Jan 28, 2013

What will be the third largest mobile OS in 2013?

Shhh…
Can you hear that?
Those are the sounds of a change.
Something is about to happen in 2013, and it’s going to be exciting.

No more a two-horse race. No more iOS vs. Android. It’s about time something will change around here.
Time for a third mobile operating system to come in and shake up the mobile realm a little bit.
Time for a new competitor to join the party.

After 2 years of a status-quo in the mobile operating systems, there are finally signs that a third mobile OS can break through this year. The conditions are here: iOS is getting old (and is not as cool as before), Apple is slowing down, Android is everywhere, in all shapes, colors, prices, but it’s still the same Android.

Time for a third option to join the race. Who shall it be?

Windows Phone 8

Yes, it took Microsoft forever to release WP7, and then to introduce a weird re-write of the underlying infrastructure to fit the Windows 8 technology. Microsoft, as usual, is lagging behind, but the Windows Phone OS is not.
It is actually an advanced OS, with a unique UX, and tons of potential.

Microsoft claims that WP8 is friendlier to the enterprise than iOS and Android. It includes all the security features required by IT managers, and comes pre-integrated with Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, OneNote and more.

In a way, I see the future of Windows Phone dependent on the success of Windows 8 and devices such as the Surface. If people will love Windows 8 and the new experience it brings (Metro, Modern UI, the name doesn’t matter), they are most likely to “feel home” with Windows Phone 8 and select it as their next smartphone.

And of course, there’s the devices thing as well. Smartphones, tablets, they must be cool. I think the Surface has what it takes to intrigue people, but I’m not sure Nokia and HTC are enough for the phones.

Will Microsoft be able to finally create the right volumes for Windows Phone? I believe 2013 will bring the beginning of it: more apps, more sales, more partners, and maybe finally a momentum for Windows Phone.

[Confession: I actually own a Windows Phone device, I think it is an amazing platform with inspiring user interface, yet I stopped using it after a few months, mainly because the apps ecosystem is still very poor. Hopefully this is about to change.]

BlackBerry 10

Built on top of QNX, BlackBerry 10 is RIM’s last chance to survive. Palm did a similar move few years ago with webOS, and was acquired short after releasing it by HP. Some say the same will happen to RIM, but it doesn’t change the fact that BlackBerry 10 is soon to be released, for both smartphones and PlayBooks.

BlackBerry 10 is going to be completely different than older BlackBerries, a re-write, a new platform. It will have a better balance between personal stuff and enterprise data (sandbox) to support the growing BYOD challenges.
It also aims to be the leader in HTML5 capabilities (as seen in previous PlayBook models).
It comes late, but still on time to try and make a comeback (and think what an amazing comeback it can be!).

Will executives or IT managers give BlackBerry 10 a chance or is it too late for RIM?
I believe we will find the answers during 2013. Unlike Microsoft, RIM faces bigger challenges to create the volumes and the ecosystem, but unlike Microsoft, RIM still has enough users and organizations using older BlackBerry phones.

Ubuntu for phones

The creators of Ubuntu for phones, Canonical, is claiming that Ubuntu is the only true device independent platform out there. The only one that runs seamelessly across laptops, tablets and smartphones. As a result, apps that are running on the full Ubuntu for desktops will run on Ubuntu for phones with a bit of UI tuning.

Ubuntu for phones brings a refreshing design, and just like Microsoft’s WP8 – it’s all about the content and less about the chrome and buttons. Ubuntu looks similar to Android, but feels more like Windows Phone; it’s clean, it hides the menus, and focuses on the content.
Like BlackBerry 10, Ubuntu pushes HTML5 strongly, but it also treats HTML5 apps as first citizens of the OS and lets them sit alongside the native apps.

Will Ubuntu be the iOS/Android killer of the year?
Probably not, but I sure hope we will see some new smartphones packed with it during 2013 as the infrastructure approach and UX look promising.

Nov 28, 2012

Is HTML5 Truly Ready For Prime Time?

