Category: Tech

Silverlinings

My wife’s phone recently started running out of storage space, making most app updates impossible. It was not the right time to shop custom roms, so the solution was to swap phones. Farewell to HTC One, Hello to old Desires and great expectations to the 2014 lineups.

With launch events and actual availability quite a while away, next step was to get the best out of my “new” phone, an HTC Desire X. It looked like a good deal when it came out and we were looking for an Android phone with dual core and 4″ screen. Nice price too. But also flaws, first and foremost the 4GB internal memory that filled up surprisingly and disappointingly fast. Nothing that can’t be fixed by installing a custom rom with support for the excellent Link2SD app though. Unfortunately, I found no good AOSP based rom, but then I had an opportunity to revisit MIUI in a newer incarnation. Interesting and quite a polished, different experience. That could all have been good, if only the earphone sound quality had been better: I have a forty minutes daily commute by train, so that matters. Maybe my unit was faulty, maybe it is a general issue with this device. I suspect the custom roms I tried had an issue with Beats Audio. In any case, I started carrying another phone too, just for the sake of Music.

So my old Desire S was turned on once more, running CM7.2 Gingerbread well, but looking dated. Great to find out that much more recent rom versions are available too and eventually I ended up with a 4.2.2 Andromadus build. Great. Still, I know of why the device officially only runs Gingerbread. The minimalistic CM UI still doesn’t run entirely smooth, and as more apps and accounts were added, the phone would start freezing more and more often. Specs do matter, but having tasted Jelly Bean I am not going to downgrade. Instead, this slightly underpowered device is quite an interesting test platform to see him when different apps affect system performance, with any bad performer being able to tip the balance and make an acceptable experience useless. First app to go was Facebook, the next LinkedIn followed by Google Hangouts. It seems everything that touches the contacts list has trouble running on a low resource system. Not surprisingly I guess, since the contacts list is far more complex than a more list of names and phone numbers. And when several social apps are added to the system, each with its own list of contacts with contact info, photos etc, and the contacts list trying to handle duplicate contacts, it makes sense that an overstretched system gets in trouble.

However, it turns out music is more important to me than social network apps, so now the Desire S is my private phone of choice (got a BlackBerry Curve for work too). Well, metal beats plastic too and the Desire S is a lovely device IMHO…

So several lessons learnt here. They may not beat having an HTC One, but I am as happy an Android user as ever. And there may be more to come. There is some still one Desire left in the drawer – an original Bravo. It did not handle Jelly Bean well, but its 576MB RAM is more than the minimum required to run KitKat. The first pre-alpha builds are already out there, so perhaps I may even get there before Wifey.

PCs and Diversification?

It has been a while since my last post about Windows 8 and declining PC sales. During this time, the debate first seemed to settle down, probably because everybody was happy that the start button will return in Windows 8.1. Now that the Windows 8.1 release date has been announced, it is reported that PC sales keep declining. I am not surprised, but will be happy to be proved wrong eventually.

As written, hardware improvements can’t keep the sales up. Enthusiasts may buy the latest stuff no matter what, otherwise the performance gained by upgrading to the latest generation of CPU won’t make a big difference when reading mail and browsing the internet.

And what do you get when you buy a PC? A box with a standard Windows installation, perhaps a trial version of antivirus and MS Office, plus a bit of bloatware from the vendor.

It is all very generic. I don’t remember how sales of Apple’s Macs are developing compared to Windows PCs, but if you pick an Apple, you get something special,

And two points in that sentence says it all:

  1. It is Apple or Windows, not Apple or Asus or HP or…
  2. I believe that Apple is special. I have never owned one and don’t plan to get one, but I am certain that the Apple owners are getting something different and that the difference matters to them.

Compare that with the to the mobile phone market, which has many contenders, some big some small. Here it is not just Apple vs. Android vs. Windows Phone vs. BlackBerry vs. etc. It is Apple vs. Samsung vs. Nokia vs. HTC vs. LG etc.

Why this difference in product perception? Well, consider these three: Hardware, Software and Branding.

Hardware
Buy a desktop PC in a store and you go home with boxes made out of plastic or metal, which is not particularly pretty and it looks the same regardless of the vendor. If you buy a mobile phone, each vendor has a special design that goes across the product line. One reason for buying phone X is that is looks good.

Software
A new PC comes with standard Windows and trial versions of third party software. Additional software provided by the vendor is seldom useful, poorly documented and the user interface reminds you of the wild days of Win 3.1. Buy a smart phone and the vendor will provide special versions of core applications for email and browser, and often bundle a good, free office suite; as well as a number of popular third party apps like Facebook. In fact, the amount of vendor software bundled with Android phones has reached the point where several top models are also being sold in a special Google version for anyone who wants to see the standard Google version.

