The K Unit

It is a pretty known fact that I LOVE the Windows Mobile platform and consider it the best mobile platform purely from a technology standpoint. However, when I joined Canpages in November, I was given the opportunity to purchase any phone that was available by Rogers. Given that I owned both HTC Android phones and Rogers did not carry any Windows Mobile phones that was worth acquiring, the only real choice left really was to get a 16GB iPhone 3GS. I approached that decision with a lot of mixed feelings. In my initial use of the iPod Touch, I really disliked the experience. However, I only used it for a few hours at a time, I was willing to give it another try. Here are some of my thoughts after almost 4 months of use.

The one thing that I have really enjoyed about my experience about working at Canpages is that they have been very focused on giving their employees the right equipment to to do their jobs. As soon as Telus announced that they launched the Motorola Milestone which is the GSM version of the Droid, I got my hands on one within the week.

Part of the reason why I wanted to get the Milestone was because it was touted to be the iPhone killer. Realistically speaking, there will be no such thing in 2010 or even 2011. The iPhone will be here for a while. For me, it will be more of the quest to replace my HTC Fuze. My one day’s worth of playing with the Milestone has been mixed but it’s trending positively. I will write more in subsequent entries.

I was quite excited to receive this email from Waze yesterday. Waze has been one of my favorite mobile apps of late. My major complaint was of course that there were very no Canadian maps available. With new Canadian maps, this could very well be a killer navigation tool while still providing real time information that you’d have to pay for from other providers like Tom Tom for instance.

Hello Canadian mappers,
Some great news – we have acquired a base map for all of Canada (thank you Canadian government!) and we will start loading them to the cartouche.
While this change is great, we realize this brings a few concerns to all the hard work you’ve put into creating the waze maps so far, so we wanted to explain how this process will be carried out which is why we’re sending this email.

Before we start, you should know that you can take a break for the next 2 days. Any changes made after we start the process will not make it to the final version of the map, and we don’t want you to waste your time. We will also put a big red pop-up on the cartouche itself letting you know once we started our work.

The technical descriptions are below (and my apologies for sending such a long email… only read if you’re interested).

At the end of the process, Canadian maps will remain on www.waze.com/cartouche, and aerial images should be up and running in the background.

Thanks and please feel free to email us if you have any concerns or questions

Dror

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Technicalities:

So how will the maps be combined? I will refer to two maps – the GOVT (new base map from the Canadian Government) and USER (existing cartouche maps)

• Since the GOVT has more segments, this will be the base for the new map.
• Each segment from the USER maps will be checked for a matching segment from the GOVT. If there’s a match, the the GOVT segment will keep its shape, but the driving direction, street name and ownership will be changed to match the USER segment.
• If there’s no match, the USER segment will be added to the new map with all characteristics (including shape).
• We will run a process that automatically recognizes highways. This process connects the highways to ramps and opens the driving directions. In this case, any prior info from the USER maps will be kept (info will be added only on new segments).
• We will run all the drives in Canada up to date; this will open driving directions on all segments that were not created until today and create routing connectivity (allowed turns).
• As for connectivity; the GOVT maps come with physical connectivity (nodes and their connection to the segments) but without routing connectivity (allowed turns). Unfortunately, we cannot move the routing connectivity from the existing cartouche when a new segment is involved. The only case where connectivity is kept is where two segments were not recognized completely and copied as is from the USER maps (3rd bullet above).

What should you expect?

1. First of all, great new maps that will make it a lot easier for you to complete the work on your area.
2. But… also some problems. Most likely you’ll notice a few places where there are duplicates, in case that the USER and GOVT segments were not matched properly, and so both were created in the final map. This is where we will need your help in editing and deleting the extra roads, so if you are not an area manager yet please let us know and we’ll be happy to see if you can join the area managers community.
3. Routing might not be optimal; even if you got the routes around your house on a good level, you will notice a decrease. This is because we cannot copy the existing routing connectivity (see last bullet above).

