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Posts Tagged ‘Challenger’

Nexus One and Android 2.1: Apple Better Watch Out

Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One. Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren’t quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. Apple will clearly have to step up its game with the next iPhone if it wants to hold off Android’s momentum. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform, but that could easily change in the near future.

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Hardware

For the sake of this review, we won’t look at the Nexus One hardware in great detail. Suffice to say, the 1GHz Snapdragon processor makes the phone extremely fast and the 3.7 inch AMOLED screen simply looks gorgeous. While it isn’t much bigger than the iPhone’s screen, the difference in resolution (800×400) is quite noticeable. We didn’t get a chance to formally test the phone’s battery life, but unless we made extensive use of the GPS, it easily got through a day’s use without needing a recharge.

The phone’s 5 megapixel camera works just as advertised – though the camera app isn’t the prettiest app on the phone. Picture quality was generally on par with pictures from the iPhone 3GS, though the built-in LED flash gives the phone an important additional feature that Apple doesn’t currently offer.

In the long run, the big difference between the two platforms isn’t the hardware but the operating system. After all, the iPhone 3GS is also quite fast and we haven’t heard a lot of complaints about the iPhone’s screen. Android 2.1 isn’t a major step up from version 2.0, but it does introduce some notable new features, including the ability to use voice in every application that brings up the built-in virtual keyboard.

Android 2.1

While the Nexus One isn’t an iPhone killer, it’s already on par with Apple’s phone in many regards. As Google and the developer community that has grown around Android continues to improve the OS, it is only a matter of time before Apple will have to react with an updated version of its iPhone OS.

Here are some of the features that make the Nexus One and Android 2.1 a winner in our opinion. We should note there are some unresolved customer service and hardware issues that have made headlines over the last few days. We didn’t experience any of these problems ourselves, but your mileage may vary.

Nexus One and Android 2.1 vs. the iPhone

• Google Navigation: When it was released for Android 2.0, we described Google’s own GPS application as the first ‘killer feature’ for Android. Google hasn’t really updated this app in 2.1, but it remains one of the signature features for Android. This is also one of the many apps that showcases Android’s ability to multitask. On the iPhone, for example, you have to exit the GPS app while you check your email. On an Android phone, the app simply continues to run in the background and continues to give you voice prompts.
• Voice recognition: We were quite skeptical about this feature at first. Every time Android 2.1 brings up the keyboard, you now have the option to dictate text into the phone. This works surprisingly well and makes writing a quick email or tweet very easy. Some apps, including Google Navigation, can also handle more complex voice commands. On the iPhone, the newly updated Dragon Natural Speaking app works similarly well, but suffers from the fact that it isn’t integrated into every application on the phone.
• Multitasking: Other smartphones like the Palm Pre also feature multitasking for third-party apps and handle switching between these apps better than Android. At the same time, though, one of the iPhone Achilles’ heels is its inability to run more than one non-Apple app at a time. No such problems with Android, though running a lot of apps in the background can put a lot of strain on the battery.
• Back Button: Besides the volume controls, the iPhone only features button. The Nexus features quite a few more (back, menu, home, and search, plus a trackball). The back button is likely the most useful of these and works just like your browser’s back button. On the iPhone, whenever an app takes you to browser, the app quits and opens up the browser, leaving you no easy way to get back to the app. On Android phones, you simply click the back button and you’re back to where you started.
• Google Voice: If you use Google Voice, you are surely aware of the controversy around getting the Google Voice app on the iPhone. On Android, it’s simply a built-in feature and works perfectly. You can even set up the phone to route international calls through Google Voice by default.
• Photo Gallery: Google worked with CoolIris to integrate the company’s signature 3D-view of your photos into the Android photo gallery app. This is easily the prettiest and most useful default gallery app we have seen on any phone to date.
• Google integration: If you are heavily invested in the Google universe, then setting up Android is as easy as it gets. When you first start up the Nexus One (or any other Android phone for that matter), the phone will ask you for your Google Account credentials. Once you enter these, the phone will set up all the Google apps on the phone for you. The phone sets up your email accounts and downloads contacts from Google Contacts. The gallery app connects to Picasa and the calendar connects to Google Calendar.

