Two years ago I wrote an article about my personal daily media consumption which was in response to a meme that Jeremiah Owyang began three years prior. So much has changed in the past two years that I thought I’d revisit the discussion, talk about my own morphing media consumption patterns, and ask you about your daily media consumption. It’s a topic that’s near and dear to Intertainment Media, because they distribute a communications and content application, KNCTR, which pushes content daily to your desktop.

Since my last article, I believe there have been three significant changes in my media consumption:

I’m forcing myself to go paperless

I made it a plan for 2012 to go paperless. The obvious thing to change with a paperless strategy is to scan all your receipts and then throw them away. But paperless also has to do with removing all the other paper junk in your life such as manuals, books, newspapers, and magazines. I now trash manuals and download the PDFs. I only purchase eBooks to read on my iPad. And I read newspapers on digital devices and my favorite magazine, Wired, cover-to-cover on my iPad. Oddly, Wired doesn’t have a way to turn off the paper magazine subscription, and just get the digital subscription. Every time that magazine shows up, I just throw it in recycling. An unfortunate and unnecessary waste.

By going paperless, and consuming my media in that manner, it’s forcing me to better organize my digital media. That means I have to have a system for bookmarks, storing digital files, and finding the media.

Reading a lot on my mobile phone

I can now actually read text, and lots of it, on my Android phone. The screen size is large enough and my favorite media sites either have a mobile application or a mobile optimized web site. The latest news in the areas I’m most interested is always with me. I don’t have to wait for it to be mailed to me or go pick it up at the newsstand, nor do I need to deal with the physical disposal of the media, which is a pain in itself.

The downside to all this media consumption on the mobile device is that batteries die quickly, rendering their primary use, communications, useless. Luckily, Android phones have removable batteries and you can purchase plenty of extras. I always have three extras charged in my bag at all times. This isn’t true with the iPhone, but there are plenty of portable iPhone chargers.

Reading everything on my iPad

I’ve become a huge fan of my iPad for reading PDFs, newspapers, blogs, magazines, and purchasing and reading eBooks. It’s a fantastic media consumption device. I don’t ever plan to purchase another physical book again. I’m so tired of packing them up in boxes and moving them to just adorn a shelf like it’s artwork in my home. Yes, there is something very comfortable about a physical book, but in quantity they’re a sheer pain in the ass to manage. Also, when I want to read something new, I can just select it and have it on my device within seconds.

The next obvious stage is textbooks to go digital. It’s no surprise that Apple is targeting the education market and will be making an announcement in NYC next week. I wish I had all my textbooks on an iPad when I was in school. My son is going to have it so easy.

How has/will your daily media consumption changed in 2012?

How has your media consumption changed over the past five years, or even just last year? What are you doing now that you’ve never done before and what have you given up?

Creative Commons photo attribution to leondel, zandwacht, and BenSpark.

It’s no surprise that none of those media players are around today.

Apple at that time had already proven the successful marriage of device (iPod) and application (iTunes). It was truly simplicity. I remember when I installed my iPod for the first time, I was blown away at the simplicity. It just found all my MP3s and sucked it into the device without any difficulty. It was the best consumer product experience I had ever had. Many competing products claimed, “Oh, you can just bring all your music into our device,” but it was far from simple.

Hey tablet PC makers, don’t let software be an afterthought

Lenovo Ideapad U1 Hybrid

While I’m still suspect of whether the iPad will be successful given how we’ve become so accustomed to inputting information through keyboards (see Will the iPad Follow the Failure of Voice Dictation Software?), I am buoyed by the fact that they’re continuing on their tradition of simply acquiring and managing media. Their online bookstore is just an extension of the iTunes experience. While Amazon has successfully simplified the content gathering experience with the Kindle, I’m not seeing the same with other tablet computers.

If everyone knows what it takes to be successful against Apple, why do manufacturers of media consumption devices continue to ignore the content input experience? We saw it with MP3 devices, then video devices, and now we’re going to see it again with iPad competitive tablet devices. Take a look at PC World’s round up of Tablet PCs from this year’s CES. The obsession over the mechanics under the hood and not the actual experience using the device just points to the impending failure of all these competitors.

Yes, the current version of the iPad is hamstringed severely and I’m not going to jump out and get version 1.0. But they’re definitely creating a new type of media consumption (to a lesser extent media creation) experience. And while I was down on it in my Technologizer article, I want to be proven wrong. I want to see people adapt to a new experience of consumption and computing in somewhat the same way they’ve done with the iPhone.

MSI Tablet PC

Except for the Kindle, the competitors are just trying to slam technology into a device. They’re not focused on creating an experience. Yes, these tablet PC manufacturers will sell a few units, but they won’t capture grand mind share like Apple can.

Prior to the release of the iPhone, I received a competitive handheld computing device from Nokia, the Nokia 810. It was a painful computing experience. After toying around with it for a few hours, I gave up and it sits in my drawer. If I could recognize how annoying it was to use, why did they release the device? Don’t you sometimes think the manufacturers don’t use their products first?

If you don’t love the experience, guess what? We won’t either.

Creative Commons photo attribution: ndevilTV / CC BY 2.0