BirchTree

Stereo HomePods for Difficult Rooms and Social Listening - Jim Willis

The HomePods are strange in this way in that you can be sitting very close to one of the pair but still not sure if what you’re hearing is predominantly coming from the speaker closest to you or the one on the other side of the room.
Moreover, as you move further and further away from the HomePods, the volume of the music does not seem to fall off quite so rapidly. Meaning it’s easier to have a conversation in the room while music is playing and the music volume always seems just about right now matter where your are sitting.

Jim wrote this as a bit of a response to me and  Kirk McElhearn’s pieces on how HomePods compare to the Sonos One. He makes a compelling point about the HomePod that I didn’t mention in my comparison, and that’s on me for skipping it. The HomePod does a very good job of creating a “level” sound throughout the space in which they’re playing. The Sonos is pretty good here too, and it’s certainly better than your average Bluetooth speaker, but it’s not quite at HomePod’s level.

This is a classic Apple-style feature in that you just get used to it being great. I thought about it when the HomePod was new and I was getting use to having it in my life, but as time went on I kind of forgot that the even audio quality and volume around the room I was in was indeed a really cool feature.

The new Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro is not the phone for me, but it does make a compelling case as a good phone for merchants who want a mobile POS. COTS (“commercial off-the-shelf”) is a thing we’ve been looking at in the payments industry for a while now, and the concept is pretty damn cool.

The short of it is that instead of using a hardware device to accept credit cards from your customers, you can use the NFC chip on your phone to act as the “tap-to-pay” point in your POS. This removes the need to plug anything into your phone or pair anything over Bluetooth, and for merchants who just want to get paid with as few complications as possible, this is super compelling.

The great thing about this phone is that it ships with support for COTS. The bad news is that, as far as I know, there are no major payment gateways that support this in their apps yet, so it’s not going to be super useful for many people today. But the good news is that because this is out there, it hopefully indicates that more phones will follow suit. As always, we’re mostly waiting on Apple to enable this on the iPhone to make it go truly mainstream. We shall see…

Google testing Stadia gaming on non-Pixel Android phones - 9to5Google

Playing AAA titles on a phone is a rather futuristic experience that helps sell the promise of Stadia. So far, that’s been limited to Pixel devices, though the goal is to have the streaming service work on every screen. Fortunately, Google is already testing Stadia on non-Pixel Android phones.

“Already.”

Already?

Stadia was announced 10 months ago with the explicit pitch that you could play on the device you want, including your phone. The service launched in November, two months ago, and only worked on Pixel devices. It was such a limitation that the reviewer package came with a Pixel 3 in the box!

So when I see a story about Google testing their service with other phones a few months after launch, the word “already” doesn’t really come to mind. Maybe this will roll out to everyone in a couple days, but even then it seems a weird “already” moment.