Credit where it’s due

For once, I think that Android deserves a little credit.

Let’s get this out of the way first: No, I still don’t love Android, and No, I certainly don’t understand the appeal of most Android features advertised. And finally, No, I don’t think Android is better than iOS.

But what Android deserves credit for in 2012 is an incredible transformation. Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4.0, took the phone lightyears ahead in terms of design.  Continuing that trend, the two versions of Jelly Bean 4.1 we saw in 2012 added features that seem to actually solve problems such as Google Now.  When you look back at the enormity of the problems that plagued users in the 2.x era (when Android really took off) and compare them to the quibbles users have buying a new Android phone, you can’t help but be amazed.

You look at Android’s prime competitor, iOS, and what it’s done in the past year. A not-quite-ready mapping service. LTE. Passbook. These are the kinds of features that hardly move the needle by comparison.  The UX of iOS remains stuck firmly in 2008, and little beyond incremental hardware compels a user to move to a newer iPhone.

One could defend the iPhone by saying that it had comparatively little that had to be ‘fixed’ as 4.0 had to fix for Android. While this is definitely the case, you have to ask why Apple couldn’t spend its immense resources on building something amazing and new. When your backlog is empty, you’re empowered to move that much faster forward. Apple, however, seemed too complacent in 2012 to take that opportunity, and this could hurt their long term trajectory.

Congrats on being ‘Most Improved’, Android. While you’re still not my favorite, every improvement you include pushes the entire ecosystem to do even better. Let’s hope that 2013 will be just as innovative as your competitors respond.

Disclaimer: Yep, I still work on WP, and there are many reasons I don’t directly compare Android and WP. These opinions are still my own and not my team’s or company’s. No forward-looking or insider assumptions should be inferred from this post.

A sobering reminder that Apple is not a services company

This certainly isn’t the first time that Apple has launched a bad service. But it is easily the most prominent- ripping out a functional, if dated, experience grounded in good data in exchange for what? A hodgepodge of data collected from numerous 3rd parties. Apple hoped that with a bit of UI sugarcoating, some ‘new’ features (Turn by Turn) and let’s be honest, the general fanboy-ism of its user base, that they would be able to squeak away with a service that wasn’t ready to ship.

We all know how that looks now.

The problem is trickier than usual though. While some of the examples are just one-off algo adjustments, such as image stitching, there’s a fundamental lack of map data and expertisethat is underlying the rest. They don’t have experience building a geocoder, or heck, even a decent search algo. They don’t even control the data they’re using- all they can do is layer it and hope that it’s right.

In this way, I find it hard to believe that, no matter the amount of time Apple puts into it, that they can surpass Google or Nokia (owner of industry stalwart Navteq) in the gelocational field.

While Apple grasps around in the data darkness, its users will suffer every day in a very significant way. What has happened to the vaunted Apple ‘UX over all else’?

Disclaimer: I’m obviously biased in that I work on maps & local for a competitor, but I don’t represent any of their opinions on the matter.  On the other hand, I’d love to hear a defense of Apple Maps at this point

Excuses No More

Many of you who have seen me in the past few months have noticed that I’ve been using a variety of Android phones.  These phones have invariably been running Ice Cream Sandwich, and more recently, Jelly Bean, most often through a series of open source projects, most notably Cyanogenmod, which allow Android users to load phones with newer version of Android than their own phone makers are bothering to support.  So it was fair to say that, despite the fact that I had many complaints about the seeming instability of Android, or over this battery life problem or that camera crash, it could easily be blamed on unstable and novice implementations.

Recently, however, I have been using a Nexus S, one of Google’s own halo phones, running an official version of their newest Android variant, 4.1 aka Jelly Bean (JB).  I was excited- here I was finally going to be able to experience Android in its most ideal situation- on hardware that Google developed (with Samsung) running software Google itself created.  Of course, it wasn’t going to make miracles happen, such as speed up a phone that chokes on the (absurdly) high RAM requirements of Android 4.x, but surely I would at least find the Android experience so many users seem to be choosing.

Instead, I find myself after just a couple weeks using the phone, stuck in a perfect storm of calamities.  Having seen the phone be stable for a week in Seattle, I decided to bring only this one phone with me for my trip to India, in which I would be relying on my phone as effectively my only communications device.  Upon arriving here, I’ve suddenly been experiencing a series of Google and Android service crashes. These crashes have crippled my one absolute need from a phone- Gmail.  Having tried to follow along with online tutorials, I’ve tried resetting setting x and clearing cache y, but to no avail. Instead, I’m left with a catch-22 of needing to hard reset my phone to (possibly) fix my Gmail experience, but requiring a boatload of (expensive) connectivity time to be able to sync my content and contacts back on.  So I’m left with a choice- email or phone- that even my crippled Blackberry never forced upon me.

