iTWire has a great post about the blog coverage of the TiVo and iPhone launches down under. It is a bit of meta-blogging, blogging about blogging. And I couldn’t agree more with that they have to say. A pitfall a lot of tech blogs fall into is forgetting the target market of the products they’re covering and making the mistake of reviewing them from the perspective of a tech geek and not a normal end user. This tends to lead to negative reviews as geeks are looking for loads of features. I know I’ve fallen into that myself. We tend to want all the bells and whistles and can be disappointed when something isn’t there, losing sight of the features that are there that will appeal to the target market (which is rarely the geek market). More succinctly:

Members of the digerati seem to be so immersed in the digital lifestyle that they often forget they’re not the average user. Just because something doesn’t meet the needs of the digital elite doesn’t automatically make it crap.

That’s been happening with some of the coverage for the launch of TiVo in Australia. Since some of the networking features won’t be rolled out until a future software update a few of the tech blogs have been fairly negative about the Australian TiVo. But they’re ignoring the features the TiVo will have as a DVR, well above and beyond other DVRs in the market. And even without all of the additional features, it will have some of them which is another advantage. As iTWire nicely put it:

I agree that waiting for extra features is frustrating but, purely as a Personal Video Recorder (which is its primary purpose), Australia’s TiVo will be very impressive straight out of the box. Much of the criticism seemed to come from fanboys of other high-end PVRs, plus Seven and Nine-haters who were venting their spleens.

Yes the lack of ad-skipping is annoying and just reinforces the fact that Australians get screwed by the local networks. Yes the networks are bastards for withholding EPG data and dragging IceTV through the courts. That doesn’t change the fact that the Australian TiVo is a great solution for the average man on the street, if not power users. Some media centre owners believe the world is conspiring against them, but they have to accept the fact that media centres aren’t for everyone and the average person doesn’t want a computer in their lounge room.

The same article also talks about similar negative blog coverage regarding the Australian launch of the iPhone. Local cell carrier Optus is offering 100MB to 1GB of data per month on its Australian iPhone plans, which a lot of geeks feel is too little. But for many users that’s plenty for checking email via IMAP, a little web browsing, etc. You’re really a heavy user to need more than 1GB/month - lots of video streaming, etc.

Remember a couple of months ago when the telnet interface to control HD TiVos was uncovered? As expected, the user development community has been hard at work producing tools to take advantage of this capability. And one of the most polished developments has tivoremote, for jail-broken iPhones. It is still very much a development project, but it has a decent UI - as seen here. And it can auto-detect compatible TiVos on your network. And it uses the TiVoToGo XML interface to download a list of the recordings from your TiVo to display on the iPhone for selection.

I love developments like this, they really show what the user community is capable of doing. At the same time, however, it is extremely frustrating and disappointing. Why? Because it is just a hint of what we could have if TiVo would only open up some APIs and publish them. If we can have interesting tools like this based on reverse engineering efforts of undocumented interfaces just imagine what could be done if TiVo would officially publish more of the APIs and enhance them. For example, the largest problem with the telnet control interface is that there is limited positive feedback of the status of the commands. If the commands returned the screen the unit was on, etc, you could truly remotely navigate the system. Currently developers have to rely on certain patterns being deterministic, which could break any time TiVo updates the software and changes the menus in any way.

TiVo could really engage the development community just by making some simple interfaces on the units more open. While ReplayTV did a number of things wrong, and ended up folding, one of the things they did right was having an extensive network API. This allowed the ReplayTV users to develop DVArchive, a very nice freeware tool. Their API extended to searching the EPG and scheduling new recordings, viewing lists of upcoming recordings, and more. I’d love to see community tools like this for TiVo.

Maybe someday TiVo will embrace the user development community and publish more APIs. In the meantime we still get to enjoy tools like these due to the efforts of the community.

Ever since the Apple iPhone hit the market, people have been asking for a version of SlingPlayer Mobile for the platform. To date Sling has only expressed their desire to support the platform when it is possible to do so. But with the Apple WWDC kicking off this week, they’ve been showing off a bit of what they’ve been up to, and a number of blogs have coverage:
Engadget (video)
Gizmodo (video)
Zatz Not Funny (video)
PVR Wire @ TV Squad
Ars Technica
Macworld
NewTeeVee
Electronista
jkOnTheRun
The Mobile Gadgeteer
Crave
CrunchGear
AppleInsider
Mobility Today
Gizmos for Geeks
9 to 5 Mac
I4U News
Gear Diary
Download Squad
Unwired View
GottaBeMobile
Nerd Beach
Brighthand
Geek.com
SlingCommunity

And I’m sure there others that I haven’t spotted.

Dave Zatz posted this video to YouTube:

Note that this is a proof of concept, a technology demonstrator, and not the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone that will eventually be released. This was an engineering project written for jail-broken iPhones to characterize the performance of the platform and ensure that Sling could deliver a high quality customer experience on the iPhone & iPod Touch platforms. This allowed Sling to gain experience with the platform while waiting for the SDK to be released. The official SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone will be written using the SDK and sold through the iTunes App store like other official iPhone/iPod Touch applications. At least that is currently the intent.

If you’re attending the Apple WWDC this week you can get a look at the proof of concept application first hand. Sling Media Product Manager Vicky Shum will be at the Starbucks at 120 4th Street, San Francisco (across from the Metreon) between 10:00 and 16:00 (10am and 4pm) on Monday, June 9th running demos.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media.

I was happy to see Apple announce today that they’re boosting the iPhone’s capacity from 8GB to 16GB, and the iPod Touch from 16GB to 32GB. I’m not really much of an Apple fanboy, in fact, the only Apple product I really use is my iPod and iTunes. I do think OS X is a great operating system, and if they’d sell it for use on generic hardware I’d probably use it, but I haven’t been willing to pay the Apple Tax on their laptops. (Yes, I know about Darwin.)

But I really do like the iPod, and, having tried a number of alternative portable digital music players, it is still the only one I really recommend. However, I’m still using a 60GB iPod with color, initially known as the iPod Photo. The first generation of video iPods just wasn’t enough to make me jump - the screen is too small. And I have almost no interest in the iPhone. I’ve played with them, I know people who own them - and I still prefer my Treo 680 to the iPhone for my needs. I really use my ‘phone’ more for email and such - text applications - and I just didn’t like typing on the iPhone. It is shiny and sexy, but that’s not enough for a serious relationship.

But I do love the screen and the interface for other things, including the browser. So when the iPhone was announced I was excited, not because of the iPhone, but because I knew it was only a matter of time until an iPod popped up with the same design. And it did, the iPod Touch. But when it was announced I was very disappointed. What I wanted was a high-capacity unit with the UI of the iPhone. I was thinking 80GB, or even 160GB, with the same screen and UI, not 8GB or 16GB! I’m getting close to filling my 60GB iPod, and I like having all my music on tap. I started with a 20GB iPod and quickly dumped it for the 60GB model because I couldn’t stand picking and choosing which songs to load, invariably not having the song I wanted to listen to on there, of course. So there was no way I was going back to even 16GB.

So I’m happy to see the 32GB model announced, not so much for what it is, but because the next logical step is 64GB. I just have to wait and the price/performance curve will bring Flash memory prices down far enough for Apple to kick up the capacity again. And when they finally launch the 64GB model, I expect to finally upgrade. I think it’ll happen in the second half of this year.

I can wait.