As mentioned before, we will put the pop-up on the cartouche once the work begins (most likely in the next couple of hours or by tomorrow the latest) which will be your cue to take a break. I will also post this on the forums.
–
waze support team
www.twitter.com/waze
alpha@waze.com
Share your experiences on the road with other wazers – waze.com/user_blog

Lately I’ve been addicted to a pretty neat application called Waze. It brands itself as a social navigation app and has apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian. I actually played with both the iPhone and Windows Mobile app and both work pretty decently. The app is pretty addictive. You essentially get points for numerous activities such as simply driving around, sharing event such as speed trap, recording new roads and yes, even editing the map. The mobile app works like it’s supposed to although I surprisingly had more problems connecting to the GPS with the iPhone than I did with the Windows Mobile which is quite rare. The web application is simplistic. You have a dashboard that shows you your previous trips and then you can choose to click them to view those trips. You could also choose to use those trips to enhance a current map by filling out roads that are missing and so on. I like the idea of editing my maps but I find the experience quite frustrating at times. Hopefully over time, they will continue to improve on it. The mobile app also integrates with both Twitter and foursquare.

Although maps are pretty sparse in Toronto and thus rendering navigation pretty useless in my area, it is easy to see the use of Waze. Every once in a while, I’ll get an alert stating that segments of the 401 have medium traffic followed by the speed of an anonymous user at the time. People can also report various things such as accidents on the roadways. One of the issues is that it’s technically illegal to operate Waze while driving so it works best when you have another driver in the car with you. For me, I typically just turn on Waze before I start driving and keep on driving. The neat thing about this is outside of giving up some privacy, it typically doesn’t really detract me from doing what I normally do anyway.

To me, what is probably most intriguing about Waze is the social experiment it represents. I’ve always been of the opinion that most people are most interested in controlling their privacy and not so much containing it. Most people are willing to give out information about themselves usually if it benefits them in one way or another. Given its ability to provide real time data to its users, it’s the equivalent of Twitter for navigation

This review is about Android, the operating system, and not about any particular handset. I remember the first time I got my hands on the Android when @elusivejackal picked up a development unit late last year. I played with it for about 30 minutes and left with the feeling that it was a really solid operating system. Rogers, Canada’s only GSM provider, launched both the HTC Magic and HTC Dream a few weeks ago and I finally bit the bullet to pick up an Android device for myself.

Playing with the Android, Google seems to be taking a hybrid approach and picking up the best and worst of what has been done on the iPhone and Windows Mobile platforms to date. The Android’s native home screen looks like the iPhone. It breaks it up into 3 panels and you can add more apps by swiping up the menu screen from the bottom and adding them to any of the home panels. An additional thing you can do is to add widgets to the home panel which is useful. The panels are finger friendly where you can swipe up (to see all the apps you have installed), down (sees all the system notifications), left and right (to move between panels).

As soon as you turn on the phone, it asks you for your Google credentials which makes sense. It is a Google Phone after all. By default, the phone will synchronize with Gmail, Calendar, Google Talk and Contacts. It will also activate your Latitude if you choose to do so when you run Google Maps on the Android. However, you have to re-enter your Google credentials for any third-party apps you use on the Android. I would have hoped that it would ask me for confirmation if I wanted to re-use my Google credentials. Hopefully this will change as I think that tight integration with Google is one of the most attractive features with the Android.

Android, like the iPhone, has its own centralized application repository which they call Marketplace. You can do keyword searches to narrow down the application list. Once you click on the app, you get to see all the reviews, see other apps the developer has published for the Android and even email the application developer directly. One thing which I do like about the Android is that it gives you the ability to install apps even outside of the Marketplace. You have to check it off in the phone settings and be able to find an app to install. A prime example of such use is Brightkite. One thing I didn’t like about the Marketplace is that it didn’t alert you when an app was updated. The application developer has to build the capability into the app or you have to stumble upon an update by searching for it in the marketplace.

The performance on the GPS is phenomenally fast and accurate. One of the things that I like about it is how the GPS is abstracted that multiple apps can access the information without causing a conflict. For instance, I can publish my location on BrightKite while Google Maps is running.bWindows Mobile actually attempts to do this but unfortunately most developers bypass the generic GPS driver which provides the same abstraction layer concept because of performance issues.