Forget transit directions or tethering or all the rest- I just want my damned email.

The Name Game: Windows Phone 7.8

I’ve been stewing on this ever since Windows Phone 8 was announced last week.  I’ll save any discussion of WP8 itself for a future post when we have more public info, but wanted to tackle Windows Phone 7.8, the update for existing devices.

Before I begin, let us for the sake of argument, agree that there was no way to bring Windows Phone 8 (eg. the new core) to the old hardware, and that we’re looking at what to call the more modest update.

The new start screen

Now, some have begun to wonder what Windows Phone 7.8 is.  From what has been announced (and I have no further insight beyond that announcement), 7.8 appears to mostly be a culmination of the new WP8-style Start screen and bug fixes.  The first, and natural reaction is to demand why Microsoft is not upgrading the devices to WP8. If the lowly 3GS can get iOS 6, why can’t I get WP8?  This is spurred on by calling it WP 7.8- clearly, if the number isn’t as high, it’s not as good, right?  But it must be better than 7.5 (“Mango”).

There has been an excellent challenge to call this new variant “Windows Phone 8 CE” or a similar WP8-derived moniker.  The argument goes that by simply calling it a version of Windows Phone 8, you will have silenced many non-technical critics who look at the number and the most central feature.  Indeed, this is the strategy that Apple has employed in the past, claiming that old variants of iPhones (previously the 3G, and now 3GS and 4) will receive the new OS, but delivering a pared down experience.

My take? It’s disingenuous to call the update anything with Windows Phone 8 in the title.  By calling it 7.8, the Windows Phone team has chosen a consumer-friendly nomenclature, rather than a PR-friendly one.  When a developer targets his application, it’s obvious what 7.8 means vs 8. In common discussion, where suffixes are easily lost (especially by sloppy salesmen), the nomenclature will remain pure.  Buyers know what they’re getting, even if it isn’t obvious when they first use the phone, and that’s the way it should be.

As tough of a pill as it is to swallow, given the constraints, the WP team has made good on “Putting People First”.

(Disclosure: I’m a past and future Windows Phone team member, but these opinions are my own.  I had no impact on, or prior knowledge of, the nomenclature/marketing decisions discussed here.  This post should not be read as the “behind the scenes” of the decision process, but the views of an informed member of the public.)

SSD is The New RAM

The old adage used to be the more memory, the better. But with even the cheapest laptops today shipping with 3-6GB of RAM, that’s hardly a bottleneck for all but power users, who certainly don’t need me to tell them how to improve their machine. Nope, these days the bottlenecks are battery life and your hard drive. SSDs deliver on both fronts.

While you could go buy a fancy new Macbook Retina, Air, or even an ultrabook, SSD’s themselves have come down radically in price and can be easily retrofitted and for not nearly as much as you’d think. My upgrade was a 90gb drive for $65, and the deals are only getting sweeter.  The only trade-off is sheer space for now, until the SSD size/price balance catches up with magnetic drives.

Simply undo one screw and swap it in. The result? My 5 year old laptop (Thinkpad X60 Tablet- yes, an IMSA tablet) feeling more spry than should be even be possible.  And my battery life? Up roughly 2 hours, to 7+ hours under light use. Doesn’t hurt that the machine sleeps and resumes instantly, either.

tl;dr: Buy an SSD as soon as you can. You won’t regret it.

We’re told not to be sheep, yet Samsung itself is just falling in line with the herd.

For months, the tech and Android faithful have been taking note of the Galaxy S III’s impending launch. Would it finally be the leapfrog ahead of the iPhone? Would it retain the Galaxy’s dominance in the Android sphere?  Was the two month delay from Mobile World Congress going to bring us the unicorn of phones?

And then the GS3 hit.

Here we have a phone that, despite months of pent up excitement about revolutionary design and hardware, was quite thoroughly iterative. Samsung faithful will point to the myriad of software tweaks Samsung has rolled out, but beyond the Siri and WP ripoff functionality, I’ll believe things like eye tracking work when I see it.  And this is assuming they don’t just bloat the phone with the Touchwiz UI like every other stock Samsung.

And again, with Android, it’s all about the hardware.  And the GS3, while no slouch, simply does not impress.  Quad core is nice, as is 720p, but your competitors are providing that without compromises such as Pentile screens or subpar plastic build quality.  So you’re left with a phone that, despite its modern specifications, already feels like an also-ran.

