Author: Stagger Lee

Welp. Blackberry is officially looking for somebody to buy them. This was more or less inevitable; the Z10 was far too little three years too late while the Playbook was a complete and utter bust as a tablet (Amazon basically schooled them with extraordinarily similar hardware with the original $199 Kindle Fire).  Sic transit gloria mundi – the gold standard of the connected life in 2002 is a poor fourth in 2013, and arguably has been since Microsoft shipped Windows Phone 7.

It didn’t have to be like this.  Research In Motion had a hammerlock on the corporate market for most of the first decade of the 21st century.  For the longest time, the Blackberry Enterprise Server was the only option if you wanted to get your corporate email sent to a portable device, and it remained the most secure and reliable choice even as the Sidekick and iPhone carved out the “consumer smartphone” market for themselves – because Blackberry Messenger split the difference between texting and IM and became the indispensable unique selling point for RIM’s devices.  Apple didn’t produce an alternative until Messages in 2011.

But what did for Blackberry, ultimately, was Android – which gave half a dozen different companies the opportunity to put a “good enough” smartphone in the hands of any old punter, free with a two year contract. And Android (and with it the iPhone) got a lot better at accommodating corporate requirements before the Blackberry got the ability to handle consumer smartphone apps and connectivity. I experienced it myself in 2009, when I carried the Bold for a couple of months.  The most well-received and highly-regarded Blackberry device to date, and it still sported a physical keyboard and a tiny (albeit crystal-clear) screen.  And the most highly-recommended application for web browsing was the same Opera proxy browser that I’d been trying to use on a Moto flip phone four years earlier.

RIM thought everyone would stay loyal to the physical keyboard – but of all the high-end smartphones of the last couple of years, exactly none have shipped with a keyboard.  Not the HTC One, not the Samsung Galaxy S3 or S4, not the Moto X, not any iPhone.  Even RIM/Blackberry shipped the Z10, with no keyboard, a month before the Q10 which had it.  RIM also thought people would stay loyal to Blackberry Enterprise Server – but the iPhone has had direct interoperability with Exchange servers for five years, which beats having to run a separate box for wireless email.  And the proliferation of unlimited texting – and ultimately unlimited messaging of all types – made Blackberry Messenger just one more number to remember.

It didn’t have to be like this.  RIM could have, should have jumped onto Android as soon as it became obvious the iPhone wasn’t a gimmick or a fad or a one-off.  Instead of the Storm – with its full screen that clicked as one huge button – RIM should have turned out an Android phone.  Instead of layering it with the likes of Sense or MOTOBLUR or TouchWiz, they should have taken the opportunity to port BBM, to layer their BES interoperability and security over Android.  They could have taken the best, most attractive, most marketable parts of the Blackberry experience, let Google be responsible for the OS and the ecosystem, and established a value proposition that no Android vendor could have rivaled.  Instead, they remained convinced they were indispensable.

Nobody’s indispensable. “Good enough” always carries the day, else the Macintosh would have ruled personal computing in the 1990s.  And “good enough” has carried Android to the market lead, as the Moto X builds buzz and as one blogger after another proclaims the miracle of Google Now.  One in particular said that Android has surpassed the iPhone experience for him because he uses Google services for everything anyway – which makes perfect sense. If you use Google services for everything, well of course a Google phone OS that integrates with your existing Google accounts and services will work better than an iPhone, or a Blackberry, or a Windows Phone device.

But that’s the thing, as I learned when trying to make it work: Google Now is of very limited utility if you don’t use GMail as your email provider.  I can get the directions to work every morning, I can get the weather (kinda sorta), but I don’t use GMail at all anymore – so I’m not going to have automated package tracking or flight status updates or boarding passes magically appearing at the airport or hotel and restaurant reservation reminders.  Once somebody comes up with a mechanism that can mine the data on the local device and parse it there, without recourse to reading your data from the server side or piping it back up to the cloud first, this might work out a lot better for me.

But for now, I don’t need it that badly. Weather and traffic alone aren’t that vital, they appear to be coming to the iOS 7 notifications automatically anyway, and there’s nothing I can’t get just as effectively elsewhere.  Which could be the ultimate epitaph for Blackberry: in the end, everything else got to be just as good.

