Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Ode to Nokia’s BH-503

Published
by
Sally
on July 31, 2008
in Articles and Electronics
. 3 Comments

Although we are not just a tech review site, as this is a niche well-served by thousands of opinionated man geeks whose mission is to describe tech objects in the most excruciating detail possible, I want to briefly attempt to describe the newish Nokia BH-503 headset…

Since this is just a headset, it does essentially the exact same thing as every other bluetooth headset ever made, just a little bit better and in stereo. Sounds boring eh?

What’s remarkable is not the engineering that’s gone into this product but that it’s taken the world’s finest electronic companies over three years to come up with the something that “just works”. It’s an understatement to claim that the market is flooded with crappy and non-functional bluetooth products. The overwhelming majority of Bluetooth gadgets are barely-functional trash.

This year Nokia seem to have got it right for the first time - they’ve built a headset on which I can listen to music on without annoying cut-outs. They’ve figured out that when a connection fails, the smart thing to do is automatically re-connect. They’ve managed to make a product that can withstand a few months of knock-about use without breaking.

Best of all they’ve made it so you can actually have a phone conversation a feature which previous generations of headset seemed to fail, despite arguably being the raison d’etre for a bluetooth headset.  And the best thing about this is that it liberates me to do other stuff while on the phone.

Bottom Line: It’s the first Stereo bluetooth headset I’ve owned that sounds good, does not make me look like I’ve escaped from the local mental institution, does not instantly fall-apart and is approximately as reliable as the old sort (you know the ones with wires).

Vocational Training on the Rise – Gender Segregation Remains

Published
by
elisabethkelan
on July 27, 2008
in Articles
. 0 Comments

I was very pleased to read that vocational qualifications are - according to the educational foundation EDGE - on the rise in the UK. While this is certainly a positive trend, my heart sank when I read that 36% of vocational qualifications achieved by women are in the areas of health, public services and care and only 3% in engineering and construction. It appears that the occupational segregation with men and women working in different areas of work is as strong as ever.

Why does this matter? We know that so-called women’s jobs tend to be lower paid than jobs classified as men’s jobs. More importantly for Ladygeek, women tend not to chose or to remain in technology work.

I just recently read a report by CRAC: The Career Development Organisation which stated that female IT students outperform male students academically and are as keen as men to enter IT jobs. However, despite of this, a lower proportion of women actually ends up working in IT jobs. I find it puzzling that women decide to study IT but then don’t get jobs in the IT area.

Unfortunately, the study was less conclusive in terms of why this is the case. One could speculate that women find the culture of technical education alienating. Maybe because men treat women as exotic and less able to use and create technology. To counteract this problem, in the 1980s women-only vocational courses were en vogue. The rational was that women would be encouraged by seeing other women in their course, have it easier to find role models and are in an environment where they can speak out freely. However these courses have fallen out of fashion.

So, even in cases where women decided to break gender norms and enter an area which is coded ‘masculine’ in society, they often do not end up working in technology fields. More often women do not even chose areas of study and training in which technologies are central. This means that women lose out on the opportunity to shape new technologies and add a women’s perspective to them. They miss the change to leave their fingerprint on technology.

The rise of vocational training courses in the UK is certainly laudable and important. It would be even greater if vocational training courses that challenge gender barriers in society and at work would be developed to attract women and indeed men to non-gender typical areas of work.

Move over Barbie, the “Smart Berry” has arrived

Published
by
belindaparmar
on July 23, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I want to cry into my coffee. Japanese little girls of between 6 and 8 have eschewed Barbie and now want a Smart Berry. Its a new ‘mobile communicator’ and is a ‘girly’ version of the BlackBerry made by Bandai.

Its got a touch screen and a slide out keyboard and Wi-Fi. The device registers user profiles so that Smart Berry owners can only send and receive mail from friends. It also has a function that allows users to raise a virtual pet. Other functions include a scheduler, calculator, alarm clock and address book. The toy costs $97.

I can’t work out what I am most upset about. Is it the fact that the Blackberry has become such a symbol of status and ’success’ that a 6 year old would even know what a Blackberry is, let alone want one? Or is the fact that they have taken an intelligent piece of technology and dumbed it down and pinked it up for young girls? I think I am most aggrieved about Bandai not using any imagination or depth of understanding of young girls other than they like pink and want to communicate with their friends and nurture animals. The Smart Berry has a virtual Tamagotchi-like pet you can play with.

I have no problem with young children using technology and gaming as a way to stimulate and fuel their imagination. And living with a hard core gamer, I will have no chance in vetoing games when it comes to my children. I’d much rather my daughter play on the Wii than dress up an anorexic Barbie doll. But why can’t product developers and games designers come up with new and interesting ways to keep children’s imagination alive beyond the obvious?

I have a 7 year old niece, Lila. Lila is beautifully ‘unbranded.’ Lila loves art and creativity. She loves fantastical role play with her friends. She loves feeling like she ‘belongs’.