Areas for Improvement

But there are also some areas where the iPhone is still a clear winner:

• Music: For now, Android’s music app doesn’t come close to the iPhone’s native iPod app. While it’s not woefully bad, it also doesn’t come close to the design and functionality of the iPhone.
• User Interface: While Android 2.1 looks pretty nice and offers some cool new eyecandy like animated wallpapers, the Apple is still one step ahead of Google when it comes to the fit and finish of the built-in apps. Also, while we love the back button on the Nexus One, using the menu button isn’t very intuitive and quite a few people we showed the phone to struggled with understanding its functions.
• App Store: No doubt, Apple’s App Store features far more applications than the Android Market. Especially when it comes to games, Apple beats Google hands down.
• OS Updates for Everybody: You can reasonably assume that the iPhone you buy today will be supported with OS updates for the two years of your contract. With Android, you can’t be so sure about that. It’s still a moving target and quite a few early adopters are still stuck with Android 1.5 because their vendors never updated the phone or because their phones don’t feature the necessary hardware to run later versions of the OS.

As we pointed out last week, the Nexus One and Android 2.1 aren’t quite ready for the enterprise yet and Google has to work on the security features of the phone and software before it can become a major player in this market. Google, however, is aware of this and is already working on an enterprise version of the phone.

Verdict

Overall, we were very impressed with the phone’s hardware and software. Android 2.1 could still benefit from some design work, but in terms of features and functionality, Android can now easily compete with the iPhone.

Disclaimer: Google provided us with a loaner unit and a working SIM card free of charge.

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Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha’s Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it’s hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May, as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn’t a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia.

Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Wolfram|Alpha: What is it Good For?

Wolfram|Alpha is a product that was built on top of founder Stephen Wolfram’s Mathematica product, a software tool for mathematicians that was initially released in 1988. The aim is to allow users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those. Wolfram|Alpha was first conceived and started development about 4 years ago, and just 6-8 months ago the team gave serious consideration to taking the product to a wider consumer audience.

I started out by asking Foltz-Smith what the Wolfram|Alpha team thought of all the media hype around their product, particularly about the "Google Killer" theme which many media outlets reveled in. Foltz-Smith replied that they were expecting to be compared to Google, but not to that extent. Their team was a little surprised there wasn’t more discussion around Wolfram|Alpha’s similarities to Wikipedia and Freebase (although he noted that ReadWriteWeb certainly covered that!). Regarding the Google comparisons, Foltz-Smith said that they didn’t give into the hype – they stuck to what their goals were.

I remarked that many people still seem confused about what Wolfram|Alpha does and what it can be used for. Foltz-Smith said that people will use it for different things. The crux of the product though is that it allows people to compute and calculate things.

But will mainstream people use Wolfram|Alpha? Right now, it seems to be focused on mathematicians. Foltz-Smith replied that yes, eventually Wolfram|Alpha will find a mainstream audience. It has started specific, but it will go broader. First, he said, it has to "pass a test" with "serious users" – by which he means academics and computational users. If it’s useful for them, claimed Foltz-Smith, it will then go mainstream.

Use Case: Education

One real-world use case we talked about was using Wolfram|Alpha in education. Russell Foltz-Smith said that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to automatically generate problem sets for students, and then research those sets.

A recent article in education website Chronicle.com argued that Wolfram|Alpha may have a less desired effect: encouraging cheating and laziness in students. This is because Wolfram|Alpha not only solves complex math problems, it "also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions."

Stephen Wolfram told Chronicle.com that computer-algebra systems like Wolfram|Alpha actually improve education – because they allow students to explore complex problems on their own and intuitively determine how functions work, rather than just learn rote processes. Wolfram claimed that "it’s better to let them [students] stand on that platform and go further."

Either way, it’s clear that Wolfram|Alpha and similar computational software will force the education system to adapt and change. Students now have a new (and certainly easier to use, as it’s on the Web) platform on which to compute things. There’s no point in the education system pretending it doesn’t exist. If you’re interested in tracking the progress of Wolfram|Alpha in educational settings, there is a wiki devoted to ‘Teaching Undergraduate Math with Wolfram|Alpha.’

Use Case: Computational Journalism

This one was described to me as "anomaly spotting." For example with the current interest in swine flu news, Wolfram|Alpha could be used to fact-find and compute interesting trends. As Foltz-Smith described it, Wolfram|Alpha could "automatically enhance news."

Foltz-Smith noted that CNN and other major networks do this already (analyze data), but that it’s expensive to do. The end results on CNN are added value things like interactive maps and fancy diagrams. Wolfram|Alpha could make this type of data gathering and analysis presentation inexpensive and common place amongst all kinds of news operations – including good old blogs.

