Saturday 12 November 2011

Amazon - Can we gift it?

So to the sounds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD0vHZxAmso&feature=related 

I have to ask the question to @KindleUK , @AmazonKindle & @Amazon "Can we fix gift it?"

Of course, what I'm referring to is the ability for customers to purchase gift eBooks for other Kindle users...

Now as per previous blog entries I'm a big fan of the Amazon Kindle - and last week was my father's birthday, so my mother purchased him a "Kindle Keyboard 3G". Naturally my brother & I both then planned to gift him a number of good books to read - perfect as he had a couple of long haul flights in the week after.

So on I trundled to the mighty www.amazon.co.uk and went to the Kindle store section - only to find that the only to manage this process in the UK is to buy a gift credit voucher, send that to your intended recipient, have them go shopping for the ebook and use the voucher... Not exactly simple, rather painful and most certainly a DIY present :(

Now of course if I'm a gun-toting, burger eating, economy trashing, redneck American this function has existed on the Amazon.com site here for a long time - but for some reason the mighty largest e-commerce site hasn't be able to enable this trivial feature for their international customers...

Honestly, does it really need to be this hard?


Tuesday 1 November 2011

Android - improvement needed?

OK so I'm a massive fan of Google's Android platform, but naturally there are a good few areas that improvement is needed in :-

• Memory - yes my 16GB microSD is great but the 0.5GB internal RAM in my phone (Google Nexus One) is driving me insane, I'm certainly looking forward to the full OS support of app2SD for all applications AND 2GB+ of RAM in devices.

• System Apps (1) - the applications Google bundle. Frankly most of these I don't want and need to be able to uninstall them to free up RAM.

• System Apps (2) - the fact that its possible to optionally download an application but then not be able to uninstall it

• System Apps (3) - that I can't 'force app2sd' these bloated applications drives me mad

• The fact that MMS picture messages save the MMS images in internal RAM that consumes large chunks of RAM per image drives me mad. Its daft to have to manually save each image to SD and then delete the MMS attachment (& no Chomp can't work around this)

• Quality control - 2.3.6 broke a number of new things rather than fixed them :-
• Browser cache now seems to behave oddly after 2.3.6 with it consuming RAM regardless of settings or cache cleaning apps running
• Pinch to zoom for pictures no longer works
• 'Preparing the SD card' after a reboot now seems to take much much long (ie 20+ minutes for 16GB card)

Yes I know I can select a different firmware, but these really should be in the standard build...

Now that Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) has been finally unveiled there are a couple of other points :-

• Google need to look at making it easier to move between phone devices - transferring settings, desktops, data etc

• I really hope the latest version of gMail application allows native label & folder managment

Right, off to grab a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a play...