Android is now winning for me over iOS

I'm preparing to switch over to Android for good. Since the release of the Google Nexus 5 , I've been carrying both an iPhone 5, and the said Nexus 5. Essentially, I use the iPhone for my personal phone, and the Nexus for work. But I gotta say, I barely even use the iPhone. The Nexus and KitKat are just so ingrained into my work and lifestyle, being connected with Gmail, hangouts and my Google accounts, that it's really just my go-to device for almost everything. KitKat is so easy and smooth, and iOS 7 is just, blah. Android has been making quantum leaps between versions (granted, they've been playing catch up), where the only interesting feature that has been added that's interesting on iOS7 is easy access to the flashlight.

Even on the music side, where I think Apple and iTunes have traditionally led leaps and bounds above Google Play, whenever I add something to iTunes, Google Play Music picks it up and uploads it.  It's available on my device sooner than it is on iTunes match because of how iTunes match refreshes on the device.

On the tablet side, I've seen the same thing.  I barely touch my iPad, and instead gravitate to my Google Nexus 7 every night. And the Nexus Wireless Charger is pretty amazing and convenient.

Now, every company I work with still develops an iOS version of their app before the Android version, so I'll still need to keep the iPhone around - but I'm getting tired of carrying two phones.

I'm ready to switch for good.

Chromebook just got infinitely better, and this is the future of Android

I've been using a Samsung Chromebook Series 5 500C for some time now, but to be honest, I was getting ready to sell it because I just couldn't get used to having only one browser open at time.  Especially with multiple Google accounts, it just didn't mirror how I work on my Mac with multiple Chrome profiles for every Google account I use.  Fifteen full page tabs just feels weird.

The newest release into the Chrome OS dev channel just changed all that.  It allows for multiple Browser windows to be overlapped, and includes a ribbon launcher on the bottom of the screen that makes this feel more like a computer.

To get the newest release, you go to the wrench, select "About Chrome OS", select "more info..." and choose "Dev - Unstable".  The next time your Chromebook looks for updates, it will download this version, which although it is called "Unstable" has been pretty stable for me.

This all got me thinking...this is probably one of the biggest reasons I don't take a tablet seriously for getting real work done.  That is, the multitasking presentation that exists today on iOS and Android just doesn't make sense for how my brain thinks about multitasking apps.  I need to see the multiple windows to remember they are there.

The closest I've seen to this being solved is Chrome on Android.  There's an affordance that's always there to tile the multiple windows, and it just works so much better than having to remember that button is down there to see the other programs that are running on Android.   And having to double button on iOS - I wonder how many people know that is there.   The simplicity of iOS doesn't work for me. My brain craves something more complex.

If Google can solve the multi-window problem in Android like they have in Chrome for Android, and merge that with Chrome OS, then I think they will actually have a powerful weapon against Apple.     When I can effectively use my Android phone as a Chomebook, then this starts to all make sense.

The Motorola Atrix kind of has a feature like this when you dock it, and although it looks pretty klunky now, perhaps this is one of the things that Google really bought from Motorola mobility, especially if they patented it.

I expect the next iteration of the Xoom tablet, to be a Google tablet, sold like they started selling the Galaxy Nexus yesterday.  I expect Chrome to be front and center on said tablet, to pave the way for the Chrome OS/Android merge, with this Moto docking technology coming in the background.

Chrome on Android is already so good, I definitely use it more than I use native apps on my Galaxy Nexus, so this doesn't seem like a stretch.

This post was written entirely on my Chomebook.

[n.b.:  this is all conjecture - I don't have any knowledge of this as a strategy from my time working at Google]

It's all about thin

While cleaning out my basement last weekend, I found my first laptop.  It was a Thinkpad 750Cs with a passive matrix screen, and a 170MB hard drive, I believe.  Yes, that's MB.

I was working for Andersen Consulting at the time, and working 16-18 hour days on top of an hour and a  half commute, so working on the train was absolutely critical.  This could barely run the ParcPlace Smalltalk distribution we were developing our architecture on at the time, but it was still useful.