Branding
The new Samsung Galaxy is not just a smart phone, it is a Life Companion. The HTC One is a Changemaker. With an LG Optimus you Live without Boundaries and Connect & Share Like a Pro. A PC is a PC is a PC…
I don’t believe total PC sales will change a lot if vendors started diversifying like smartphones have, but I do believe that a vendor that provides some special extra will fare better than those that don’t.

Using Outlook.com and hotmail with Android and iphone/iPad

I read an article today that compared the different webmail services Gmail, outlook.com and yahoo (-> link). Nice one, which, however, can be improved on one point: it states that mobile availability of outlook.com is limited to Windows Phone and a not too great app for android. This is not correct (except the part about the Android app): outlook.com (as well as hotmail and the related MS domains) is in fact supported natively on these devices, via the Exchange ActiveSync setup, and includes not only mail, but also calendar and contacts.

Here is how to set it up on Android devices:

  1. In the ‘Settings’ list, select ‘Accounts & sync’ and then ‘Add an account’
  2. Select type ‘Exchange ActiveSync’ or ‘Corporate’ (name depends on the Android flavor – those are the twos that I have encountered on HTC Sense and CyanogenMod respectively)
  3. Select ‘Manual setup’ and enter the following:
    ‘Email address’ = xxx@outlook.com
    ‘Server address’ = m.hotmail.com (that is hotmail regardless of the domain part of the email address)
    ‘Domain’ = xxx@outlook.com
    ‘Username’ = xxx@outlook.com
    ‘Password’ = your password to outlook.com
    ‘Encrypted SSL connection’ should be checked
  4. Tab ‘Next’ and select data to synchronize and update settings
  5. Tab ‘Next’ and assign a name to the account and indicate if it is the default mail account
  6. Done

An illustrated guide is also available here at komodocontacts.com: -> link.

I have done this on Android versions Gingerbread, ICS and Jellybean, with Samsung, HTC, MIUI or CyanogenMod flavor, and it always works without problems. I even did it once for a friend iPhone too, and expect it to work on iPad as well.

Since the outlook.com mail/calendar/contact services also work with the free Windows live Mail, Windows 8, Outlook 2010 (with connector plugin) and Outlook 2013; this service really ties things together.

Regarding the outlook.com app for Android, it is worth considering for the calendar synchronization. Setting up Exchange ActiveSync will synchronize the standard calendar, but it does not include special calendars like holidays, birthdays or shared calendars. This will work if the outlook.com app is set up (which means that the standard calendar becomes available twice, so one of them should be hidden). Synchronizing contact data with this app should be avoided, since it only includes synchronize name fields. The mail experience is similar to the Web client, but I tend to disable the notifications and use the standard mail application instead.

 

What Will Windows 8.1 do for PCs ?

Today it has been officially leaked that Microsoft will release Windows 8.1 aka Windows Blue later this year as a free upgrade to Windows 8.

Well, I just posted a comment that falling PC sales are not because Windows 8 has no start button etc, but because most people do not need a new PC to get their daily tasks done, and if they wanted a better tool, a tablet is the thing.

So, if I am wrong, we will see PC sales rise again when Blue hits the stores, while tablet sales remain unchanged. However, if I am right, then Windows 8 users will hopefully suffer fewer inconveniences and the decline of PC sales continue.

I don’t mind being wrong here, but time will tell, as will my news feeds.

The PC Industry and What People Want

A persistent theme in my news feed is the decline of the PC industry. Some manufacturers blame Microsoft and especially Windows 8, others have blamed the netbooks for pushing prices so low that the industry is not sustainable. Some note that tablet sales went up, when PC sales went down, and remember that the households’ IT budget didn’t double when the iPad was launched.

What I haven’t seen mentioned by the industry or the commentators  is what the consumers need and want. There is an underlying assumption that people must want to buy a new PCs every Nth year. But why should they?

A person who primarily needs the computer to browse the Internet, read news, access email, do netbanking, play a casual game and socialize via Facebook will be served well with an older PCs. If the only other things wished for is a simpler, wireless experience that can be enjoyed everywhere, a tablet fits the bill.

A modern PC can do amazing things, but why would the person sketched out above need one?

(writing some ideas sounds like my next post : )

A side note : If Windows 8 could be blamed for declining PC sales out would be because it is more resource efficient than previous versions of Windows, making upgrade to Windows 8 on an old PC an alternative to bring all new hardware.

Another side note: History seems to have proven Marc Andreesen right and more, when he said that “[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers”: the user above can do all that is to be done within a browser, making the OS and the hardware irrelevant (ref Wikiquote)