As a followup to our last post on the Jawbone UP, we thought it appropriate to provide an update to our UP experience, which has unfortunately stalled. While we were among a group of users who didn’t have any notable problems with our UP, we’re now part of the class of users who have a non-functional UP band.

Our band worked fine up until a few days ago, when we noticed that the Smart Alarm would only vibrate twice before stopping. This wasn’t immediately apparent, as we first thought that perhaps, in a sleepy state, we hit the alarm off button and forgot about it, but after a couple days of missing the alarm (thankfully we were on vacation), we realized that there were only two vibration cycles before the band stopped the alarm automatically. We suspect that the software on the device was still working, as we still noticed a flashing light on the UP when the alarm went off, despite the vibrations having stopped.

We sent Jawbone customer support a message through their web site explaining the problem, and in a couple short hours later, we received a message back saying that we could reset the band by holding the band’s button while we plugged it in. The capacitors would be reset once we released the button and the band was plugged in, and hopefully this would fix our problem.

Strangely, that same day, despite our band reporting it had a 30% charge left in the morning, it died in the afternoon. We tried the reset trick that evening, and had a full charge by bed-time. The next morning, we noticed the alarm, and at first thought that the two-vibration cycle was still in effect, but after a short delay after the second vibration, the alarm continued, and we thought all was well. Happy, we continued to wear our band that day, but by late afternoon, the band again reported a low battery. So, we plugged her back in.

Unfortunately, despite a charge of two+ hours, the band didn’t come back on; the band continued to report a low battery, and we couldn’t even sync the band with our iPhone. In short, our band too had become a “brick”. We left the band plugged in to a power source for the rest of the night, but nothing had changed by morning.

We sent a followup e-mail to Jawbone, this time including contact information which Jawbone’s prior e-mail had asked for in the event the reset trick didn’t work. Again, in a couple short hours we had a response, complete with confirmation number that a new band would be on its way to us, and that there was no need to send out old band back.

This tells us two important things:

1) Jawbone presumably has enough diagnostics information on hand from other customer band’s that they don’t need ours to help determine why UPs have failed since release.

2) Jawbone customer service is awesome.¹

Sure, we’re disappointed that the product we bought failed in so short a time, but we’re very happy with Jawbone’s response to the issue. In fact, Jawbone’s customer support was so fantastic, that we would gladly purchase another product from them in the future. Other companies should take note of this, because even if an unfortunate issue comes up in a product, it’s how the respective company responds that determines whether the customer remains loyal. In this case, assuming Jawbone continues to put out awesome products, we won’t hesitate to buy from them again.² Good job, Jawbone!

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“So it’s come to this” I thought as I held down the white iPhone’s power button. A frustrating task because it took time, and any time not spent doing what I wanted was time wasted. I only had the bastard for a few days when all of a sudden its data feed died, going out while I I clamored to log in to Evernote before the moment to grab a picture passed before the moment to grab a picture passed. The 3G indicator was still on, but the cursed phone just sat there, miniature hamsters spinning away to no avail.

“Fuck you” I silently cursed, waiting a moment before I pressed the power button again to complete the reboot cycle. But it didn’t work as its wont to fail. A third press, this time longer, and the phone woke from its slumber. A full thirty seconds before it sprang back to life, but spring back it did with its data stream intact. I shrugged. “What causes such a strange 3G outage?” I wondered, as if my phone were a patient and I were its confused doctor.

I thought about how every phone I’ve owned has required reboots and shut-downs and airplane-mode cycles to fix various issues and stability problems. They’re like Windows PCs in the 90s, requiring a dozen reboots a week to keep the wheels greased and moving smoothly. As phones became more complicated and smart, so did the need to reboot them rise accordingly. That is, until the iPhone, when there was a noticeable drop in the frequency of such reboots. And now, my iPhone runs days, if not weeks, without needing to sleep, clamoring on with only the occasional hiccup.

“The value of a mobile device is inversely proportional to the frequency of its required reboots”, I concluded. One may wonder why such reboots are necessary at all, and why radio issues and platform stability can’t be addressed in a way that doesn’t force the user to lose a minute of their time on a boot sequence. And I wonder this too, but right now I’m busy capturing a scene into Evernote.

