MUSIC: A FULL RETRACTION

I hate admitting I'm wrong. I'll do almost anything to avoid it. I'll go to extreme lengths to prove my point and I'll argue it to the death. I may even fake evidence if absolutely necessary. I was 3rd speaker on my debating team at school. I didn't even need to believe the argument, I was literally disagreeing for the sake of it.

However, when it comes to enjoying music on my Samsung Galaxy SIII, and this hurts me to write more than I can say, I was wrong. So wrong. Way wrong. Wrongiddy wrong wrong the wronging wrong.

And it's all because of Google Play Music.

Last time I wrote about music on smartphones, I was struggling to sync things onto my S3 from my iTunes playlists. I may have been a bit hasty. Since then, I've persisted, primarily because of the other features of the phone. I gave up trying to sync things with Kies, an application that tries to work either via USB or Wifi, but just took forever if it worked at all.

In fact, once I uninstalled Kies, everything functioned a lot better. I now keep the playlists I want up to date on my handset using Easy Phone Sync, a more stripped down program, but it works and it works quickly.

What's more important is now if I'm in Wifi range, it literally no longer matters if I have any music saved on my phone at all. Thanks to Google Play Music, I can access my entire music collection through my phone.

I'm not sure what Apple are trying to do with the iTunes Radio service they revealed last week, but they're probably trying to replicate what Google has been doing for a while, the difference being, you can access Google Play Music from a variety of devices.

Using the Google Play Music Manager on your PC, you can upload as many as 20,000 songs from your iTunes library - playlists, podcasts and all. They are then available from anywhere, all you have to do is log in.

I've found the streaming to be amazingly stable, probably due to the way the Play Music app caches songs in advance. You can even download songs and playlists to your phone on the go.

In short, finally, I have the ability to access my entire music collection in a way I've never been able to before, even when it was just a stack of CD's under the coffee table. The chances of me fossicking through over 1000 albums just because I felt like listening to one particular song would be about zero. Now I can search for it on my phone just as easily as I can using iTunes on my PC.

This is what I've been waiting for since I spent a stupid amount of time digitising my collection. Now, at last, I can finally LISTEN to it.

A SAMSUNG GADGET YOU SHOULDN'T LIVE WITHOUT

Oh dear, what a sellout I turned out to be. It seems like all I want to talk about lately is Samsung this and Samsung that. If it's not the innovative features of the Galaxy S4, it's the all round usefulness of the Note 8.0.

And now I've seen Samsung's dongle, there's no turning back...

Yes, today I bring you something from the You-Never-Knew-It-Existed-But-Now-You-Do-You-Must-Have-It-Immediately Department; the Samsung AllShare Cast Wireless Hub.

To be fair, it is a silly name for it. If I was naming it, I'd call it something a bit more straight forward, like PhoneOnTelly, because that's exactly what it does.

My relationship with my Galaxy SIII was not love at first sight. In fact, when I first tried to use it, I only lasted a week before I was scared off by how fiddly it was to set up. But eventually I went back to it, lured by Android's promise of a wider app selection.

It's actually a bit like my relationship with the Domestic Manager - we couldn't really stand each other when we first met, but over time we grew to love each other and 20 years on, we've really started to take each other for granted. Same deal with my trusty S3; after I spent a bit of time and effort getting to know it properly, we reached a mutual understanding and now I use it for things I never expected to.

Initially, I said mean things about playing music on it, for example. Now, after discovering Google's Play Music app, my listening habits are all Samsung based, but more on that next week. 

Not only am I now listening, I'm watching too. Unlike Windows and Apple phones, the Samsung's default browser doesn't even blink when asked to stream video. In fact, I even watched yesterday's Warriors game on my phone. Weirdly, this actually wasn't terrible.

The screen on the S3 is big, the S4's is bigger still but obviously, the game would have been even better on my TV, and what all Samsung phone or tablet users need to know, not only is this possible, it's easy.

I guess the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub is effectively Samsung's answer to Apple TV, except, instead of using it to stream stuff from your computer, you do it straight from your handset. (And by computer, I mean a Mac - I've heard "inconclusive reports" from people who've attempted to use Apple TV with their PC)

These days, Samsung makes a pretty impressive Smart TV, and this may be why I haven't seen any marketing for the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub, because it effectively turns ANY HD telly into a Smart TV, as long as you've got a spare HDMI socket to plug it into.

