European Chronicles 2013: Connectivity

INTERNET

Long story short, we ended up buying SIM cards from Lebara for Netherlands (1GB for a €20, if I remember right) and from Sunrise for Switzerland (1CHF/day for unlimited Internet, extra for voice and SMS). Lebara gives you credit for the amount you spent on a card (or a refill), Sunrise gives half. Both cards can be refilled on the fly.

WiFi

"Free WiFi everywhere" is a myth. In not so many places where there is publicly accessible WiFi, they normally require your mobile number to send a text message with access code to (in other words, forget about trying to use WiFi access to bootstrap your Internet, such as find the store to buy the card from, without spending your money at least on SMS). Even then, the "free" access is limited, normally to 30 minutes.

And it is absolutely *not* "everywhere". Especially if you go into rural areas - good chances they won't even accept your credit cards, but that's another story.

It will be a good idea to get a hold of SIM cards *before* you arrive, for the hassle and lost time of your vacation will be worth much more than time spent on investigations.

^[European Chronicles 2013]

There's No Limit To Perfection

Now that cell phone manufacturers agreed upon Micro USB B being the standard jack for the charger, there's just one step left - to agree which way up to position it...

MyTouch Slide As Heard From The Other End

My friend and I are talking - the venerable G1 on my side, fresh new MyTouch Slide on his. I'm stationary, he's walking.

The best way to describe the experience would be to invite the reader to listen to The Run at the Swedish Radio Multichannel Sound 5.1 Sound Archive.

Google Latitude: Late

THE GOOD

Google Latitude is a service that allows to "see your friends' locations and status messages and share yours with them", according to their home page.

Well, let me see - people move pretty fast in this world. All right, I would be happy if there was about 30 minutes of delay - I understand that the infrastructure is complex, and Latitude is a loss leader, allowing Google to peddle location based services and gather massive statistics on us, mere mortals, in order to do that more efficiently.

THE BAD

But for Pete's sake, 20 hours is unacceptable. That's a good case. A bad case is a friend of mine that is being shown stuck in Nevada on May 10th, with no way out.

THE UGLY

The worst part of it is that the worst behavior Latitude exhibits on the most touted mobile platform, the Android (Blackberries seem to be the most stable, WinMo just crash a lot). And even worse is that it seems to be a design feature.

Without being privy to implementation details, this is how it looks like from outside the black box upon a brief glance:

• There is a com.google.android.apps.maps entity that runs in background;
• Whenever the memory gets tight, it gets booted out;
• Bye-bye goes your Latitude presence;
• Until the next time you run Maps.

Last time I checked, there was no way to make sure your class doesn't get evicted if there's a memory shortage.

Which means that Latitude users on Android are fundamentally <censored>.

As well as users on many other applications working as background services. Like I've said before, "almost working" seems to be the bane of the platform (which, by the way, makes me think that next Android phones will have significantly more memory than G1).

1.5 release didn't fix this. Let's see if 2.0 does.

For now, if your work depends on it, go with BlackBerry.

UPDATE (2009/06/14): There's been an update that is, among other things, supposed to fix this issue. Let's see how well it works.

UPDATE #2 (2009/06/14): Did I say "almost working" already? It is not clear yet how well the update timeliness is working. but one thing is absolutely certain: user pictures are randomly gone. First impression is that the only picture that stays on both receiving and sending end is the one the user has set for themselves, but if I have a picture assigned to the user, it will not show up. Guess another update is due soon.

UPDATE #3 (2009/09/18): Still nothing. Guess these problems are not on the "priority list", or are resolved in Android 1.6. Which is kind of moot, considering the fact that G1 may be unfit for new Android releases.

(Image credit: Mister Rad)

UMA Is Not Dead Yet?

What? G2 is FCC certified with UMA? Dire predictions about death of UMA were wrong?

I'll be glad to eat my hat if that is the case. Still pondering about nuances of making profit on UMA, other than $10/mo surcharge on the plan plus feature appeal, stacked against the overhead of VOIP infrastructure and increased tension between the wireless carrier and Internet service providers.