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Recently, John Gruber linked to a new Kickstarter campaign for a fairly nice iPhone dock, called the Elevation Dock. As Gruber notes, it’s certainly a beautiful dock, but we question how useful it is. Particularly, in regards to FaceTime:

The dock’s acoustics make the iPhone sound great and less tinny than when laid on a desk, so speakerphone and FaceTime calls sound better. And its angled back 8 degrees, so you are perfectly in frame of the video.

Here’s the problem the Elevate, and most every other dock out there, have: they keep the iPhone in portrait mode. That’s fine for some features, but it’s horrible for FaceTime, which just looks so much better in landscape mode. We’ll admit that we’re starting to use our iPad in portrait mode a lot more often than in the past, but even for FaceTime, we set our iPad up in landscape mode because we prefer to see video maximized.

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On browsing the feed for Stephen Hackett’s excellent blog, 512 Pixels, we came across a post quoting Garret Murray on the Jawbone UP:

Don’t buy this piece of shit. It doesn’t work, it will fail, and the software is terrible. Jawbone is still selling them even though they know they’re all future bricks. Don’t buy one.

For what it’s worth, our Jawbone UP has worked fine since we bought it on the first day of release. We own a medium UP, and the one issue we experienced with a night of sleep not getting logged was because of a software bug not accounting for daylight savings time. That bug was fixed a day or two after the UP’s release with an app update. Beyond that, we haven’t had any frustrations with the device, though we’ll caveat that with three other remarks:

1. We’ve experienced the occasional “sync error”, but unlike Murray’s experience, it’s been far from “75% of the time”. In fact, we’ve had, maybe, three sync errors in the several weeks we’ve owned our UP.
2. The battery life does not meet the expected 10-day operating window. On average, we estimate the UP loses about 15% of its charge per day, which means we have to plug the UP in every six or so days for a recharge. Is the battery getting weaker over time? It’s too early to tell.
3. The software feels like a beta, not because it’s “buggy” like Murray claims (because it’s not), but because it’s not as feature rich as we’d like, especially in regards to food intake. Jawbone’s actions seem to suggest they’re aware of this, and plan to increase the scope of what they track.[^1]

Murray complainsabout the UP movement tracking being off, but it’s no more off than similar devices. There’s a limit to what the UP can and cannot track, and we feel that as a daily average, it does fine. Yes, it’s logged steps as we brushed our teeth, but it’s also not logged steps at the local market because we were holding a Starbucks coffee cup and weren’t adequately swaying the respective arm. Again, we’re looking for a reasonable daily estimate. If you want highly accurate tracking, then track only specific events using UP’s workout mode, and don’t wear the UP when you’re at your desk and you know you’re not moving around.

This problem partially extends to sleep as well. The UP uses movement to determine your light versus deep sleep patterns. The problem is that its alarm utilizes this movement to decide when to wake you up in a 30-minute window. For a single person or someone who does not have pets, this might work fine. But when you share a bed with another person and have cats that like to crawl around on you all morning, what this leads to is being woken up within two minutes of that window’s start time.

We’re not sure what Murray’s getting at here. Is he moving to swat at his cats, or are his cats pulling at his arm? In other words, what is causing him to move, which ultimately sets off the alarm? If he’s physically moving his arm (meaning he’s no longer in deep sleep), then the alarm should be going off, cats or not.

Was it truly a coincidence that I happened to be in light sleep at the start of that window every morning? Based on how insanely tired I felt when it woke me up, I doubt it. A further problem is there is no way to snooze the UP, so if you don’t get up right away, you’d better have a backup alarm.

This confirms that Murray just doesn’t get what the UP is designed to do here. If you’re not getting adequate sleep in the first place, you’ll be tired whether or not the UP goes off because of movement or because it hit the alarm time. Adding a snooze button entirely defeats the purpose of this system, as it’s supposed to wake you when you’re in a lighter sleep and therefore less tired when getting up. If you’re willing to ignore the alarm and go back to sleep, then this system isn’t for you, because you’ve just acted contrary to its design: get a “normal” alarm clock and stop bitching.

I’ve yet to hear from anyone who has had an UP for more than a few weeks that works.

Well, we’re one. Maybe we’re lucky, but it’s doubtful that we’re the one exception that proves the rule.[^2] Maybe our UP will die tomorrow, but for the last several weeks, we’ve enjoyed using our UP daily, and would still recommend it to others. We’d tell them to be aware that some UPs are having issues, but that if they get one that doesn’t, they’ll have a convenient movement tracker and alarm that works wonderfully alongside an iOS device.