Some say 2011 was the year of the big breakthrough for HTML5.
From a promise to something real. A technology supported by a growing number of developers. The only true device agnostic alternative.
Well, if 2011 was the year of the big leap forward, seems like 2012 was the year of the disillusionment.
HTML5 became one of the biggest topics for debates, being mostly smacked down by many experts.

“Is it better than native?”
“Is it ready for prime time?”
“Did you hear what Mark Zuckerberg said about HTML5?”

Gartner recently stated that HTML5 is still 5 to 10 years from becoming a suitable basis for businesses.

I think they are wrong.

I am certain it will happen much faster. For many businesses it is already happening right now.

Many people have mistakenly defined HTML5 as an equivalent alternative for native development. It cannot be, just like a web based email client such as Gmail cannot compete with a native rich client such as Outlook.

And yet, organizations are successfully using web-based tools for doing business, isn’t it?
Windows is undisputedly dominant in the enterprise, and yet most software vendors build web-based products and stay away from native technologies, aren’t they?
Web tools are part of any IT strategy and only 10 years ago experts claimed that web applications will never be able to replace native products (I remember I used to protect native technologies such as MFC and .Net against those wild, disordered web developers who used plain text editors with no compilers… they’ve won. I lost. I’m now part of their team).

The same will happen in mobility, and it will be thanks to HTML5 and other mobile-web technologies.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg wanted a kick-ass mobile app for facebook and couldn’t get it using HTML5, but to be honest, facebook’s desktop version isn’t exactly the top of the art in terms of user experience either, so maybe it’s not all about the technology after all?

So 2012 seems like the year of disillusionment for many HTML5 developers, but it’s not because it’s a bad technology. It’s because it’s so good it managed to dazzle all of us.

Think about it for a second: a new technology which is not even close to being standardized, already responsible for the death of a few other successful technologies, already supported by all the leading platforms, being used by a huge number of organizations, products, platforms, and more.
That was the peak of inflated expectations, and from there it could only go down.

So during 2012 people and organizations have learned that in some cases (or better say: some Android devices) the user experience provided by HTML5 is not yet perfect. Developers have learned that in some areas there are still functional gaps. The world has learned that HTML5 will never be a good fit for developing games. It learned that HTML5 does have limitations.

It changes nothing, because what the business world has also learned is that HTML5 brings a perfect answer to many of its’ needs: it’s easy to deploy, flexible and configurable beyond any imagination, truly device agnostic, beyond just mobile devices, and most of all: can support the majority of the business needs fairly easily (and also interact with complementary technologies to close some remaining gaps if exist).

My personal experience with HTML5:

I’ve been involved with mobile development for the past 8 years. Java, Embedded C++, .Net, WAP, Objective C, Windows Mobile, CE, resistive screens, styluses, you name it.

We started using HTML5 back in 2009, when it was fairly new and not as popular as it is today.
Back then, we were asked to build a native BlackBerry client for a few of our clients. Java for BlackBerry was the obvious way, but we felt it would be a matter of time before iOS and Android will become popular among our enterprise customers. We wanted to develop once and still support those new platforms. We made a bet on HTML5.

Today, old BlackBerry is dead, and BlackBerry 10 is just around the corner. It will have a solid support for HTML5, just like iOS and Android have. We made the right decision.

So back to 2012: while people were debating whether HTML5 can compete with native or not, we at ClickSoftware, spent our time deploying our mobile solutions among many of our large enterprise customers all over the world.
Thousands of mobile employees are using our HTML5-based products today. They love it. They run it everywhere, on multiple devices from smartphones to tablets, including laptops and desktops. Some are using our products as pure web-based apps, while others have selected to embed it inside native containers. Functionality wise it gives them exactly what they need, with the ease of web-deployment, brilliant configurability and extremely high flexibility. Using Responsive design, our solutions not only run everywhere, they are adapting to the device type, screen size, peripheral devices and network availability.

