mobrec

So
With all the predictability of a rocket launch, the Apple fanboys were a-bloggin' when the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 was released in mid-June. It was pretty evident from the posts that they had not even bothered to checkout the device first hand – they just 'knew' that the iPad was better. It was also amusing to note that the things that Apple touts for its own products 'don't matter' when a competitor has a more favorable stat.

Take, for example, the fact that the Tab is thinner – 'doesn't matter, doesn't matter' goes the fan boy chorus. Hmm, I think back to the most recent releases of the iPod, iPhone and iPad – one of the first things that Apple touted about each was that it 'only x millimeters thick' or 'x millimeters smaller than y'. In reality, is someone going to make a buying decision solely on a few millimeters of size difference? Probably not.

Another difference that was shouted down was the true widescreen format of the device. The upside of this is that when you watch video on the Tab it doesn't get clipped like it does on the iPad. This was attacked as being 'weird', 'awkward', and even 'unusable' by the fan boys. Personally, I find it quite convenient and easy to use. The device feels well balanced and easy to hold in all orientations.

Next the plastic back plate on the Tab was declared 'cheap' and 'shoddy' by the Apple fans because the back of the iPad is metal. My experience with the Tab vs iPad on this is that the subtle give of the plastic backing makes me feel like I have a good grip on the Tab versus the sometimes slippery feeling of the iPad's metallic back. Also the plastic is not quite the fingerprint/smudge magnet that the iPad is.

Now that we have discussed some of the superficial bits, let's talk about the things that really set the two apart and that is the OS and the software.

One of the things that absolutely drove me nuts every time I tried to use my wife's iPad was how modal it is. Reminded me of the 'good ole days' of DOS. Need to write a doc? Open a word processor. Need to crunch some numbers? Close the word processor and open a spreadsheet. Yuck. It is sort of amazing to me that with all of the work that Apple has done with widgets in Dashboard that the concept hasn't carried over to the iPad. Well, it has with the Galaxy Tab, and I am loving it. I can drop widgets on the screen and in one view I can see gMail, Twitter, Facebook and the current weather without having to cycle through apps to get the latest updates. That is a huge win for the Tab.

Notifications are subtle and convenient on Android versus annoying and in-your-face on the iPad. Notifications appear on the bottom right of the screen where I can get the details on them (and dismiss them) when I want. The iPad notifications remind me of the Windows “Abort, Retry, Cancel” dialog boxes of years past that break the flow of what you are trying to accomplish at the moment.

The Android Market is much less painful than it's Apple counterpart. I never understood why it was important to hurl me out of the Apple app store every single time I selected an app to install. This just meant that I had to swipe my way back to the app store, open it back up and find the next app I wanted to try out so I could again be hurled out to some random screen. With Android, I select an app, it installs in the background and I can continue browsing for additional apps or close out of the Market when I want.

The browsing experience on the Galaxy Tab is fast, clean and overall more productive. One of my favorite features is real tabbed browsing on the Tab, not the modal screen-swap browsing on the iPad. Having Flash available is nice to have, but not essential for my needs. Still, it is better to have it and not need it than otherwise.

Another huge win is the inherent openness of the Android operating system. When I am on the web I am attending to multiple channels (Twitter, browsing, RSS, Evernote, blogs) so I am constantly shifting and saving things from one channel to another or saving things for later review. This is dead simple on the Galaxy Tab because most every application has a 'Share' menu option in it. So if I see an interesting link on Twitter I can easily view the full page (without having to leave Plume no less!) and then 'Share' it with Evernote or gMail or whatever I want without awkward copy and paste and opening and closing of applications. Android 3.1 on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 just works and works the way that I want to not the way some engineer in Cupertino thinks I should work.

So
So the answer to the Faux News-esque Has Apple's iPad finally killed the Netbook? question is a firm NO. It is right there in paragraph four:

But the real reason Netbooks have fallen by the wayside is that they failed to evolve. After the first couple of generations, Netbooks settled into a comfortable niche of a 10.1-inch display, 1GB to 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and Windows (first XP, then Windows 7 Starter or Home Premium). You could get this basic combo for as little as $299, but some companies would charge more for upgrades such as nicer designs, rugged bodies, 3G antennas, or occasionally a higher-resolution display. But performance-wise, you'd usually be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a $299 Netbook and a $450 one.

