WirelessDoc

The rise of Android: Google having its cupcake (and donut, eclair, flan, etc.) and eating it too, but not sharing

Gizmodo posts this tongue-in-cheek article: Giz Explains: Android, and How It Will Take Over the World.

Verizon Wireless has certainly boosted the recognition of the Android mobile phone OS supported by Google and the Open Handset Alliance with their current ad campaign for their Motorola Droid smart phone.

For some reason they're branding this phone as evil. I guess to upset the iPhone applecart in a hurry.

The TV commercials show space-age bombers deploying bomb-like metal containers across America's heartland (where AT&T's coverage just so happens to be weak?). The containers hit the soft dirt with explosive force, scaring horses and children alike, then a metal leaf shutter opens revealing the evil intruder with the ominous red eye. It makes HAL look like avuncular. Their prior commercials have been very aggressive against AT&T's network shortcoming, prompting AT&T to take legal action.

Regarding the Giz article, it points out that while the basic Android OS is open source, it can also include propriety apps and extensions that don't have to be shared with the open source community.

With the first Android phone on Sprint, the Hero (Android 1.5 aka Cupcake), HTC implemented a form of multi-touch, but could only do so on the open source portions of the OS, the browser for one. Google apps such as Google Earth and Map don't have the HTC multi-touch hack because they're proprietary. Some speculate that this an agreement by Google not to compete with Apple's multi-touch on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Palm decided not to play nice, and added multi-touch to the Pre, as well as using Apple's iTunes to sync the phone with your PC. Apple fixed that with an update to iTunes.

And, if you make your own Android phone, you'd better not use Google's apps, "like when Android modder Cyanogen had to strip the apps out of his custom Android builds to avoid getting sued by Google."

Having tried the HTC multi-touch, I didn't like it, and it doesn't work as well as Apple's. It's hard to get the right sizing. When you think you have it right, it snaps to a different magnification. This makes it very hard to fill the screen with a particular column on a Web site. With the Apple multi-touch, a double tap just seems to do the trick.

Competition is always a good thing, so is free stuff such as Google's turn-by-turn voice navigation supported by their Android 2.0 release aka Eclair, unless you're Garmin or Tom Tom whose stocks have recently taken a hit.

There will be more hardware devices running Android, that's expected, but that's also the problem. With various manufacturers producing devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, plus adding their own proprietary extensions, the Android mobile phone experience will be inconsistent, and the brand could suffer.

Apple has the advantage of having close control over the hardware. The iPod Touch 3G I'm using now is unsurpassed in the way software is integrated with the device. Everything flows, with no clunky menus or hacks. The Web browsing experience is the best, as well as playing media. Well, that is if you don't include Flash, as that war is raging between Apple and Adobe. Flash also is building a bad reputation because of Web sites that are serving up ads you have to suffer through before you get the content you expected. Also, Flash has security risks, including the troublesome use of Flash cookies. Some are saying there should be open standard for vector graphic media and compressed video. I think Apple wants to stick by QuickTime.

This all means that change is picking up in pace. The smart phone you buy today will probably look very indequate a year from now. The next wave coming will be in speech recognition. I've already been amazed by Google's Voice Search on the HTC Hero phone I had tested. Speech recognition will be the killer app for mobiles, IMHO. It will take a beefed up processor on your phone to support this. Right now, they use a back end solution where Google's servers do the processing.

What's unshakeable is the Web's movement towards the mobile platform, and Google will be there.

Walt digs the Droid with some reservations

Walt reviews the Motorola Droid, which is Verizon Wireless' first Android offering, priced at $200 after the $100 mail-in rebate. (I tend to believe that this price point will drop as the smart phone competition heats up.)

His likes...

He thinks this is the best Motorola phone, the best Verizon smart phone, and the best hardware he's tested that runs Android.

It runs Android Eclair (2.0). He says that this version adds voice-prompted turn-by-turn navigation. Actually both the HTC Hero and the Samsung Moment offer Sprint's navigation app which work well with both phones according to my tests.

Its screen is sharper and larger than the iPhone's.

His dislikes...

No multi-touch. Actually the HTC Hero uses a multi-touch function sitting on top of the Android. I didn't like it at all. It was very jittery, and hard to get the right sizing. The Samsung Moment doesn't have multi-touch in any form but uses zoom icons, and they work much better.

The keyboard has, in his opinion, "flat, cramped keys that induce too many typing errors, yet lacks auto-correction." This sounds like the keyboard on the Moment, which I'm falling out of love with. I can type faster on the Treo keyboard.

The Android platform only has 3 panels for displaying app icons in contrast to the iPhone's 11.