2013 is right around the corner, and I’m sure we will see more products designed to run everywhere using HTML5.
Few years ago I predicted that by 2013, HTML5 will rule enterprise mobility. In some aspect this prediction has already materialized. In other aspects it will take longer, as companies are still learning the pros and cons of the mobile web, and with time will learn how and where to make a better use of it.

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Oct 2, 2012

Scan2Login will help you log-in quickly and safely

Firefox and Google Chrome add-on that lets you log in to websites by scanning a QR code with your smartphone.

Memorizing user names and passwords is a nightmare; using the same combination to all of the accounts is too risky, so people are often using different variations with some priority rules – but with so many online/cloud services, it’s not a simple task too.

You can always count on your browser to remember those combinations for you, but then again, what happens when you switch computers?

Scan2Login (by Holabar ltd) is a unique app that allows you to automatically log in to any website by scanning a generated QR code with your smartphone. The system combines a smartphone app (currently available only for Android) with a FireFox/Chrome extension. To login, all you need to do is pull out your phone, point to the QR code, and you are logged in automatically.

The process is simple and quick, without compromising on security. It means you can use longer (and therefore stronger) passwords, without wasting time trying to remember or manage them. The app does it for you, it does it quickly and in a very friendly way.

Here’s how it works:

The Scan2Login QR code is totally anonymous. It generates random number and does not keep any private information. The login data is stored encrypted only on your smartphone and transferred (using a secure channel) to the addon only when needed.

Read more about Scan2Login by HolaBar in here

Or download the mobile apps directly from Google Play:

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Aug 11, 2012

The Great App-splosion (Infographic by ClickSoftware)

A great infographic by ClickSoftware is now available in here.

It describes some of the trends in enterprise mobility and how IT Consumerization impacts IT in the business world.

Hit the link below for the full infographic:

http://www.clicksoftware.com/mobile-business-applications-infographic.htm#.UCdMhp0gc1N

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Aug 4, 2012

HTML5 vs. Native Applications… Again…

HTML5 is not a “mobile technology”, and yet it seems like it is considered to be the one technology than that has the power to change our current mobile experience from native apps into coherent, device agnostic, software applications.

Few weeks ago I was interviewed by By Brian Albright, from Field Technologies magazine, along with Zack Bergreen and Dave Miller. The article was recently published and can be found in here:

http://www.fieldtechnologiesonline.com/doc.mvc/html-levels-the-mobile-playing-field-0001

The maturity of HTML5, device selection process, tips when deploying an HTML5 product, and more.

More Enterprise Mobility Articles in The Mobile Spoon

Looking ahead, the mobile realm will deliver new mobile devices and more importantly: new mobile form factors and hybrid devices (Microsoft’s Surface is just the beginning). In such world, HTML5 will continue to evolve rapidly and influence the entire industry.

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Aug 1, 2012

Are Widgets About To Be Extinct?

My short experience with HTC One X has taught me that widgets are not as useful as I expected them to be. Widgets allow you to access information “previews” without having to dig into specific apps. They let you see information at a glimpse, take popular actions in a single click, and practically be more productive. And yet, with the recent changes in iOS and WP7 I think that widgets are simply overrated.

When you think about it, It’s hard to find really good widgets which are not related to stocks, clocks and weather. There are plenty of those, plus a lot of system toggles for changing network settings, Bluetooth, etc. but that’s about it. Productivity widgets that are truly brilliant are harder to find and in most cases they simply present limited information and take you to the app itself to do the sophisticated things. It’s not always enough to make an impact.

Instead of using the widget, how about you simply use the app?

Why bother navigating to the page with the widget, when I can place a shortcut and simply open the app?
It takes about the same amount of clicks, opening an app is done very quickly (especially when you have a quad core processor), and since the widget will eventually take you to the app anyway… why not start with the app in the first place?

Many apps today take no-time to open, and give you such a strong user experience where reaching the desired action or piece of information simply takes seconds. So why do we need to mess up our homescreen?

Instead of a widget, how about you simply do it from your lock-screen?