1981.  A different era. ESPN barely exists.  College football games only appear on television on Saturdays. There’s no  such thing as commercial Internet.  Sports talk radio is in its infancy.  The triple-option Wishbone offense is au courant among major programs, not just service academies.  The SEC still has ten teams, SMU is still a national power, and Bear Bryant is still alive.  Basically, from our standpoint thirty-plus years on, it’s prehistoric college football. No realignment or 12-team conferences or first-week-of-December title games or BCS standings.  You know, what I was raised on.

Into this comes one Willie Morris, native of Yazoo City and alumnus of the University of Texas, a Rhodes Scholar in the late 1950s and a famous literary editor who found himself at the University of Mississippi in 1980, just as a young man in Philadelphia, Mississippi was making a name for himself on the high school football field.  Apparently that young man’s legend had reached all the way to New York City, which is how Willie Morris found himself spending most of the 1981 high school football season in and around Philadelphia to watch the senior season of a certain Marcus Dupree, the consensus #1 high school player in the country.

The book is widely regarded as a classic of college football literature, and so I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t start reading it until 2013. When I did, though, it was compelling – this, after all, is less than two decades removed from the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia in 1963, more or less contemporary with the Birmingham marches.  So reading about Philadelphia in the autumn of 1981 is more or less like reading about my own hometown in the vicinity of 4th grade or so.  Combine that with recruiting in an age with no Twitter, no 7-on-7 camps, no Rivals rankings, no national high-school All-American games, no endless hat games broadcast live by ESPN on National Signing Day…

I mean, think about it.  This is an era where national sports coverage realistically means Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, and ABC’s Wide World of Sports. There’s no SEC Media Days with more credentialed reporters flocking to Hoover than attend the Super Bowl’s media day; instead a bunch of beat writers crammed into a rickety DC-3 and touched down in each of the 10 SEC towns to see the teams and coaches individually (and the SEC Skywriters Tour passed into legend).  For a single high school player to rate that kind of national attention was literally without precedent, and The Courting of Marcus Dupree does an amazing job of showing how a small Southern town, still scarred from the civil rights era, finds itself through the looking glass because of one 17-year-old.  They had no idea how to handle recruiting mania, because the mania hadn’t existed before.

Really, that’s the appeal: at root, The Courting of Marcus Dupree is about a small isolated Southern community having to adapt to the modern world, one halfback sweep at a time.  And yet, for the first time that I can remember, it actually made me a little tiny bit homesick for the idea of a small pastoral town, leaves turning, high school football as the focus of everything, where the “coffee shop” is in fact a diner and the sports talk comes from guys at the counter arguing over what was in the paper and what they hear (the evolution of “What do you hear?” as the greeting of choice is a particularly salient and entertaining point). No social media, no 24-hour cable news and sports, something quiet and manageable.

I’d go crazy inside of a week, I know.  At least, I think I know.

Not a typo. Effective today, Google has begun introducing advertising into Google Maps. This is why we have Apple Maps: because ads were the price of introducing vector maps and turn-by-turn for the iOS version of Google Maps. Apple said no, took the bullet, and the mapping solution in iOS is still recovering.

Not to say that Apple might not try to monetize its location data in some future version of iOS. Anything’s possible. But Apple is still out to sell you atoms, not bits, and as long as that’s the plan, they’re not going to give away their bits for somebody else to sell. I have no doubt that this news will drive a lot of iPhone users to give Apple Maps another look – and a year on, they might like what they see better than they did on first release.

…is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, and it’s literally the first one that ever actually made me consider signing up for it.  Largely because it’s not Yet Another Dungeons And Dragons Knockoff.  Between Everquest and World of Warcraft, it’s tough to find any sort of RPG that isn’t caught up in the same old swords and sorcery and Tolkein-knockoff.  But The Secret World is set in the present day.  Yes there’s magic and such, but there’s also international conspiracy and H.P. Lovecraft and a Hollow Earth and…well, imagine equal parts of Raiders of the Lost Ark and At The Mountains of Madness and you’ll get there.  It doesn’t hurt that two of the factions are Templars and Illuminati (and based on the way the game operates, I can say without hesitation or fear of contradiction that I am all Templar.)

