PC Mechanic, New Article |
- Bank Point Reward Programs? Glad To See Them Go
- Amazon Now Offering Unlimited Movies And TV Shows On-Demand Via Amazon Prime
- Calendar Battle: Google vs. Windows Live vs. Yahoo! vs. AOL
- Amazon Cloud Player – What Apple Should Have Done
| Bank Point Reward Programs? Glad To See Them Go Posted: 30 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PDT I received an email yesterday from my bank:
Good riddance. Point reward programs offered by banks have always been total crap for one simple reason: You can’t get cold hard cash from points. To the best of my knowledge there are only two major credit cards that actually offer true cash-back rewards in cash either in the form of a mailed check or as a credit to your balance. But as far as local banks are concerned, uh-uh. Nope. You’ll have to deal with almost-worthless “points”. Where did reward points start with credit?You can blame airlines for this one. Many moons ago, someone (who probably got a huge promotion because of this) got the idea of, “Hey, why don’t we offer ‘miles’ as rewards for using our credit cards. We can grant a mile for each dollar spent, and the customer will be suckered into thinking this is wonderful when in fact they have to spent hundreds to thousands of dollars just to get enough miles to be worth using! Brilliant!” And oh, how the suckers took to this hook, line and sinker – and still do. What made reward points so awful?Airlines at least offered something you could actually use, but with banks all they could offer were crappy bank-branded merchandise, such as tote bags and umbrellas. The awful part comes in when you realized a point is only worth one-half of a cent (and in some instances even less). Here’s how it worked: You’re doing your online banking thing, and a pop-up screen appears saying that you can get “FREE” (but not really) stuff if you sign up for the rewards program, and – coolness – they’ll start you off with 500 points. Well, hey, that sounds good, right? 500 points sounds like a lot. You sign up. Using a tote bag as an example, you would most likely find this item for sale in any department store for about 10 dollars – but the bank is listing this point reward item with a “cost” of 2,500 points to get it. 500 to 2,500? Doesn’t sound too bad.. right? Wrong. You “earn” one point for each dollar spent. At this point you’ve been given 500 points. To get to 2,500, you will need to spend $2,000 to get to 2,500 points. Remember, the tote bag is literally worth 10 dollars; you need to spend $2,000 to get that crappy tote bag. That means each point is only worth $0.005. And you thought the value of a dollar was weak. Ha! It’s a good thing you weren’t shooting for the crappy digital watch, because that thing would have cost you 15,000 points. Buh-bye, bank reward points. You won’t be missed. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.       |
| Amazon Now Offering Unlimited Movies And TV Shows On-Demand Via Amazon Prime Posted: 29 Mar 2011 11:00 AM PDT Amazon has offered video on demand via a rental system for a while, but now they have stepped up to offering unlimited access to their on-demand library via an Amazon Prime subscription.
Considering Amazon Prime also gives you the shipping benefits on top of the newly added on-demand videos, this becomes a very interesting offer. This obviously becomes a direct competitor to Netflix’s streaming service. Considering Netflix offers their streaming service for (currently) $7.99 a month which comes out to $95.88 a year, Amazon’s plan is $16.88 (18%) cheaper over the course of a year. However Amazon requires you to pay for a full year instead of monthly. Of course, Amazon and Netflix libraries are likely to be different as I am sure this will lead to some shows only being available through one service or the other. Amazon is offering a free month of the service, so if you are into watching on-demand videos then give it try. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
| Calendar Battle: Google vs. Windows Live vs. Yahoo! vs. AOL Posted: 29 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT Web calendars are important because they help us better organize the stuff in our lives. A proper web calendar should allow you to do the following:
AccessDirect address AOL: calendar.aol.com Google and Windows Live lose points here because calendar.gmail.com and calendar.hotmail.com do not work; they should to accommodate people that are used to the gmail.com and hotmail.com domain names. Access through email AOL: One-click access from left sidebar, same window, or zero-click access if you have the calendar sidebar option enabled from the right. Google Gmail: One-click access from top bar link. Scores a negative point however for forcing a new tab/window open. Definitely should not do that. Windows Live: One-click access, same window from hovering over Hotmail link at top or clicking Calendar at left. Yahoo!: One-click access, and also scores a negative point for forcing a new tab/window just to use it. Ease of setting eventsAOL Accessible through top bar of calendar, optional sidebar calendar or directly clicking on a date box. Accessible through Create Event button or Quick add at top left, or by clicking a date box. Scores extra positive points for having date box entries with "long-stem" speech bubbles; it’s a nice touch. Windows Live Only accessible by clicking a date box, and scores a negative point by having to do it twice. Click a date box once to highlight, Add then appears, then you must click that to add an event. Yahoo! Only accessible by clicking a date box. Scores a negative point by being forced to choose a time/"All-Day" (requiring a second click) rather than just instantly opening the event edit dialog box.