Here is another stunning insight:

Tablets, on the other hand, have been growing in reader interest since the iPad launch (with a few ups and downs along the way), and is 56 percent higher in April 2011 than it was one year before.

So, interest in tablets has been growing since the first viable one was introduced. Shocked, shocked I am that there wasn't more interest in tablets before they were actually being sold. I bet there was a similar uptick in iPods after they were introduced!

So
This is a great story about a guy in Copenhagen who had his bike stolen and through the power of social media and the interwebs he got it back. And what a great reward for the guy who found it for him!

So
This post titled Don't Mimic Real-World Interfaces really resonated with me and reminded me of a post that I had done a while ago titled Evolution Of The Mobile Experience.

There have always been those few apps that insist on looking like their physical, real world, equivalent. Calculator apps, date books, calendars, note taking apps, “stickies” — you know what I am talking about. Despite there being better options out there, better ways of displaying the data, designers stick with the known representation of the tool.

Now, though, Apple is taking it too far.

If you have seen any of the screenshots linked across the web about the new iCal interface you know what I am talking about. If you haven’t seen those, iCal is looking a lot like it does on the iPad right now in Lion’s developer preview. It’s ugly, and we should be way past this style by now.

Ugly and harder to use than it should be. Designers need to focus on how to allow the user to fluidly access and manipulate their data not slavishly stick to the limitations of physical items.

Another dimension of this is how poorly developers/designers have approached the touch interface. The industry seems to be mired in button-driven-pull-a-menu-to-do-anything paradigm. Interfaces really need to take better advantage of long-tap context options and gestures to make the interactions more fluid. This is one of the things that drives me bonkers about the iPad – it is so modal; I have to close one app to do something in another. I guess I have gotten used to how easy it is in Android to just share data between apps without having to change apps.

Speaking of Android apps, I think that Feedly is the first really usable news reader that I have encountered on Android. I subscribe to a lot of feeds and that seems to be the death of most readers on mobile devices because the developers thought it would be a good idea to download all your feed updates at once. This typically results in the app going away for a long time. Feedly does it more on demand. And they are clever about using gestures in the app – swipe down and to the left and I have marked that page of articles read and moved on to the next. Brilliant. Much better than 'pull menu, select mark read, select next page, close menu' annoyance of other apps.

So
I spent a little time this morning browsing the blogs of people who live in downtown Cincinnati. After about 10 minutes I had to stop. Why do they all seem so bitter and angry? On one hand, they spent a fair amount of time talking about how great it is to live downtown, then turn and belittle people who come down from the (evil) suburbs to partake of the urban greatness. Leaves me wondering why I should hang out downtown with such cliquish bitter crowd.

They also seem to love to hate on people who have chosen to live in the 'burbs (apparently all they we do is drive SUVs and go to the mall). We have nothing entertaining to do, nothing interesting to eat and nothing worthy to see. Look, downtown folks, it is all about choices; I made mine and you made yours – it doesn't make either one of us right or wrong.

Does the anger and bitterness come from a perceived lack of awe at the downtown living decision? Should there be weekly articles in the local press about how wonderful the people who live downtown are? Do they not feel vindicated by their decision, don't feel revered enough that they chose to live downtown? And where is the line? I am sure it exists. That is, the line beyond which you are no longer 'downtown' enough to be part of the in-crowd. Yikes, now I am doing it to. Downtown folks, here is what I have for you: respect. Care to share?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to live downtown; especially if I worked downtown. But I don't. I work in the evil suburbs (Blue Ash) and live in the even more evil exurbs (Union Township). I enjoy being able to commute to work on my Vespa. I enjoy being a few miles from the fantastic Little Miami Bike trail; my wife and I love to cycle down to Loveland for brunch on sunny Sundays. I am sure I enjoy a pint at the Brazenhead just as much as I would at the Lackman. I like that my daughter has a fantastic school system to attend. I enjoy having the largest YMCA in the country a few mile from my home. I enjoy not being able to see my neighbor's houses. I enjoy having a large vegetable garden that feeds us through part of the year. Besides, looking at what condos are going for downtown I would pay about twice as much for what amounts to a two bedroom apartment as I paid for my three bedroom house on five acres of land here in the heart of evil-dom.