It took me a while to understand the true power of the relatively new iOS lockscreen. It’s a masterpiece when it comes to efficient handling of common activities. It’s all there, being pushed to you, on a silver spoon.

Missed a call? slide to make a call back. Got an email? Here’s a preview. Got a new article that interests you? There it is. Read, unlock, you are there already. Faster than using a widget. It’s like Apple took all the widgets in the world and placed them in one queue, ordered by time, priority and relevance. Who needs widgets when you can get everything loaded to your lockscreen?

Instead of widgets, how about Live Tiles?

I still haven’t made up my mind about Microsoft’s Live Tiles. They are nice, they are special, They are part of the fascinating Metro User Interface, and yet, they sometimes seem to be too simple.

Windows 8 will be all about Live Tiles. They are much smaller than widgets, and they have clear UI guidelines.

As a result, they do not mess up your screen with inconsistent fonts, colors, sizes, and layouts, and in addition, you can squeeze many of them into one page. The result is similar to having “mini widgets” stored in one location.

You can argue about the functionality a given Tile provides, but the combination of multiple Tiles is for sure much nicer than widgets.

Summary:

Android fans often mention Widgets as an advantage of the OS over other platforms out there. And still, Microsoft chose not to add widgets in Windows 8 and Windows Phone, Apple copied back a lot of features from Android in recent iOS releases and yet decided to ignore widgets. RIM never tried to implement widgets and the same goes with the unforgettable webOS by Palm (RIP).

I have widgets on my Mac and I never even once used them. Windows 7 has widgets and I don’t think they are that popular.

Can it be that widgets are overrated? Can it be that users have become so lazy they want everything to be pushed straight to their lockscreen? Will live tiles eventually replace widgets to create live walls with endless data streams?

Think about it.

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How Does A 3D TV Work?

[Guest Post]

The TV has come a long, long way since it made its first appearance. Big bulky boxes have become sleek new panels. Grainy black and white pictures are now crystal clear and vibrant in colors; you can even hear grass rusting in the wind. LCD, KLED, HD, Plasma... just when you thought that it had reached the pinnacle, in comes 3D TV: The latest kid on the block. Watching 3D at home seems so amazing. So how does it work?

You need to have 3D capable TV sets and the glasses to view 3D channels that many cable and satellite providers air. If you want to rent 3D DVDs, you will also need a 3D capable blu-ray player.

We get to see the depth of an object (or get 3D vision) when the vision form both our eyes merge. When we see the same objects on TV, we see them flat. Let’s see how 3D technology gets around this conundrum. To put in short, the TV needs to refresh the picture at least 120 times in one second. It also needs to present alternating frames for the left and right eyes. The brain is tricked into thinking that there is only one image, and it gives the illusion of depth.

How we see

It’s the light reflected off the objects that’s interpreted and used by the brain to create its image. When the object is at a distance, the light travelling to both eyes is parallel; the light starts converging as the object comes nearer and our eyes too, shift to make up. While focusing, the brain estimates how far the object is by looking at the eye convergence: the more the convergence, the nearer the object.

So in 3D technology, both eyes are shown the same image, but at two separate locations. This tricks your brain into convincing you the object has depth. Your eyes seemingly come together on an object right in front but in reality you’re focusing on the screen far away.

Glasses

3D technology is incomplete without the glasses. There are

a) Passive glasses

b) Active glasses.

Passive glasses use anaglyph lenses (two different colored lenses) show one image to your left eye and another for your right simultaneously. The filtered lens in the glasses ensures that the right eye sees the right image. The not-so wow factor with passive glasses is that you don’t usually get a full HD picture, because with two images being shown, the resolution has to be halved. Active 3D glasses have shutters that display an image to each eye in rapid succession, in sync with the images displayed on the screen. This also ensures the each eye sees exactly what it is meant to see. Picture quality is better with active glasses.

