Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 03:58

Mort Walker wrote:The "features" are useful some of the time and Sammy has to go to effort to put them in.

Now that's a sorry excuse - who cares how much efforts goes in to put them, customer doesn't care.

Mort Walker wrote: The Sammy UX has improved considerably in the last 3 years and their is less bloat. Their sales indicate that it works, I don't know if it helped GB in their Symbian days, but for Sammy it is a plus.

Don't go by sales to figure out whether UX is good - that is a common fallacy that gets parroted by management suits since time immemorial. By the logic, Symbian had the best UX since it had a 85% marketshare worldwide and Windoze has the best UX in desktop since it has 90% marketshare. Sammy should dump that TouchWiz crap and just go with the Nexus Google experience - that is at least competitive with other offerings in terms of good UX esp. after JB. But then it doesn't help them when it comes to asserting control and now with all the tiffs it might be too late.

A common fallacy is people think UX is a comparative measure. Its not! It is an absolute measure. So saying things have improved or are better than before means nothing unless it is good in absolute terms.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 04:02

Anujan wrote:I think chacha wanted to buy Motorola solutions but realized they bought Motorola mobility after they paid for it.

I can think of a meme coming out of this. Apne meme generator main feed kijiye!

Motor Oil solutions does make a lot of money due to their gobermint contracts albeit in totally boring stuff like police/military radios. They have some of the best RF engineers in the business - real hardcore crusty old f@rts who would curse like the devil but do miracles in their sleep. Perhaps some SDRE jingo should buy them so that at least our NSG guys can get better radios - right now they use the decades old model which even a small town cop in massa has given up on.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 10 Mar 2013 05:32

RB,

You misunderstand - the customer does care. Unlike Symbian, as you know with Sammy, HTC and MOTO (to a lesser extent) use their UI as a "skin". I can't stand HTC's Sense UI and for me it ruins the UX, but others like it. For you, you don't like Sammy's TouchJiz UI and it ruins the UX for you, but not for me. There are "features" that I like in TouchJiz such as the S-pen and swipe screen capture. Now the hardware is good and if you root, then you can get close to a vanilla Android UI, but I do understand that rooting is not done by 99% of users. I have one EE colleague who is eagerly awaiting the S4 so he can dump his Nex4 because he really likes Sammy's TouchJiz. He went from S ---> S2 ---> Nex4 ---> S4. Moto is moving to minimize its UI to be close to vanilla Android and the others Sammy and HTC will to some degree as well, but at the same time they need to differentiate their devices. IMHO, Sammy's TouchJiz has improved much more than HTC's Sense UI and it will continue to improve to the S4 and Note3.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 10 Mar 2013 06:38

Word on arab street is msft under heavy pressure from vendors to solve the two biggest pain points with win8..letting people boot into desktop mode and bringing back the start button.

I must admit am myself lost how to bring up a launchable list of all installed programs quickly. Imagine how it is for older people who are not familiar with hot corners and having to dig deep to get what they want. Even my son hates win8 and has ordered me to put win7 on the home laptop.

Its not looking good in the market..forcing a touch ui onto a mass of desktop machines with no choice of using desktop mode...silly decision by the msft big boys.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 10 Mar 2013 06:52

when has msft scored high on usability?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 10 Mar 2013 07:24

Win7 was pretty good imo. This whole unified thing for tablets, touch pc and desktop thing was not well thought out..putting a touch oriented ui as the mandatory thing for a desktop is not a good choice.

And from winxp onward stability was taken care of.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 10 Mar 2013 07:28

^^^Yes, Win7 is pretty good and that is what corporates are settling on when migrating from XP. Win8 is going nowhere in terms of mass acceptance. Win9 will be coming soon enough.
The Win8 UX is horrible.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 10 Mar 2013 07:54

Steve Jobs was right!

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 08:22

Mort Walker wrote:RB,

You misunderstand - the customer does care. Unlike Symbian, as you know with Sammy, HTC and MOTO (to a lesser extent) use their UI as a "skin".

I meant the customer doesn't care if some feature took more effort of part of the company - if they don't like it, they don't like it. Symbian actually was the 1st smartphone OS which could be skinned. That evolved into separate UI frameworks (S60, UIQ) later on. Most people ofcourse equate S60 with Symbian but that's like equating the Google Experience UI with Android. In Android's case that might happen esp. if Sammy follows Takla's lead and uses Android in the same way.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 08:30

Win8 UX is schizophrenic at best and I find the Metro/Modern desktop with tiles doesn't scale well with number of apps. Sure, they have a pretty fast search to zero in on an app but what happens when you don't know what the app is called but recognize it by its icon (which is what a lot of people do)! The problem with convergence between desktop, touch, TV etc. is that the first step will inevitably look like what Win8 looks like now - there is no way around it since WIMP interfaces have ruled desktop for too long. So if Mickey had to take that step however painful it turns out to be, this is the only time they could do it since they need to absorb some heavy blows and live thru the pain for a while due to a long legacy tail. That painful step may be a reason why Fruit Co has held off becoz it will violate their design sensibilities plus right now they are going thru some perception issues.

