Product Review: Pressy and the Perils of Kickstarter

Ah, Kickstarter, what a wonderful idea. I love the notion of encouraging creativity and removing the middle-man of corporate influence in the creation of products and ideas. Kickstarter has been responsible for the creation of several products I own and thousands of other projects I never got to try.

One of the biggest issues I see with Kickstarter, and I myself on occasion fall into, is a lack of tempered expectations. The old saying: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is" rings extremely true on Kickstarter. You'll get people assuming that a project must be delivered on the first day of the projected month. When that fails to happen, they demand their money back and rant about how the project creator is a fraud and a shyster. They fail to understand that products, services, art, entertainment, etc, get pushed back all of the time. Sometimes designs change for the better or worse and they feel cheated then. This is completely normal human behavior.

Alternatively, project creators often offer the world in the hopes of getting the funding they need. Sometimes they actually believe they can deliver on their promises and sometimes they use it to mask any inadequacies the project has. Often, due to production being cheaper in bulk, they set their goal so high it is pretty much unattainable. Both of these are problems with crowd-funding that need to be addressed in a meaningful way.

Enter Pressy. The concept of the little device doesn't seem very interesting. In essence, it's a 3.5 mm headphone tip with a button on the end. The goal is to create an on-demand customized button. In theory and to some degree practice, this works. More on that in a moment, however.

Pressy is the epitome of what happens with production delays, impatient backers, design changes, and excessive promises. I backed the project back in October of 2013. The projected delivery date was March 2014 and I didn't receive the Pressy until late August 2014. Truth be told, this isn't uncommon. My Impulse controller was a couple months late if I recall as well, but in the instance of Pressy, it helped create a great deal of anger.

One thing that changed was the design of the holder for the Pressy.

The original case design pre-April 2014

The case design that was shipped to backers

As you can see, they made some pretty drastic changes. The original appeared to be of a more harder silicone with a key ring through it. It was a simple design, but considering the project, that's not bad. Afterwards, they used a cheaper, more flexible silicone with a slot to put your headphone cord in. The change was not well-received and I agree. The new holder is much flimsier and runs a back risk of tearing at the loop.

Still, this isn't a massive issue to me considering I was in it for the actual button, not necessarily the extras. 

One of the other issues was a lack of some functionality upon delivery and issues with getting the Android app into the Play Store promptly. This led to fears of a lack of official Android support, but in the end, things worked out. However, there was (and still is) some missing functionality such as the Pressy Screen Drawing and Pressy-to-Talk. 

However, most of the app integration and functionality are intact I can proudly say. I was able to easily program most of my commands and execute them well. Sometimes they took a second or two to activate, but they worked like defined. I will say that the app is very fluid and well designed. I can't say for certain that it follows the Material guidelines for Android L, but it's certainly close enough you'd have trouble guessing.

What I don't appreciate is having to activate the app with the code provided in the packaging. This seems very draconian and somewhat dangerous considering if one loses their code, their Pressy is useless. Of course, this came about because naturally there were copycats. Pressy's delay in shipping facilitated that for certain. There are comparable versions of the button out there for less than a tenth of the asking price. Are they any better? I cannot say, but app reviews on the Play Store put them at a little less than Pressy itself. 

With the copycats coming out of the woodwork, designs changes, delays, and missing functionality, it was the perfect storm to ignite hatred against the little start-up. Reviews for the button have ranged from horrible to average to pretty positive. This is entirely expected from a first generation product. People aren't understanding Kickstarter and what it means. You are investing in something whether it be hardware, software, a movie, music, book, or whatever ever else. You're not buying a product. The reward is to show that something came of the project.

This has led to a burgeoning series of scams unfortunately. There are always people looking to take advantage of a situation for their own benefit. However, this doesn't mean things are bad. Look at Pebble, iMpulse, and Meenova who are now on their second generation of Kickstarter projects. Unencumbered by funding issues, they have made improvements to the original and worked on addressing complaints. This is how Kickstarter should work and how people should view it. You're helping someone get their idea off the ground. You're not buying something. Once they've established themselves, you're free to be anger at delays, but these things are projects and ideas, not a streamlined corporation pouring out your goods. 

In the end, I'm alright with Pressy. It was an idea that took a great deal of work to get off the ground, but came through, which is more than can be said of other projects. Would I buy a second generation Pressy? Or perhaps another iMpulse or Meenova reader? Of course, because I've seen how the product develops and how a small company can better address concerns a large one may ignore. I have plans on getting the newer Meenova certainly. Pressy is in an even better place. There's little that can be altered at the hardware level. To succeed all they really need to do is improve the software, which they appear to be doing. 

Is it an A+ product? No, but it's good enough for me and will likely get better. We should support it along with the other hopefuls who want to change the world or at least get their ideas out there. Crowdfunding is a powerful idea that can really make waves. Pebble basically pushed the smartwatch industry into overdrive. The Dual Drive I reviewed came AFTER Meenova. This shows what kind of influence it can have. Just remember though, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

5 months down the line....thoughts on my Nexus S

Now that I have had my Nexus S for five months now, have rooted it, and installed custom ROMs, I thought I should give a bit of an update to personal peeves and enjoyable things I have found about it.