I have no doubt that she would want one of these as she loved her Tamagotchi. For a few minutes. For a few weeks. A few months at very best. But it will be a fad. Another toy that gets thrown into the playroom with other ‘deleted’ toys which cannot capture her imagination for more than 5 minutes. When the technology that surrounds us is so much more advanced and accessible compared to use than days gone past, how is that companies can just churn out gadgets that do nothing more than dumb down and imitate the world of the adult. Surely the generations that follow deserve more?

The mamas, not the papas

Published
by
Nik
on July 10, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

I was playing with some old survey data the other day and found some interesting effects of life events on how men and women use technology. We asked about the number of people who had done various activities online in the last 6 months.

On the whole, the numbers for men and women for most activities were broadly equal. But for certain activities, the presence of children changed the picture completely. Take blogging. Among those in the pre-family lifestage, the proportions of men and women who were bloggers were about equal. If we now compare these figures to those who have children, the proportions who blog are similar for women, but men with children barely blog at all.

It’s a similar story with social networking sites. Mothers are almost as likely as not-yet-mothers to be active members of these sites. Fathers, on the other hand, just don’t seem to be as interested. Is this because mothers tend to have more time at home to spend on these sites? Given how much social networking usage seems to go on in offices, I doubt it. I think part of it is that mothers are more closely involved with their children’s social lives than fathers are, and so might have been persuaded to get a Bebo profile somewhere along the way. Might this also point to women becoming less set in their ways as they get older, perhaps again because they are around younger minds for longer?

Or perhaps it is simply a demographic effect of mothers generally being younger than fathers, and the difference in web 2.0 usage will disappear as younger cohorts come into parenthood and the fathers are equally tech-savvy as the mothers. This data is about a year old, and when I get a moment, I intend to check these results against more recent waves of the same survey to see if they show signs of shifting this way. [Disclosure: this data comes from (my employer) the Future Foundation's proprietary research.]

Finally, most people who have bet or gambled online are men without children. Most of them give up when they have kids, however. Young women are very unlikely to bet online, but when they have children, something seems to happen, and they become three times as likely to have a flutter.

All of the above are just observations from the data. I’d love to know your hypotheses for why older women seem to be more interested in technology than older men.

Honey I shrunk the Mac

Published
by
belindaparmar
on July 3, 2008
in Electronics
. 3 Comments

I’ve written about my Asus EEE. I love it. Its cute. Lilliputian. Compact. And most importantly it fits perfectly into my handbag.

The Asus EEE has taken the market by storm (PC Pro, Gizmodo). I’ve already put my order in for the next upgrade. Even Dell have recognized that the micro-laptop is the next big - their Dell E series looks like a flattering imitation of the original EEE. Dell seems to have gone all out for copying asus, even down to bundling a Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Windows which has been a compulsory feature of just about evrery Dell sold in the last ten years.

There’s even a new name for this kind of dinky laptop: “mobile internet device” or (MID):

But not everybody loves these new gadgets: One female friend of mine claimed that she loved it, but “at the end of the day, still not a mac.” I explained that it was a 10th of the price of a Mac and not ten times inferior from a performance and usability perspective. But what ever I said, I could not convince Sarah. To quote Carrie Bradshaw,

“this was not about logic, it was about LOVE.”

(cheesy quote I know but reflective of the whole film)

If ever a brand was about pure unadulterated love, its Apple. Its a the world’s 7th most valuable brand, worth a staggering $55billion. Its is a Lovemark for so many people. Sarah anthropomorphised her mac in no uncertain terms;

“My Baby is old now. Arthritis has worked her spine for a while, but she is still going strong. Her memory is remarkably good considering all the strange things I have introduced her to. I love my Baby.. I can’t be mad at her. When her metallic voice speaks out “It Is _Not_ My Fault…” all I can say is: “I know, Baby… I know. I gave you a bad command, and I’m sorry. Let’s try again.”

Whilst I agree with our CEO, people are 20% rational and 80% emotional, I am left feeling that the love for Apple seems misplaced when there are so many better or equitable products on the market.

But perhaps that’s part of the joy of owning the EEE - the technology you buy makes a statement. With the near ubiquity of Apple’s products in the creative industries, these high-end laptops are no longer about “Thinking Different” and are more a sign of conformity to cultural norms, wheras carrying around an unusual laptop, especially one which runs entirely different software marks you as an outsider. Those rival icons of computing, the Thinkpad and the Powerbook (or Mac Book) represent your tech-tribal affiliation.

I feel emotional about my Asus. I feel emotional about my Tangent Quattro Internet radio. I feel emotional about my Blackberry. But show me a better, cooler, smaller, cheaper, more useful product and I will be promiscuous. With technology changing so fast, can we afford to be loyal to one particular brand. And quite frankly is any brand (even Apple) brand deserving of such unconditional love?