XP used to crash for me. Stability problems got solved with Win7. Win8 to be fair does seem much more fluid and fast even in desktop mode than Win7 on same hardware so they might have done some performance tweaks for GPU, threading etc.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 10 Mar 2013 08:39

Anujan wrote:Steve Jobs was right!

Msft is right every other release though., so the corporate pattern is always skip a release.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Mar 2013 08:50

Can one of you make any sense out of this (garbled for me) article? There is no mention of how the actual charging happens. That said, there are some interesting tit-bits about cell phone usage patterns (in Africa).

Send a text message to charge your cellphone

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 08:57

matrimc wrote:Can one of you make any sense out of this (garbled for me) article? There is no mention of how the actual charging happens. That said, there are some interesting tit-bits about cell phone usage patterns (in Africa).

Send a text message to charge your cellphone

Makes no sense how the monetization happens. SMS fee goes to carrier so how the heck does lady running the battery unit get her cut?

And she is a rural small business owner - she cant keep waiting for that amount to arrive end of the month. She needs cash in hand. Also isn't it much easier to just pay the lady and get the phone charged like it used to happen in villages in South Asia? On the face of this sounds like something cooked up in a 1st world pub over a few pints by 1st world folks who want to "solve" turd-world problems.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Mar 2013 08:59

A scam alert for speakers - John Scalzi (author of Old Man's War - it is a a very nice Military SF IMHO and all that) reporting this. It is also reported in New Scientist...

Brits are either victims (a la Prof. Frampton) or perps. looks like.

Alert: UK Speaker Scam Targets Writers (and Others)

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 10 Mar 2013 09:03

^that is buffalo charging station solar powered.. the article is misleading in the sense, the text message is like indic call taxi sms.. the buffalo charge pedals to the location, and changes the cell phones.. perhaps he might ask for at least 10 cell phones to charge to break even for the day. while it charges from the 60w cycle battery, he can do other business in the village as well.

http://www.buffalogrid.org/trials/

again, this is my best guess!

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 09:04

^^OK. Then I stand corrected.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Mar 2013 09:04

The monetization part is that the company wants people to spend more airtime. They must be paying the woman. But not sure what is the whole process. What is the role of a text message? To whom does it go? How does the physical charging happen? Where are the phones to be charged? Where is the solar powered battery? What is the importance of "red LED"? May be this New Scientist is some bogus mag like Dicovery. No idea...

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 10:59

Red LED indicates that led lips of motorhama running charger are willing.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 10 Mar 2013 21:29

The red LED is on the phone or on the charger?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Mar 2013 22:54

Charger

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 11 Mar 2013 00:06

What is the point of the LED? Is it for indicating to mothorma that she can charge more phones? That would not matter if there is nobody waiting to charge their phone or she is not at the place where people need charging. I don't see how the whole thing works. As I said, I am unable to parse the article.

may be due to my inability to understand the tech.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 11 Mar 2013 00:10

Which one of you jingos was in the car

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2013 00:13

^^^looks like Castro St in Mountain View (Cascal on the right?).

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 11 Mar 2013 00:34

Yes castro

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 11 Mar 2013 03:58

so, why are you driving an altima while speaking like an audi driver there rob bin?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2013 04:01

Altima?!

That's waaaay more expensive than the car I currently drive - certain BRF jingos can vouch for that statement

negi · Post by **negi** » 11 Mar 2013 04:02

Why what is so special about the car ? Numberplate ?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2013 04:06

Samsung UI designer Golden Krishna

If he has his way, the future of Samsung consumer electronics might work more like the Nest thermostat,....

Apart from the funky name, Mr. Krishna is outta luck coz he ain't no Korean and he can huff and puff but Sammy management won't listen. So he won't have his way unless they overhaul their corporate culture, sorry

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2013 04:11

Courtesy, TheVerge:

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 11 Mar 2013 06:13

^^^See even IG is a Chacha Chasma pankha.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 11 Mar 2013 06:27

What is this weird obsession about convergence hain ji? I think it is one of those nandi droppings companies try to sell us -- because they can sell more software licenses and not because it simplifies anything for the user. Oooh we are converging your TV to work just like your desktop!! Why? So we can use our desktop brand and install base to somehow convince you to buy our set-top box.