UPDATE: Another article in today's WSJ "BlackBerry Offers Low-Hanging Fruit" suggests the that BlackBerry will take the hit with the rising smart phone competition provided by the new crop of Androids. Third quarter estimates put the global smart phone market share for RIM at 20%, while Apple sits at 17%. Nokia is at approx. 38% according to Strategic Analytics.

The article speculates that the BlackBerry may become "the AOL of the mobile device market." This might a little over dramatic.

Apple is leading the price war with their $99 iPhone. I'm sure you'll seen an Android soon similarly priced.

First impressions of the Samsung Moment, Sprint's second Android smart phone

Samsung Moment, Sprint's second Android smart phone
Originally uploaded by BKMD

I picked up this Samsung Moment at Best Buy yesterday, the first day of its release from Sprint. The phone was activated and the EVDO service was provisioned in minutes. It took around 5 minutes for my Google contacts to sync.

It has no software to sync with your PC. Everything is done over the air (OTA). I installed Unbound Medicine's Harrison's Manual of Medicine OTA from their Web site. But it's easy enough to attach the phone to a USB port and mount the 2GB microSD card that comes with the phone. Supposedly it will support up to 32GB.

Wireless zeitgeist

"High Price for iPhone in China Will Test the Appetite for Apple"

The buzz-killer is price. China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., which will start selling the device Friday, is offering a version of the 32-gigabyte iPhone 3GS for 6,999 yuan ($1,024) without a service contract, which is the most popular way for people to purchase phones in mainland China. That compares with about the $800 consumers pay for the same product in nearby Hong Kong, which has different wireless carriers.

Some stats from this article: China has 710 million wireless subscribers, compared to 217 million in the US; price of the iPhone in China with 2 years of service: $3,120, and $2,600 in the US; smart phones sold in 2008 in China: 11 million versus 33.9 million in the US.

"Unraveling In-Building Wireless Networks"

Mobile workers often complain about wireless connections in the office, while cellular carriers are grappling with a rising flood of traffic. Some technology vendors are betting they can address both problems at once.

One Silicon Valley start-up, SpiderCloud Wireless Inc., is introducing technology next week to take over the job of delivering either cellular or Wi-Fi signals to the smart phones or laptops of workers in the office.

The performance improvement is so dramatic, SpiderCloud executives claim, that some customers might choose to dispense with desk phones—letting employees rely on cellphones alone.

"Sprint Continues to Shed Customers"

Sprint Nextel Corp. posted a wider third-quarter loss as subscribers continued to leave the mobile-phone service provider for other carriers despite the launch of some new handsets.

The number of subscribers slipped 1% from the prior quarter to 48.3 million. The company lost a net of 545,000 wireless subscribers, including 801,000 customers on contracts, putting the total decline in the last eight quarters at about 7.8 million.

I think this will change as Sprint releases more Android phones. Their customer service has vastly improved, and I think they have a good chance for a turnaround.

Speaking of Android: "Motorola Droid Makes Its Debut" 

The Droid, which will go on sale for $199 starting Nov. 6, is the first device using Google Inc.'s Android software to run on Verizon Wireless' network. The major push from the biggest U.S. wireless carrier underscores the momentum of Google's Android platform, which has seen a number of phones launch in recent months.

Remember, the Google Voice Search is the killer app for mobiles, IMHO. This means that the Android OS becomes a worthy competitor to the iPhone and BlackBerry in the very near future.

iPod Touch 3G: DOA

After many hours of troubleshooting, and then two calls to Apple Help, my new iPod Touch 3G is officially pronounced DOA. What happens is that it has no problem connecting with a Wi-Fi network, but seconds later downloads stop. The status bar shows that there is an active connection, but no packets are received.

I tested this both on my home network and the local library's Wi-Fi network with the same result.

Apple will be shipping me a new one, as soon as I can send back this lemon.

iPod Touch 3G: 2 days from China to front step, but it has to be returned

I received my iPod Touch 3G yesterday, but now I have to return it because it loses the Wi-Fi connection after a short period. But, it did get here in a hurry.

You can see by the FedEx tracking table here that it made its way from Kunshan, China to Springfield, MO, by way of Anchorage, in two day's time.

I told the FedEx delivery person that I thought this was amazing, and he said that he checked the main tracking number just to see how many were being shipped (per day?). He said he stopped at looking when he reached 50 pages of shipments, with each page holding 50 items.

I said there must be a dedicated plane just for shipping Apple devices, and he said that the entire shipment is cleared through customs while the plane is in the air.

So far, I notice improved performance of the last 2G iPod Touch I owned. The games load and play faster, working more reliably. I downloaded the Kindle reader, and for me, this beats the Kindle without a doubt.

It's the perfect second device (I don't need another digital camera), plus I won't have to drain my smart phone's battery.