The TV

Your TV of course needs to be 3D ready. The TV needs a way of communicating with your glasses. It needs what is called a stereoscopic sync signal connector; one end goes into your TV port and the other to an IR remitter. This sends signals to your active glasses. You could also plug your TV to your computer with an HDMI cable and stream 3D onto it. Currently Panasonic, Samsung and Sony are some of the top companies striving to bring 3D entertainment to your living room.

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Jul 20, 2012

HTC One X is a huge smartphone but may not be that smart

Disclaimer: the writer of this post (me) is not an Apple fanboy.
First of all, I’m not a ‘boy’. I’m an old man with 1,000 kids. Second, I’ve been using non-Apple products my entire life and like them very much, I do think the iPhone was the biggest, most innovative mobile invention of the past few decades but it stops there: I recently bought a Mac and learned that Apple does have bad products. So Android fans, before you start commenting, please take my words as they are without suspecting I have a hidden agenda…

For the past few weeks I’ve been using one of the best Android smartphones out there: the HTC One X.
It took me a while to get used to the ridiculous size of it, the keyboard, the Sense UI but after a few weeks of giving it a serious chance I came up to the conclusion that HTC One X may be one of the strongest smartphones out there but it’s definitely not a smart product.

Yes, sorry HTC fans, if this is the best device HTC could create to compete with Samsung and Apple then I wouldn’t buy HTC stocks in the near future (nor recommend on buying the One X).

So by now you probably ask yourself, how can a device by a company known for its’ years of experience in mobility, and its’ friendly Sense UI, be called ‘Not Smart’? Here are few reasons:

The size may be huge, but it doesn’t bring real advantage

When I just got the One X I didn’t know what to do with that ridiculous size of it (4.7 inches).
I mean, I’m not a small man. I’m actually pretty tall with relatively long fingers, but at first I found it really hard to operate this mini-tablet. Reaching specific areas in the screen forced me to change the way I hold the device, I found myself using two hands instead of one, or accidently touching the wrong buttons with parts of my hand I never knew existed, while stretching my finger trying to get somewhere.

After a few days with it, I started to get use to it.
Guess what? The iPhone suddenly looked too small, a bit funny even. I started appreciating the size of the new phone, and of course I appreciated the amazing design of it.

But the problem is that HTC failed to make a good usage of that screen size when it comes to the software.

Here are a few examples to how the size of the device is not being used wisely:

Sense UI: Sense UI is nice, but the truth is that it has widgets that existed 5 years ago in the TouchPro user interface that ran on Windows Mobile (I had one of those devices back then).
The way the Sense UI is using the screen real-estate is a disgrace. You can barely place more than one informative widget in a page and the number of pages is still limited (the plus button doesn’t work), the result is that you cannot really enjoy the benefits of widgets and need to move back and forth to find information.
(Information that, by the way, exists on the iPhone’s lock-screen without having to make a single action).
Emails: With such a huge screen you would expect not to have any issues with reading emails, right?
Unfortunately, it seems like there are some issues identifying the required width of each email, and so I find myself scrolling left and right in 1 out of 3 emails I read where the text expands beyond the width of the screen. This is a huge usability bug, that doesn’t exist in phones with much smaller screens. And no, you cannot “zoom-out” and make the text smaller…

On the positive side, browsing the internet (especially with the new AMAZING Google Chrome) is much better when you use such a big device.

Great specs but disappointing results and poor performance:

Almost a year ago I explained that technical specifications should not be your primary way of selecting a new smartphone and the HTC One X is a perfect example of how great specifications do not guarantee perfect performance: this giant droid comes packed with 1.5 GHz Quad-core and things still work slowly!

Unlocking the screen with one of the quick app launch options takes long
The beautiful multi-tasking option is an eye candy but getting back to a running app takes forever and in many cases seems like it is restarting the app that is supposed to be running in the background…
Sense UI is simply the slowest homescreen I’ve ever worked with. There are lags when you move from one page to another, lags when using different elements of this shell.
The front camera (1.3 MP, 720p) might not be that bad, but the pictures it takes are seriously below expectations.
Browsing through photos in the Gallery app feels like it is actually challenging the device. From time to time you will notice the photo did not move as if the phone is getting tired of photo browsing.