FruitCo has done a pretty good job of maintaining 2 OSes. iOS and Mac OS. In scenarios where you need to exchange data between them (music, books, bookmarks, email ityadi) they work just fine. Did anyone complain that MacOS doesnt work like iOS? People seem to use an iPad just fine with little or zero training. Ofcourse it is bad for the company (they have to maintain 2 different teams working on 2 different OSes), not sure it is bad for the user. Ofcourse you can come back and claim that the user has to learn yet another interface if their tablet is different from laptop, but as someone said: Only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. Why not make the interface useful for the task it accomplishes rather than having one common denominator? Somehow Metro is supposed to do well on a desktop (with fellows using a keyboard an mouse), a tablet (using touch) and TV (using some kind of pointing device or gestures) while accomplishing content creation, content consumption, content search ityadi. Question is - why?

M$ could have had that metro thing solely on their tablets and left laptops and desktops alone. I used a win 8 laptop for a few days. I am not in any way more productive than either my Mac, windows 7 or Linux laptops (yes I have all three). OTOH I was confused frequently though.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 11 Mar 2013 06:45

This is why I hate tech news sites. Frequent mental m*sturbation by the writers.

Here is an entire article which I can summarize in one line: "Cell phones should have better battery life"

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/03/09/ ... ervention/

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 11 Mar 2013 06:49

The huge font sizes that come out of the hot corners in win8 is ugly for a terminal and mouse user.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 11 Mar 2013 07:32

Raja Bose wrote:Altima?! That's waaaay more expensive than the car I currently drive - certain BRF jingos can vouch for that statement

sure, you can drive a ferrari at 20-30k of equal years old... depending on your luck. like al pacino says, a ferrari and a phuck is any gizmo man's high priority items.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2013 08:07

^^^heh heh, ol' Bess is no Ferrari that's for sure (though once I drove it at its top speed to check if the number on the speedometer was there for decorative purposes or not). Even in brand new condition it would not be something a valet would offer to park at any chi-chi Silly-con valley gathering.

Anujan-ullah, convergence != shoehorning same UI across device categories and trying to make one behave like the other. That is a common mistake people make. Convergence can happen at multiple levels. It can be at the HW level, system level, UX level, content/storage level etc. At the HW level I would argue we are already seeing that happen. At system level, Android (not necessarily talking about Chacha here) and Mickey have that, FruitCo to a smaller extent. We already have good convergence at content/storage level in its basic form with SkyDrive/GoogleDrive/Box/Dropbox though certainly lot of scope for improvement. At the UX level convergence means that the same 'user experience' transfers between device categories - that is different from the same UI being shared across device categories. You don't want your game console to behave like your desktop or your tablet to behave like your desktop either. But when switching between devices, if a user knows how to do X in one device category, he should not have to think or learn how to do X in another device category - the experience must feel natural (and at its best, not require conditioning). That is convergence. From a UI perspective, there is commonality in look-and-feel when it comes to design language, fonts ityadi but that doesn't mean you shove the same UI in and hope for the best. Fruit Co.'s iPhone and iPad are converged devices but when Android tried to do the same, they essentially fell flat on their face. The reason is this is not a data driven/formula driven design. A lot of factors which are not measurable go into this hence, the only option is to iterate and test till the design converges (convergence of convergence!) and if solved there are some very real tangible benefits from it but it is a hard problem. To begin with your core design language has to be constructed in such a way that it is amenable for convergence (like Fruit Co. did and Mickey is trying). And it is inevitable to see the iterations in between have schizophrenic qualities or in words of DSP Bhurelal in Gangaajal: "Yeh to saala hona hi tha".

One way to force convergence is to force adoption of certain UI modalities across devices (touch, speech). This is probably what Mickey is trying to do by forcing laptops to upgrade into touch-and-type versions.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2013 11:57

Small gestures, Big impact

The leap motion controller for gestural control. Definitely a startup to watch out for. I briefly consulted for them after getting introduced to one of their founders by a Chacha contact.

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 11 Mar 2013 20:52

Need help from techies.

I want to buy an all-in-one desktop for web browsing and running some small BRFiq Social Network analysis programs. My budget is $500. I came across many models but am confused between intel, celeron, AMD processors.

What is a good processor for text processing and some small modeling s/w like agent-based modeling, astronomy s/w and mind mapping type stuff?

I already have a work laptop.. but do not want to install all this s/w on it. My iPadMe is too close to my heart and cannot handle stuff like this

Bliss to help.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 11 Mar 2013 20:59

a intel i7 quad core + 4 Gb of dram + a couple of HDD (1 TB conventional + 250 GB SSD) might be what you want.
thinkpads for example the midrange W430 use i5 while the bigger W530 uses i7.

RamaY · Post by **RamaY** » 11 Mar 2013 21:28

The price is crossing $1000 as soon as you talk about core processors... i am not sure if that is a worthy investment for browsing BR and doing some calculations so I can fight Rajababu... instead I should learn shivspeak so Rajababu is forced to do the calculations and buy an expensive 16 core server

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 11 Mar 2013 21:40

why cant you do all that on the ipad itself? there are tools like wolfram alpha for calculations...cheap too.
seems like overkill to me to get a desktop. and if you buy a low end machine it will probably crap out in a year and leave you stranded.