I recently started keeping up with Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcasts, with its very American technology content with accompanying chatter. While it is very much put together from a US of A perspective, they do make nods to us over here in Europe where its relevant, and he and his guests genuinely seem to be having a good time. Anyway, they have a habit of mentioning technologies, software and links that inspire my curiousity. Since I’m often out and about while listening, and don’t want to be distracted from the podcast too much, I note things down on my trusty N900 to look up later. Given this usually inspires only 2 or 3 items per podcast, I suspect that these may be a source of many posts on here in the future, given my current track record of posting at least. It’s certainly more manageable than trying to put up content covering everything I think is cool on Engadget or Gizmodo…

The first, small item I want to mention is gdgt.com, which seems like a pretty cool idea, at least for gadget lovers out there. It’s also worth noting that it’s the brainchild of the previous founders of the two major aforementioned technology blogs…

Gdgt (GDGT? gdgt?) is something of a social network for people and their gadgets, and that’s about it. You’ve got your normal list of friends and a profile as with any other social site, and it’ll let you hook into big names like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail to find more friends automatically. What it then does is give you the ability to add gadgets to your profile, under the categories of “Have”, “Had” or “Want” to represent your relationship to this gadget. Personally, I somewhat would have liked a couple more categories – notably “Used” and “Have Access To” to represent those I’ve played with, or those that are owned by family/housemates living in the same building – or that are available to me in my workplace. That said, I suspect they were aiming for the tried and tested intention to keep things simple.

The site then goes to offer you the chance to discuss and review gadgets (whether they’re linked to your profile or not) and to look up the gadgets your friends have against your name. There’s also a news feed, which seems to display news about random gadgets, and a ‘features’ page which seems to contain blog posts and news updates from those behind the site itself.

The site very much feels like it’s just starting up still. The functionality they have in place is solid, and just about unique enough to stand out in the world of social networks. There’s a lot they could do in the future too, which would be great as long as they keep it simple. Ideas that sprung to mind off hand included:

• Finding other users with the same gadget(s) as you? Perhaps the ability to search based on an overlap of a specific number of gadgets, 1 – n (where n is the number you have on your profile). Connecting this up with a location based search would have a lot of potential – I’d love to know how many other N900 or Gigabyte T1028X owners there are in my corner of the world, for instance.
• It would be nice if the news feed could be (optionally) toggled to only show news about gadgets you have on one of your lists (either all of them or specifically). There’s a lot of news about the next iPhone appearing, and to be honest I’m not that interested at the moment.
• Going a step further, the site has some awareness of manufacturers behind devices. It would be cool if the site’s news feed could offer me news specific to them, so I can see what’s coming up in the future. After all, Nokia just announced the N8, and there’s no sign of that on there.
• It’s nice that users can ‘like’ news posts and rate gadgets, and that you can get a view of what’s popular as a result, but it would be nice to develop this on the social side a bit more, giving me more feedback from my friends, or from others in my corner of the world. I imagine they could pull out some really interesting figures about what gadgets are used where as their membership builds up…

Of course, the site is still in beta, so there’s a long way for them to go yet. I just hope that they can get some distance along that road before someone else comes along overtakes them.

The reviews here at Gali are designed to be focussed on personal needs, and how technology can be applied to do every day tasks, with a clear bias towards my personal life. I’m not arrogant enough to consider that this means every assessment of every product is right for everyone. Different people have different requirements, and if anyone finds that their needs line up with mine and they find one of the articles on Gali useful, then the site has done its job. That said, if the reviews didn’t contain any facts, and simply spouted made up nonsense about products that may or may not exist, then if I was lucky it might pass as some kind of entertainment. It certainly wouldn’t be a gadget blog.

Lists of facts can be useful. When in the market for a product where several possibilities are available, each with subtly different specifications, a means to compare the different details factually, without paragraphs of analysis and opinion, can be incredibly valuable. A number of online shopping web sites provide services where similar products can be compared, listing specifications next to each other in tabular form so that it is easier to see how they differ. When well implemented such that these tables include the specifications that a customer actually cares about, these tables can make a quick initial comparison a lot easier than running around a local store with a scrap of paper to take notes.

Of course, many of these facilities leave a lot to be desired. Many lack sufficient detail, list irrelevant information that wouldn’t influence many, list incorrect information, or simply seem to just show the details where the products are identical. I remember one site of note that quite happily informed me that a Playstation 3 would play Playstation 3 games, an Xbox 360 would play Xbox 360 games and a Wii would play Wii games, and this (along with the colour of the console) was the defining comparative feature. I guess it was accurate, but not useful. In general, however, just having a few details that differ and are accurate can often be a good guideline to creating a shortlist of what to buy.

The problem is that choosing a product can rarely end there. Occasionally, something that meets the numerical specification requirements laid down by the customer will actually do just fine. If you happen to just need a spoon to eat a tub of ice cream with (an example  you would come to value the first time you don’t have a spoon), then as long as it’s spoon shaped and clean, you’re probably going to be happy.

More often than not though, determining whether a product does the job you need it for can be subject to actually using it. A new smartphone’s software can contain small quirks that annoy or small conveniences that are a wonder. The latest release of an operating system might put options you’re used to in obscure places or features that previously took hours to configure suddenly just work first time. A new laptop’s processor speed being bigger does not necessarily mean it’s going to outperform laptops with lower processors thanks to the variety of other factors that affect PC performance these days. There are small details that come to the surface only from use, and the fact many technologies these days are so complex or vast in scope that it would be impossible to create a concise and useful list of facts to compare quickly. These combine to make a review that focuses on the experience of using a product invaluable.