T-Mobile G1 $100 off: Costco bait and switch

There was a persistent rumor that Costco is selling G1 for $79.99. Turns out, nope, it's the same $180 as it was before (see the comments for the original link).

I wonder

• Whether it is the initiative of some overzealous T-Mobile reps at Costco (it's not quite Costco that sells mobile phones, the relation is not that clear);
• Why Costco didn't say a peep about the fact that the actual price is going to be $100 more than advertized (false advertizing?)
• Does this situation qualify as "bait and switch"?
• How Costco is going to handle this PR disaster - I'm sure the Internet is about to explode in criticism in a few hours.

Nice try, shooting themselves in the foot.

Oh, and by the way, the $97.99 G1 from Amazon is apparently sold out.

UPDATE: There are price discrepancies. Sometimes it is $180, sometimes it is $129.99 for a new line and $169.99 for an upgrade.

Android G2 Wish List In Motion

Just before the "system update" happens, let's see how the software components listed in the original Android G2 Wish List evolved:

• Battery life (not quite software, but not quite hardware replacement, either): there are persistent rumors that T-Mobile is sending out a battery upgrade. Unconfirmed;
• "Escalating" volume setting for ringtones and alarms: Klaxon addresses that. It is a little bit sluggish to start and quirky at times (no 24 hour setting, 12/24 change is somewhat bizarre), but quite usable;
• Centralized application update notification: there's aTrackDog. Despite some bitching and moaning, mostly works - and if you can't remember the exceptions, you should seek treatment;
• Web access to Market - Cyrket is there for you.

Not bad, considering the fact that Google didn't lift a finger to make that happen.

Now let's wait a bit and see what update brings.

Introducing: Multiple Connectivity Disorder

There is a new challenge for instant messenger implementations: to find you.

Didn't it drive you nuts that you forgot to close your Yahoo Messenger session at home, came to the office, logged in (thus having disconnected the session at home) and later that day, after returning home, found an urgent message that came a split second after you left home?

Or, even better, found that the home session is set to automatically reconnect, thus buoncing out your work session and making the messenger useless, and that you don't have remote access to kill the open session on your home box?

I don't know if Google came to the idea of enabling multiple simultaneous sessions looking at Yahoo's mistakes, or that was a common sense decision. Hats off to them for that.

They have a different challenge, however.

Even though they do allow multiple sessions, the wrinkles on the mobile side are not quite ironed out yet. Rules of message propagation to multiple sessions are murky - messages in both directions seem to be delivered simultaneously to all web sessions, however, messages originated on mobile devices don't, moreover, replies to these messages don't register in other web sessions. All communications, however, get collated in the chat archive.

I can see why it is happening - without doubt, they have different content delivery servers for web and mobile clients, plus, security and privacy concerns on top of that. It would be insteresting how and when they sort it out. They better do it, though, as it is becoming a real pain in the neck as smartphones become a commodity.

Conspiracy Theory: UMA Will Die

Along the same lines as the conspiracy theory about absence of Google Talk on G1 -

Fact #1: mobile carriers charge customers for airtime.
Fact #2: UMA allows customers to talk using a WiFi connection (sometimes a flat fee is involved).
Fact #3: this strips mobile carriers from airtime revenue that could otherwise be produced.
Speculation #1: Carriers offering unlimited UMA calling on a flat fee basis realized, to their dismay, that a lot of people use it a lot.

Corollary: UMA will be a feature that is offered less and less in the future, until it disappears completely.

G1 may have been the harbinger.

Android Wishlist: Smart Context

G1 is literally a death threat in the car, with its lack of voice dialing capabilities.

On the other hand, it is also a privacy threat, being used without the screen lock pattern.

Whereas it is barely possible to get away with placing a call with the screen unlocked (Menu-Menu-Home-Direct Dial, if it is configured, and Menu-Menu-Call-get-lost-and-die, if it's not), it is even more difficult if there is a lock pattern.

A good start in the right direction could be, for example, automatic unlock to the home screen upon connecting with a specified Bluetooth device.

Still, this doesn't make it safe enough, just reduces the threat. I do wish someone's got enough time and money to come up with the docking station.