Amazingly, that's about all the setup required. You plug the tiny box in, push the AllShare button on your phone and you're good to go. Photos, music, video all played in crystal clarity on the big screen. Even if you're just browsing, you can now do it on your TV, just like one of those flash new ones you can't really justify buying.

It really is that simple - there's not even an on/off switch, just a reset button if you want to swap feeds between phones or tablets. Updates over the weekend have incorporated all this into the Samsung Link system, which gives you access to any multimedia content stored on any of your devices.

You can use the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub in conjunction with the Galaxy S3 and S4, the as well as the Galaxy Note II, 8.0 and 10.1.

What this all means is at last, after years of trying, is I can now use my phone to play anything on my computer through my TV. And that makes me a very happy boy.

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part Three

A LITTLE LESS REMOTE...

Over the past few weeks, I've been taking a look at how Samsung has made the Galaxy S4 better than the SIII. Quite a few of the features they've been shouting about are software-based and a rumoured to be coming to an S3 near you in future updates.

Several of the new gizmos are built-in though. There are some pretty wizzy camera tricks I'll try and cover off next week, but I discovered one of the coolest things about this new phone almost by accident.

As well as being the smartest phone on the block, the Galaxy S4 is now your new Universal Remote Control.

I am old. I know this because I can clearly remember a time BEFORE remote controls. In fact, I recall the first VCR my parents ever owned. It was cutting edge because it came WITH an actual remote. Admittedly, it wasn't a wireless remote... it was connected to the video recorder by a very long lead. (No, I'm not making this up) You could play, stop, rewind, fast-forward and possibly even record. Obviously if you wanted to do anything as complicated as set the timer you'd have to do it on the actual machine, but what do you expect?

Of course, in order to do that timer recording thing, you'd have to stop the clock flashing, "00:00" - nobody's ever worked out how to do that, so no point in putting it on a remote, right?

Needless to say, things have progressed somewhat since then.

Now you can control EVERYTHING by remote - from the telly right through to the lights and the heater. Even just watching my favourite shows now involves up to 3 different clickers; home theatre for the sound, TV for the pics and SKY for dialing up the actual show. That's a lot of buttons on a lot of remotes all taking up a lot of coffee tabletop.

Enter, the universal remote. These come in all shapes and sizes - there are universal remotes that look like remotes, then there are models that operate more like a small tablet giving you complete control over your whole house, your beach house and possibly the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The price of these varies wildly too, but it's hard to find a half decent one for much under a hundred bucks. So is it worth handing over a hundie to free up your sofa arms? Possibly not. But if the universal remote was already built into your phone, it'd be silly not to use it.

The S4 comes with something called the IR Blaster, a piece of hardware you can now find in several of the new Samsung devices. On the S4, you run it with an app called WatchOn which will guide you through a reasonably straight-forward setup process to get your phone talking to your other gadgets.

The really cool thing is, you can set up different rooms. Hell, I even took it to work and started changing channels there. Primarily just to annoy people who couldn't figure out why their remote had stopped working properly. Good times.

If I have a criticism of what really is a very straight-forward device, it'd be some difficulties I had figuring out which option to use to recognise my MySky decoder. You select devices by manufacturer and it took some fairly intensive Googling to discover Sky's set-top boxes are in fact manufactured by Pace. Once I had discovered this, I could access most of the Sky remote's functions bu not all. I can't rule out operator-error here, of course, but given I would have thought this was a reasonably common machine for New Zealanders to want to control, the WatchOn people may want to have a look at making the kiwi MySky options a bit more accessible.

Other than that, how cool is it to have a universal remote that doesn't take up any table space at all, because it's in your phone? Or your Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet - but that's a whole other story. Or at least another blog.

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part Two

TELLING ME WHERE TO GO...

Last time I investigated driving navigation on a Samsung Galaxy, I was comparing the Google-powered app on the Galaxy SIII with the very slick Nokia Drive on the Windows-based Lumias.

I gave the honours to the Nokia phones simply because their app worked offline, whereas the Google one didn't. Well... it SORT of worked offline, but not really, and certainly not as well as the Nokia version.

