FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2004

The Aquos has no clothes
The world is flocking to flat-panel TVs, and when they are smaller than a wall, they are usually LCD, not plasma. So it is important to note that they suck.

News.com's Richard Shim has a nice piece about this disparity between perceived and real quality. And he's actually being rather generous. To my eye, LCD TVs fall even shorter than he describes, especially when compared side by side to CRTs.

Now, that hasn't stopped me from buying a couple of Sharp Aquos TVs to put in places where style matters more than substance. There's one in the living room, where a large, black, plastic box is anathema to our design sensibilities, and one in my office here at CNET, where there simply isn't room for a tube TV. But in the TV room at home, there sits a large, hugely heavy Mitsubishi CRT, which isn't going anywhere--literally and figuratively.

Have you fallen under the spell of the flat panel, or are you--like many of our experts here at CNET--using either a CRT or a rear-projection set? (Hint, hint.)

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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2004

What planet am I on?
The world is completely nuts: AOL is focused on dial-up, MP3 players show pictures, and Comcast has great customer service. I need to get off the poteen.

But it's true, Comcast customer service has absolutely blown me away, at least here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I told you earlier how I made the switch from DSL to Comcast cable broadband, and the experience was absolutely superior: a much faster service, for less money, installed by a real good technician less than 48 hours after the idea first entered my mind.

OK, that had to be a fluke. So I called Comcast again, telling them that my cable TV picture had gotten very fuzzy and ghosty. Again, a service call was booked for 8 to 10 a.m. less than two days later, on a Saturday. The guy showed up right at 8 a.m., dressed in a crisp, pinstriped Comcast uniform, smiling, with good social skills and no apparent hygiene issues.

He scurried around the house checking out signals on my TVs, happily climbing up on the roof in the rain, and finding the problem: a squirrel or some such rodent had been reaching from a branch of my apple tree, chewing the braid and housing off the coaxial cable on the eave nearby. Mr. Comcast spliced in a new piece of cable, nailed everything down more neatly than it had been, and didn't charge me a red cent. He even seemed to be enjoying himself. I half-expected to see a video crew shooting the whole process for a Comcast TV spot.

After many years of bad, bad, bad experiences with every cable company I've dealt with in my life, I am shocked at how good my experience has been with Comcast. Someone upstairs at their HQ in Philly must have put out the word that if cable companies want to be part of the sophisticated digital home, they'd better act like they belong there. And the message was heard loud and clear.

OK, maybe I'm just Mr. Lucky. Is your cable company getting it right or still screwing up and infuriating you?

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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2004

Hybrid cars everywhere; some even make sense
Let's face it, the hybrid car is the automotive technology of the hour. Mating an electric motor with a gas engine yields greater fuel economy, lower pollution, and the novel fun of a car that is silent when running on its batteries.

Toyota has just announced that by 2008, it will offer a hybrid version of every car it makes, not just the horrid-looking Prius. That means a hybrid Corolla as well as a hybrid Lexus LS. That's the kind of offer that will drive the masses to buy a car with hybrid technology, because while early adopters often like technology that looks weird, most Americans can't handle the triple whammy of buying a car they've never heard of that doesn't look good with an engine they don't understand.

Which brings me to the wackiest hybrid car story I've seen yet: the Chevy Silverado Hybrid. Yes, Chevy's full-size pickup now comes in a hybrid version. This certainly changes the image of hybrid drivers from pencil-necked members of the Green Party to guys who sweat copper pipes and the tops of whose asses are always in view.

But as I read up on the Silverado Hybrid, I started detecting the scent of opportunism, as if Chevy is dropping an electric motor in the Silverado's engine bay primarily to stave off the bad PR that full-size pickups get these fuel-conscious days.

Here's the skinny: The design of the Silverado Hybrid drivetrain is such that the truck never actually uses its electric motor alone. In fact, the electric motor doesn't even help the gas engine while under way: this hybrid just shuts down the V-8 whenever you idle and fires it back up again when you go for the gas pedal. It gains you only about three more miles per gallon for an additional $2,500 in the MSRP.