I haven't touched this machine in years, but besides it being really really heavy (I can't even find a google search that will reveal what it weighs) the first thing I noticed about it was that it has almost the exact same footprint as my 11" MacBook Air.

I've used smaller and bigger laptops, but I find this size is about right for what I need.  The utility of that dimension hasn't changed.   But the thinness is what has and makes the MacBook Air such a useful too, especially for travelling.   Apple really got this right.

I find it's the same thing with phones.  Thinner the better.   They can be a little bigger on the height and width, but the depth has to be as thin as possible.  That's probably why I'm enjoying the Galaxy Nexus right now.  Huge screen, great for email and reading books on the Kindle application, and thin enough to be unobtrusive in the pocket.

Chrome for Android...wow

One site	Multiple Tabs
Syncs with your Desktop	Synced bookmarks

Some quick thoughts on Google Chrome for Android:

Awesome user experience.   For a beta, it's incredibly polished.  The animations on the Galaxy Nexus are smooth, and just beautiful.   This is the mobile browser you want to look at. You can't see it in the stills, but when you dismiss tabs, they fly off the screen at an angle.  Really slick.

The best execution of multiple tabs on a mobile browser I've seen.

It pre-fetches websites it thinks you want to read next - if you want it to. The default is not to do this on the mobile network. ( I wonder if it generates ad impressions for pre-fetched pages, or if they've created an API with Doubleclick to delay impressions somehow. )

When there are no tabs open, your recently closed tabs are there in a list.

According to html5test.com the browser implements 343 out of 475 of the necessary actions (compared to iOS5 Mobile Safari doing 305) and it does seem to render most websites better than anything else I've seen on a mobile device.

And it's fast.  I'm sold.

It sure seems to me that the rate in which Android and its collection of apps and services are improving is faster than the rate in which iOS and its apps and services are improving.  I personally find myself grabbing my Galaxy Nexus over any other phone about 90% of the time these days.   My iPhone is getting jealous for sure.

Motorola Xoom won't boot?

My Motorola Xoom a few times has decided to just shut itself off and put itself in a state whereby pushing the power button will not turn it on.

The fix:  hold down the power button and the "volume up" button for 3-4 seconds.   

Not sure what causes this, but this always seems to fix it.

HUDs for text and tweets

Yesterday, BMW announced that 3 Series cars are going to get full-color Heads Up Display (HUD) capabilities.  I was first introduced to HUDs through military fighter F16 video games and often wondered why they weren't in more cars.  I've seen them in a few cars to display the speedometer, but I can't recall which models.

With texting while driving quickly becoming illegal everywhere, I think the killer app for HUD would be displaying texts from your phone via Bluetooth, and just being able to press a button to speak a response.  This would allow the driver to perhaps keep his or her eyes on the road and not be distracted by the incoming notifications.

I could also see functionality to pipe selected tweets, DMs, or email subject lines as well, though responding to such things would probably be more challenging.

The reality is, I see a lot of people texting while driving, sometimes at stoplights, but mostly going 65 miles per hour on the expressway, and that's kind of scary.  But I have to admit, there are certainly many times I am waiting for a message and when my phone goes off, I pick it up and have a look.   If I have to respond, I will pull over somewhere and respond.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this but look for this feature to be built into applications in the next couple of years if HUDs roll out to more vehicles.

Streaming Netflix in the car

Fred Wilson posted today on the evolving model of using you mobile as your "primary"  device, and this is the model his family uses for audio.

In fact, in my family we've been using this model for video for quite some time.   Our Acura MDX has a DVD player and a screen for the kids to watch on their commute, and although for many years we primarily used the DVD player, more and more, we are now just plugging in an iPhone or iPad into the AUX jacks and playing video that way.

The key is this cable from Apple:

In fact, we've actually been using this to stream Netflix into the car as well.  It works pretty well.  Luckily I have a grandfathered unlimited AT&T data plan.

This same cable I carry with me when I travel as well.   It plugs into most hotel TVs and provides a great way to use your mobile as your "primary."

