Technology, Social Media and Millennials

I'm going to start this post off with a disclaimer. I know that I am not an expert on my generation, I know that my experiences probably don't reflect everyone else's, and I know that I am not an expert on, well on anything really.

The video above gives a brief insight into the perceptions of Millennial. Perceived as being underachieving, lazy, and unfocused, my generation faces an uphill battle to win respect in the mind of the older Gen X and Baby boomers.

It's no secret that Millenials love technology. We grew up with the internet and cell phones and for many of us it is hard to remember a world without these conveniences. Don't know something? Google it. Want to read up on something you heard in a conversation? Wikipedia my friend. In some ways we might just end up being the smartest generations ever, or maybe the dumbest- it just depends on the way you look at it. We have all this information literally at our fingertips 24/7 a phenomenon the world has never known before.

If I had a nickle for every time a classmate proclaimed tests were stupid because 'in the real world I could just Google it' I would have a large pile of nickels. While that is certainly true for facts and formulas which some classes are based upon, concepts and ideas require abstract thought processes which some Millenials tend to push to the wayside. Thus is the first woe of our generation. Just because we have the ability to know everything, that doesn't mean we actually have any knowledge. 

We live in an always on always connected time. I only know a few people my age that do not own a smartphone. These devices can seemingly take over our lives. We live for the likes and the favorites that give a sense of achievement or belonging. The apex of this would be the app Yik Yak. Think of Yik Yak as being Twitter, but no one knows who tweeted what and you don't know who favorited your tweet. The App is literally about winning meaningless points from strangers, kind of like Reddit. The app has taken over college campuses and because of its anonymity and self-moderated community has lead to several cases of cyber bullying and race issues. Girls are judged by how many likes they receive on the their Instagram selfies, guys are called gay for tweeting song lyrics, and then you see everyone tagged in a photo of a party you weren't invited to. 

The solution seems easy enough. Don't engage in these social activities; delete your Twitter, deactivate Facebook and Instagram and you're free. But we live in a time where these medias make up such a large chunk of Millennial communication that unless your group of friends all take the plunge and cleanse themselves of those bastardly Social Media sites, you would be stuck on in the cold, forever out of the proverbial loop. 

Its that fear of missing out that drives our obsession with social media and causing us to be glued to our screens. With everyones opinions and criticisms out there for everyone to read, Millennials need to have a tough skin, which can often come off as a 'I don't care about anything or anyone' or 'nothing matters' disposition to older generations. 

Technology will forever define our generation and those to come, but being first we going to endure the rough edges and hopefully make the path smoother for those to come. 

--Technical Scott

Is Samsung Poised to Fall?

Samsung has risen through the ranks of Android OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) on the heels of its flagship Galaxy S series.  Beginning in 2010 with the original Galaxy S all the way through this year’s S5, Samsung has consistently given users a bigger more powerful upgrade year after year. Each year brought improvements that, along with the Korean Giant’s massive advertising budget, helped Samsung become a household name throughout America. Samsung even renamed anentire airport terminal in a massively expensive marketing push. 

Samsung Galaxy S5 Terminal at Heathrow Airport 

There seemed to be a point in time where you either had a ‘Samsung’ or an ‘iPhone’, and even casual users of an HTC or Motorola handset though they had a Samsung Device. That is a testament to Samsung’s marketing more than anything along with their deep market penetration. I still remember back in 2010 one of my friends got an original S and referred to it as “an iPhone on Verizon”; due to the AT&T’s exclusive distribution of the iPhone 4 in the states.  For years Samsung’s offerings have been the best-selling flagship Android devices, being compared to iPhones in almost every review. In the early days of the S series Samsung produced some of the best hardware available for Android, but it feared it might be lumped in with other OEM it competed with. To combat this they developed their own Touch Wiz skin overlay on top of Android. In theory this gave the advantage of having a Google powered phone but with extra software that was supposed to enhance usability. Average users may not notice the caveats of Touch Wiz, especially if they have only ever owned a Samsung device.

When you buy a new device it's no longer about which phone has the largest battery or the highest clocked processor, because Smartphone hardware is plateauing.  Companies like Apple are fine tuning their operating systems to run smoother on less powerful devices. The new iPhone 6 has a smaller battery and slower processor than the S5, but according to these benchmark tests that doesn't really have a negative effect on overall performance. 

            To the casual observer, the situation looks to be Android vs iPhone (sorry Windows Phone and RIP Blackberry), but Sammy’s biggest competition is really coming from other Android OEMs. 

As the chart above illustrates, the real competition is coming from low cost Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi. In the days of the S2 and S3 Samsung had the advantage of being so big it could leverage the market to produce high quality phones for a cheaper price than most of its competitors, but now with greatly improved software from Google that is designed to run on less hardware (which is now cheaper) that advantage no longer exists.

            Last week, Samsung released its earnings guidance for Q3 2014 and the numbers did not look very good. 