First off, the good. After tinkering with it for some time, I managed at one point to get a custom ROM/custom kernel combination that netted me 45 hours of battery life on one charge. I have since moved on to a newer ROM that isn't that great on battery life, but it shows with the proper settings and software that one can really crank out the battery life on this phone.

Secondly, the minor annoyances. There are really only three types of ROMs at the moment. There are tons of actual ROMs, but all come from the same variances. It's either CyanogenMod 7, AOSP (the basic stock option that comes with the phone initially), and MIUI (a Chinese derived variant with some blendings of Cyanogen and AOSP and custom UI).

I spent a lot of time with Cyanogen because of all the customization that worked so seamlessly. However, CyanogenMod has been unstable at times. It's slowly improving, but not fast enough considering Ice Cream Sandwich will be out by the end of the year and they haven't even managed to lock down 2.3.4 stably enough for daily use. It was my go to ROM until recently.

MIUI, on the other-hand, has just as much customization, if not more, than CM 7. However, I found that certain themes would cause my text to be rendered too dark to read. Because of many of the Chinese oriented themes which clash with my American sensibilities, I found I had to put together a hodge-podge theme. In the end, I couldn't really get the ROM the way that I wanted it in spite of its benefits. I still keep a backup just in case I want to upgrade to newer versions which are improving all the time.

Right now I'm rocking SuperAOSP 8.6 . It's a hybrid ROM combining AOSP with CM 7. This gives it the stability of AOSP with the customization of CM 7. I have to say that I passed up on this ROM for some time. I had a backup of it but did little with it. After dealing with Voodoo color issues, reboots, and other problems, I have abandoned CM 7 for the time being. My current ROM is the most up to date at 2.3.4 with only a few minor quirks like Voodoo color taking a second to kick on after turning my screen on.

Finally, the bad. There seems to an issue with the back capacitive button on my phone. It's fairly intermittent and it seems to span across all ROMs, but I'm not sure if it is a hardware or software related issue. Basically it seems that the button is either difficult to press or outright non-responsive. Sometimes though, like after playing Gem Miner for a bit, the button works flawlessly. My Zagg shield may be partially to blame, but I'm not sure right now.

I've had issues finding a decent case to keep it in. The lightweight plastic is a liability for me and my phone was purchased off contract so I'm not taking any chances with it. I initially used an Amzer Jelly case with my Zagg shield. It was decent, but I wanted to up the protection. I tried TPU cases, but they made it where I couldn't push the power button without difficulty. I already have issues with the back button so I chose to abandon these types of cases. I then moved on to a Trident Aegis case. The case itself is actually wonderfully designed and very unique. However, the plastic part of the case (two piece case) has soft touch material that began to flake off, likely because of how often I put it in and removed it from my pocket.

In the end, I went with the Seidio Convert case. It consists of a snap together soft touch plastic case (materials are better with this case than the Trident one), which can be upgraded to a second case that goes on top of it, making it like a Otterbox Defender case that I had with my Nexus One. It also comes with a belt holster which was something I decided to move to. Having the case on my belt actually saved battery because it was no longer next to my leg giving off heat which causes the processor to work harder. The battery itself heats up as well which is also not good for overall performance. So far the case has been great. The snap together case is difficult to get off if I need to, but not agonizingly so. The back button issue may be exasperated by the case, but I'll take the risk.

Aside from all this, the phone is really good. I'm disappointed that no companies have really jumped on the idea of using the NFC chip for debit transactions. Paypal was supposed to do this, but seems to be slow going to get to it. I was personally hoping that the whole NFC thing would take off, but as of now it is a useless feature that draws battery when its on. I likely see NFC getting big if the next iPhone adopts the technology like everyone predicts it will. Sad to see Apple dictating when people should be adopting technology.

I'm a little depressed at the limited accessory offerings. Unlike the Nexus One, that has a wonderful desktop dock and car dock, the Nexus S desktop dock is really rather bland, costly, and can only be ordered through Samsung's site. I don't really have an opinion of the car dock. Neither were available through the website for some time before the desktop dock was finally made available. I sense that the Nexus S isn't doing as well as one would hope from its limited accessory offerings. I see this as a problem from Google. Had they utilized a different chipset (the first gen Hummingbird could only do 7.2 mbps max), or chose to not try to cram in a NFC chip when the tech wasn't being adopted (it's the reason why the Nexus S doesn't have 720p recording because of the front facing camera and NFC taking up a great deal of space) they might have succeeded better. The loss of the SD card for this phone is really the baffling part as all Android phones, down to the crappiest one you can find, have SD card slots.

Still, the phone is good in spite of its shortcomings. It will definitely hold me until the rumored Nexus Prime comes later this year. Hopefully, Google is willing to do what they did with the Nexus One and push the bar while providing a good mix of future proof technology.