Note to gadget manufacturers: rules for designing chargers

Is anyone else getting tired of carrying 3 or 4 chargers around with them?   I'm not an electrical engineer and I guess I'm not really talking about laptops here, but if you are a manufacturer creating a phone, tablet, or some other similarly sized gadget, I'd love to know why you would choose anything but Micro USB as your charging interface.  I understand that some batteries are bigger than others.  I understand that some batteries mothers are bigger than other batteries mothers....but surely this is a solvable problem.

Okay, if you are Apple, you have a bazillion other accessories that are already out there in consumers' hands that use your special iPhone connector pinout...and we all have an iPhone and probably an iPad charger...and ahem, why are those different?  So that's okay.

If you are Sony, I will let it slide that you chose Mini USB before Micro USB was popular or existed and so the PS3 accessories and PSP (kinda) will charge with Mini USB.   And I have a Mini to Micro USB adaptor.  It's small enough to not be a bother.

If you aren't Sony or Apple, please make your device charge by Micro USB so I don't have to carry yet another charger.  It's okay if it charges slower than a second dedicated power source, but just make it charge through Micro USB.

Android tablet manufacturers I am looking at you.

Mobile Batteries and the Cloud: another rant

To follow up on my last rant on the need for next-generation batteries, here was my use case this morning that ended in a huge failure.

As and aside, the Nexus S is winning me over in a big way.  I'm finding about 90% of my dual-wielding phone life is being given to the Nexus S, and about 10% to my iPhone 4.  Two months ago, these percentages were flipped.  But I digress.

Today:

7:06 AM  Unlplug Nexus S from the charger
7:10 AM Check some email
7:16 AM Walk out the door and fire up Rhapsody, listen to a streaming album over T-Mobile
7:18 AM Check some email, see battery meter is at about 90% already.  Holy moley.  Go look at the batter meter, I used Google Maps last night to find a destination, it has been running in the background chewing up battery.  The app says it's been using 16% of the battery life.  Hm.
7:34 AM Get on the train. Continue listening to another streaming album  (Oasis - 'What's the story morning glory?' in case you were curious)
7:35 AM  Turn off display and put Nexus S in my pocket.
8:30 AM Arrive at work, look at Nexus S - see less that 10% battery message, connect to charger.  Look at Battery Meter.  Rhapsody now using 16%, Maps using 10%.

So let me sum up here - doing nothing really but listening to streaming music, my battery lasted one hour and twenty-four minutes.  One hour and twenty-four freaking minutes!    

This is the promise of "The Cloud".  The Holy Cloud.   One hour and twenty-four minutes of Cloud.

So who is to blame here?   Rhapsody?  Google Maps?  Android?  T-Mobile? Samsung?  My Klipsch headphones?  They are unpowered headphones, are they drawing all the power?

Probably a combination of all, but I'm still saying Lithium Ion batteries aren't up to the task of how we want to use our mobile devices in the coming years.

ars technica ran a timely article yesterday called "What's the best way to use a Li-ion battery?" and essentially the advice is "always plug it into a charger whenever you can."   You better just hope you are near one every hour and a half!

Nokia, farewell, until we meet again.

Nokia, I tried.  I used to love you.   But now we've grown apart.


From my first time I held a 8890 Tri-band GSM on Voicestream in my hands I knew I loved you.  As you got older I was with you through your awkward phase as a 3650 with that crazy round dial pad, through your slim times as a 6670, and your thicker days as an E70.   You became a 3G world traveller as a 6680, the form in which I brought you with me to Japan all six times.


But I was lured away.  First by the half-Swedish, half-Japanese bird Sony Ericsson.  She photographed beautifully and played beautiful music.  And later by a pair of California Girls both Brian Wilson and David Lee Roth could be proud of - Apple and Android.


But I never forgot you.  I saw you reinvent yourself as the N8, and I had to see if we could make a go one more time.    But it was not to be.  When we got together this time after all these years,  I immediately knew something had changed.  Or maybe I changed and you didn't.  It's not you, it's me.   It wasn't to be.  I hope we can still be friends, and I will always miss you.

Yep, last week, I was going to write a post that I was going to try to use a Nokia N8 for a week as phone and report back on what I found.  But the truth was, I couldn't stand it.  I lasted about 3-4 hours and and I popped the SIM out and put it right back into my Nexus S.

