i, Samsung Galaxy Note

Hi,

This is my story. And I am the Samsung Galaxy Note that hangs around with the owner of this blog. Its been three months since he picked me off the Samsung store someplace in Delhi and I've been with him ever since. To tell you an honest truth, he spends more time with me than his laptop now (smirk)! In fact lately I've noticed that even his kids seem to find me unputdownable :).

You see, I figured out pretty soon that I was way more than a dumb smartphone and smart as I was, I figured that I had to tell the whole wide world my story (before Anupam got any stupid ideas on reviewing me on his stupid blog. I am the self appraisal kind). And I've penned this using my blogger app; no laptops or PCs were harmed in this production. (Update: had to use the laptop to fix the paragraph breaks and the pic positioning. The blogger app needs to get some of its priorities sorted.)

No one is paying me a penny to pen my story. Not Samsung. Not Apple. Not anyone in between. So what you hear here will be an unbiased expose. Plain, simple and raw.

My editor asked me if I was trying to rub off the iPhone charisma on the title of this post. I simply said that 'i' was as much an English word as it is an alphabet and just because some unimaginative American put it before the 'phone' (and the 'iPhone' became a minor celebrity) did NOT mean that they owned the letter i! I used i to simply assert myself as folks have for ages. I certainly am not copying anything!

The first day Anupam held me by his ear to make the first call, some of his colleagues thought he was holding his bathroom slipper in his hand! (i am sure they are myopic and would advise them to consult an optician). I admit I am slightly-larger-than-your-regular-phone but I am not THAT big. I would describe myself as tall, slim (and gorgeous). In case you feel shy holding me close to you, (you're missing something) you could always get a dumb Bluetooth hands-free.

With my 5 and a half inch super AMOLED screen, I show things crisp and bright. Maybe not as glamorous as the retina displays, but a class apart nevertheless.

The only problem I must confess is that all this requires me to have a high metabolism rate and hence the need to get frequently hooked to the power charger. I ain't the marathon type and I ain't the cross-country kind. I am more like the 9 to 5 office goer who is used to the usual niceties of life. So don't expect me to be all charged up by the end of your road trippy unless you'd thought well in advance about hooking me up with your car charger.

I must admit that i can handle 3d graphics and hd video pretty nicely. In fact I think my screen size gives a distinct wide screen touch. Youtube and TED videos? No sweat!

Its the apps on the Android store, recently renamed playfully as Play, that add a zing to my life. I sure don't make Anupam miss his antique Blackberry thanks to the Google mail app (I still don't fancy the Samsung mail client; have simply disabled it). Skype and whatsApp and gTalk do everything to keep him in voice, message and video contact with his kith and kin. Google plus auto syncs all his pics on the cloud. I have a low-res eye infront for the video calls and a high-res one behind that should make you throw away your old point and shoot. Google maps shows directions, places and distances. Unfortunately Navigation does not work in India :( i guess it must be a giant challenge for Google! Book readers, pulse, news apps- you name it. I've got GPS, gyros and accelerometer. I can also double up as a wifi router!

That brings me to my USP. Note. I come with a stylus! Would you believe that? Most folks had thought these appendages were prehistoric and obsolete (remember the palm pilots and the iPaqs?). Well Samsung seemed game to go retro. As i'd said, you'll only hear the honest truth from me. So here goes. The truth is; I still ain't a substitute for the good 'ol pen and paper as far as note taking is concerned. However, if you feel artsy, boy can I inspire a masterpiece? And kids simply love me. I have a whole range of stuff for them to touch and learn. Drawing apps, jigsaw puzzles, games and a cat that repeats what they say.

I do have my quirks as well. For instance, imagine you were calling up the customer care number for your bank; now the IVR plays: "press 1 for this and press 2 for that". By the time you want to press 2 the screen gets locked (timeout?). Now you have to go through the entire phone unlock routine (which at times screws up). Once unlocked you've got to pull down the top tray, then click the green phone icon. Then the keypad shows up. Now if you're not lucky enough; do expect to drop that call.

With all the tech wizardry and the buttonlessness, I realized that for my makers, making the good 'ol phone call was a lesser priority. Another case to the point. I have what is called an integrated address book. I can aggregate all your contacts on your sim, personal email, official email, facebook, twitter and what not. Result? I have over 300 contacts in triplicate and 400 duplicates. So Anupam has to figure out which of the 5 Anjus listed on his contacts holds the latest phone number of his wife! (he better remember his better halfs number, i'd say). I think id have done way better if i'd been designed with a simple green button and a red button; atleast on the edge if not on my face.

