AOL's 6.0 has come a long way, baby
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America Online 6.0
SPECS
America Online, Windows 95/98/Me (Pentium, 16MB RAM, 130MB of disk space, Internet Explorer 5.0), available via CD-ROM or Internet download, free with monthly $21.95 ISP subscription fee.
www.aol.com
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What happened? America Online is all grown-up. It's like the day we discovered Drew Barrymore posing in Playboy and realized she was no longer the 5-year-old girl on "E.T."
AOL's 6.0 upgrade, released earlier this month, has come a long way, baby. It may still be a walled garden, but like a macabre "Little House of Horrors" plant, this garden is sprouting vines and branches everywhere.
The upgrade has three prongs: AOL Anywhere, an ambitious export of AOL's content to the mobile world; AOL Plus, its new broadband package; and improved software features for standard dial-up AOL on the PC.
AOL Anywhere's strategy has transported content onto mobile phone browsers and any phone line. You can send and receive e-mail and instant messages and download personalized AOL content a Sprint phone that has WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, technology. (The content is also spotty - when I typed in my ZIP code for theater listings, it didn't even list theaters in downtown Seattle.)
The AOL voice portal reads you your e-mail - albeit in a horrible computer-generated voice - and AOL content from any phone line. (The service is free until February, when a $4.95 monthly fee will apply.)
One could say that AOL has finally woke up and smelled the make-up. All of these technologies already exist through various providers - TellMe Networks, Yahoo!, MSN, AT&T PocketNet, MyVerizon. And the success of Web browing on the phone and voice portals have not caught on in the mass market yet. Reading and writing e-mail on your tiny mobile phone, for instance, is a Sisyphusian task. But package all those services together for 25 million subscribers and now you have a force to be reckoned with.
Because it doesn't just stop there. AOL also launched AOL Plus, a compelling broadband package for high-speed Internet users - smart, with most people having to pay extra for AOL on top of their DSL or cable provider fees. And AOL also just launched a satellite high-speed Internet connection called DirecPC, which starts at $19.95 a month plus $249 for the satellite dish, modem and installation. As you surf across AOL's channels, an AOL Plus window pops up in the bottom right corner displaying the audio and video offerings for each topic. The content isn't all that extensive - only a few of the channels have broadband content - but I expect this to expand.
And then there are all the little tweaks and add-ons that AOL popped into their program. Granted, most of those are solutions to problems that should never have been there in the first place.
Making the address book and calendar available offline, for instance, was a no-brainer that should have been in 5.0 last October. You can also now finally receive HTML-coded e-mail. (AOL should be apologizing for not building that in years ago, not congratulating itself.) Auto-completing e-mail addresses as you type them in, another function AOL is bragging about, has been around for quite some time in other programs.
It's also bragging about improving the toolbar, adding a Web toolbar and stripping the channels down the left side of the screen to make it more intuitive. But it's not any more intuitive than it used to be, and it used to be completely confusing to the tech savvy and tech novice alike.
AOL also finally integrated a media player into the program. My reviewer booklet shows a very nice media player with nice big buttons but the streaming music player, called WinAmp, stinks. It's horribly designed, I can barely make out the type on the interface and, after I download music, it was impossible to figure out how to upload it into the player to play. AOL needs to fix this immediately, especially since it owns WinAmp. The Internet radio-station tuner, Spinner, also needs to be expanded since it only comes with five stations to choose from. I'd be better off listening to FM radio.
The rest of the new features laundry list includes a shopping assistant that pops up with user ratings, limited-access group sites for families and friends (that's been around on Yahoo for over a year now), an option for adding smiley graphics in instant messages, invitations (hello? has anyone heard of Evite?), a voice recognition component called AOL Speaks that lets you dictate your e-mail into the computer (This sounds a little too good to be true and maybe it is. I couldn't get the program to load into my computer from the CD-ROM.)
Graphics-wise, I still prefer the new MSN Explorer. It's cleaner, it's fresher and it doesn't look like it was downloaded from some clip art folder from the '80s. In fact, AOL looks like it's beginning to suffer the same bloating that Microsoft software has so frequently been accused of. The AOL Anywhere features sounds fantastic on paper, but I doubt most people will use them with any regularity. It's all icing, but we all know somebody who likes icing.