I saw a post about VSCO on Colin Devroe’s Blog and it got me thinking about how awesome it is that services like VSCO and MicroBlog are finally dropping chasing mainstream social networks and just going their way. They proudly proclaim that if you want better social networks, more support, and good features, please pay up.

It’s not just where innovation will happen, but also where users will be happier and developers more satisfied. There is always the threat of the whims of the developers taking over the wishes of the users, but it’s not as if Google, Facebook, and Twitter have helplines you can call to give suggestions and understand their policies. So it’s either the whims of large corporations with strange and often lopsided goals or the whims of people more closer to earth.

It’s also in line with the trends of newsletters and blogs going paid, and Patreon taking over the creative process. All of this shows these segments maturing.

It’s like with forums on the previous iteration of the Internet – first they started off with free and then became paid and closed and in many ways, that was great.

People often look at the iOS App Store as a success story when it went from free apps to paid, to freemium, to ad-based, to finally subscriptions. It’s not just that subscriptions are more sustainable, but that they mean that the people on the other end are more cognizant of your time and value.

Money changing hands somehow adds value to the relationship online. This is good. But it’s not just that. It’s also about these little players just giving up on the constantly changing aims of big players and signaling to users – “they don’t have their best interests in mind; we do. We care, they don’t. Who would you rather be with?”

I got the chance to buy the new Echo Auto from Amazon recently. I could only order one, so I’m playing with it now and will pass it on to my brother soon.

Some thoughts on this new product from Amazon –

1. Terrible packaging – Amazon has this idea of basic packaging for their products. I was recently in the Amazon 4-Star Store in Seattle and noticed that they’re selling their Kindle Paperwhite in an blue (cardboard? paper?) box with bare-minimum packaging. This is both great, because we’re reducing waste, and terrible, because the overall experience is cheap for a >$100 product. The same is true for the Echo Auto. It came in a black box that barely fit the product, charging setup, and a booklet as cozily as possible. The unboxing experience was not impressive.

2. Not-so-good setup, partly because of the app and partly because of Bluetooth – The Amazon Alexa app is your be-all for the Echo line of products. I updated the app before trying to connect the Echo Auto with it and the setup experience was meh. The app is janky and does an OK job of connecting with the device. The problem for me was two-fold – first, the idea that the Echo Auto doesn’t directly connect with the bluetooth of the car, but goes through the app. This has the effect that if you’re in an underground parking, or if your phone has killed the backgrounded app, the Echo Auto gives you an impolite beep as soon as the Accessories come on in your car, to tell you that the Echo Auto has lost the connection with the app and whenever you can, you should start the app so that the process can be completed. I park in an underground parking. This happens every, single, time. This dependence is a boon, because you’re not buying a data plan for yet another product, and you’re not constantly worried about an expensive product being stolen from your car, and because somehow, apps like Spotify work perfectly through this setup, but the impatience shown by the device to connect to its conduit is irritating. The second issue is that BMW doesn’t seem to have a good bluetooth vendor. Their bluetooth is one of the worst I’ve ever used in a car. But hey, this is a post about the Echo Auto, so let’s focus on that.

3. The wait for the beep is funny – when I setup the Echo Auto, the setup explained that I must wait for the beep of the device before I give it a command. So I followed the instructions – Say “Alexa”, wait for a few seconds for the beep, and then give it a command. Nope, not worth it. I have first gen Echo Dots and Google Home Minis and they launch a lot faster than this! I guess this has to do with the device first confirming that the connection with the app is present, and then letting me give it a command. But here’s the thing – after only the first few commands, I stopped waiting for the beep, and lo and behold, it still works! So even if you don’t wait for the beep, the Echo Auto passes everything you say to the app and understands the command. This is both great, and weird. If it starts recording as soon as you say the magic word, then the beep is nothing more than an unnecessary audio feedback, specially since the device also lights up LED to confirm that it’s listening. If this is about a11y, give me the option to turn off the beep.

4. It listens to any Alexa word on sentence – It seems like the Echo Auto doesn’t have a filter for conversations. I can be talking about Alexa in a sentence and the Echo Dots don’t pick it up, but the Echo Auto does, and then complains loudly when it doesn’t understand the command that I didn’t give to it. It’s a first gen Echo Auto, so these are issues that can be ironed out, but it’s not a first gen Echo, so these issues shouldn’t exist to begin with.

5. The air vent is dumb. Just dumb. – When I got the package, it came in a typical Amazon yellow jacket, with not one but two things in it. The Echo Auto in a black box, and the Echo Auto air vent mount, in a blue box. This $15 accessory came free, and I set it up, and took it down within a day. First of all, all air vent mounts are dumb. If I’ve got a thousand dollar phone on an air vent, and it’s freezing cold outside, my expensive phone is being blasted with super hot air on its back. That is NOT how you treat your electronics. So I have it out against air vent mounts in general. On top of this, the wiring is just ugly and inconvenient. I understand that the Echo Auto needs to be in a place where it’s easy to use, and centrally located to hear all voices, and should not cause the driver to move their eyes off the road, but instead of the air vent, I just placed it next to the BMW media controls and it felt just right over there. A weak 3M adhesive strip would work wonders, but even that is not needed, as the USB power cord can just be reeled in and used as a leash for the Echo Auto. So Amazon, thanks for the $15 freebie, but it’s useless.

Overall, the Echo Auto is an interesting product. It conquers the one place Amazon hasn’t fully reached yet – your privacy in your car. It works great with apps and services that the Echo line has tied up well with – ask it for the news, or tell it to change music on Spotify, and, thanks basically to Spotify’s absurdly good API, it all works smoothly. But the device itself is jerky. It’s dependence on your phone, its imperfect listening skills, all need an update. So if you want to play with it, sure, go for it, but maybe wait for v2 or v3 to come along.

