I don’t know about you, but as a writer, there are a few essential apps that I make use of on a regular basis. One of them is Microsoft Word. The other two most-used programs on my computer, or phone for that matter, are Pandora and Spotify.

I like Spotify when I have specific songs in mind I want to play, but what if you want new and unique songs based on your current favorite artists and styles? That’s what makes Pandora so great. I probably don’t need to go into a ton of details about Pandora- most of you reading this will know what it is. What’s important though is that Pandora for Android just got an update to version 1.7. This change brings plenty of great new changes to the app.

The new Pandora for Android update has a HTML5 app experience that is much more attractive and easy to navigate than the previous version. What else is new? Pandora is introducing what it calls interactivity features to the app. This means that you can now access your song history in order to review, rate or even bookmark songs you’ve played in the past. The Android app even has an exclusive feature, though iOS will eventually get it, and that’s the new encyclopedia-inspired exploration systme that accesses song lyrics, artist information and info about artists like the one you are looking up.

You can check out the latest Pandora update for yourself through Google Play.

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Google already dominates a significant part of my life, but it hasn’t really infiltrated my living room just yet. The search engine giant wants to do that and that’s why it has just launched the all-new Google TV 2.0. This follows in the footsteps of the original Google TV launched last year, but it comes with some new hotness in the form of apps, Honeycomb, Discovery, and more.

Google TV is still meant to function as a supplement to your usual cable subscription, but they’ve expanded the scope to include more goods. For instance, you will notice that Google TV runs on the tablet-friendly Honeycomb Android operating system. This cleans up the UI and makes it a little more familiar. This also lets it run a whole whack of applications.

To be fair, most of the apps aren’t going to play friendly on your TV, but they have about 20 or so right now that have the proper resolution and formatting. This makes it easier for content providers like Pandora and Netflix to get to you through the Google TV framework. Google plans on creating a sub-section in Android Market for Google TV apps.

One thing that I think is pretty cool is that when you look up a TV show, it won’t just show you when it’ll be airing next on regular TV; it also gives you the other options to watch that show, including YouTube rentals and Amazon purchases. That’s flexibility. It’s also cool how YouTube automatically plays a related video when your chosen video ends, instead of just sitting there blankly waiting for you to choose the next clip.

The Google TV 2.0 update is set to hit compatible Sony devices on Sunday with the Logitech Revue update following “shortly after.”

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With it’s dated internals and design, the first batch of 3000 Pandora cases (the actual plastic molding) have been painted and received, the guys spent $5000 USD on shipping them from wherever (China I suppose).  They say the next batch of 3000 will be sent via container to cut costs.  FedEx must love them by now.

The Pandora Logic boards are being made in Texas, which are shipped to the UK (home of Pandora) for assembly. This is quite the manual operation; these guys are soldering the LCD cables manually to each and every board. Craig, one of the main guys behind it all – also behind the iControlPad - are prepping all 2000 cases for the boards by hand as we speak.

This is just a small snippet in a day in the life of a Gadget Maker;  it may also give you a quick glimpse of what it’s like to manufacture a real product – rather than just to use it.    Now after three years of taking orders, with several thousand units sold, and who knows how long of a preliminary planning stage, the Pandora is finally coming to fruition.  Of course, with a hell of a lot of blood and sweat from the Pandora team; who include Craig Rothwell, Michael Weston, Michael Mrozek, M. Fatih KILIC who have all probably pondered a few times “what if we outsourced it to China.”  But would it have been the same? I don’t think so.  This is what the big guys do, it comes in the form of a mobile phone to the shirt off your back.  It would have been on the market much faster that is for certain , and probably would haven’t been so dated by now. But the Open Pandora project is just that, a project, and its open for the world to continue upon.

When you don’t have millions of dollars of equity to dispose of, when you have a conscious and wan’t to do as much of these things on your own as possible, the Open Pandora project was the only way to go.

I’m sure if you ever thought of manufacturing a device on your own you may now reconsider, the CrunchPad is one good example of it just not happening. That leads me to ask the question, will we always be dependent on foreign labour to get these luxurious goods we use today? I sure hope not, and would pay more to have less to have something come in a more sustainable way.

Pandora Blog

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