And a word about the Sense UI and its’ performance: I mean, how many years should a company the size of HTC invest in order to make such an important product work perfectly without bugs and performance issues?
And how come the most popular topic in the forums is “how to remove Sense UI?”

A smartphone UI that is not that… smart:

User Interface and UX are very popular these days, as smartphones are getting smarter every day, doing more for the user, helping him to get things done with minimal attention. HTC One X fails in the small things of the UI and it made me realize I do not enjoy using it and use my laptop (!!!) instead for simple things I used to do with my iPhone.

Some of it is Android’s fault. This OS still lacks the “magical” touch iOS has. The capabilities are the same, and actually better than iOS in many aspects, but the “how” is not the same.

Sorry Google. You are just not there yet with the UX. But hey, make everything work like that new Chrome for mobile and I promise I will stop complaining…

The main problem with the One X is that HTC customized some areas and made them worse.

Here are a few examples:

Front camera: bad, bad…
I have kids, and like any (dumb) excited parent, when they do something (I think is) cute – I want to picture it and force others to see it even though they really don’t want to.
Once you are in the camera app - it takes 3 extremely accurate clicks (menus and stuff) to activate the front camera! That is just annoying.
When holing kids, and trying to keep up the momentum – that is an insane number of actions to get things done. Seems like something small, but believe me, when you have kids all over you, every click counts.
Lock-screen: You can only have 4 apps launched directly from your lockscreen, how about some configuration over there to make it more useful?
Notifications in the lock-screen are doable, but guess what: unlocking your phone by sliding ‘missed call’ notification does not call back the person. Instead, it opens up the phone application. Why do I specifically slide down the missed call notification if it’s not for calling back to the person I just missed? Why do I need that redundant click in the upper area of the phone (which is had to get to anyhow due to the size of the screen…)?
Emails: up to now, I’m not clear about the way addresses are presented in the email app. Sometimes they are shown when I scrolling up the email page – (which reveals them), and sometime they can be seen only by clicking a certain part of the email showing only the first name (taking you to a special screen with all the addressees). Weird. Inconsistent. Annoying.
Emails again: Picture this: you get an email, from a person not in your contact list. You want to copy the email address and do something with it… well. Sorry kids, you cannot. The only way to do it is by creating a contact out of this email address, edit it, and then copy the address…
Keyboard: I can’t say the default HTC Keyboard is bad, but still, as the alternatives are there, I tried looking for alternative keyboards, and found that each of them had few issues that bothered me. Sometimes having too many alternatives makes you more frustrated than having just one option. Eventually I found that SwiftKey X did better job for me.

So many small things. Am I a nagger to even mention them? I probably am, however, in a world where every click counts, where Apple and Samsung are constantly searching for those small things that can make their mobile OS smarter and more productive, comes the HTC One X and proves that highly customized products often take you backwards in terms of basic usability.

Bottom line

Don’t get me wrong: HTC One X is not a bad smartphone. It is a beautiful device, it’s elegant, it is loaded with the best specs you can possibly ask for. For many people out there it might be the perfect smartphone they always dreamed of. There are days when I’m actually happy with it, but then there are those small things that drive me insane.

I think HTC can (and should) improve the software so that UI bugs, and performance are significantly improved. There are already a bunch of tweaks all over the net showing how to improve performance in the Sense UI, most of them a bit techy. HTC must release an update in order to get this beast to do what it’s capable of. I believe it will happen.

For now, I’m generally disappointed with the HTC One X. I think it doesn’t stand to the expectations I had and the potential, but I’m not switching back to my iPhone just yet. I’m going to give it some more time, look for ways to customize it some more, optimize it for my needs. Enjoy the unique features it does have (camera and sound mostly).

Who knows, maybe in a few weeks from now I will be a happy Android user saying bad things about Apple fanboys too…

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