Once you get out of the “pretty” and look at the guts of the Android, as a developer, you can quickly see how much of it is Java and Linux. When I was setting up the Dream for my mum, I deleted something I shouldn’t have causing the phone to crash a lot. The only way I could recover from it was to hard reset the phone. The best way to uninstall anything really would be to go through the marketplace. The nice thing however is that it is really easy to install apps even though they aren’t necessarily in the marketplace.

Overall, the Android shows a lot of promise but still lacks the polish of Windows Mobile. If Android can capture the heart and minds of the developer community, it will turn out to be a very solid product. Already HTC has developed a new UI with the Sense and it looks promising.

Mama Kang seems to be inspiring a lot of my blog entries lately. As a was writing my previous blog entry, I came to a really personal realization and there’s no other way to describe it as an Apple moment three years too late. First off, let me describe Mama Kang a little bit more. The Kang family in general are a bunch of technophiles. We’ve long been exposed to computers even in our early childhood which is rare from a generation perspective and from the fact that we were born in a third-world country. We’re comfortable with trying anything new. Let’s just say that even at my age, I get tech hand-me-downs from my dad and not the other way around. In fact, Papa Kang is totally comfortable with the idea of having a PS3 as a mumtimedia centre because it’s cheaper than to build one. The exception to that rule is my mum. For the most part, mum is more than happy to hand off anything remotely technical to my dad.

Off late, I’ve been getting Mama Kang to use Twitter more. Not because she wants to but because it makes life easier for the rest of the family. The first thing after setting up her Twitter account, I installed Tweetdeck because there is no way that mum would know how to get to the Twitter page. Yes, that’s how mum works. I quickly realized at that point that mum isn’t in front of her computer much and isn’t apt to check Twitter. However, she’s more than happy to use her phone.

I was quite happy for mum when they reinstated SMS for Twitter in Canada and I quickly set up her phone. Funny thing is mum has never sent text messages before this and she didn’t even know how to get to the message function on her Sony Ericsson W810. After showing her how to use the messaging function and T9, she was ironically blocked by the fact that there was no easy way for her to get to the @ sign. Previous posts from mum typically resulted in random broadcast messages that you’d have to know her to understand who she was referring to.

My solution – purchase @elusivejackal’s T-Mobile G1. I have to admit that the initial introduction didn’t go as well as planned. Largely because it was two brand new paradigms for her – touchscreen and slideout full keyboard. Once she got that, it was really smooth sailing. It was, however, really amusing to watch her press the touchscreen really hard. Hopefully the phone lasts through that abuse.

A couple of things blew my mind. I have to admit that I half expected the experiment to fail. My use of a smartphone is really complex as I use my phone for most things such as communicating (IM, phone, email, twitter), blogging, life management (contact, tasks, calendar), finance tracking, reading, looking up info and lots of things I’m sure I don’t realize that I use it for. In all of the complexity of my use, the one thing that they have really done well with Windows Mobile, Android and the iPhone is that all of them have done a great job in making the phone extremely user friendly. For mum, she found the Android to be significantly easier to use than the Sony Ericsson W810. Once everything was setup, mum found the touch screen intuitive to use. With the slideout keyboard, it was a lot easier to send text messages than a regular T9 keyboard. She loves the new phone and I’ve been receiving lots of Twitter messages since she got her new phone.

Technorati Tags: android, windows mobile, iphone,

MG Siegler wrote an article on Techcrunch titled “HTC Killed The Physical Keyboard. Smart Move.” The article quickly caught my interest because I naturally wanted to see if HTC was killing all physical keyboards for their devices. Fortunately, it wasn’t. I’m a big fan of HTC devices, particularly those with keyboards. In fact, I think it’s the differentiator for me between the iPhone and HTC devices. Reading the article, there are two arguments that stick out in my mind – the first is the physical versus virtual keyboard argument and the other is the Android versus the iPhone OS argument.

The implementation of the G1 was particularly awkward. I hate the lip because it got in the way of the keyboard. HTC has many other devices with keyboards with both slide-out implementations as well as vertical stand-up keyboards. Personally, I liked the physical keyboard implementation of the HTC Tytn 2 but the smooth screen of the HTC Touch Pro. The Tytn 2 keyboard has fewer keys but also larger and much more intuitive to use. It looks like they have brought back the same style of keyboard for the HTC Touch Pro 2. Personally, I have no issues with the extra bulk that comes with the keyboard as I use it lots. I have an iPod Touch and I never onced wish that I could bring it every where with me. In fact, it sits at home beside my bed for the most part. Ultimately, the question of physical versus virtual keyboard really is a matter of preference. I wouldn’t for one assume that all devices would only have virtual keyboards in the future. It’s like saying that the only style of cars in the future would be coupes.