Enter the Galaxy S4 and its promise of a whole new navigation option. It's called Navigon and it just about does the job.

Somewhat confusingly, the original Google navigation app is still installed as well, so you need to choose which will be your default.

The Navigon app comes with the whole of New Zealand pre-installed, and I could also choose to download Australia for free. This is still not as comprehensive as Nokia Drive, which seems to offer a whole world of downloadable maps at no charge, but it's certainly a massive improvement on Google, which would only allow you to store 5 relatively small regions for offline use and even then, you'd have to go online to plan your route.

The S4's new navigation option works very quickly, asking you first for the city you're travelling to, then the street address. You then usually have a choice of routes along which you can decide to either drive or walk.

I used the app on a few of my regular routes, just to make sure it really knew what it was talking about. The only fault I could detect was at roundabouts, when the voice guidance would tell me to take the 1st exit when it meant the 2nd or 3rd. Very odd, given the map itself showed the correct route without fail. I'm sure this is a small glitch the designers will remedy in a future update and bearing it in mind, I set off on a real test of the might Navigon's abilities; Middlemore Hospital.

For any non-Aucklanders reading this blog, Middlemore is not what you'd call a central, easy-to-get to destination. Especially given I live at the opposite end of the country's only super-city and I'd never been there before.

My sister had decided to cut her wedding anniversary trip to Fiji short, by having an argument with a kayak in rough sea conditions. She lost the argument in spectacular fashion, smashing her knee up so badly it required urgent surgery back in New Zealand.

This is how she wound up stranded in Middlemore Hospital, still some distance from her usual network of friends, family and helpers in her home town of Palmerston North.

Being the doting younger brother I am, spending some time with her while she was waiting to be shipped back to the Manawatu seemed the decent thing to do, and the perfect excuse to put the Galaxy S4 to the test.

If you're online, you can simply speak your destination into the phone - this is true of any of the navigation apps I have used. It drives me nuts that you can't do this offline. When is offline speech recognition going to be a standard feature on our phones so we can do things like dictate text messages safely while driving? It's just stupid.

Anyway, even though I had to type it, I only got as far as "Middle..." before the S4 had suggested Middlemore Hospital as a probable destination and set me on my way.

I found the voice guidance less robotic than some others I've used, and less intrusive - only giving me directions when I needed them instead of hassling me with the same direction 15 times before I got to each intersection. The really cool thing this app does is when you have to do something tricky on the motorway. The display then changes from showing where you are on the road to a graphic of the motorway on or offramp in question. The lane or lanes you need to use are clearly highlighted taking any doubt out of your maneuver - even the signs on the screen match the real ones exactly.

The estimated time of arrival was as accurate as any other GPS I have used and the display was very clear and uncluttered.

In short, I got to the hospital with no problems whatsoever. The parking charges were exorbitant, but sadly, no phone is smart enough to get around that. Yet.

So the S4 has truly delivered an offline navigation solution, and a powerful, user-friendly one at that. Now if I could just figure out how to get off this roundabout...

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part One

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU...

It's been a fair old while since my last series of phone faffs, in which I pitted the Samsung Galaxy SIII against the latest Windows Phones from Nokia. The S3 won in the end, primarily due to the fact I could make it work like a Nokia Lumia, whereas I couldn't make a Lumia work like a Galaxy.

Since then I've been using the S3 pretty much exclusively, and it's consistently delivered in every area. Browsing, photos, the navigation works great (as long as you're online - more on that in a later blog though).

I found I could even pimp it up. I added a longer life battery and discovered I could charge the phone wirelessly - just like the Nokia Lumias.

I took it overseas, bunged a U.S. sim card in it, tethered iPads and other phones to it and it just kept delivering.

So when Samsung launched the S4 recently, I had to wonder just how much better it could possibly be.

Well, I've been playing with one for a few days and it definitely is a step up - in lots of little ways.

Essentially the S4 is the same phone. It's still an Android, albeit a very fast and powerful one. Although it's the same length and slightly more narrow than its predecessor, the screen is a bit bigger. It has a more solid feel to it - I don't know why, it just does. In fact, every time I use it, I seem to find something else it simply does better.

One of those things is called Smart Scroll.