What specifically was the problem?   It's hard to put my finger on it, but the whole user experience with Symbian^3 was just horrible.  I'll try though.

• User input.   When you have the N8 in "landscape" mode,  and you click on an input field, you get a keyboard like you might expect.  However, when the phone is in "portrait" mode, which is generally how I operate a phone, you get a 1-9 dialpad and are expected to enter text using T9 or the tap-tap-tap method.  In a text field.  Sometimes it lets you rotate the phone once you've realized this mistake and other times it doesn't.  Hm.
• Accepting user input.  And then when you are done typing in any case, the green check box which signals "ok, done, or go" is in the bottom left corner.  For those of us who read left to right, you don't know how awkward this is until you try it.
• Intrusive Alerts. Things like software updates aren't messaged to you in the background or totally passive like iOS, you get modal dialogs.   This somewhat reminds me of the Adobe update alerts you get in Windows machines and it's bad, bad, bad.
• Fonts.   The Facebook and Twitter apps look pretty much like their Android counterparts, except the Fonts look like those of out a stock SUN Solaris install cerca 2004.  Really difficult to read.
• It's slow.   For a top of the line flagship phone, the N8 feels really slow and non-responsive.   It seems like this is more the OS than the phone itself, because things like videos play at pretty normal speeds.
• Couldn't successfully setup email.  I consider myself to be reasonably technical.  It just would not connect to Gmail no matter how I tried.
• The app store.  There are actually some decent apps in the Ovi store.  But there were lots of unexplained installation errors that have no explanation.  After a few tries you just give up.

I really took for granted how the Apple user experience has shaped our expectations on mobile phones.   Android isn't quite there yet, but the pace will get them there soon.   The N8 feels like any other Nokia phone did five years ago.  Maybe they spent too much time figuring out how to be a Camera Phone, instead of a Phone that happens to have a Camera.

I feel like this phone would work for the die hard Nokia fan that never experienced an iPhone. Someone who would rightly thing it's a better Nokia phone than the previous Nokia phones.  Someone that one day will see what the best had to offer, and will feel duped.

To be clear, I'm being critical here, but it makes me a bit sad.  There's some great hardware here, and in fact the camera on this phone rocks.  

From what the press is reporting, this post is news to no one, including Nokia.  I'm sure there's been more than a few internal meetings in the board rooms of Espoo on whether or not they should just make hardware and install Android or Windows 7.  I look forward to seeing what happens with Nokia.

Until then, farewell. I hope we meet again someday when we're old and gray.

Next Up:  Windows Mobile 7

Next Gen Batteries, where art thou?

Three months ago I wrote this post on how much I loved my MacBook Air,  largely because of it's 6 hour plus battery life.  Now I sit here, not even 90 days later, and this same machine fully charged lasts under two and a half hours.

Before

After

Incredible bummer? Yes.  Surprising?  Not in the least.  This is the third MacBook Air I've owned and none of the batteries in any of these machines can hold a decent charge anymore.  I'm too lazy to go wait in the insane lines at the Apple Genius Bar to get these replaced.

But it's got me thinking about batteries in general, and how important they are to the mobile internet.

Really, batteries are the lynchpin to the future of the internet and our connected lives.

It's one technology that I haven't seen improve exponentially in my career so far.    There's always a huge huge tradeoff in functionality of product versus battery life, and the consumer electronics industry needs to get past that.

I look at the best Android phones today like the Nexus S and see the same problem that's existed for years:  A state of the art mobile phone can't make it 24 hours of normal use without a charge.

I think about working with mobile phones for the last ten plus years and things haven't really improved.  In 2003 the Sony Ericsson P900 was introduced which was really a state of the art smartphone at the time, and its batteries would only last 12 hours or so per charge.   It's the same now with the Nexus S.  Why hasn't this improved?

Actually, I guess what I am saying is that I'm sure that the capabilities of these batteries have improved, but they've only kept pace with, not exceeded, the needs of the functionality increases of the devices.  Brighter, more colorful screens, Wi-Fi, 3g/4g and Bluetooth all at the same time, faster processors - the demands of mobile devices have surely become more demanding as well.