[1]: We base this statement on an e-mail survey Jawbone sent UP users about what features they’d like to see in future software releases.

[2]: That’s not to say that we deny the failure problems with the UP. We realize that there’s a real problem with UP devices bricking and losing battery capacity fairly quickly. However, our experience tells us that the major issues are only affecting some owners, even if that percentage is fairly significant.

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Paul Graham wrote a great piece on “stuff”, and how the trend of recent decades has been to amass an inordinate amount of it. It’s a message that some other bloggers have made as well, because there really is something to be said for the simplicity of having less stuff and living a more streamlined life. On a recent cross-country move where we had little personal belongings with us on the coast-to-coast drive, we found it rather refreshing to have little on our minds other than the drive ahead and locating a suitable rental at our destination. Evenings were spent with family, and our primary outlet into the rest of the world was our iPad, which is itself a statement of simplicity compared to computers of yesterday.

But this experience isn’t why we link to Paul Graham’s article. Rather, it’s this statement of Graham’s:

Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?

Most of us are probably guilty of buying something we didn’t need but that we picked up just in case, because the price seemed good. Meanwhile, we sometimes gawk at the more expensive prices associated with certain items that we really would use a lot, yet hesitate to purchase because of the up-front cost. Our philosophy has generally been to spend more money on quality items, versus buying something cheap that we’ll outgrow or have to replace in the near future because of cheaper construction. Yet, we still shy away from certain expensive items because we don’t necessarily need them, like an iPhone 4S. We do, after all, already have an iPhone 4. Some minimalists will a argue that this hesitation is just: the iPhone 4 is good enough, so skip the iPhone 4S. But Graham made a statement that’s equally valid: if we’ll use the iPhone 4S constantly, then the purchase may make more sense.

So we don’t feel as guilty about upgrading our iPhone 4 now. We advised a friend in the past that such an upgrade, based on the merits of what the new iPhone offers, is likely not worthwhile, but we’ll now revise that claim: if you use your iPhone 4 a lot, and expect to continue doing so, then upgrading to the iPhone 4S is absolutely worthwhile. More specifically, if you use the iPhone camera, and anticipate regular use of Siri, then the upgrade is definitely a functional one, and an upgrade you should really consider. If, however, you don’t use your iPhone much beyond a phone, and maybe a handful of apps, then an upgrade to the 4S is likely not worth your money.

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We mentioned earlier that we were interested in doing a side-by-side comparison of the Jawbone UP’s sleep analysis and that done by the Sleep Cycle iPhone app. Well, user alexw at the official UP forum beat us to the punch with a sample one-day analysis. As expected, because the UP is attached to you, it’s accuracy is better than Sleep Cycle, which relies on the iPhone sitting on the corner of your bed.

Another user compared the UP to another body-mounted device, and the results were very similar. It sounds like the UP’s sleep analysis will be a much better log of sleep activity than what Sleep Cycle offers, so the UP is definitely an upgrade. The downside at the moment is that several users have noted bugs in the sleep analysis display, which at least for one night, didn’t show up at all in the detailed, landscape-based mode. Jawbone has already released an update for the UP, which is a good start, but on our end, the logged sleep from last night remains missing. Hopefully the update ensures that future logged nights display correctly.

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On Friday, we drove by two Targets, a Best Buy, and an AT&T store to see if anyone was selling the Jawbone UP early. None were. The reports we heard about UPs selling early must have been very isolated experiences, though it seems people had more success at Apple stores, who apparently are more likely to not play by the rules.¹ Both Target stores we visited had places set aside, complete with labels, for the three sizes of the UP initially available, yet employees at neither store could tell me whether they already sold out of their UP stock, or if they hadn’t received any yet. We decided to return to the AT&T store on Sunday morning.

We had sized our wrist using the printable template available at the UP site. This proved to be a waste of time, because not only did the AT&T store have demo units out to try on, but the packaging on each UP box has a plastic template included, so buyers can check for their size when in the store. It’s a nice touch, and shows Jawbone’s attention to detail. So we bought our UP, and set it up in the car on the way home.² We won’t bother to give a full review here, because we found Shawn Wall’s review to be plenty thorough for a product that’s only officially been on shelves for less than two days, but we will respond to some points he made for the sake of completeness.

The rubberized bracelet is bendable to a degree. It’s not the simplest task in the world getting it on or off your wrist, but thankfully you don’t really need to take it off given its waterproof nature.