Do the math: If you drove a Silverado Hybrid 15,000 miles per year, feeding it gasoline at $1.95 per gallon, it would take you more than 11 years just to break even on the extra in the MSRP. And who knows what sort of additional maintenance expenses will crop up on the world's first hybrid pickup.

No, this smacks of a bandwagon move, or at least a pointless one. I ask my pickup-driving readers, would you buy one?

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Hold the Humax
There's an enticing bunch of TiVo boxes on the market lately, such as the much-buzzed-about Humax line, that have a built-in DVD recorder. Don't waste your money.

Go for the separate DVD recorder. Why? Because the odds are just too good that TiVo will disable the ability to burn some or all programming from the hard drive to the internal DVD burner on a device that includes both. Companies are already moving toward controlling the shows you have on your TiVo and deciding how long they can stay there, if you can share or move them off the TiVo, and whether you can record them at all.

The standalone DVD recorder and its analog input jacks will always be able to defeat TiVo's ass-kissing of Hollywood and Madison Avenue--until and unless TiVo stops letting you record programs at all!

I'm really tired of the electronics industry's vision of "smart devices." Too often the smarts are used only to destroy consumer choice and privacy.

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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2004

Ka-ching.com
I started banking online in 1987, if memory serves, using an IBM PC/XT over a 2,400-baud modem. If you think Wells Fargo's interface is ugly now, you should have seen it then.

But I stuck with online banking through its infancy and with a variety of banks, eventually coming back to Wells Fargo. (I went back not because I liked the bank very much, but because its then-president was a guy named Richard Cooley, and the folks at my local branch thought I was his cousin or something. Can't imagine I inferred that. But I did get damned snappy service.)

For years, I was a freak, the only person I knew who actually did his banking over a modem. I would extol its virtues. Coworkers, family, and friends would get excited like dogs do when people are laughing nearby: they have no idea what's being said, but they know it sounds good.

But we've come a long way. Today about 31.5 million U.S. homes are banking online, according to some new numbers from eMarketer. That'll be 45 million by the end of 2007. There is a lot of debate over what defines an "online banking customer," mostly because the big banks don't say how many customers they have online. But let it suffice to say the number is now large.

For a long time, there was uncertainty about whether online banking would ever take off. Today, they show TV commercials of a woman ripping her clothes off and paying all of her bills before her bathwater runs over.

But unlike credit cards, online banking does involve risk. We're playing with cash on account here, not payables. Big difference. I'm frankly surprised nobody has yet performed a megahack on an online banking system. Or perhaps it's already happened and we haven't heard about it because that would send customers heading for the woods.

Do you bank online? Do you just look at stuff or actually pay bills and move money around? I have a hunch that even this technically savvy audience will be rather against the idea.

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2004

Me, my trench coat, and you
Perched in CNET's rooftop broadcast studio here in San Francisco every weekday from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, hosting the Holiday Help Desk Webcast, blazing new trails in mass media, I feel like Edward R. Murrow.

Two differences:
1. He looked smashing in a trench coat.
2. He had an audience.

Don't get me wrong, I don't take your silence personally (I tell myself it's a sign of reverence). And we've had a decent flow of calls, all with great questions, but barely enough to fill 15 minutes, let alone the longest hour in Webcasting.

The whole Holiday Help Desk hour is a chance for you to call in toll-free and talk with me and a really smart CNET editor, asking us any question you want on that day's topic, such as, cameras, notebooks, TVs, and so on.

We know we're doing something different here, and it takes some getting used to for all of us. So let's do a little focus group of Cooley readers. You're the smartest bunch on CNET.com, so you've gotta clue me in.

Copy and paste the little poll below into a TalkBack message so that I can make this the coolest thing CNET has ever done.

Have you ever watched an episode of the Holiday Help Desk? (Y/N)

Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? (Y/N)

Are you annoyed that we cover only one product category each day? (Y/N)

Is our Webcast time (11 a.m. PT) lousy for you? (Y/N)

Would you prefer to e-mail your questions in? (Y/N)

Do you want us to do fix-it calls instead of recommending products? (Y/N)

Would you sooner reinstall a copy of Windows than watch this thing? (Y/N)

Will you watch tomorrow? (Y/N)

And call in? (Y/N)

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