30 Minutes was all I could take with a Windows Phone

Every six months or so, I get this urge to try a Windows Phone again, so today I took my SIM card out of my LG G2x and popped it in my htc HD7 to try it out again.  I was going to try to use it for a week, but  I couldn't use the phone for more than 30 minutes and I had to rip the SIM right back out.

It's got one thing going for it:  it's super snappy and fast.  Way faster than both Android and iOS.  And I love fast.  But otherwise, this is the worst user experience around.

One of the reasons I got the urge to try the phone again was that I needed to check something in my hotmail account, which I rarely use.   Even after logging out and logging back in with my Windows Live account, the phone continued to show me that I had no hotmail messages even though when I went to double check on the web, I clearly did.  You want apps that just work, and I got apps that just didn't work.

I went in to update the 10 or so applications I had installed, as the phone told me they were in need of update, but I got a "Windows Live service is down" - sorry.

The IMAP client to Gmail is just horrible.

Maybe this is the best experience around if you have an Exchange account, but I don't get it.

The "Metro" UI to me doesn't work because it wastes too much space.  I don't need title bars and fonts that take up 10% of the screen.   It works okay on the Xbox, but not so much on a phone.

I think a lot of this does have to do with perspective.  I saw this article by Danny Sullivan, who I respect and think knows what he is talking about, on how Android needs a better email client and it is amazingly the opposite of what I think.  

If you use Google apps or Gmail as your primary method for calendar and email management, there's nothing better than the Android interface, and actually the iOS mail client is terrible.   It doesn't bring the Gmail experience to iOS at all, but then again, I don't think Google's iOS Gmail client does either, as it doesn't support multiple accounts (last time I checked).

At any rate, I've seen the new Lumia phones, and although they are nice, I can't see myself ever using one of these phones.  

I don't understand Caribou Coffee

Caribou Coffee goes a long way toward giving you a comfortable cup of coffee.  There's usually a lot of tables, free wi-fi, lots of comfy couches and chairs.  And a nice fireplace, which is awesome in the Winter.   The coffee itself is good, and there's a great assortment of interesting coffee drinks you could probably put an umbrella in if they were Polynesian themed instead of North Pole themed.

But here's what I don't get:  Caribou's baked goods suck.  They are all pretty much horrible.   Why go to all this trouble to spend on this great interior and then have such a crappy collection of baked goods?  It's like they are running a marathon against Starbucks and fell face first 10ft before the finish line.

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!

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.

Comcast, the least fault tolerant part of my home network

I don't know if it's just me, but I've had Comcast for internet service for years - pretty much ever since they've offered it, and although I've expected the firmware in their devices to get better over time, it just hasn't.

Unfortunately, I live in an area with a lot of trees and a lot of strung power lines (as opposed to buried).   In the midwest, this is pretty much a recipe for frequent power outages.   This is a minor annoyance for most things, but a major annoyance when it comes to Comcast internet.  

In the said many years that I have had Comcast, I have probably had 5-6 different cable modems.   They have all been from different manufacturers.  I think they used to be Motorola devices, now they are mostly Cisco.  Getting to the point, whenever the power goes out, the Comcast provided cable box is the only piece of network hardware on my home network that needs to be manually rebooted.  I have 4 Apple Airports and various other switches from Netgear, Linksys, etc - and they all come right back to serving packets from a power outage situation.

Not the Comcast boxes - I have to do down into the depths of my basement, and pull the power on the Cisco cable modem again and reset it.   I've even hooked it up to a UPS now so it doesn't get powered down when the power goes out - and it's still the same issue.

This all makes me think it's a problem with the software in the mini-station that Comcast has on the lines outside - but still - in 2010, in the age when I can run Quake on my phone, can't firmware in all their devices detect "Hey, I'm not serving packets, perhaps I should reset my connection! Retry...."

This is the classic "two ifs and a do loop" that all managers think should be in code they didn't write - but am I crazy here?

Anyone else have this problem?