All said and done, i'd consider myself closer to a laptop than a phone but still have the slim looks of a phone. And I definitely ain't cheap. So if you wanna have some fun on the go, at home and in your workplace then its me you've got to befriend. If you're still looking for a plain phone or a long distance runner, look elsewhere.  5 million of my brothers have been 'placed' so far and counting. Samsung has also promised an ICS update for me soon. Dreaming about it! And don't dare dropping me, it would break my heart, display, my cheap plastic exoskeleton and your bank account.

So long folks. Adios amigos! Get a work life balance :)

The Mobile Handsets Family Snap

I have been reading and thinking of how the mobile phones have changed our lifestyle. A typical morning starts thus: Office dress? Check. Car keys? Check and finally- Mobile Phone? Check... Reached the main gate; something seems amiss. Oops, forgot wallet! More intriguingly, its interesting to think of how the mobile phones themselves have changed. The way mobile phones have developed in the past three years has been unprecedented. 

In this post I'll attempt a silhouette of this handset super-family snap and try to outline their places in the family.

1. The Young, Bold and Beautiful (TYBB)

Apple created a usability paradigm that was not just incrementally better than what was otherwise available but was transformational. It created and set standards that others have yet to surpass and has created an eco-system that others are trying hard to replicate. A techie may still call the iPhone a duh! phone, but if the queues at Apple stores and the buzz when Steve makes his "This is the most amazing thing ever invented" speeches are anything to go by, thats a killer product.

Google went ahead created a mobile OS called Andriod, where it had no prior experience. Amazingly, it succeeded in creating a worthy competitor to Apple. Actually a lot of manufacturers realized that if they had to compete with The Quick and Dirty pack (read on to know more about them), they needed to adopt an OS that would provide them the competitive flexibility of being able to churn out more designs and faster- Andriod proved to be a good bet. HTC Mobile is a great company that has innovatively adopted Android. Even Samsung has made some bold moves with it.

2. So Yesterday, Yet Trying (SYYT)

Lets start with a pioneer of cellphone technology: Motorola. Motorola literally created this market, saw its culmination and complacence in the Razr series and has been struggling to find its grounding ever since. Its recent forays into the Android with Xoom seem promising- thats officially the tablet space; its certainly lost its ground in the cellphone category.

Nokia has been a corner stone in the mobile telephony revolution that has certainly changed India. Rewind a few years, in the mobile app development world, Nokias used to be the targets for the Gold builds. The first two builds that would come out from most studios would be an s40 and and an s60 build. All the other builds would normally be ported out of these. I'm not sure if the case remains. I guess most studios now focus only on the iPhone version, the Android build and perhaps one for the BlackBerry. I'm sure Nokia still gets a spot, but the point is - its no longer the spotlight. Thankfully, to its credit, India is still flush with the Nokia torch phone (the so called 'made in india' 1100, 1200 series), second hand N Series and third hand S40s and S60 that still make it a majority by existing numbers. Some of its new avatars also seem to show some promise. Again, far from its glory days.

Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Sagem - heard of them lately?

Windows Mobile. The reviews for Windows 7 interface have been rave, but lets face it- these guys have been around for a long time (remember the iPaq days?) and have not been able to make a worthy dent in this domain; very unlikely that they could.

The Symbian OS. Once considered a powerhouse OS designed for the mobile platform, it was a developer's nightmare platform. Sigh, even its parents don't love it anymore! Nokia recently announced that it plans to orphan Symbian and has already adopted Windows (a case of: you're sinking, I'm sinking, lets party and try not sink together?). 

BlackBerry from Research In Motion is one helluva 'ol timer that seems to have been able to stand on its own amidst waves upon waves of assault by dozens of old and new handsets. It seems to have succeeded in packaging itself youthfully afresh, despite its age. RIM bastion has been its rock solid messaging interface, instant push emails to instant messaging- RIM has simply got this spot on, not to mention its messaging friendly key layouts both soft and hard.

3. The Quick Guns. (TQG)

In 2007 (I think) a miracle happened. This miracle was a chipset made by a Taiwanese company called MediaTek. Its SoC (System on a Chip) dramatically reduced the component count, the time taken and the cost of building a cellphone. At the same time, it dramatically increased the number of people who had access to the reference design, increased reliability as a platform and suddenly unleashed a wave of handsets that have swept TYBBs and the SYYTs off their feet.

Another miracle that happened was Shenzhen. Shenzhen is an electronics manufacturing powerhouse. And the scale I've read, is mind boggling. Read this blog to get a feel of its size and this one (also has a video) to read its scale. In India 'China Phone' is a known acronym and customers come asking specifically for it. But Shenzhen has something much more interesting. It churns out three categories of devices: 

1. Original handsets. 

2. Handsets that look like original handsets aka fakes/ phonies 

3. Handsets that are are ingenious. 

Suddenly new models began to get churned out every week and even days! while earlier the So Yesterdays painstakingly churned new ones out every quarter or two.