What's difficult to know is how much of this "keeping pace" are hardware optimizations and how many are software optimizations.  The first Wi-Fi phones put out by HTC were absolutely horrible at knowing when to use and not to use the radio, but OS releases throughout the life of those phones made things better without changing the hardware.

There are a ton of hacks like Tasker on Android that can make things a whole lot better, but these shouldn't be necessary.  They are patches on the real problem:  our batteries can't handle the "normal" use cases we need today for connected devices.

I actually have another post brewing about why I still use an iPhone as my primary device.   To spoil that  post, among other minor things, it's the battery.   My iPhone can actually keep a charge for my entire waking day without plugging it into a charger.  Sure, the tradeoff is that the multitasking is a bit weak but it's actually functional and not dead.

I could continue on with this litany of failed battery use cases and how we are patching it, and I'm sure everyone reading this has their own disappointing battery story to share as well.   I see plenty of my colleagues carrying an extra battery with them and think that a replaceable battery is a feature - but I don't necessarily agree, and if I have to carry around an extra battery, what's the point of making a device as slim and lightweight as possible?

It seems to me there should be tons of VC money being poured into solving this hardware problem.   Maybe there is, but I don't see it. There's money being spent on faster charging and other tangential solutions that perhaps gets us part way there, but doesn't seem to solve the real user issue.

I'm going to watch this space a little more and see what develops.  Feel free to educate me if I'm off base here.

Trying out Blogger's new insert YouTube feature...

I thought I'd try out Blogger's new insert YouTube feature announced today and at the same time show off some of the cool features of what AdMob can do on the latest Android handsets.  Enjoy.

Kudos to the Blogger team, who spent a few years creating plumbing so they can now add features very quickly.  All that under-the-covers work has really paid off for them.

It's probably one of the tougher things to pull off - transforming a product from being semi-popular to working at really large scales - because you constantly have to defer some "features" while this infrastructure work is going on.   Users don't see the benefits while you are remodeling.

The Blogger team, which includes a large set of both former and current team members, has done a great job of this.   As a user, I've totally forgotten some of the clunkiness that used to exist in this product.

Amazon adds barcode scanning to iPhone app, hooks me deeper

I realized the other day that I rarely buy any "durable goods" online from anywhere except Amazon.  Especially when they hook you with Amazon Prime, why would you? (The exception is Zappos for shoes, but guess who owns them now too.)  Occasionally there are some specialty items I need to order online that Amazon  doesn't carry, but really the only other competitor for me are some brick and mortar stores.

A lot of it comes with the trust I have in Amazon to resolve any problems. In the past, I've been burnt by ordering a camera or something from one of the other online electronics retailers, only to find when the package arrives that's it's really an open box item, or even worse, reconditioned.  Then returning it is usually a huge PITA.   With Amazon Prime, I pretty much know I'll order something and it will be what I ordered, in good condition, and on my doorstep in a couple of days.

In addition, there have been multiple times I've been standing in a store, and looked the item up on my phone to price compare against Amazon.   If it's an item I'm not sure I want, it's easy enough to add to a wish list and but it later.

That's why features like this are great - more than just another feature that any mobile purchasing app should have.   They just made it a lot easier for me to find what I want and buy from them.  Good move.

As if you needed more proof that mobile and desktop are converging

While cleaning out my basement, I found this CodeWarrior development kit for the Sony Ericsson P800 from 2001. I think it was an easy way to get an early P800, but when you think about it, it's a bit crazy that you used to have to spend big bucks for a development environment in order to develop applications for a phone.  This whole development system screams "embedded software" and not "application platform".

Developing for Android is now the same as essentially developing for the PC. It's all driving toward no cost licenses to develop. You can certainly do it for free if you want and need to with Eclipse.

Anyway, this was a great find from the time capsule from late 2001.

Apple iPhone 4 Bumper refund - Automatic!

Wow, that was way easier than I thought.  I actually bought a bumper for my iPhone 4 at the same time I bought the phone, and Apple just refunded it.  I was expecting to have to dig up a receipt somewhere and enter an order number to get a refund.  Gotta like when a company exceeds expectations.