Jawbone actually calls the bracelet water resistant, and only to a fairly shallow depth. The idea is that you can wash your hands, and even take it into the shower, without worrying about it getting damaged. We even saw a picture of someone wearing it in a shallow pool, so the idea that you can wear it most places is obviously something Jawbone wants customers to understand. But don’t think about taking the UP diving. In fact, the notion of taking this thing in the ocean makes us a bit uncomfortable, and we’d rather someone else tried it first.

When we took a shower this morning, our hesitation for getting the UP wet made us take it off. It’s not like you’ll be missing out on too much activity tracking in those few minutes of the morning anyway. Though, we did notice that the black rubberized band³ attracts dirt pretty quickly, so wearing it into the shower may not be a bad idea after all.

As far as bendability goes, the UP has to be somewhat bendable to get it on and off. But that’s only for the “ends” of the band, and the bendability is temporary. In other words, you can’t bend the UP into a different shape, or make it larger or smaller.

There’s really not much in the way of moving parts here; there is a button at one end that is used for switching modes (more on that later), and the opposite end has a cap that is pulled off to reveal the 3.5mm male jack that is used to sync the device with your mobile phone (currently iPhone-only, but Android “coming soon”).

The one thing we don’t like about the UP is that the button on one end, as well as the cap, is painted silver. We’d much rather have these match the main band colour, as we don’t expecially like the accent color. The cap is only silver on one side though, so if you put it on backwards, it appears black to all but the closest observer. A backwards cap also means you’re not proudly displaying “Jawbone” written on your jewelry; we don’t need to advertise for the company we already supported by buying their product. Depending on how much we dislike the button on the other end being an “off” colour, we may end up painting it black down the road.

One really great feature in regards to sleep is that the bracelet can be used as an alarm clock using vibration. Even better, it supposedly will wake you up out of a light sleep instead of a deep sleep by getting you up a little earlier if it can (by looking at your deep vs. light sleep somehow).

This feature worked well for us this morning, though to be fair, we didn’t sleep all that great last night anyway, and noticeably tumbled around a bunch. In this case, we were quick to feel the pulsing vibration of the alarm, but we wonder if it will wake us on days that we have a deeper sleep. Today, it woke us up 15 minutes early. We’re considering doing a side-by-side test of the UP and Sleep Cycle iPhone app to see how consistent the two are, or if one tends to go off before the other. For now, though, we expect the UP to handle our alarms equally well, if not better, with the only concern being whether the vibration is strong enough to rouse us from a deep sleep.

One of my favorite feature of the device is found in this area. You can set your bracelet to remind you to be active if you are sedentary for too long. The time range is user defined. This is great as it can remind us programmers to get out of our chairs once an hour

We’re rather fond of this feature also. We have it enabled during business hours, and its a great reminder to get up and do something, even if it’s just to pee or get some fresh water.

I do not own another pedometor, Fitbit or anything else along those lines so I cannot speak for the accuracy of the UP. It feels like the numbers are too high though.

Whether they’re too high or not, all we can say is that the “lightly active” category is cake during an average weekend, and that’s not even with workout scheduled. From noon until night yesterday, we scored over 8k steps taken, which means we can easily up our steps goal to the next level. We’ll have to see how our weekend activity compares to the average workday to see whether it’s worth adjusting our goals at this time, though.

The food diary portion of the application is well… a little underwhelming in my opinion.

We haven’t played with this feature too much yet, and honestly, we’re not too tempted considering there’s no way to count calories. We’ve used other apps to compare our caloric intake to our ideal goal (at least 3k calories a day), and the fact that such a simple feature is missing makes us feel like we’d gain little from the UP app’s inclusion of a food log. Maybe once this feature becomes more robust, we’ll be more likely to keep up with it.

Game mechanics are a huge portion to an offering such as the UP, and I feel they currently fall a little short.

We agree with Shawn here, and don’t like how simply accepting a challenge means others who accepted the challenge can suddenly see your progress. We’d prefer “private” challenges that don’t involved any reporting, or at the very least, allow users to select a username instead of their registered (true) name. Sure, the public feed only uses first names, but we’d still prefer a nickname.

The problem of the food log and the game mechanics points at the one flaw the UP currently has, and that’s a very simplistic piece of software. If Jawbone maintains a regular release schedule of updates and bug fixes, however, we can truly see the pair being a useful lifestyle assistant for some time to come.

More thoughts to follow as we spend more time with our new bracelet.

