become one

Here’s the money shot: Tangerine does cool stuff with your iTunes library that would have taken you way to long to do yourself. Sort of like SoundFlavor (I guess… my PC owning buddies have been rubbing that one in my face for a few days now). Get on the free beta here or better yet, get yourself a license for blogging about it.

Tangerine is a tool that analyzes the songs in your iTunes music library by beat intensity (amplitude?) and allows you to create playlists by specifying ranges of BPM and intensity and then making arrangements of songs based on your parameters. For example, you can create a playlist that starts with slow tempo music and then builds in the middle, effectively making a perfect (and random) workout soundtrack.

But keep in mind, it’s beta software. It’s hard to tell at first though (I’m really impressed how fast it flew through my music collection).

Things to watch out for:

• Since Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to store album art work outside of files, it appears that any albums you’ve tagged with Artwork using the iTunes get album feature won’t properly display in Tangerine. It’s too bad too, the playlist view is very very cool. It would be even cooler without all the ‘?’. Hey, do Apple one better, want to go populate those BPM fields on my songs for me? I know I’m not going to…
• Tangerine seems to have trouble with some of my songs. Sometimes it evaluates the BPM incorrectly (fast for slow, slow for fast), but worse is that I think it fails on some of my songs. Instead of indicating that, however, it just doesn’t show them in the library. I can only assume that’s why they aren’t here.
• I really wish I could simply drag a song in and then have Tangerine generate a playlist based on that first song. Sort of like Pandora but for iTunes. I don’t really need songs that rise and fall over the course of the playlist, but if it’s raining in the morning. I’d love to be able to tell Tangerine just to give me a bunch of songs based on this one Sufjan Stevens track and throw it on my iPod. Which leads me to…
• Yep it’ll save the playlists back to iTunes, but I wish I could save it directly to the iPod. Technically Tangerine should just be a plug-in to iTunes, but I think they’re quite limited by Apple’s API so I understand why it’s a seperate app. Still, I don’t want to have to switch between them if I can avoid it.

As always, things are bound to change between now and 1.0. I’ll give you an update once it comes out. Definitely give it a sneak peak while you can though. The UI is tres pretty (as Potion Factory apps seem to be). Man, who needs all those Web 2.0 apps anyway?