Now, HTC used to fall into this trap thoroughly- there were so many variants of HTC phones that even I, a phone otaku, could not keep them straight. And they all looked the damn same: Generic.  But with the One line, HTC seems to really have turned it around.  They not only look great, but they feel great, with thoughtful design and hardware selection.  Oh, it also doesn’t hurt that HTC is already selling their phone today.

It’s easy to fall into the classic OEM trap of assuming dominance and kicking back. But the life of an OEM is a rollercoaster, and if you don’t keep climbing, you’re inevitably falling back in line with the herd.

Source: theverge.com

The Game Has Changed

The Game Has Changed

Few, if any of you, were expecting the Lumia 900 come and go without my commenting on it.  After all, some are calling it Nokia’s last stand- bold words for one of the world’s cellular giants.  But rather than try to review the 900, which has been done far better by quite literally every tech journalist in town, there are some interesting launch takeaways, even just a couple days after it hit the street.

Hype

It’s hard to remember a time before iPhone megalaunches, but it did exist.  A few short years ago, smartphones were lucky to be noticed at all- they were the devices of the 1% and the enterprise- few ‘average’ Americans were considering Windows Mobile and Blackberry powered devices.  It wasn’t that the OSes were terrible (though, they were)- there simply was no cool factor in owning most smartphones.  Instead, you had devices like the RAZR earning most of AT&T’s marketing spend; phones that sold on physical beauty.  Passionate phone buying could be described as ponying up for the magenta flavored RAZR.

A linear race for dominance

A predecessor to the System we know

Those few smartphone buyers often had no control whatsoever.  Even if it came out of their own pocket, their enterprise would clearly dictate what devices could join the corporate email and calendar.  A ball and shackle.

Apple, as we all know by now, changed the game in many ways. But among the most significant was convincing America that it needed smartphones.  It didn’t really matter if you had all that much business to do on your phone. It didn’t matter if you could even connect to your corporate Exchange account (that came much later).  It didn’t even matter that you were going to get an inferior data connection.  No, it became an emotional decision.

Of course, Microsoft was as clueless to the threat as Flynn.  They relied on the their own Tron to protect them- the power of Exchange and the enterprise ecosystem. But this could only last so long.

You've been corrupted

Steady Progress

While Apple changed the game on the hype dimension with the first iPhone, it wasn’t until later generations would pick up numerical steam.  In fact, it took 74 days to reach 1 million sales for the iPhone- comparable to the first Verizon Droid.  Of course, the smartphone market had expanded greatly from 2007, with over half of all Americans owning a smartphone today.  But that’s largely a result of Apple opening the minds of consumers.

Millions

The Competition

Sure, there have been successful phones such as the Galaxy Nexus, a critical darling and the launch of a new generation of Android devices.  But what does successful mean?  A typical Android device is expected to sell a few hundred thousand devices in its lifetime; we’ve already seen the original Droid, the blockbuster, sell well over a million.  In aggregate, you find that Android does control a very significant, likely majority, stake in the smartphone market.  But it’s highly fragmented; OEMs contort the OS onto all varieties of novel devices and hope they can ship a hundred thousand before anyone notices the flaws of the approach.  Even a flagship product such as the Galaxy Nexus only sold about 700,000 phones in the first month- merely a few hours of iPhone sales.

The User Returns

“Chaos. Good news”

The Epic Struggle

Analysts and journalists alike have built up the Nokia Lumia 900 launch to be nothing short of the return of the User.  The system has remained as Apple’s territory ever since it was wrestled away from Microsoft.  But now Microsoft is back, much for the wiser, seemingly ready to put it all on the line to defend its legacy- its relevance.  The expectations are such that if Microsoft doesn’t succeed, it’s squarely in hostile territory, among its fiercest competitors.

However, the User’s intervention in this scenario is not one that will be able to turn the tide.  The Lumia 900, whose sales are still unknown and tentatively positive, but can only be disappointing in contrast with the iPhone.  The 900 is a beachhead and nothing more- there is no realistic expectation that it alone will carry the Windows Phone ecosystem, the Son of Flynn, until it’s ready to fight.  Even if the 900 outsells the Galaxy Nexus, the Sam Flynn is hopelessly outnumbered- for now.  

Microsoft’s only strategy is tri-fold.  It introduces chaos to a nearly-steady-state market, it energizes the few allies it has left, and it allows WP to hold its ground, prepare, and hope that they will soon be able to restore the system.