Tag mobile

Mind your Mind Share

It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as […]

On Device Identifiers.

Mere hours after pressing ‘Publish’ on the previous mini-article concerning walled gardens, an article on TechCrunch, this morning, clarified the situation we have more or less been suspecting for a while now: that Apple, after deprecating UDIDs (one of the things they truly did well in iOS from the beginning), they will start rejecting apps […]

Location and Privacy

Yesterday a story about Apple’s unauthorised logging of timestamped location data on iPhones running iOS 4.x versions of the system software was published in several articles in technical and mainstream media worldwide. This is important, not only because of the ubiquity of location-based services available to consumers worldwide and the significance of location in safeguarding […]

Palm's Comeback

Jon Rubinstein is no stranger to success. He was the engineer that architected the iPod, Apple’s single most successful product for years, until the iPhone was released in 2007. After more than fifteen years working with Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein left Apple in 2006. Around ten years earlier he had returned to the company with […]

An enthusiast product for early adopters

This is what Andy Rubin stated in his 'D: Dive into Mobile' interview, yesterday. And that's probably the best descrption of Android I've read. Like desktop linux was (and arguably still is in some respects), like Mac OS X was in its first three years and like Windows was for a very long period until --- arguably --- Windows 95 came out in August 1995. It's hard for 'normal' people to get excited about Android, because there's little that appeals to normal people. Even from a development standpoint it's clearly work in progress, with volatile APIs, significant bugs and vastly inferior performance (incl. power management) compared to iOS. As I've written before, Android development is moving fast and I reckon it'll take a couple of years at most for it to reach maturity.

What's wrong with this?

Check out this table. A bunch of modern, high-quality, high-performing codecs. AAC+, AAC LC, enhanced AAC+, MP3. All decodable by Android, on all devices. Sadly, Android devices can only encode on AMR-NB at the sad sampling rate of 8KHz. At the miserable bitrate of 4.75 to 12.2kbps. At qualities unheard of since the early days of the telegraph (ok, I'm kidding --- AMR-NB is the voice codec most GSM and UMTS phonecalls are carried over). Now, you may be asking: Couldn't the manufacturer add encoding support for more audio codecs? Sure, and some do. Others, like HTC for example, don't. Even on high-end devices like the Desire. Devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs clocked at 1GHz. With hardware support for stereo AAC encoding. No, really, what on earth is wrong with these people. At the same time, HTC went into the hassle of adding encoding support for h.264 and 720p (using MPEG4). And it makes me wonder: that they added h.264 encoding support means they are at least clued up with respect to paying royalties, adding the codec to the system and making use of it. That they introduced 720p using MPEG4 on the other hand makes no sense: how useful is 720p video recording --- recently introduced with HTC's Froyo build for the Desire --- or the capability to record audio as a whole come to think of it, when the recorded audio on this phone sounds like a wax record from the 1880s, not least because of the totally backwards codec they use throughout, while one of the most powerful mobile device CPUs in the market today just sits there idling. Idiots.

Δύο μήνες με το Android

Το οτι το Android αποτελεί βασικό στόχο στην ανάπτυξη τόσο του AthensBook όσο και του GEO|ADS είναι κάτι που δεν έχουμε κρύψει, εδώ και αρκετούς μήνες. Ετσι, στις αρχές του περασμενου Απρίλη, επενδύσαμε σε ένα HTC Desire, μια συσκευή που βρίσκεται κοντά στην κορυφή της αγοράς γα τη συγκεκριμένη πλατφόρμα και παρέχει πλήθος δυνατοτήτων που […]

Γιού Τέρν.

Μια φορά και έναν καιρό… Πριν από λίγο καιρό στο podcast που κάνουμε σε ημι-σταθερή βάση με τον Παναγιώτη, τον Γιώργο, τον Αστέρη τον Δημήτρη και εκλεκτούς προσκεκλημένους, μιλούσαμε για mobile internet. Από τη συζήτηση δε θα μπορούσε βέβαια να λείπει το iPhone, μια συσκευή που ανεξάρτητα από τα δικά της πλεονεκτήματα έφερε σημαντική ώθηση […]

Not so Heavy and definitely not Crap.

Definitely still Taiwanese though. =) Of course, it'd be too early to tell whether the Hero, or, indeed, Android will become a success, but if anything, the new HTC Hero will be remembered as the device that started the custom Android experience era. From the company that, according to Microsoft's own statements and some simple arithmetic, makes 80% of Windows Mobile handsets comes a beautiful 'port' and of its popular TouchFlo interface but with a twist. It may be true that the Hero only sports skin-deep improvements to Android, but with the platform rapidly evolving and with 18 to 20 Android powered devices due by year's end, it is already looking like a fantastic alternative to the ageing, craptastic Windows Mobile platform that HTC has depended upon since its earliest days. If anything, contrary to Nokia, HTC seems to 'get' how important the User Experience is.

They'll never learn.

The Nokia N97 is out. And what a disappointment this is. Still great hardware features. Still the same mediocre system software, the poor usability that comes 'for free' with Symbian, and average industrial design [from the moment a phone is that bulky, it's bad --- it doesn't matter how many Mpixels its camera has or what the resolution of its display is]. I find the idea of a resistive touchscreen dated and wrong, although I understand why Nokia might have chosen it over the capacitive kind that everyone else is currently using, given the subpar feel that its software has as a touch interface and the possibility for the need of a stylus. I'm really surprised however: given the success of the iPhone, the huge challenge that Android is going to pose to low and mid-level phone manufacturers (especially given how customisable it is) in the near future and the dwindling profits, mind and marketshare, why on earth isn't Nokia caring more about the user experience?