Part of the appeal is just that it’s different.  And part of the appeal is that it apparently doesn’t rely on the endless level-grinding or guild-based dungeon-raiding that other games do; you don’t have to book hours to go clomping along with a bunch of other people in order to play.  The asocial element is kind of appealing, actually.  I think that’s a bit of what drew me to Ingress however briefly – while it’s a huge game of massive factions locked in combat, you actually do all the work by yourself.  I just couldn’t bring it up quickly enough to make it worthwhile, especially with a dodgy side-loaded client.

I guess that’s the genre I’m into now: somewhere between urban fantasy and magical realism. Kentucky Route Zero might be the best example, with its weird and surreal things simmering under the surface of the ordinary world – and that’s as simple a game as you could ask for.  It’s more interactive novel than game, to be honest.  And then, there’s the TV show I’ve unearthed on Netflix and started watching again after twenty years…but that’s a whole post of its own, of which etc etc you know the drill. 

It’s time for something new.  Well, new-ish.  Vampires are played all the way out, the endless Star Trek and Star Wars knockoffs are running out of steam, the superhero genre is starting to feel long in the tooth for everyone that isn’t Marvel Studios, why not break out the magical realism? Skip the Hogwarts stuff and just go for that creeping strangeness that we call magic because we don’t have another explanation for it…after all, isn’t that what the entire genre of magical realism was created for? To work out those things in print that we can’t talk about in polite society?

Or maybe there are just days when you need a demon clawing its way out of the Earth, and a shotgun full of silver pellets, because you just need to be able to shoot something dead with a clear conscience.

The thing I keep coming back to about the imminent BART strike is the same thing I go to with all manner of public-employee labor disputes: these are the last people to get screwed.  People talk about their zero-contribution defined-benefit pensions as if this is some sort of mystical ice cream land – when this used to be a regular thing.  Seriously. I still have a piece of one myself from my first job, which I started in 1997.  With an old and conservative and slow-to-change organization, sure, but we’re not talking about some sort of cloud-cuckoo-land.  

In fact, what we’re talking about is a lot of what kept people working in public-service jobs for a long time: the promise that you were giving up cash up front now in exchange for a secure and reliable retirement.  Corporate America realized it was cheaper and easier to match some money up front, trumpet the ownership society, and make people do their own retirement financial planning (or better yet, line the pockets of the financial services industry to kinda-sorta-halfass it).  But for the most part, government retirement stayed the same: with no shareholder value to maximize and with things like collective bargaining and workplace rights protected in ways the private sector circumvented to a fault, the public sector remained an echo of the days when you could stay with an employer for thirty years and retire in good stead.

Supposedly, BART employees haven’t had a raise in four years. That’s the other annoying thing: the idea that this notional platinum-encrusted retirement is so generous that asking for a raise is the height of impudence.  But then again, that’s the Southern way: don’t worry about your penurious circumstances now because you’ll get milk and honey and fried catfish in Heaven.  Oddly enough, for some reason this deal is never that attractive to the ones offering it.  But here on Earth, you can’t pay your mortgage with the promise of a gainful retirement – shit costs money. And prices haven’t really been dropping these last four years – gas is still over $4 a gallon and the cable bill never goes any lower.  For all the Fed’s and the Street’s fretting about the inflation risk and damping it down, it hasn’t made stuff cheaper.

No, what happened was that there were jobs that paid and jobs that didn’t.  The jobs that paid got moved to where they could pay people less, and the jobs that didn’t pay so good – the sorts of things filled by high school kids on summer break – stuck around.  We hollowed out that space where people without a professional degree could make a living and raise a family on one income.  There are only a few left, and the people who have them are going to defend them to the very last.  As well they should. “We already screwed everybody else to take your turn” is no reason to accept a screwing yourself.