I give it two out of five stars.

Recently, I completed four years of owning the Apple Watch, and today, my watch told me that I’m 75% of the way to completing a thousand move goals.

I think it’s a good time to talk about the Apple Watch. I own the original, first-gen, Series Zero, the one that doesn’t support the latest WatchOS, and doesn’t calculate resting heart rate, because, according to Apple, it doesn’t have the battery to support that function. But that’s OK. I can’t miss something I’ve never had.

Very soon into owning the Apple Watch, I knew I had to make some compromises. Only a few days in, I had to turn off notifications for WhatsApp, because watchOS had no notion of grouping notifications. Progressive improvements may have made things better, but this year is anyways the year when I’ve sworn to remove as many notifications as possible from every device I own.

I also realized, as the watchOS version number increased as frequently as it did, that there is probably a hard stop to when my watch will no longer be supported. I think iOS 13 is that time. The watch might still work, but OS support will drop, apps will stop working, and eventually, Apple will kick this device to the curb. My next phone might not even support this elegant piece of hardware that I’ve strapped to myself for most of the last four years.

But till that happens, I can enjoy what I’ve got – the watch is pretty great at recording my calorie burn – I’ve compared it with OrangeTheory’s Mio Link devices and I can’t say whether that’s a testament to Mio Link or the Apple Watch. The watch is also great at notifications for things that are timely. Sometimes, I’ve noticed that when I’m intensely focused on something, I’ll ignore notifications, even though I’ve set them on the highest vibration. But other times, noticing a notification right as I need it is great!

Over time, I’ve removed apps and features from the watch. I used to let the Watch app install pretty much every iOS app’s corollary to the watch, but that’s just taking space, unnecessary processing, and battery. After removing all but the most essential apps, the battery life almost doubled for me. At this moment, I have a total of three third-party apps on the Watch, out of which one is for near-daily use, while the other two are purely for navel gazing.

Apple introduced some new features to the WatchOS at some point, including a feature called theater mode. The reasoning was that the watch would turn on at inconvenient times, say in the dark, when watching a movie, and this would prevent that. I have a few thoughts on that. First of all, within a few days of owning the watch, while on a walk, I tried to raise my wrist to wake the screen. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work! Somehow, my walking was completely negating the action of raising my wrist. I had to hard stop to get the watch to work, and I wasn’t even walking fast, it was a leisurely stroll. Since that day, I’ve had this gripe – the Apple Watch needs to grow up and join other watches in letting me see the time any time of the day. Until that happens, until Apple launches an OLED version that includes always-on (something that is glaringly missing in the latest, most expensive iPhones ever), the Apple Watch is NOT a watch.

Secondly, what kind of execs and movie-goers work at Apple? What amount of gesticulating do you do in your average movie? Just wondering.

Lastly, Apple advertised the watch as being able to wake up 90 times in an 18 hour day. This is nice, specially since that’s far more than the number of times you probably actually look at the time on your watch. But all those times that the watch misfires because it didn’t read your intent correctly are lost chances, are they not? So instead of releasing theater mode, I’d much rather Apple work on improving battery life. Now that Mr. Thinner-than-before is out the door, maybe this will come to pass? (Incidentally, turning off raise-to-wake is one of the things recommended by blogs to improve your watch’s battery life, and frankly, that is a stupid and terrible idea. If you have to tap the device every, single, time, to look at the time, just use your iPhone.)

The Apple Watch is a great piece of technology, but there’s one more thing that irks me to this day – that the time is relegated to the side. I don’t know if this is a patent issue, or just a design philosophy, where the time is the time, but the other features are what are supposed to matter. But the fact that Apple embraces this idea that the digital watchface must put everything other than the time in the center is a far cry from what I expected the Apple Watch ethos to be.

This is not an ode to the Apple Watch, nor, hopefully, just a list of gripes. I love this watch. It’s got a simple set of features that matter to me, and the price is just right for something I’ve worn for four years and can continue wearing for another four at least. A few years ago, I wanted the milanese loop band pretty badly, so I bought one off Amazon for a couple bucks. You know, those ones that ship from China and take a couple weeks to get here. It was such a bad experience that I swore off third party bands completely, wearing only the original that came with the watch. Recently, I changed bands, and this new band, though it is a complete mismatch for the watch color, feels pretty great and sits well! I feel like I’ve given the watch a new lease of life, even though the original band still works perfectly and sits on my side-table, vacantly staring into the abyss.

There’s not much else to say about the Apple Watch at this time – the latest hardware features that Apple introduced – the larger screen, and the ECG, are novelties which I wouldn’t ‘upgrade’ for. If they introduce something like a glucose monitor, or, like, a thermometer – anything that enables an elevated level of idle introspection – then I’ll consider buying the next watch that comes out, and only when this one is all but dead.

Till that day, I charge it every day, even though nowadays the battery lasts me a day and a half (I’ve reduced animations on the watch, which greatly helped my sanity, and the battery), wear it every day, and still grumble when it dies on me mid-hikes. I wanted to write exclusively about the Apple Watch, without once mentioning traditional watches, but I want to say just one thing – I’ve seen this watch on almost every wrist lately – from service industry workers, to gig economy laborers, to bloggers, to world travelers. The Apple Watch is versatile, but maybe it’s still attractive only to those people who have always worn watches. After all, keeping track of time is not something everyone bothers with, is it?