While I really like the Android, the Android is not an iPhone killer. If anything, the Android will more likely be a Windows Mobile killer than an iPhone killer. After all that’s said and done, the iPhone’s strength is its multimedia capability. It’s great to watch movies, listen to music and play games. While the iPhone has a stunning design, underneath the beautiful exterior is a surprisingly weak hardware specs. In its current implementation, it only has about 20 MBs of free memory which is why it was brilliant of Apple to not allow the current generation of iPhones to allow more than one non-Apple application to run at the same time. Both the Android and Windows Mobile are more likely going to be the OS of choice for the market who wants to tweak their devices. Don’t like the browser, replace it. Don’t like the virtual keyboard, replace it. Again, it is a matter of personal preference if the Android, Windows Mobile and iPhone is better than the other. However, it is clear that the iPhone OS will continue to dominate in the consumer market because it does serve a much broader audience.

My conclusion – the physical keyboard is not dead even on the Android phones. Looking at HTC’s history of releasing devices, they will continue to release both form factors to appease both markets.

Technorati Tags: android, iphone, htc

It has been really interesting watching Google manouver its way into being the next Microsoft of the web. I'm not sure if Google will run into monopolistic issues but I am certain that Google will be the dominant platform of the not so distant future. It's not hard to see if you simply look at Google's investments in terms of what it has purchased and built.

Until the emergence of Google Apps, Google seemed destined to be a search engine that generated a tonne of revenue from its advertisement capability. It had odd offerings here and there that seemed fragmented at the very least. As soon as it launched Google Apps, it was rather obvious that Google was building towards the business markets as well. Looking at Google Apps for the very first time, I couldn't help but think about how close the offering was to Microsoft Exchange; it offered organizations the ability to host email, share calendars and even offer instant messaging capability. With the additional capabilities of wiki, blogging and document sharing, you essentially have most of Sharepoint's capabilities. It's hard not to offer small clients to use Google Apps as it is easy to setup with minimal operational and maintenance cost.

Google reached further to the consumer with Android and Chrome. The reasoning behind it really is simple – it's about control. The hardest thing about developing any software is the inability to determine where it is going to run. One of the most challenging thing about developing for Zoocasa is that we have to cater to a large number of browsers. A lot of our code gets "dirty" to account for the way different browsers react to different pieces of the code. So Chrome makes sense. The strategy would be to develop functionality that would work best on Chrome before venturing out to other browsers. The other thing to note is that the browser is the new desktop. The browser is by far the most used application that I have as it is the window to how I manage my life. I still use Firefox as my primary browser, venturing into Chrome every once in a while.

Android is particularly interesting for me. The one thing that Apple did right was that they limited devices and the Apple App Store was simply brilliant. Google seems to be building the best of both worlds. There already is an Android App Store and by choosing HTC as their first manufacturer, you can be certain to find Android on traditionally Windows Mobile devices. Android will give Google the ability to reach a user in the most personal of spaces. Outside of my wife, my mobile device is my next closest confidante. I have it with me wherever I go. For instance, on this trip, I have my phone but have left my trusty Asus R1F at home. Given that Google has a whole battery of web services, Android makes a tonne of sense. Right away, Android would be a killer device if it integrates into all of Google's core apps like mail (including contacts), calendar (including tasks), reader, news, picasa and of course search.

FriendConnect is going to be interesting. The function that I see it to be most useful is to be an LDAP-like service. One of the most frustrating for corporate users is to have to have multiple login ids and passwords for multiple systems. The web is littered with many small applications that make our life simpler. If FriendConnect can simplify this, it would make life simpler for webizens every where.

What most people fear about and rightly so is handing so much personal and private info to an external entity. This will be Google's Achilles heel and something that they will have to maneouver and struggle with over time. But that being said, Google is going to be the platform to contend with in the WWW.

Sent from my HTC Touch Pro®