So the Moto X is here.  It’s attractive, it’s innovative in its way, it’s not particularly future-proof, and it’s a lot more expensive than people were anticipating.  And that last bit, while most disappointing/relieving to me, may very well point up a fundamental problem.

See, one of the selling points of the Moto X is that it’s actually put together in America.  Some of the components are imported, of necessity, but the phones themselves get made in Texas, in an old Nokia plant.  It’s the closest thing in years to a legitimately American-made mobile phone.  And it’s got mid-range specs and a high-end price.  And there are some rumblings that this is the inevitable cost of making a phone in America – and by implication, that the current pricing level for high-tech gadgetry is entirely a function of cheap Chinese wages, and that moving away from that inevitably entails a possible doubling of costs.

That’s as may be.  The fact is, almost every high-tech manufacturer had decamped to China by the early 21st century (Apple’s own PowerBook manufacturing left Cork for OEM by Quanta around 2000 sometime).  It’s not unlike what happened to the textile industry over a century and a half of seeking cheap labor – clothing moved from the mill towns of New England to the deep South, and once modern OSHA regulations and labor laws reached the former Confederacy, the industry promptly chose to up sticks and move into Central America, and eventually as far as South Asia. Bangladesh recently experienced a loss of life an order of magnitude worse than the legendary Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, which caught the attention of the rest of the world and pointed up the fact that it’s not just high tech: mass manufacturing as a whole has been moved to where labor is cheapest and oversight is slightest. 

The thing about technology is this: as a result of ten years of manufacturing in Shenzen, all by the same half-dozen companies like Foxconn or Pegatron, an infrastructure has grown up around that manufacturing process that provides economies of scale. Setting up shop to make iPhones or iPads in the United States would entail moving the supply chain for parts, or else shipping them halfway around the world (much as Motorola may have to do with the X), and then building the infrastructure to do large-scale assembly of delicate parts. Almost from scratch, at that, since Silicon Valley manufacturing mostly evaporated twenty years ago.  Not for nothing is this Motorola plant in Texas, which leads the country in “business is always right and taxes are always wrong” levels of regulation and workplace safety; the South has always been the site for manufacturing of last resort before leaving the US altogether.  And even with all that, the Moto X’s announced cost at point of purchase is nearly double that of similarly-configured hardware from other manufacturers.

There are other theories around this. The most prominent is that Motorola is attempting to send the signal that because this phone costs $200 on contract, it is a peer of other phones that cost $200 on contract like the HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4 – phones that have much more advanced technical specs. Or of the iPhone, which is similarly equipped but almost a year old and due to be replaced with a more advanced model by the end of autumn.  Maybe it’s the designer jeans approach – if you charge $200 for it, people will think it’s worth $200.

But it’s also entirely possible that this is the price of “made in America”.  Just like the Levis 501 jeans that cost $40 off the shelf or $178 for the LA-made North Carolina denim pair, it may be that what we think of as a mid-range Android phone just has to cost twice what we’re used to if we want to put it together in the United States instead of whatever the cheapest sweatshop in Shenzhen is this month.  Maybe if a lot of different companies went that route – if we had the Fort Worth Special Economic Zone and went nuts with the tax incentives and unemployment was high enough that the necessary skilled labor could be had at a minimal wage and a whole lot of gadget makers started making a whole lot of gadgets here – you might eventually achieve some economy of scale and drive down the cost.

But for whoever goes first, it’s going to be an expensive proposition, and nobody is patriotic enough to take a bath on their earnings while rebuilding the sector. More to the point, Wall Street won’t reward you for the long-term thinking, because they’re not capable of seeing a world beyond the next quarter.  So for Motorola to do this at all, they’re going to have to be able to do some magic – using patriotism and multi-colored shells to convince Ed Earl Brown to buy a quarter for fifty cents.  Whether enough people are willing to buy into the magic…well, I guess we’ll find out.

Well, here we go…the Moto X is here, or close anyway. It is pretty much as advertised in every leak – mid-range technical specs but engineered for maximum usability – except for one thing.  I posited in my last post that there were rumblings that the phone could be had off-contract for $200.