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Firstly, Jawbone products are good. Sure, we had problems with the Jawbone 2 earpiece because of a particular weak link, but overall their products are stylish and innovative. We don’t use a bluetooth headset at the moment, but we did receive the Jawbone Jambox as a birthday gift this year, and we love it. When we heard about Jawbone’s Up device, which tracks lifestyle actions, we were immediately intrigued, because we knew the engineering behind it would be good, and better than devices like the FitBit that the Up challenges for market space. Which brings us to our second point: the Up is a bracelet, which means there’s no need to hang it from your belt, waist, or pocket. Instead, it sits on your arm where, unless you’re a bracelet aficionado, is likely bare at the moment anyway; a perfect place for a device that tracks what you’re doing.

Scary Orwellian conspiracy theories about user tracking aside, the Up is the perfect N=1 logging system. Not only does it track your movement, but you can configure it to ensure you’re getting enough of it by having the Up remind you to move. This follows Cornell’s findings about sitting and standing at work. We use a standing desk at home, and tried one at work for several weeks, and while we believe it definitely has its merits, there’s something to be said for simply moving more; standing around, while perhaps beneficial in certain areas, is simply not as good as getting the opportunity to move. Regardless of what desk type you use, the Up can remind you to get more movement in, as it will vibrate to alert you when it senses minimal movement for a particular amount of time.

At night, we’ve relied on the iPhone Sleep Cycle app as our alarm clock for well over a year. The concept is simple: the app tracks movement in the bed using the iPhone’s hardware, and will set off your morning alarm up to half-an-hour before your alarm was set to go off, based on your movement patterns. In other words, if it senses movement 30 minutes before your alarm is supposed to go off, indicating that you’re likely no longer in a deep sleep, the alarm will go off. Otherwise, it will wait within that 30-minute window and sound the alarm when it does notice movement. Worst case scenario, the alarm will go off at the time you set it to, but in our use, we’ve rarely run into that problem, and always hear the alarm a little early, suggesting that the app is working as intended.

The problem with Sleep Cycle is that it requires the iPhone to be sitting on the bed, so it’s detection of movement isn’t as precise as if the iPhone were attached to your body. Some people may also not like the idea of their iPhone sitting next to their head all night, what with all those radio waves. More practically, the iPhone can be pushed off the bed, or your bed is too small for you, your partner, your cats, and all those pillows. Or maybe, -something- iOS 5 will cause Sleep Cycle to crash, or you’ll somehow accidentally exit the app by pushing the Home button. In any case, Sleep Cycle is obviously not perfect, and much of these faults are addressed by the Up, since you wear it 24/7. And, like Sleep Cycle, the Up will track your natural sleep pattern based on your movement at night, and wake you up with a vibration once it notices you’re no longer fast asleep.

Available Sunday in the basic colours,¹ the Up will replace Sleep Timer for us, and hopefully serve to better track our sleep. The software also offers “challenges”, which are novelty proposals to get you to do something you otherwise might not, whether that’s simply moving more, or getting enough sleep.² And further, the Up software includes a food log, which we hope that Jawbone expands to include calorie tracking. We hope to pick up the Jawbone Up this weekend, and write more about our experiences with it in the upcoming weeks. If we can tie this experiment in with paleo/primal living, even better.

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With the release of iOS 5, we had a chance to try out the upgrade on several devices belonging to us and family. The process, unfortunately, was rather inconsistent across devices, with some going smoother than others:

1. iPad 2 w/3G, 64GB: This was the first device we opted to upgrade. We did a sync first, then started the update. Everything seemed to go fine until the “restoring apps” window appeared to freeze about two-thirds of the way through. The screen on the iPad itself seemed to suggest that it was done, and we continued with the setup there. With the restoring apps status bar still not moving, we unplugged the device and had to force-quit iTunes. The device worked fine, but was indeed missing some apps. Some pictures were still present on the device. When we launched iBooks, all our eBooks seemed present, but they then deleted themselves after the device “phoned home”. The next time we connected the iPad to the computer, it did re-sync all apps, and the status bar actually moved.

2. iPhone 4, 32 GB: Didn’t do a last sync before updating, and the same thing happened with this device as with our iPad 2. Only this time, most of the apps were missing. When we installed a few of them from the on-device AppStore, we found that the data for the apps was still present on the iPhone, so we didn’t need to set every app up again. The same iBooks problem as with the iPad 2 appeared on this device, too. A second re-sync fixed the problem as it did with the iPad.