According to Samsung, they've put a lot of time, effort and money into making the Galaxy S4 its most user friendly device yet. To achieve this, they've included a whole heap of extra sensors to read how you're interacting with the handset, from the way you're holding it to how you're looking at it - even what the temperature is!

This means browsing a website or reading a long document can now literally become a hands-free experience.

Who's watching who?

Smart Scroll works in one of two ways - Firstly; you can set it to detect which way you're tilting the handset. Tilt the bottom up and the the page automatically scrolls down. Tilt the phone the other way to scroll back to the top. It works in both portrait and landscape which is good because I've never understood why people try and view websites in portrait.

Alternatively; and this is kind of hard to believe till you've actually tried it, but you can set Smart Scroll to detect which way you're LOOKING at it. I'm not even kidding. Look towards the bottom of the page and it'll scroll down. Look up and back you'll go. Even Mike Hosking was impressed when I showed him this trick.

Whichever setting you choose, a small icon flashes up green in the middle of the screen to let you know when you're good to go, although you can turn this off if you find it intrusive. It isn't so I haven't.

I don't know whether it's because I wear glasses or I'm just not very good at it yet, but I found the second "looking" option a bit less reliable than the tilt option. I get the feeling it's the kind of thing you could train yourself to use more consistently if you really loved the feature. For now though, I'm perfectly happy with my Smart Scroll set to tilt. It makes me feel nicely lazy not to have to swipe up and down my emails.

Is it a must-have feature? Probably not, but it's some pretty nice icing on Samsung's latest cake and like I say, it's just one of a host of neat little tricks they've built in to the S4. The phone's now watching you all the time. If you're someone who views a lot of video content you'll appreciate the Smart Pause function, which stops your clip if you have to look away for any reason then automatically plays it again once your eyes are back on the screen.

Again, this is not something I was sitting there thinking, "Gee, I wish my SIII would stop playing my video automatically when I have to look around to answer someone's question." But since I've used it, I'd miss it if I didn't have it.

Now my phone is watching my every move, I can do more of what I like to do best; think less. After all, that's why I have a smart phone in the first place - so I can be dumber.

Next week we'll see if the the S4 can deliver on it's promise to provide comprehensive off-line navigation... as long as I don't get lost in the process.

ALL I EVER WANTED

Every now and then, and it doesn't happen nearly as often as it should, you stumble across a piece of technology so brilliant in its simplicity, you can't comprehend how you ever got along without it before.

These are those, "Why didn't I think of that?" things that are obvious, but only obvious once somebody else has done them.

Two notable examples of this in my life are MySky and LightSpeaker.

Imagine being able to access your TV guide and then digitally record what you want directly from it at the push of a button. On 2 channels at once. For the whole series. Even if they change the schedule time. Brilliant. Of course, MySky is now just one of a whole collection of similar services now available, but when I first used it I was totally blown away. Even the Domestic Manager thought that particular remote was pretty useful.

Then there's LightSpeaker. Wireless speakers built into LED lights that simply screw into your existing light sockets. An instant, wireless, multi-zone sound system you can't see. Also brilliant.

The really important thing with these two examples is they both work. All very well having the brilliantly obvious idea, but if it doesn't actually do what it promises, or it only SORT OF does it, that's no good. It should either just work, or forget it.

So what does all this have to do with phones?

If you've been reading some of the previous editions of this blog, you'll know I've been weighing up the various merits of the Samsung Galaxy SIII, the Nokia Lumia 820 and the Nokia Lumia 920.

Today I announce my winner; all of them.

To be honest, technically it's the Galaxy SIII, but only because I've turned it into a Windows Phone.

Let me explain by saying today's blog is more of an app review than a phone review. The app is called Launcher 8 by the Qihang Dev Team. Not only does Launcher 8 make my S3's home screen look like my Lumia, it actually works even better than the original.

Here's what I love about Windows Phone 8: the way it looks and the way you navigate around it. What I love about the S3 is the way it actually works - browsing, uploading, downloading etc.

As it turns out, the Samsung's Android OS let's you put a home screen over the top of existing one that really is a dead-ringer for WP8.