I'm not sure, but am led to believe that a spate of companies in India owe their origins to MediaTek and Shenzhen. These pack is led here by the likes of Micromax, Carbonn, Lava, Lemon and a bevy of names that just seem to keep popping up. Slowly but steadily, this pack began to corner a significant share of the market which was till now being held by Nokias and their likes (SYYTs) by focusing first on the tier-2, 3 and rural markets. They also focussed on features like music, video, radio and multi-SIM. Despite the fact that on most devices usability sucked, the sheer variety and incredible cheapness seem to have gone their way.

Micromax is an interesting company which I believe is trying to mature from being cheap-shenzhenish-copy-plus-a-few-features phone seller to a new-feature-centric phones churner. One innovation from its stable has been the Micromax A60 'My first Android'- the cheapest and a pretty decent Andriod phone for the masses retailing first hand at about Rs. 6500 when I had last checked.

The road ahead?

For TYBB, they need to ensure that they always remain a few notches ahead of the rest of the pack. Youthful looks don't really last that long.

For SYYT, they are bound to be sandwiched from the top by TYBB and the bottom by TQG. They need to ensure that they find their sweet-spots. Real fast.

For TQG, the very fact that they can themselves be engulfed by another TQG clone launched today means that they need to move from being simple phone sellers to value sellers.

Update:

Check out the stats from Business Standard India (http://business-standard.com/india/news/reconnect/432525/) that support this story with some numbers!

Yahoo Blueprint

Mobile games and applications development has come a real long way since the early days.

At some point in time, developers realized that in making mobile applications, they were repeating mundane 'base codes' for every project. After a few projects, each developer had his own set of 'engines' and a library of code snippets which could be assembled and themed ('re-skinned' as the industry jargon goes) to get a range of applications out in shorter time frames.

Another important factor which influenced the growth of development tools was the fact that despite its premise of 'write once run anywhere' that Java (the most popular development flavor) proposed, the sheer variety and subtle differences in the JVM implementations and feature-set of handsets made it nearly impossible to have one set of code that could work on all handsets. Netbeans was one of the first IDEs to introduce the concept of 'profiles' that tried to standardize the process of creating multiple builds with pre-compile like instructions. Another significant development was toolkits such as J2ME Polish

All these led to the process of mobile applications development slowly becoming 'design' processes rather than 'development' processes. Put in a different way, it became possible to 'script' a complete application and use a standard script interpreter/ compiler to translate this into a working application on the phone. The net result - one could now develop pretty professional looking applications in a matter of hours rather than weeks! We too, like most development companies had one such framework. These frameworks took a cue from the desktop phenomenon of widgets. Widsets (now acquired by Nokia) was one such initiative. Widsets allowed one to script applications that could be downloaded into the Widsets main application that resided on the phone in a simple point and click operation.

The latest entrant in this category is Yahoo Blueprint. I like what I see here!
From its website:

Blueprint is Yahoo!’s platform for building mobile sites, widgets and applications. Using a simple yet powerful language based on W3C XForms developers can design and host their Blueprint markup which Yahoo! will deliver to 1000s of different mobile devices.

The process is analogous to building a mobile website - you can use any server technology you like such as Apache, IIS, Java or PHP. Just return Blueprint XML and we do the rest. Remember: your Blueprint services run on the same platform that powers our own mobile services, including oneSearch, oneConnect and even our mobile homepage. Not only is it responsive and powerful, but we supply you with analytics to help you find out what makes your customers tick.

I must admit that Yahoo! did a pretty good job with the Y!Go application for the mobile and I think that they have put in a good tool in the hands of the developers with Blueprint. You can now make real slick mobile apps pretty easy. And guess what, this could be your short-cut development tool for the iPhone too! The only negative I could find from a quick read on the docs was the lack of secure communications for a lil more serious apps - I could have missed it, and in any case this could be added easily. So if you're into mobile apps development, go ahead, download the SDK and if possible, do return here to post your feedback.

myMobile extends myMemory { reQall () }

"Imagine being able to talk to your phone while it intelligently organizes your utterances into your Calendar, Notes or To-Dos."
Disclaimer: I'm just about to give all iPhone and Blackberry users an big dose of ego boost and everyone else a sense of envy (apologies).