Instead, it’s $200…with a two-year contract.  And the Verizon version is already coming with the typical load of Verizon crapware.  And the customization features…are currently exclusive to AT&T.  And there will be a “Google Play” (read: un-crapped and unlocked) version…sometime.

This might be the most Android thing ever: a legitimately exciting device with a ton of buzz among the technorati, shipping without the latest version of Android and encumbered by its carrier partners.  This isn’t Samsung shitting up the phone with TouchWiz and a load of badly-designed gimmicks, this is damn near a pure Android experience, but it’s still going to suffer from the Android problem: you have to buy the device knowing full well that you may never get an Android version update.

That ain’t hay. Motorola (and through them, Google) is taking a risk by selling a phone with last year’s top-of-the-line specs at the price point and contract obligation normally associated with “hero” phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One.  This is a bet that “premium user experience” can be made to trump “premium hardware” – but the question is, with a 2-year contract obligation, will you still be happy with the Moto X in January 2015 if it’s still running its 2013 OS on its 2012-grade hardware?

To be brutally honest, it’s a relief. I was afraid the temptation would be too much to resist and that I’d wind up dropping $300 for a second phone before even setting up some sort of prepaid service. (Not for nothing but you can go prepaid with T-Mobile for $30 a month and get 100 minutes talk, unlimited text, and unlimited data with the first 5G at full speed – I honestly don’t know why I’d ever need anything else.)  Instead, if this turns out to be the whole story, and the Moto X ends up as just another phone, it will be one of the hugest missed opportunities in mobility.  And that’s a shame, at a time when cellular services in this country desperately need shaking up.

So apparently on August 1, Motorola Mobility (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google) is going to reveal, in New York City, the much-debated Moto X, a smartphone which is supposed to be a significant departure in several ways.  For Motorola, it’s Android without the Droid branding or the Verizon ties, which is a nontrivial shift from their positioning over the last few years (remember, Verizon’s “Droid” identity was the thing that was going to put the smack down on the AT&T/iPhone pairing. Then the Droid phones kinda sucked and the iPhone came to Verizon, while Samsung created the Galaxy cross-carrier branding and pretty much became the face of Android).  For the mobile phone industry in general, it’s a return to American manufacturing, or at least American assembly, for the first time since Motorola had a 50% global share of all mobile phones.  For Google, it’s their first self-produced Android device – the Nexus tablets were outsourced to Asus, the Nexus phones to HTC and then Samsung and then LG, and they own Motorola.

So, Google’s making a new Android phone in America themselves (well, themselves once removed) and not going through Verizon.  What else do we know?  Well, for one, it’s supposedly a mid-sized phone, under 5″ on the display as opposed to the shed loads of Android phones that have blasted through 5″ and are starting to push 6″ diagonal on-screen.  Not gonna lie: a lot of that size growth was for the sake of including an ever-bigger battery, because power management is still the Achilles heel – hell, the Achilles lower torso – of Android telephony.  And one of the things that’s specifically being talked up around the Moto X is its power management and battery life awareness.

But that’s not all – supposedly the phone will be “contextually aware” – know when you’re driving, know when it’s in a pocket, know when you’re voice-commanding it (a leaked video from Canadian carrier Rogers Wireless seems to bear this out).  And apparently it’s being pitched as a “mid-range” device that will nevertheless compete directly with the likes of the Galaxy S4 or HTC One or iPhone 5 – from the looks of things, by eschewing the stat-sheet arms race that drives so much of Android phone development in favor of doing some truly innovative things with the gadget itself.  There are rumblings that it will be possible to pick the thing up for $200…off-contract.

This, at last, is some serious innovation in the mobile space.  Android was supposed to be a game-changing open-source OS for phones that would allow for all kinds of innovation – and in the end, its main effect has been to give back to carriers what little control Apple prised from them and give manufacturers a way to make dirt-cheap “good enough” devices for $0 with a contract…and, of course, to spare Samsung another round of R&D.  For Google to take a hands-on approach – and to specifically target the mid-range and mass market with an inexpensive high-quality device – strongly suggests that they are done screwing around and want to demonstrate what Android is supposed to be capable of.  No more chasing stats – this is about crafting a premium user experience, whether it’s comfort in the hand or drop-resistance or guaranteed all-day-all-night battery life, and at the same time pushing the envelope of what can be expected from a mobile phone.