UPDATE: As it turns out, people are having problems with the iPod Touch and Wi-Fi. My previous two Touches worked perfectly with my home WPA2 secured network. I was able to listen to music using Pandora with little or no problems.

I even went to the local library to test it on their wireless network, and sure enough the same thing happened. For fixing this, people are suggesting that you change your network security to WEP, type in random numbers when it asks for the passcode, and then even though you see a prompt saying this is the wrong code, the wireless service starts up anyway. THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY.

Voice (speech) recognition is the killer app for mobiles

And, it's a workable solution now, based on my experience with Google's Voice Search on the Android platform that I blogged about yesterday.

Once you can reliably use speech recognition on a mobile, the issues of small keyboard and small screen, even on a netpad computer, vanish.

The most important aspect of this is that it changes how you think about finding information. I was lying in bed, and for some reason I was thinking about my sister's wired haired terrier, and I remembered that her vet said the dog may have a form of Cushing's Syndrome. At that moment the term "canine cushing's syndrome" popped into my head. I did the voice search on the HTC Hero, and sure enough the first hit did come up with a Web page devoted to this subject. I quickly looked it over, and it seemed to be well research, so I chose to send the link to my sister via e-mail. All this was done within minutes.

If I had to type this search term using the Hero's virtual keypad, I wouldn't have done the search.

Besides performing Web searches, this potentially could be used by patients to record symptoms, or ask questions that could be sent via e-mail. Of course, you still have the issues of privacy and confidentiality, but encrypted e-mail is already available.

Another aspect of this is that more Web sites will have alternative mobile sites that render well on small screens. This is long overdue, perhaps because it limits the number of ads that can appear on the page.

Adobe Flash is another problem for the mobile Web. Eventually it will be universally supported, but here you run into the problem of overloaded cellular networks by power users watching videos.

I think all this points to the fact that soon smart phones will look and act very differently in the near future, as well as changing how people approach information management and communication.

Medical search using Google Voice Search on the Android HTC Hero

I stumbled upon Google Voice Search when I was testing the Sprint Navigation app on the HTC Hero smart phone. In order to chart a course from your present location, you have the option of speaking the address of the destination, then Google finds on the map and shares it with the navigation app, giving you turn-by-turn navigation.

Then I noticed that the voice search was a standalone Android app. I tested it with a medical term search as I mentioned in a previous post. Now, here's the video:

Here's some screen shots of the app in action:

The best and worst of the HTC Hero

BEST: The trackball. Sometimes the type size in a link you want to click on is so small you can't reliably use your finger on the touchscreen with any accuracy. It's also great for navigating on the phone, but not all apps allow this universally for each screen.

Every smart phone should have one.

WORST: Accidental button activations, and lack of touch sensitivity near the screen edges. Several times I've mistakenly started a phone call.

Depending on the app, when you use the touchscreen you have to keep in mind you'll get no response near the edges. Walt Mossberg mentioned that he had trouble with the touch sensitivity of the Hero he reviewed. I'm guessing this might be what he encountered.

Minor complaints include the camera which will show banding and color artifacts, slowness, especially with the browser, and the volume rocker switch which you can't help but activate when you use the phone in landscape orientation.

The virtual keypad works well, but I think I can type faster with a physical one. The processor in this phone is kind out outdated, and it would worth checking out the newer phones with faster processors.

But really, I have to say that this is an amazing smart phone, but in the current climate competitors are being released at a fast pace. I would suspect that during the next year we'll see phones that will be vastly improved. The idea of keeping the same phone for over a year might not be appealing.

The best and worst of Android

I've had my Android HTC Hero for 17 days, enough time to check out the basic functioning of the Android platform.

BEST: Google Voice Search. This lets you use your phone to do a Google query simply by speaking a word or phrase. I'm assuming that all the speech recognition processing is being done on Google's servers, but this service is remarkably fast and accurate.

Late last night, I tested it by speaking "epigenetics new england journal." Within seconds the screen showed the first hit as the excellent review article by Dr. Esteller, published last year. Since I have an account with NEJM, I was able to view the full text, download and view the PDF, and download some PowerPoint slides associated with the article, but these had text that was too small to read on the phone's screen. They also have an option for downloading a PDA version, but Android is not yet supported.

You can use the voice search for addresses, businesses nearby (the phone always has an idea of your location), or not so nearby, and you can use this in conjunction with Sprint Navigation, the turn-by-turn satellite GPS service also supported on this phone.

WORST: The contact manager is blind to company or organization names. You can't search by company name, and an incoming call will not be identified unless there is a person's name associated with the number. I guess that's why the app is called "People," but it's a major incovenience, and in my opinion, a major flaw.

My old Palm 700p Treo has a much better contact manager.

A quick search of the Android Market didn't produce any apps that would correct this deficiency.