Or, for Pete's sake, fix the voice dialer...

Android G2 Wish List

Now that it is more or less clear what G1 is, it is becoming clear what it's missing.

First of all, the big items:

• UMA - but unlikely this will happen;
  
• Improved battery life - it is possible to drain the battery in an hour when actually doing something;
• Improved voice recognition - current generation is pretty much unusable;
  
• Hands-free operation, voice commands over headset - it is dangerous to use G1 to initiate a call when driving, visual feedback is required. Any feedback other than audible, or pressing a button on a headset, is unacceptable;
  
• Internationalization (input language support);
• Google Talk Voice - I know this will not happen, but still want it;
• Google Apps Integration - I don't see why GMail should get preferential treatment over an offering with identical, if not superior (for paid editions) functionality.

Low hanging fruit:

• I wish Google developers realize that GMail contacts with no first/last name, but with company name, should not be displayed as just a telephone number in Android contact list. It is ugly to copy/paste the company name into the name field - it is not the name. Interestingly enough, they got this right in GMail, but not Android...
  
• Along the same lines: contact should be searchable by company name as well as name. Well, while we're at that, why don't make it searchable by any field? (Update: fixed in GMail)
  

From this point on, in no particular order (RC33 fixed these issues):

• Auto-answer when on handset options
• User-programmable buttons
• Volume control buttons in a place where they don't get pressed all the time
• "Escalating" volume setting for ringtones and alarms
  
• Better tactile feedback
  
• Raised keys on the face (flat keys are pretty difficult to find)
• Cached Market entries
• Centralized application update notification (today, there's no way to find out about the update other than look it up in the Market manually)
• Market Watch List (an application may be not good enough today, but I want to keep an eye on ie)
  
• Customizable clock on the home screen (I'd rather have a digital, with 24 hour display)
• Full control of the phone via remote connection - TCP or at least USB (GMail sync is a good start, but some operations are just too cumbersome and slow on the phone itself)
• External screen/docking interface - it would be nice to plug the phone into the car and have input and output on a bigger screen (maps, GPS, directions, you name it) - another view at the same problem
  
• Multi-touch screen - those zoom buttons are annoying
• Web access to Market - even today, access is already slow and cumbersome, and there's too many applications to view comfortably. And please not as clumsy as Apple App Store;
• No IM interruptions on joining/departing WiFi.

(more to come)

T-Mobile Store: Just Say No

Just one item: Motorola H710 Bluetooth Headset.

T-Mobile: $99.99
Newegg OEM: $36.99

That'll be 37% of T-Mobile's price, or 63% off. Impressive, duh?

The Tao of Mobile Computing

Not something I normally do, but just couldn't resist:

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me,'' he said, "may I examine it?''

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard,'' said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human.''

"Pray, great master,'' implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?''

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

Source: Slashdot, (Useful) Stupid BlackBerry Tricks

Android vs. iPhone: What Part Of The Message You Don't Understand?

Reading SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone vividly reminded me of a joke I've first heard in mid-nineties:

In seventies, IT managers were choosing VMS over Unix.
In eighties, IT managers were choosing Novell over Unix.
In nineties, IT managers were choosing Windows NT over Unix.

What part of the message you don't understand?

One quote from the article: "If you can't get coders on board, you're sunk."

Guess what, I don't have a Mac. Neither did three startups I've worked for. Neither did three corporations I've worked for. And neither of us (me, the startups and the corporations) have any intent to buy a Mac, despite an overwhelming desire to have one someday.

I've placed my bets.

Android G1: Hardware

Can't stop comparing the G1 with other phones I've had in general, and BlackBerry Curve in particular.

Operating system aside, G1 seems pretty flimsy compared to other phones. However, the keyword may just as well be "seems".

I've read an article once about differences between German and Japanese engineering. In an essence...

German engineering is exact and elegant. The buttons will always feel the certain way, the tactile feedback would be just like you expect, the doors will thunk just like so (did you know they design sounds?), and, in general, the experience would be exquisite.

Until something breaks, that is.