3. iPad 2, 32 GB: This device had very little stuff on it. Upgrade went perfectly smooth.

4. iPhone 4, 16 GB: This device also had very little stuff on it. Upgrade went smooth as well.

5. iPad w/3G, 16GB: Another smooth upgrade.

6. iPhone 3GS, 16 GB: Upgrade seemed to go fine, but then on restoring the last backup, we received the -34 error.¹ A quick web search suggested that this error was due to the device being almost full before the update, and because the down-convert mp3s to 128 kbps was checked in the sync settings, iTunes defaulted to trying to sync the full-size mp3s back to the updated device instead of down-converting them again. When the dialogue box popped up to try the restore again, we had to cancel out and do a manual re-sync. That worked.

One would expect these types of issues to have been resolved by Apple before the iOS 5 release. Whoever is behind the iTunes and iOS testing process, however, seems to be less serious about hammering out bugs than in other Apple products. After all, the iOS upgrade process has not been without error in the past, and this is a pretty significant update. At the very least, we’d expect there to be more system feedback on what iTunes is doing at any given time. For instance, instead of “restoring apps”, we’d prefer some indication of what app is being restored, and maybe even a count of how many apps have been restored so far, versus how many are left. Some window of where we stand in the process, and what’s left, would also be nice.

It also doesn’t help that the post-update things-to-do is not very intuitive.Our family was quick to note how they would have never known what steps to take after the update, which boiled down to getting their Mobile Me accounts upgraded to iCloud, and ensuring that syncing and the iTunes store were set up properly. To make most use out of iCloud, all of the options like Photo Stream need to be turned on, but they’re not all on by default. Further, the iCloud backup option wasn’t on by default either, nor was the ability to sync with iTunes wirelessly.². Owners who started using Mobile Me after using iTunes may also have two accounts, so they need to configure their devices with their Mobile Me/iCloud accounts, and then manually switch their AppStore username even if it was correctly configured before the update already.³

Fortunately, iOS 5 is a nice update, so the struggles are ultimately worth it. Still, it’s surprising that there are as many hiccups out there as people are reporting, especially this late in the game.

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Microsoft recently sent out a heads-up to the masses that XBox Live will undergo another update later this year, adding some new multimedia capabilities like integration with certain cable television channels, as well as the long-ago-announced-but-never-realized IPTV integration.¹ There’s even Kinect support, so XBox owners can speak commands to switch what they’re viewing. Not only does this further direct us to what the future will be like, but it also prompting the question of, “Why can’t Apple do this?”

That is to say, the Apple TV is a much cheaper set-top solution than the XBox. (Of course it is, as it’s not a traditional gaming console.) But the features Microsoft is advertising with the new XBox dashboard upgrade is straight up the territory that Apple has fought for with the Apple TV, and it’s not hard to see how Apple may respond.

Why wouldn’t Apple be vying for similar contracts that Microsoft has snatched up for the XBox? Players like HBO, Bravo, the UFC, and others are clearly good to have on your team, and while Apple is still pushing content via iTunes, there are several others like real-time streaming pay-per-view that Apple could go after. But it’s not just content that Apple can try to match, it’s also cost and functionality.

Take Siri, for example, which is premiering on the iPhone 4S. Whether or not it comes to the next-gen Apple TV, there’s already solid integration between Apple devices, so it’s not hard to imagine that Apple might leverage Siri on the iPhone to control the Apple TV. From browsing the iTunes catalogue for TV shows and movies, to playback control, Siri looks like it could become an integral part of the future television experience. And Siri becoming a foundation for future control methods doesn’t need to stop there, considering how third-parties could leverage the technology.

We already have games utilizing AirPlay to stream video and audio to the AppleTV. Add in a third element, voice commands, and suddenly games can become even more complex and immersive. The XBox can do the same, of course, but whereas the Kinect remains an almost novelty purchase, Siri is part of the new iPhone experience, which means it won’t be too long before every iPhone Apple sells will offer the virtual assistant built in.

Siri’s real future is how third-party developers can integrate Siri functionality in their apps. It’s already great for Apple’s included apps, but it becomes ever more cool when we can create new tasks in OmniFocus using voice commands, or new notes in SimpleNote, than relying on first-party apps. Especially if we can use Siri to manipulate these apps along with AirPlay, giving us a big-screen picture to control with our voice.

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