Launcher 8 displays your apps in the Windows Metro Style, but it doesn't stop there. It replicates the now iconic People/Contacts tile which randomly flips over little pictures of your contacts. It let's you display your favourite pics as a little slideshow on the photos tile, just like WP8. A simple swipe to the right reveals all the apps you haven't already pinned to the home screen, again, just like Windows. Here's the kicker though; unlike the home screen on your average Lumia, all the tiles are completely customisable. You can call them what you want, make them whatever colour you want, assign a Metro-style icon to them or just a picture of your own choosing.

It gets better...

Although you've now made your Samsung LOOK like a Nokia, you still want some of those Android widgets on the start screen, right? Not a problem - in fact, you can even resize them to fit exactly how and where you want. This is literally the best of both worlds.

I can't recommend this app highly enough. In fact, if you're a Lumia 800 user, considering upgrading to an 820 or 920, Launcher 8 could well be the reason you go with the Galaxy S3 instead.

Pity it's going to be obsolete in about a month's time when the S4 hits the shelves. Ah, well - that's phones for you.

THE BIG LAUNCH

On Friday NZ time, Samsung launched their new Galaxy S4 handset. They packed out New York's Radio City Music Hall and broadcast it all to thousands watching big screens outside in Times Square.

And I was there... in a function room at a bar on Quay Street in Auckland. I still saw the whole thing though.

This is not a review of Samsung's new phone. I'm not going to review something I haven't actually used yet, otherwise I may as well just cut and paste the press release, listing off all the new features they've packed into an even slimmer box. I'll get to that stuff once I've had a go on one.

This is a review of the launch itself.

This is a picture of someone taking a picture of the Samsung launch with their Samsung.
I took it with my Samsung. (Oh and yes, the telly IS a Samsung)

I'm no expert when it comes to product launches, but it seems to me, smart phone manufacturers put a big effort into theirs - a bigger effort than most. This time round, Samsung took the showbiz theme literally. Not only had they hired the Radio City Music Hall, but there was a cast of actors and dancers, a full orchestra and they'd paid Will Chase (who plays the cheating husband on Smash) to MC.

There was a kid with a really big box, which I thought was weird, given the phone is supposed to be a bit smaller than the last one. Then came Mr. Shin.

That's literally how Will Chase referred to him, Mr. Shin. He has a first name of course (if J.K. counts as a first name) and he's one of Samsung's 3 co-CEO's. I know, this is getting weird, right? Who has THREE CEO's? Anyway, Mr. Shin is specifically in charge of the mobile communications bit, he took the stage and just stood there smiling. For ages. I really hope it was because thousands of adoring fans were cheering and clapping madly, but on the satellite feed I was watching, we couldn't hear them, so Mr. Shin ended up looking a bit like an evil genius from a Bond movie. Once the crowd we couldn't hear died down a bit, Mr. Shin gave us a brief overview of what they were trying to achieve with the S4.

This is where I really started getting interested. Mr. Shin wasn't trying to tell ME what I wanted from a phone, he seemed to be saying they'd actually been listening to US. A host of new photographic functions, along with some neat biometric interaction, longer battery life, it was all sounding good.

We were then presented with a suite of sketches performed live on stage to demonstrate the various new abilities of the S4. We watched a pretend proud dad inserting himself into his own kid's dance recital picture. Pretend backpackers synced their photos directly into their parents' living rooms. A rather disturbing fake hens party created a surround-sound stereo by turning each of their phones into a separate speaker. The acting was corny, but the phone certainly looked cool.

While all this was going on, I was sitting in a wing-backed armchair eating mini-burgers, prawns on a stick and sipping a Peroni. Alright, maybe I sipped TWO Peronis - but it WAS lunchtime, and I HAD been up since 3AM.

If I was being schmoozed into loving this phone, it was working. Take note, prospective schmoozers; I really love mini-burgers.

Like I say, I can't honestly tell you if this phone deserves all the hype until I use it myself, but from what I've seen so far, Samsung is definitely continuing a trend in smart-phone innovation Apple started, but I now wonder if the iPhone was left behind a couple of generations ago. The Glaxay S4 is promising more than a few genuinely new tricks, and I don't just mean a bigger, clearer screen and a faster processor.

There's a big difference between TELLING the customer what they want and GIVING the customer what they want, and I've got a feeling Mr. Shin and his team know what that difference is. Some of the other phone-makers out there could take a leaf out of Samsung's book.

Then again, maybe it's just the Peronis talking.