This, at last, is where it really starts to get interesting.

Location-based apps are the new social networking, it seems like. Google Now is the most prominent example of the genre, a year old now – assuming you use Google for everything, Google Now will mine your mail and calendar, and correlate with your location, to produce things like traffic for your commute.  Or transit stops as you approach them.  Or your boarding pass as you approach flight time.  It’s at once tremendously cool and unbelievably creepy.

Google Now came to iOS with a recent update of the Google search app, and was immediately awash in controversy because it was allegedly hell on battery life.  Google promptly released an update – some said it actually made changes, some said it just advertised how the app works.  But it wasn’t the only option – almost as soon as Google Now was announced, other companies began working on iOS workalikes.

I wiped my iPhone 5 and set it up from scratch a couple weeks back, in hopes of dealing with the ongoing battery life issues.  I’ve put things back one step at a time, and this past week I tried out Google Now, then Osito, then Saga, then Donna – four of the most prominent location-aware real-time info apps on iOS.  By and large, the battery impact wasn’t that bad – Osito and Saga seem like they were slightly worse than Google Now or Donna – but the bigger problem is, they didn’t really give me anything I could use.  I have two different worksites and none of the apps do a good job accounting for that, while the option to automate calling into meetings isn’t much use if the calendar event for the meeting doesn’t include the teleconferencing data (thanks a lot, boss).  The weather information is, quite frankly, all over the damned place (I’m currently running an experiment testing six weather apps and their predictions against the actual recorded data at a known good National Weather Service airport facility).  And honestly, without access to my email, none of them can really do any kind of mining for other types of data.

The problem is, this kind of location-aware app isn’t something I have a tremendous use case for at the moment.  I don’t travel around that much, least of all for work; I haven’t been on a plane in almost a year. None of them would pop up scores for me (not that I have many right now), and I have alerts set for that anyway via AtBat or ESPN Scorecenter or Sportacular.  Google Now was supposed to produce nearby restaurants or attractions, but I guess I just don’t go anywhere that draws on those.  As with so much of social networking (looking at you, Foursquare), the utility of these sorts of apps is not for the likes of me.

There was one other location-based app that I was very interested in – an iOS port of Ingress, the highly-addictive Android-based game that layers a secret war between two opposing factions on top of real-world geography. In theory, it sounds like an incredible good time, and if it were closer to The Secret War’s battle between Templars and Illuminati, I would have been all in (of which more later).  As it is, I couldn’t sort out the game mechanics enough to make the juice worth the squeeze, and it got wiped with everything else.  I don’t think it had that much impact on battery life, but why take the risk?

As it turns out, the two biggest battery draws are predictable.  One is Twitter.  Constantly reloading Twitter is pretty much guaranteed to destroy the phone’s battery in short order.  The other is signal strength – when Verizon’s LTE network gives out, what’s behind it is the same old CDMA-based 3G or worse, with a top speed of maybe 2Mb.  And if a Verizon iPhone can’t find a signal, it will burn the battery like Cheech and Chong at a Phish concert as it grasps for the nearest tower.  By staying off Twitter and steering clear of dead zones, I was routinely coming home at the end of the day with 50% battery life despite using the phone normally all day in every other respect, including for multiple hours of podcast-listening.

In the end, Verizon was a necessary evil – their LTE network is still the best built-out in the Bay Area, it ships with the SIM slot unlocked, and it has the best available bands for international travel.  But I’m very pleased that I’m not paying for this myself, especially when T-Mobile’s fallback network in the absence of LTE is an order of magnitude faster than Verizon’s.  The true test of a mobile device and network is how each degrades.  Plus, T-Mobile is the only carrier that actually spares you the cost of a device subsidy on your service – Verizon and AT&T will gladly let you pay full price for an upgraded phone and then still shaft you with the subsidy-boosted service rate.