The table above shows the outlook at a glance and while the numbers are not horrible, some believe it could be the start of a trend that could land Samsung at the bottom of the ranks of Android OEM if they fail to curb the problem. The release of the S6 is due out early in 2015, which should help sales. That, along with the recently released Galaxy Alpha, which looks to be a massive leap forward in design, might be enough to keep Sammy at the top. But then again it might not. The market isn’t the same as it was a few years ago when Samsung reigned over Android. Now there’s not one but two bigger iPhones, competition on the high end from the likes of Motorola, LG, and HTC, and a push from low cost Chinese companies. Any one of these pressures could bring them down, but they aren't out yet. 

-Technical Scott

Is the Smart Watch Poised for a Break Through?

Just a few years ago wearable tech was seen as a passing gimmick that wasn’t technically feasible, useful, or appealing to the general consumer. Smart watches and the like were seen as geeky tech for geeky people.   A few years ago those doubters were right, but the advancement of battery, screen and processor tech that has allowed us to build thinner more attractive smart phones has also had an equally positive impact on the Smart Watch Market.

Let us take a look at the (brief) history of smart watches.

When you think early 2000’s mobile tech what comes to mind? I don’t know about you but Palm OS comes to my mind. In 2003 Fossil released a wrist worn PDA (Read: Smart Watch) that retailed for $250- the same price manufactures are aiming for today. Fossil’s hardware ran Palm OS 4.1.2 on a Motorola Dragonball Super VZ clocked at a whopping 66 MZ. The device sported a grand total of 8 MB of RAM and 4 MB of flash memory. It did have a touch screen but the display was a 16 level greyscale. Wired.com called Fossil’s effort a “Wrist-Top Revolution”  and the early reviews were very positive for a product that never got off the ground.

In 2006 Microsoft took a crack at the game and it was called the “Smart Personal Objects Technology” or Spot Initiative. The watch was touted for its ability to wake you up to your favorite songs or connect to the local FM radio waves in the US. Like most early smart watches it never took off due to its lack of decent battery life, poor screen and overall lack of functionality.

Samsung's "WatchPhone"

Jump to 2009 and Samsung comes in with an unusual effort to try to crack the wearable market, the S9110. The Korean Giant unveiled a Watch-phone, which is exactly what it sounds like, a phone on your wrist; keep in mind this was pre-Galaxy S Samsung. It was marketed as being the thinnest watch-phone on the market, though I can’t believe there was much competition, at just 12mm thin; by comparison, the iPhone 4 was just less than 10mm.

Once we hit the current decade the competition really starts to heat up. People even used a device that wasn’tsupposed to be a smartwatch as such . No company’s efforts had come to fruition, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. Sony has already had 3 iterations of their Sony SmartWatch since 2012. Same goes for Samsung and their family of Gear watches. 2013 was supposed to be “the year of the smartwatch” . Although the tech was there to make a viable watch, no one had developed a truly useful platform that would actually improve the user’s life instead of hinder it. The only company, until recently, that had come close was Pebble- who released its watch from a Kickstarter campaign . The second generation steel is a large improvement from the original, but neither feels like a true smartwatch platform for most people. Don’t get me wrong, the Pebble was great leap forward in wearable tech and it might still be the best option out there, but hopefully not for long.

The real game changer came in March of 2014 when Google announced Android Wear, its solution to the smart watch question. Android wear is a software platform that borrows heavily from the Google Now concept which produces ‘cards’ of useful information when Google thinks you will need it. It ties in perfectly with your Google account and connects to your Android 4.2 or high device via Bluetooth. Because of this, Google is betting that the future of smart watches is in them being a companion, rather than stand-alone, device. Currently there are three devices that take advantage of the Wear software; the LG G Watch, the Samsung Gear Live and the Motorola Moto 360. All of these devices definitely feel first generation; even the Moto 360 with its excellent design could use improvement.  Google has built a solid platform that with some updates and tweaks along with some stellar hardware is poised to break out into the mainstream next year.

Until recently, Apple had been silent in the world of wearables. Apple who is known for their awesome design and user experience seems to have hit another homerun here, but we’ll have to wait until reviewers actually get ahold of the thing early next year. An advantage, or disadvantage depending on the way you look at it, that Google and Apple have is that there is no cross platform compatibility going on here. An Apple Watch will only work with iOS and Wear Devices with Android.

Smart Watches are now truly useful and are poised to break into the mainstream next year, but will they? Google, Apple, LG, Samsung, Motorola and company have an uphill battle to fight. They have already convinced us to spend hundreds of dollars every few years in order to be happy, but can they do the same thing for watches? I don’t see the price going below $200 USD any time soon and without the watches being able to augment our lives in a useful way the average consumer isn’t going to buy into it. The idea behind current Android Wear devices is to let you forget about your that multi-hundred dollar smartphone in your pocket. The watch pulls all of your notifications right to your wrist and lets you act on them in limited ways. The functionality is there and it works, but is it worth it just yet? That’s up to you.

I believe the answer lies in a separation of hardware and software. Google did the right thing by not allowing OEM’s to tweak wear in order to give a uniform experience independent of what device you have. Manufacturers need to focus on building beautiful hardware while letting Google figure out the backend. Apple is tasked with both ends, but they have a history of making that work just fine. Regardless, the next year should be interesting to say the least.

--Technical Scott