Dear Apple Customer,

Apple recently announced that iPhone 4 customers who purchased an iPhone 4 Bumper are eligible for a full refund.

As of today, we have automatically processed your refund.

Thank you for choosing Apple.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Support

Twitter traffic via FeedBurner Socialize now represents majority of time on this blog

Recently, over at Google we've done two interesting things that allow you to get a little more information out of referral traffic to your site. FeedBurner can now automatically tag your feed to make it compatible with Google Analytics, and we now also allow you to automatically distribute links to Twitter. The combination of these two services is even a little smarter than that, because when FeedBurner knows it's sending the feed out via Twitter, it marks it as such, so you can actually tell the difference between traffic that is organically distributed via Twitter versus traffic that originated from the feed.

In the case of this blog, and like most weight loss pitches, these results may not be typical - traffic originating from the feed and coming from Twitter seems to be of better "quality" than other traffic, as is now resulting in a majority of time spent by users on the site.  

From a standpoint of just comparing the medium from which this time on the site comes, Twitter is the clear leader. In this case, the difference between "Twitter" and "feed" is simply those clicks that came from the socialize service from the feed, and clicks from feed readers. The big caveat here though, is that I publish full content feeds, and most of those views happen in Google Reader, so there is little incentive from for the user to come here and spend time on this site.  As we've noted many many times before, users of Google Reader and other feed readers tend to be a separate audience that stays in their RSS reader when reading content.  Many won't even subscribe to partial feeds.  The combined aggregate view of time in Reader plus this site would be much more interesting and something we'll have to work on providing.

From a Source point of view, you can see that most of this time, including the traffic from Twitter originated from the FeedBurner feed.   Look at the big yellow PacMan in the picture below.

Breaking this down a little more, you can see even more that the Twitter traffic itself is divided between the twitter.com site  (Twitter) and other non-web Twitter clients ("not-set"), which I've confirmed via other analytics on this site are mostly iPhone and Android Twitter clients.  According to PercentMobile, about 7% of my traffic is mobile, and I think that's all referrals from Mobile Twitter applications such as TwitDroid, TweetDeck and Tweetie.

We're working on ways of being able to display this breakdown as well so it's not marked as "(not set)".

Finally, looking at both the Medium and Source together confirms that the majority of traffic on this site is coming from the Socialize service - that's the "twitter/feedburner" combo.

Again, these are just results for this particular site, and may or may not be meaningful for the larger ecosystem, but they definitely hint at some larger trends.  They are interesting nonetheless in showing that how that part of my audience interacts.  Clearly, Twitter users do click through on links and are somewhat more engaged than what is otherwise  "anonymous" traffic.  It's yet another audience that needs to be tracked and analyzed separately from search and other referrals, and separate again from those who consume content in feed readers.

QR Codes Redux

I've always liked QR Codes.   I think I wrote about them four years ago when I first went to Japan, as I saw them on pretty much every print publication instead of www.internetsite.com.   That's because QR Code reader applications were already on most mobile phones in Japan.  If on the train, you'd snap a picture of the QR code for www.internetsite.com and you were browsing there on your Docomo browser within seconds.  It's no secret that typing on a phone sucks, but has gotten better with iPhones and Blackberries and their ilk - however, typing Japanese with 3 different alphabets was even worse, which is probably why this was popular there so early.

These are just starting to catch on today in North America.  There's a QR Code on the back of all of the Nexus One gift phones we were given as our holiday bonus at Google (goes to http://www.android.com/holidays):

I'm still surprised these aren't used more but it all comes down to having useful applications that process QR Codes.  They aren't in-built on our phones yet or the apps yet, but you can get a free standalone QR Code reader pretty easily from the App Store on the iPhone or Marketplace on Android.

Currently I'm using i-nigma on the iPhone and Barcode Scanner on Android, but I'm gonna start inspecting QR codes a lot more whenever I see them to see how people are using them.

QR Codes are one of those things you will have never noticed before but will start to see all over now that I've mentioned it.