This is not a return to phone glee, not by a long shot – I’m looking forward to iOS 7, which should run a treat on my iPhone 5.  That said, I’m very eager to see how the Moto X works out – a phone from Google (however indirectly) which will hopefully be running clean Android 4.3 and actually providing some of the alleged innovation about use-case awareness (it knows when you’re driving, it knows when it’s in your pocket, it knows when you’re giving it a command, and it knows how to save power). Too, there may well be a new Nexus 7 tablet next week, and that could be hard to keep my hands off – I still don’t have any meaningful real-world Android experience, and that’s no way to live in a modern mobile world.

Ultimately, the biggest location-based feature of the iPhone is that it goes everywhere with you.  I’ve spent thirteen years now trying to make a mobile device do more for me, and ever since the launch of the iPhone 4, you can make a pretty good case I’ve had it.  Between the soundtrack of my life, the picture to narrate it, and the social communication to keep me in touch with people, it really is the indispensable device in a way that simply wasn’t possible when I first came to California.

With the demise of Google Reader, it finally became possible for me to consider getting out from under the thumb of the Beast of Mountain View for good.  Sure, I had a lot of things going with Google, but many of them were simple to get out of – a quick redirect of my various domains for email left very little going into Gmail, while I unearthed an old AIM account to replace Google Talk for chatting with ‘er indoors during the workday. Google Voice has turned out to be not nearly as big a deal as I was expecting, and has basically become just a way of diverting calls to my old cell number (which invariably I don’t want to receive anyway, and besides, Google Voice is getting about as much attention as Reader did. I wouldn’t bet on it sticking around much longer in a world of Hangouts).

No, the two big obstacles to the Google-free life were Reader and Maps.  And when Google refused to upgrade Maps for the iPhone without additional data and advertising access, and Apple told them to go shit in a hat, the problem was half solved – a year on, Apple Maps is pretty much reliable for most of my purposes.  And now Google’s taken care of the other half, and I’m using Feedly as the backbone for Reeder on the iPhone and Mr. Reader on the iPad, and it seems to be working out pretty good.

I still have the Google Maps and Google Voice apps on the phone, under “in case shit.” And I have the Google Authenticator app in case I need to get onto the Google account. And…that’s about it, actually.  The default search engine on the browser is still Google most places, but resolutely logged out and set for Private Browsing by default.  I don’t even have my Gmail account on the iPhone anymore, just the iPad. 

Now…here’s the trick.  What if APPLE went away tomorrow?

Well, I still have the means to play all the content I already have, and I can still buy from the likes of Amazon. I might have trouble updating apps without the App Store, though.  But looking over most of the things I routinely use on my devices, plenty of them are web-accessible.  It might be easier to use the apps for Evernote, or Amazon, or Twitter, or Wikipedia, or YouTube, or Feedly – but it’s not strictly necessary.  If iCloud goes away, that would be a pain in the ass, but I still have email elsewhere, and I’d just have to go back to not losing my phone. All the notes go into Evernote, and as for maps…hm…

The moral of the story is that Apple is selling you things, while Google is selling you to somebody else in exchange for services.  It would be tougher to live without Apple at this point, just because mobility computing relies heavily on one or the other.  Except… the fallback of fallbacks, at that point, is Amazon. Get a Kindle Fire, which doesn’t depend on Google for its OS, and you’re off to the races again with a 8.9-inch tablet with 4G connectivity.  Plus a prepaid phone, obviously. Maybe an old Blackberry capable of Wi-Fi tethering, and then just get the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD with wi-fi and tether it…

Long story short, you’ve got to throw in your lot with somebody.  Google, Apple, Amazon, maybe Microsoft – but you’re just as hamstrung as you were in the build-your-own-PC days, maybe more.  You could slap together components and install Linux, but how far could you get from there?  And is it possible to get a phone or tablet that doesn’t rely on somebody’s specific services to back it up?

In any event, the de-Google’d life is now more possible than ever before.  We’ll see how long I last with it. If the Moto X is everything it’s cracked up to be, and if there really is a new Nexus 7 with the forthcoming Google announcement next week, it might be worth giving the Google silo another shot.