Right there and then everything will cease to work completely.

Japanese designs, on the other hand, would feel like crap, look like crap, buttons may plonk deep or not move at all, but everything works. For a long, long, long time.

The explanation is difference in design tolerances.

Back to phones - G1, so far, seems to belong to Japanese school of design. Either that, or it's just outright flimsy. Time will tell.

I'm looking forward to "German" engineered Android. Of course, the market positioning and the price would be different, but it would be interesting to witness nonetheless.

And if my gut feeling is right, it may be manufactured by RIM. Or Motorola...

Four R Mantra, now coming to Android

It used to be called The Microsoft Mantra: Four R's.

Retry,
Reboot,
Reinstall,
Repeat.

My Nokia never needed a reboot.

I was appalled when I was told by customer service to reboot my PEBL.

I wasn't even surprised when BlackBerry wanted to reboot after installing practically anything, and sometimes even by itself, for a good measure.

I guess I have nobody but myself to blame that I didn't figure out that a simple reboot would fix the problems I was having lately. But no, it didn't occur to me, I've put too much faith in the development team, and it took a call to T-Mobile customer service (hilarious call, I should say) to cure that.

All right, now that I know that Four R's is applicable to Android, my life is easier.

It's still disgusting, though. Thought they would do better than that.

Mobile Schizophrenia: Notifications

All notifications are not equal, but some of them are less equal than others.

I do want to wake up and take a call no matter what - I assume if someone's calling me, they really need me. But sometimes I can't take a call during a meeting.

I do need to take a look at incoming SMS - with less urgency, maybe. T-Mobile, for example, is known to send routine service notifications at five in the morning - I don't think I need to wake up for that. But if it is someone I know to be judgmental in their SMS habits, I'd rather take a look at what they wrote. Say, if my bank tells me there's fraudulent activity on my account - that's pretty urgent in my book.

I do need to know when mail comes - at day. I don't think I need that at night.

In other words, I need to be able to establish my own guidelines for what constitutes urgency, and introduce arbitrary classes of service - "anytime", "not when I'm busy", "not when I'm sleeping" and so on. Would be nice to have integration with Locale and IM status.

But today, there are only two, at most three, priorities: phone call, SMS, sometimes IM. This is not enough.

Android G1: RIM should be afraid. Very afraid.

Here's what is going to happen pretty soon, in no particular order, with different probability of materialization:

• Software development houses are going to realize that Android offers them equal, if not more powerful platform than BlackBerry OS;
  
• They are going to realize that social networking and application interoperability (a.k.a. Web 2.0) is making their life much easier, and development overhead smaller, and time to market shorter;
• For a short while, corporations will bitch and moan about absence of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes support on Android;
• Software development houses are going to realize that whoever comes up with Microsoft Exchange and/or Lotus Notes support on Android is going to hit the jackpot;
• Hence, the Big Race will start (I believe it has already started), and Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes support will inevitably come to Android, and very soon;
• This will eliminate the competitive advantage that BlackBerry is still enjoying;
• RIM is going to realize that Android in general, and G1 in particular, is the BlackBerry killer;
  
• RIM may do the right thing and drop BlackBerry OS altogether, with just legacy support (unlikely, that's too much of loss of face) or
  
• RIM may do the right thing and release a BlackBerry device with Android instead of or along with BlackBerry OS, gradually fading BlackBerry OS into oblivion;
  
• Presence of Android on BlackBerry hardware is going to save their butt, and allow them to save billions of dollars on not having to develop something the rest of the world is already eager to do for them. Just let them.

So here's what I would do:

• If I was responsible for mobile application development for consumer sector: drop BlackBerry development, change iPhone/Android resource allocation as 20/80 - iPhone is just one iPhone, Android is a platform, a cheaper platform, with more phones to come and vastly wider distribution;
  
• If I was responsible for mobile application development for corporate sector: forget that Android is not currently on the approved list. This will change very fast. Change the BlackBerry/Android resource allocation to at least 50/50, and keep watching the market. Oh, and look very deeply into not reinventing the wheel, for application interoperability will be the key for Android applications, and there'll be lots of reusable code to reuse;
  
• If I was responsible for infrastructure development: location based services are somewhat overdue, make sure they're not forgotten - and start planning ahead already;
• If I was responsible for buying a phone for myself: I'd buy G1, in fact, I just did;
• If I was responsible for corporate procurement plan: I'd eliminate all sorts of long term contracts with RIM and kept talking to Google about how they can make my life easier.