I have a confession to make, I am an extremely forgetful person. I mean, if my wife asks me to buy a pack of bread, a dozen eggs, a pack of butter and toothpaste; I'd most likely forget the toothpaste. To take care of this I'd begun to jot notes - Post-It style. That mostly used to work, except when I'd forget to take the Post-It notes themselves! :). That said, I do not recall having forgotten to take my mobile phone - ever; its almost become an extension of me - a part of my identity.

"Imagine being able to simply right-click on this webpage and add this post to your list of The-Greatest-Posts-Ever-Made list (just kidding ;) )"

In my 'phone of the future' vision, my handset would seamlessly extend the function of my brain and one department of my brain which could do with some serious extension is my memory.

Let me cut the chase and get to the point. A few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised when I read somewhere about reQall. While they do not claim to have any direct neural interface to my brain yet, they claim to be able do be supplement my memory!

In their words, this is the 'simple' problem they'd solved: "Ever had a brilliant idea while driving, but couldn't write it down? Needed to remember something, but didn't have a pen?"

Being a Blackberry user, I downloaded this cool app from http://www.reqall.com/blackberry [Note: reQall for BlackBerry requires OS version 4.2.0 or higher.]. It integrates seamlessly with my device. So now I can fire up the app click the 'Add by Voice' Option and speak "Meeting with John Doe, prepare the presentation". reQall transmits this voice signal to its server where it does a voice-to-text conversion and sends me an email apart from adding the event to my calendar and reQall interface! And the best part - it works.

reQall gave me a pleasant deja-vu as well! Back at TinfoMobile we'd developed a similar app which won us an award at the Reliance-NASSCOM Developer Contest. We'd made an app that helped the visually impaired by reading out SMS and Call History in Voice. We did the exact opposite of reQall. We transmitted the SMS text over GPRS to a server where a Text-to-Speech engine converted it to Voice and this was played back by a Media-Player instance on the phone (it worked even on a very basic and cheap Reliance Java Black-and-White handset).

There are a dozen other things you could do with reQall and I'm sure it would increase your productivity one small notch higher. Do give it a shot. Its innovation at its best and is powered by Indian brains. Its a company called QTech founded by Sunil Vemuri and N. Rao Machiraju. Three cheers for the duo!

iPhone iNdia - dUd dEal

iPhone+ India - I can only imagine what these two put (well) together could have resulted in (lets for a moment even forget the fact that it is a an awfully buggy device - the new 3G version, that is)! Unfortunately, that was not to be.

For the price INR 31K (thats $700! @44), iPhone will have to be satisfied with a couple of thousand units in sale - if they are lucky. Wish some telco really had the guts to come out with a $200, roughly (INR 8800) iPhone. Imagine what a crowd that would have resulted in. I'm sure the headlines would have been something like - 'Total Traffic Chaos. Delhi roads blocked on the new iPhone launch'. I'm sure those who have seen the real India would agree - we are a billion strong magnets (suckers) for mobile phones priced right. I'm sure a million units could have been sold in the first few weeks then - imagine the ARPU these could have generated (iPhone is a proven data services guzzler).

Well, nothings lost, iPhone's loss will be Samsungs', Nokias' and Sony Ericssons' gain! It only means that I will have to contend with my taxi driver holding on to his Nokia N 70!

Presenting the iPhone Shuffle :-)

(File under - LOL :-) )

Found this link on the inimitable David Pogue's page on the NYT.



:0

The iconic iPhone

Most people I know are either stuck with 'I am speechless over iPhone' phenomenon or an overdose of iPhone on the iNet symptom.

Anyways, here's my take: (for those who've had enough already, do keep an Aspirin handy)

The good things- iPhone = iPod+video+camera+phone. - An important event in the Wireless World History. ("Chapter 2007 - The iPhone. 'While many folks were doing many interesting things in the Wireless World, along came the iPhone and....' the rest as they say, is history) - A great PR job. - A neat design job. - The usual Steve Jobs. - Simplified, glorified and intuitified the user interface. All the technologies existed earlier, they were all just given a dose of the Apple treatment. - It IS different.

The not so good things- Completely Cingular Centric. - If the data services till now were 'walled gardens', this is the great wall of China. I don't think any content provider would be allowed even a peek into the iPhone ecosystem! - No games, no apps no anything except what is already in it. - Talk-time (nope, the big bright beautiful display does not run on drool) - Its a longish Cingular-Apple honeymoon (2 years long I hear!). - It looks too fragile to be regular cellphone replacement (I can't even recall the number of times I have dropped my phone, picked it up and continued) - The price tag. - Accessibility. I wonder how a visually impaired person might use it. I don't know if it is mandatory, but I see a little tactile mark on the '5' button on most handsets which I am sure is put there to help those who cannot see, to feel and use the keys. Are there any laws governing accessibility?