Ease of setting repeating/custom repeating eventsAOL When in the More details box, repeat/custom repeat can be set here. Custom repeaters can be set by X number of days/weeks/months/years. Scores a negative point by not making it obvious that the S M T W T F S can be clicked on/off for more customization, such as "only even weekdays" or "only odd weekdays + Sunday". In the Edit event details screen, a positive point is scored by making Repeat plainly visible with a simple checkbox. Upon checking this box, another box pops up where you can set by X number of days/weeks/months/years, and scores another positive point for having extended customization for even or odd weekdays as standard presets. Windows Live Accessible through Add more details. Scores a positive point by having a "Private" checkbox plainly visible so you absolutely know 100% whether the event is going to be listed as public or private. Another positive point scored by having the ability to set the time zone of the event directly from this screen (you can even have the start time in one time zone and the end time in another). Scores a negative point for not appearing to have even or odd weekday-only customization. Scores another negative point for the fact this screen is so frickin’ huge. Yahoo! Available through More event options. Next to Repeat options, a negative point is scored because you don’t see the extended options until you select a primary (such as "Daily") first. Another negative point scored because it appears there is no way to set only-odd or only-even weekday scheduling. Also scores big (pun intended) negative points for having the largest screen just to get to this function. Seriously, Yahoo? Phone sync and SMSAOL For the smartphone, the address is m.aol.com. That’s easy. For the dumbphone, there’s nothing but wrong, wrong and more wrong here. First, you must be at calendar.aol.com to go to its settings, which is different from mail settings. Second, you must click on Alerts / Delivery Preferences, and then… Note that "Device" is grayed out – and there’s no option anywhere to set up a new mobile device. It’s simply not there. What you’re supposed to do is click on "My Alerts" (see above screenshot), and that takes you here: You can tell AOL hasn’t updated this in a really long time, as evidenced by the fact it states you can also add a pager. Yes, a pager. Once added in you can receive SMS texts via Calendar reminders as an option. Smartphone: m.google.com For the dumbphone, you’re in slightly better shape than you were with AOL because it’s at least a little easier to set up. First you click the cog icon at top right and choose Calendar Settings: On the next screen click the Mobile setup tab: From there you can set up your mobile phone to receive SMS text notifications for calendar events. Windows Live Smartphone: m.live.com On the dumbphone side, the settings for this are buried – but not so much that it would fly you into a rage. While in Calendar, click Options at top right: Under Set your reminder time, click Change how you get reminders: On the next screen, click Set up your device with Windows Live for mobile: From there you can configure SMS texts for calendar event notifications and other Windows Live "goodness". Yahoo! Smartphone: m.yahoo.com For the dumbphone, Yahoo! is amazingly the easiest of the lot to configure for SMS text notifications. When creating an event, there’s a small icon of a phone: …and on click: This is how it should work on every web calendar. You should not have to go hunting and pecking through menu after menu just to get to this point. Yahoo! takes you exactly where you need to go in the least amount of steps to get SMS text notifications set up quickly and easily. Searching the calendarAOL Top left, in mail/calendar view or direct calendar view: In addition, if you’re currently in mail view, you can get to the calendar search this way: Top bar, in plain sight: Definitely the easiest of the lot; it’s always there. Windows Live No calendar search function available. I’m not kidding. Boo, Microsoft. Boo on you. Big time. Total deal-breaker; this makes Windows Live Calendar place dead last in this contest because of that. And if you thought you could use the Windows Live Mail 2011 client to get Windows Live calendar search, guess what? It’s not there either. Booooooooo… Yahoo! Hidden by default. Stupid, but true. Click the tiny calendar icon under "Today": …and now you can search: Think they could have made it any smaller? Which calendar wins?It’s a tie between Google and AOL. AOL scores huge points for the least amount of clicks (as in zero) required to get to the calendar, having a very nice slim-and-trim interface that works very well and super-tight integration into AOL Mail. Its biggest negative is the fact that getting mobile SMS set up is just plain stupid. If I didn’t tell you where to go to get it working, you probably wouldn’t have found it. Google scores huge points for a super-easy interface and easiest search but draws a large negative for not being tightly integrated into Gmail – a very longstanding complaint of Gmail users worldwide. Gmail and Google Calendar should work hand-in-hand but they don’t. It’s a loose integration at best. Unfortunately it’s pretty much required at this point to add in the Google Calendar gadget from Gmail Labs to at least get some integration from Calendar to Gmail. And even then, if you go to open Calendar from the Gmail sidebar, it still opens a new window/tab to do it. Better than nothing, I suppose. As standalone products outside of their respective email service integration (or lack thereof), Google is the better of the two for mobile-friendliness, but AOL is better on the desktop and laptop. Lastly, if one were to ask which is better on a tablet, that’s considered a mobile device, so Google Calendar would be better there. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
| Amazon Cloud Player – What Apple Should Have Done Posted: 29 Mar 2011 06:25 AM PDT Nobody can argue with the fact that Amazon remains one of the most innovative companies in existence. That was shown, yet again, with their surprise launch of Amazon Cloud Player. This all comes off the heels of their recent inclusion of streaming movies to their Prime members, and the talk of an Amazon App Store for Android. Cloud Player is a cloud-based music streaming service. They give you 5GB of space for free to upload your existing music collection, then you can stream it to any computer or Android device. If you buy one MP3 album from Amazon, they’ll automatically upgrade you to 20GB of storage. Worthy of note, too, is the device this service does NOT work on – anything with an “i” on it. That’s right – this doesn’t work (currently) on an iPhone, iPod or iPad. You can do a “work around” by downloading the file from Amazon using mobile Safari, then play it locally. But, as of now, you cannot stream from Amazon to your iOS device. This could be Amazon simply being competitive, or it could be because Apple would have had a hissy fit. Who knows. Interestingly, if you look at their details for Cloud Drive, it looks like you can store anything you want on there. Potential Dropbox alternative? Hmmm….. All I know is that Amazon just made Apple look bad… because a cloud-based service is something they should have done a long time ago (rather than require tethering to iTunes). And, that whole Google Music thing?….. they better hurry up. Source: Amazon Press Release Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
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