Now the prediction's been made, let's sit and wait and see what happens. I don't think holding one's breath for extended periods of time is necessary - BoA's mobile banking application has already been available on day one, Visa has declared their intent to do the same, there's some action as far as Microsoft Exchange support is concerned, Motorola is working on something. Let's see how much time it takes for others to realize that either they have to jump on the bandwagon, or be left in the dust.

Update: Told ya: CompanionLink Releases Outlook Syncing App For Android. Less than a month. May not be perfect, but certainly proves the point. Now let's see how long does it take for Lotus Notes sync app to arrive.

Google Mobile World Domination Fail, BlackBerry Edition

I've been planning to write this article about several times a day for a couple of months already. And every time, there was the next update that made me think "No, not yet" and abort the attempt.

Until now.

The point is, with all the efforts that Google seems to be directing at the mobile space, their efforts are either failing or backfiring, at least where BlackBerry is concerned.

Usability of applications is getting reduced with every new update.

Worst of all, I'm now starting to see the pattern where spontaneous device reboots that drive me nuts seem to be related to the clandestine Google Updater that runs in the background. Sometimes, it reboots in the middle of a phone call.

Visible notification about new mail in GMail mailbox is gone.

New mail doesn't get into the mailbox until a while later, I have acquired a habit of hitting "refresh" all the time (all right, Google may be concerned about bandwidth consumption, but I'd rather they ask me if I want to wait an hour until they refresh the mailbox contents).

Spreadsheet is marginally usable, if you really need to read the documents.

It is no longer possible to have just the applications that I need (the all-encompassing "Google Mobile App for BlackBerry" replaced it).

It is no longer possible to see whether the application version is the latest (to be fair, Google Updater was always quite flaky as far as new software versions were concerned, and the only way to reliably check whether the new version is available was to manually install the application - current software versions are not displayed on Google site, either).

Bottomline: having used almost all Google applications for quite a while by now, I can say with confidence that most of Google apps for BlackBerry fall severely short in comparison to their usual quality standards.

This scares me a bit - being able to use Google apps was one of selling points of BlackBerry. Now that Android enabled phones are becoming tangible, I wonder what happens to Google's desire to keep BlackBerry (and iPhone) apps with their heads above the water...

Update: New mail notification works with BlackBerry OS upgrade from 4.2 to 4.5.
Update: Visual notification only works if audible notification is enabled. If you disable audible notification, you lose visual as well.

Android: Unforeseen Consequences

Unforeseen by some, of course. I'm sure Google had exactly this in mind from the beginning.

Take a look at the flurry of announcements - major mobile hardware providers are now "looking" into the platform. The word "commodization" comes to mind right away.

Basic mobile phones are already commodized all the way - there's fierce competition, they cost dime a dozen and offer just about the same functionality.

There's still some diversity and competition between high end phones - notable examples would be BlackBerry, Treo, iPhone, and less known in North America, but more known in Europe Nokia Communicator series. They are vastly different and mostly occupy different segments of market.

Android, with some development effort, can occupy both the niches that the business phones (BlackBerry, Treo, Communicator) and fashion phone (iPhone) currently have the stranglehold on. Net result: some of those phones will go the way of the Dodo, the rest will have to drop prices. Commodity market is not fun.

There is one interesting specimen in this game: Sony Ericsson. Yes, the same Sony that pulled the rootkit on us and cheated on BluRay compatibility. They are currently "testing" Android. Seeing how Sony likes to have the market to itself and not let anyone in, and consistently fails to coexist in the same market segment with competition, I'm making my bet that either Sony will completely refuse to participate in Android game, or come up with something ridiculously vendor locked, which will not survive in the context of open API. Let's see how this prediction holds.