“With setup complete, I could see such fascinating statistics as how many minutes of hoovering I’d completed”
You can’t just add Wi-Fi to household objects in a vacuum: you need to test the software too. Plus, why Jon is unhappy about the price of toner
Ibought a new hoover. In fact, a new Hoover, given that this was actually from the company of that name. It wasn’t expensive, at just over a hundred notes, but being the irrepressible geek that I am, I went for the one that’s Wi-Fiattached. I wasn’t quite sure what adding my Hoover to the Wi-Fi would achieve, but I was fairly sure it wouldn’t magically turn it into a Roomba-esque device that would drive itself around the house on my behalf. Indeed, the IoT Hoover is just that – a normal upright Hoover that has some Wi-Fi bits.
Now I’ll confess that I’m not the world’s greatest housekeeper, and I rely on the patience and kindness of my husband for such domestic matters. But I was intrigued to see what this thing would do once connected to my network.
Being a bit of an idiot, I first fired it up at the lab using a spare Android phone onto which I had downloaded the Hoover app. I created an account, and then set about connecting to the Hoover. To my surprise, pressing the Wi-Fi button did nothing, until I realised that the Hoover had to be in full running mode with the motor on. Setting up the device with a Hoover blasting in your ears resulted in inevitable sarcasm from my staff.
The setup process was fairly simple: run the setup app and add a new Hoover, giving the cloud service the serial number of the device. Then, the Hoover Wi-Fi booted up into a hotspot mode that you joined using your phone. In the app, you connect to the Hoover hotspot, and enter the information for your Wi-Fi SSID and password. Then reconnect back to your normal network and hopefully the Hoover will be there. All this time, the motor was running.
With setup complete, I could see such fascinating statistics as how many minutes of hoovering I’d completed, and the wear status on various items. No sign of a “please start hoovering my lab carpet” button, which would have been nice. Somewhat disappointed, I boxed up the item and took it home.
That afternoon, after the necessary unpacking, I tried to set it up at home on Andre’s iPhone using the iOS version of the app. Now at this point, I probably should have used the same account name and password that I’d used in the lab. But I’d already wiped that Android phone, and wasn’t too sure of the account details. Surely this wouldn’t matter, because the registration process would just join the Hoover to a new account?
How wrong I was. It got all the way through the registration and Wi-Fi configuration process only to fail with an error message, saying “Cannot complete enrollemnt Mac address is already taken”. Yes, “enrollemnt”. I tried again, and it became clear that it couldn’t register the Hoover to the newly created account.
In the end, I gave up and phoned Hoover technical support. I spoke to a nice chap who quickly decided this was beyond his level. An hour later, a higher-level tech-support engineer called me back and finally grasped my explanation that the back-end database wasn’t allowing a re-registration of the MAC address of my Hoover, and that it clearly needed to be manually de-registered by someone in the database or development team. Unfortunately, they’re in Italy, and given it was 4pm on a Friday afternoon, the chances of getting anyone to respond was minimal. He suggested I try again in a week’s time. I decided to go to the pub instead.
It really does make me wonder how a product can be launched onto the market when even such basic functionality is missing in action. Was there no specification plan drawn up that included the possibility that you might give the Hoover to a neighbour? Or buy it as a present for a relative, but check it first before delivering? Not being able to reassign the Hoover’s MAC address is astonishingly lazy programming.
Hoover isn’t alone here. Over a year ago, I bought the then-just-released Uniti Core from Naim Audio in Salisbury, a company with a long and hard-earned reputation of analogue engineering at the highest level. Sufficient to make it the extra-cost upgrade option for Bentley cars.
It bravely entered the streaming market nearly a decade ago with a product called HDX, which, despite its looks, contained a Windows computer inside the box. Work continued on it – and its other NaimNet family of products – for a
“Over a year since launch, and the app and firmware support hasn’t yet reached a level of meagre adequacy”
while, but then it simply fizzled out. The last OS/firmware update was in December 2014 for the 1.7b software. It ran on Windows XP SP2.