In order to fully research a product, reviews that combine fact and experience, along with raw data about the product, will most likely give the best picture about whether that product is good for you. It’s vital that multiple reviews be sought though, to see where different reviewers agree, and to give a broad perspective of the bigger picture so that it’s possible to separate the opinions based on facts, and opinions based on the personality of the reviewer.

And that’s where the reviews based in experience can break down. As we move further from the extreme of entirely fact based analysis, the opposite end of the spectrum approaches. The authors of this sort of content is perhaps best described as a true ‘fanboy’ of a product or brand. This sort of content is more likely than others to contain bias that may not be truly based in fact. Reading a fanboy’s review should therefore be done with caution, but I don’t think they should be totally ignored as obsessive madmen. Within the ravings of a fanboy there is probably some good material – after all, to become a fanboy in the first place, they have probably gained extensive exposure to a product and therefore have some worthy content to put across to the reader.

In conclusion then, if you are short of time, the best reviews to read are clearly those with a strong basis in fact and experience. Content written by someone that clearly lacks one or the other is going to leave you with less than a perfect picture. If the experiences of others matter, then reading from a range of sources – or at least from sources you’ve learned to trust from previous reading – is definitely worthwhile. If you’ve got all the time in the world though to choose which product you are going to spend a lot of money on, then picking from the broad spectrum of styles of writing would always yield the best look at the bigger picture.

And of course, if you’re on a budget, that may define which product you have to buy anyway.

Back in those days, I had a little book with a load of phone numbers noted down in it, for when I wanted to make contact with friends, though I rarely used it. I could remember the 6 digits I needed to contact most of my friends, or for the place I worked. Certainly I could recall numbers I needed at will.

Now I could recall my own number without hesitation, and only then because its a very easy to remember number. The modern requirements of remembering a number have been made harder by the prevalence of mobile phones, which require the ‘area code’ part of the number to be retained in memory too.

My point is that if we want to remember anything in this modern day, our gadgets can provide a replacement for our memory. There is no need for committing information to memory for those that carry a mobile phone with the capability of taking notes, and I’ve seen people with the most basic of handsets do this by simply storing text messages. Why make the effort of keeping something in your head if you can write it down and carry it with you without adding clutter to your person?

A few more examples of the way I use my gadgets and technology in place of my memory:

• Shopping lists are still a necessity when you want more than a loaf of bread. Rather than peruse my cupboards, pen and paper in hand, I just use Shopping List Lite on my iPod touch to make the list. I don’t even go to the kitchen to remind myself what I might need to buy as the application retains sufficient detail of what I’ve bought before to build the list as I walk to the supermarket.
• Sat at work, should a colleague comment to me something unrelated to work that I wish to look at later, I don’t need to remember it – I simply switch to the ‘Personal’ tab in Microsoft Onenote, and jot down a quick note. This is almost instantly synchronised with my online storage provided by the good people of Dropbox, and is already on my personal laptop (and desktop) for me to see by the time I get home.
• Talking to a friend with Windows Live Messenger, they offer a recipe that I like the sound of, and am keen to try at a later date. I could scribble it down, or even print it. But why worry, when the history of my conversations is stored in a folder that’s once again stored within my Dropbox account, which I can readily access from my mobile phone a fortnight later while walking to the supermarket. In fact, I could transpose the ingredients onto the shopping list on my iPod touch as I walk…

Of course, the side effect is that our minds may get lazy if we rely on technology. Without constant practice, the mind’s ability to retain information can reduce, if only because it gets used to the fact that it doesn’t need to remember a number of things.

When taking notes on paper was the main way to retain information, the human brain’s memory was exercised regularly. Paper notes took time to write, took up physical space even when organised, and even then were easy to leave behind or lose, such that the memory was required as something of a redundancy to fall back on. Despite complaints about losing such notes, the human brain would usually come through.

This carried over somewhat into the digital age. Backing up data is something that is considered crucial in the professional world, but individuals are notoriously bad at backing up their own files. While careful with my own content, I would be lying if I claimed I had never lost something on a computer – be it an email, a document or a piece of code I’ve written. Memory sticks and even mobile phones are still lost by individuals frequently, albeit less so than a scrap of notepaper, perhaps due to their increased monetary value. This reduction in the risk of loss nonetheless leads to a reduction in the urgency to retain things in memory.

With services like the aforementioned Dropbox becoming more and more popular, even the risks associated with note taking personal backups fade into the background. Data and files can be immediately copied from your computer to the online ‘cloud’, backed up in the event of any problems with the computer where the file is saved, and available at any time for someone with access to an Internet connection – something that is available to many 99% of the time thanks to the all-encompassing nature of wireless and cellular data networks in many of our lives.

Perhaps it is a good thing that our minds don’t need to retain some of the smaller things. Notes, shopping lists, phone numbers, and so on, can be stored for near-instant recall without using our brains. The odds are the methods of digital storage and recall of small, random nuggets of information are more reliable than the human memory anyway. Our minds can instead focus on more important things – our day jobs, our educations, and matters that require more qualitative reasoning and understanding. Our memories can focus on things that matter towards the ‘bigger pictures’ in our lives, rather than trivial little details.

Or perhaps it is a bad thing, and deprives our minds of the much needed practice at retaining information that it needs for the times when we need to remember something that really matters. It’s not the end of the world if we forget to buy some milk one Sunday afternoon, but if there’s no need to remember to buy that milk thanks to our gadgets, might this one day lead to someone forgetting something vitally important to their – or someone else’s – life?

Perhaps this is why the various casual games for training your mind have grown in popularity over recent years, available for pocket sized devices like the Nintendo DS and mobile phones. Perhaps the success of Sudoku owes itself to a subconscious urge for the public to keep their minds active?

Personally, I’m going to keep my gadgets and the conveniences that come with them. But I’m also going to keep playing the memory games, and taking every effort to avoid my brain getting too lazy, for when it matters.