Technorati Tags: cincinnati, dubious, ideas, local

So
I was a little surprised to see Cincinnati ranked so high as it is in some ways such a backwater in other regards. Still, it is good to see the city get even an occasional positive mention. I have certainly been doing my small part in the last 10 years to contribute to Cincy online presence.

Technorati Tags: cincinnati, online, rankings, socialmedia

So
Twitter recently turned 5. Here is the history of Twitter, told in a Ken Burns style.

Sadly, this is an accurate depiction of the depth and thoughtfulness of journalism today.

Technorati Tags: fun, history, humor, twitter, video

So
If you are looking for instructions on how to update your AT&T Samsung Captivate to the latest version (2.2 aka Froyo) of the Android OS look no further than Samsung's site. And, please, avoid all of the sites out there that what you to register before they will give you this same link.

The process takes about 20-30 minutes to complete. After the update, all of your wallpapers and launch page layouts will be gone. No apps or data is lost, just the layouts, so you will need to recreate those.

Other than that little annoyance, I am noticing snappier performance overall from the phone so it is definitely worth the time to update.

Technorati Tags: captivate, mobile, samsung, upgrade

So
Found a little time to clean up my Internet Footprint – that is all the sites that I have tinkered around with in the past and for whatever reason, never really found any value in them to keep me coming back. So I have gone back and delete my accounts; though I am sure the info will live on in Google for quite some time to come. Here is this weekend's harvest:

BrightKite – first location-based service I tried out. They've gotten out of that (crowded) space. 43Places – I found that I got a lot of people asking for advice about places I'd been but no one answering questions about places I wanted to go. 43People – This was an interesting thought experiment – for about a week. GetGlue – Hunch-wannabe without the correlations and meaningful recommendations. No thanks, I don't need any more virtual stickers. SCVNGR – Another twist on location-based services swizzled with a sort of treasure hunt vibe. Not really enough going on with this to try out or keep me coming back. Also, no option to delete your account. Abandoned. Box.net – this was kind of cool when it first came out; especially being able to access files from my mobile phone. Now Dropbox and Google Docs have taken over for this. Ning – they kind of shot themselves in the head when they switched to a all pay model – that made jumping ship an easy decision. check.in – promised to provide unified 'check ins' for all location-based services. Never really worked that well and probably won't make it out of beta. twine – crashed and burned on its own; morphed into evri which doesn't seem to have a point with all of the twitter search engines out there plancast – recommends all sorts of interesting sounding events – in Austin, Paris, and NYC. Not terribly useful if you aren't in those places. task.fm – reminders; except you need to remember to do to that site to get them – easily replaced this with google calendar and as a bonus automatically gets synced to my mobile phone.

And as previously mentioned – Gowalla is gone and FourSquare is now an entropy exercise.

Technorati Tags: dubious, internet, webtools

So
It is kind of fun to listen to the 'pundits' slobber over the rumored iPad 2. They seem to not have a very long memories when they criticize (with a barely masked worried tone in their voices) the emerging Android tablets.

“There aren't many apps written specifically for the Android tablet” – yes, and this was very much true with all of the iPhone apps when the iPad came out.

“iPad has more business adoption than Android tablets” – um, which Android tablets? Most of them will be released in the next six months – businesses typically find it hard to adopt technology that doesn't exist.

Personally I find the walled off nature of iOS a hindrance for any serious use of the iPad. As I have said before, we travel with both the iPad and a cheap netbook and the netbook is the device that gets used most often. Android just provided a better fit for the way I want to use a computer and it looks like the tablet-specific Honeycomb version of the Android OS is just going to make that even better.

Technorati Tags: android, apple, design, ipad, netbook, opinion