Combining ripping, cataloguing and streaming into one high-priced box, it wasn’t without its quirks. For example, if you were ripping a disc that had surface errors on it, the display would tell you there were errors, but then clear this screen as soon as the disc ejected at the end of the rip. The only way to find out if there had been a rip error was to attach across the network, find the log file and search for the word “error”. This product went out of production in early 2018.
So, you can imagine that I’d have higher hopes for the brand-new Uniti Core product, which shipped in January 2017. A new custom OS kernel designed from the ground-up to be an absolutely no-questions approach to the task of ripping, storing and playing your CD material. At launch, when I bought one, the iOS app was fairly miserable and the Android app completely absent.
Now, there are three things that such a box needs to do. It has to rip accurately and tell you when there are problems. It has to get metadata from the internet (track name, album, composer, performer and so forth) and allow you to modify this as you wish. You might want Rachmaninov spelt in the original Russian; or a particular ordering on the names of performers. And things get even more complex when it comes to compilation albums. Finally, it has to protect your data by doing reliable and repeatable backups and restores.
It took until May 2017 before metadata editing was enabled, and even then it had to be done via your iOS or Android phone or tablet. There’s still no desktop client, which would make sense for a world-class metadata editing tool. Editing was track by track or whole album only, and you couldn’t change multiple items across multiple discs at once. There was no editing at all for fields important to classical music lovers, such as Composer or Conductor. On 27 June 2017, the CEO said, “Other features like metadata for composer, conductor – for example –are in the release planning.” To date, they still haven’t been delivered.
The ripping engine simply indicated that a track had been ripped, and implied it was successful. But when presented with a disc that was damaged, dusty or dirty, it still said the same thing. It took until 28 September 2017 for the app to be updated to show ripping error conditions. I tried it then, and lo and behold, there were many green tickboxes. Feeling a little curious, I tried some known damaged discs. They were all green boxes too, despite the waveforms showing huge error bursts. I reported it and discovered that it required a firmware upgrade for the box to enable this. That took until early December 2017 to arrive.
Backup and restore? The functionality is minimal at best, and it won’t restore from a backup I did some months ago. It seems to get stuck in a loop.
And there we are. Over a year since launch, and the application and firmware support hasn’t yet reached a level of meagre adequacy, let alone that of a claimed world-class product. Another app and firmware drop is apparently coming within weeks, but no announcement has been made as to what that might fix. The amplifier range announced at the same time (October 2016) took until the summer of 2017 to ship, with delays in certification for some streaming protocols being blamed.
Then there is Chord, a small high-end UK hi-fi company that makes exceptional products. Its little Mojo portable DAC unit is stunning in its simplicity, quality and overall loveliness. A year ago it announced the Poly add-on, which clips onto the side to extend the length,turning it into a full streaming end point, complete with microSD storage and Roon support. You can use it as a target under AirPlay, for example. It has Wi-Fi support, and it logs into your network. But configuration is somewhat a mess, and the longpromised iOS app has still to appear. I asked Chord about this at the recent Hi-Fi Show in Bristol in February, and the rep showed me the app and said it’s about to ship. But it should have been there from the start. I’ve spent most of this morning poking it with a SIM-removal tool to try to see if it’s updating its firmware to the latest version, without success.
Naturally, there’s no “download the current firmware file from here” and “upload it into the device here” UI – that would be too simple. Apparently, it updates itself when it’s in the right mood. Whenever that might be.
There are lessons to learn here. Bolting some Wi-Fi onto an object to make it IoT doesn’t necessarily make it a better product. And when you deliver a product that requires software and firmware, it isn’t acceptable to bring something to market that barely works, is clearly untested, and is more feature-incomplete than complete.
It’s worse still when you start playing in the playgrounds of the big boys. Companies such as Naim and Chord don’t set wire standards. These are set by the likes of Google and Apple, and other global players. And once you decide to play in that space, you quickly find yourself being a very small fish in a very big pond. Which comes as something of a shock if you’re used to being a huge fish in a tiny puddle. This is how companies irreparably tarnish their reputations, and crawling out of that hole can take years.
A Microsoft update
You might remember me losing my rag at Microsoft regarding its walk-in store in Boston, Massachusetts, last summer. I was in the Prudential Center, which is a huge glass shopping mall in the centre of town, and found myself wandering past a full Microsoft Store. I dropped in to have a play with a few bits and pieces, maybe do some shopping, and specifically to have a look at the Surface Studio – the large desktop machine aimed at iMac Pro users, with a price tag to match.
Much to my annoyance, I discovered that the store blocked access to all the Google properties. Now I’m a tolerant chap, and I can just about swallow that Microsoft wants to ram its own services down our throat at every opportunity. But actually going out of the way to block access to Google seemed beyond petty. I asked the staff why this was, and they said it was because Google was a competitor.
I wasn’t amused – and vented my wrath in this very column. I did receive a reply from Microsoft in mid-November. Apologies that it’s taken until now for me to update you, dear reader. A “Microsoft spokesperson” said:
“Ensuring our customers have the best possible experience every time they’re in our stores is our primary focus, and we’re sorry to hear your visit didn’t meet those expectations. Microsoft Store is intended to be a place where you can test, touch and experience the best we have to offer, and that includes how our devices interact with all platforms – including Google. It is not our policy to block or firewall any competitor’s site from inside our store.
“We have been in touch with our store management team in Boston to ensure all of our associates are aware of this policy and to make sure all of the devices can navigate to these sites properly. We sincerely regret your experience and hope to be able to welcome you back to one of our locations in the future.”
Hopefully the matter is closed, and it was a one-off configuration error. However, I’ll be visiting the US on a few occasions in the coming months, and will do my best to drop back into this store in Boston. I hope to see that all is just as it should be.
Black Label audio
And now for some good news. If you want a cheap little D/A convertor and amplifier to hook up to your smartphone then you should have a look at the iFi nano iDSD Black Label ( pcpro.link/284nano). At just £200, it’s a little miracle of simple and elegant engineering. Why would you use this on an iPhone? Because you want to use good headphones that have current consumption requirements that are beyond most smartphones.
To hook it up to your iPhone, you need the Apple camera adapter to get you from Lightning to USB, and then a correctly orientated USB cable to connect into the device. I’ve tried it with my reference quality Sennheiser HD800 headphones, and the performance is excellent. The extra oomph over the iPhone’s headphone output circuitry is welcome. Definitely worth a look if you want something a bit special.
HP toner cost
Something is rotten in the world of laser printer toner. I have the excellent HP Color LaserJet 5550 A3 laser printer here in the lab. I’ve had it for almost a decade, and it has done sterling work. Duplex A3; high-speed printing; good-enough colour performance; five paper trays. Safe to say, it has most things I need. It cost nearly £5,000 when I bought it, but it continues to work just fine. It’s needed a little care and attention over the years, but it’s still trundling along well.
The display told me I needed three new toners: cyan, magenta and yellow. I went to Printerbase ( printerbase.co.uk), where I buy all our printing consumables, and found that a genuine HP black toner cartridge is £235 plus VAT, and £330 plus VAT for each of the colours. So that’s £1,225 before VAT for a full set, lasting 13,000 pages for the black and 12,000 for each of the colours.
Printerbase also lists Xerox-brand toner cartridges for the printer. They’re £125 for the black and £172
for each of the colours, both plus VAT. Intrigued, I kept looking. Cartridge Save has appropriate toner cartridges for £75 for the black and £105 for each of the colours, again before VAT. And Inks Direct want just £46 per cartridge, and £154 + VAT for a set of four (CMYK). Someone, somewhere is taking the Mickey. And its name is Hewlett Packard.