Use Case: Sports Watching

Imagine sitting in your sofa in the lounge, remote control in one hand and your favorite beverage in the other. You’re watching the Friday night game on TV, it’s a close game and you’re curious about which team has the better chance of winning. Why, check Wolfram|Alpha of course! In real time, Wolfram|Alpha could compute statistics about not just the history of the two teams – but the history of the location of the game, the weather, the season so far, etc.

As Foltz-Smith explained it, Wolfram|Alpha would be able to do "chained queries" – queries made up of multiple parts. For example: which quarterback had the best winning record in games played in the rain during the 1970s.

Other Use Cases

We also discussed medical and scientific use cases. Although there are early examples of Wolfram|Alpha in health, such as a nutrition label generator, Foltz-Smith was generally cautious about medical uses – because a lot of health data "can’t be wrong." He noted that in use cases like medical research, the issue of data fidelity is key. For example with the human genome, you have to take great care of that data and associated algorithms. Also he explained that as something like the human genome scales, how do you do QA?

Foltz-Smith admitted that the Wolfram|Alpha team is still working on these and similar issues. But they have a lot of people devoted to solving this problem. Some types of data could be crowdsourced, e.g. in linguistics, but other data needs different approaches.

Conclusion

It was interesting to hear about some of the potential uses of Wolfram|Alpha. We at ReadWriteWeb think this product has a promising future. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data.

Let us know in the comments what use cases you see for Wolfram|Alpha, and whether you’re aware of similar computational web apps.

See also:

• Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions
• Wolfram|Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots
• Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha
• Wolfram|Alpha Launch: Here’s What You Need to Know
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update

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Sony Alpha A550 DSLR reviewed: new tricks, new trade-offs

Sony Alpha A550 DSLR reviewed: new tricks, new trade-offs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter unveils new mobile version

Filed under: Internet, iPhone, iPod touch

It’s probably fair to say that Twitter clients were the first “killer app” category for the iPhone — Twitterific lead the charge way back when, but Tweetie came quickly after and then the flood gates were opened. But now, a late and unexpected challenger has entered the ring: Twitter themselves. Mashable has the screenshots — Twitter has always had a slimmed-down mobile client (and it’s still up right now at m.twitter.com, while the new preview is at mobile.twitter.com), but this one’s a little shinier, with almost all the features and graphics of the main site.

A few things didn’t make it — you can’t skin your page as you can in the browser client (although none of the third-party clients that I know allow you to do that from the mobile client either). And lists are missing as well, though perhaps that’s because Twitter doesn’t quite consider them ready for prime time yet. Still, it’s a definite improvement from the other mobile version, and the official blog on the subject says that they still have lots of visitors, despite all the other third-party clients out there.

TUAWTwitter unveils new mobile version originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Identity Wars: Google & Yahoo! Bow to Facebook & Twitter

Yahoo! announced this morning that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. This afternoon Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web.

People have always said that Google does what’s good for the web, because what’s good for the web is good for Google. In this case I’m worried that the Royalty of the web’s last generation has crowned these two leading social networks as the Royalty of the current generation in a deal that offers traffic and money but that could suffocate the most creative developments of the open, distributed web. That could be called the web’s next generation.

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The Importance of Identity

Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it’s your wallet, it’s your reputation and it could become a lot more. Increasingly, you take that Identity from site to site, leveraging on the next site what you did on the last one. If a particular company provides that Identity for you, it sets the rules, regulations, “interest rates” (eg. use of your info for advertising) and determines things like what parts of your identity you can use on different sites and what parts you can’t.

Facebook and Twitter are becoming big Identity providers. Google and Yahoo! have wanted to be leading Identity providers themselves but today cried Uncle with a big nod to the supremacy of the two leading social networks. At this point they have an interest in doing so, because they want you to share what you do on Yahoo and Google sites with your big link-clicking network of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Google didn’t add Facebook Connect, just Twitter, because Facebook is now Google’s leading challenger.

The Rest of the Identity World

But there are far more parties in the world of Identity than Twitter and Facebook. The Internet works because it is decentralized and there are scores of small companies, services and developers building out Identity infrastructures that are decentralized as well. Infrastructures that leverage the network-effect of the decentralized internet to provide the benefits of a large group, but are independent and interoperable in order to provide the benefits of personal freedom and control that can come from owning your own Identity.

Those small players, people working on things like OpenID, ActivityStreams, the distributed social graph and other components of distributed, independent and interoperable social networking – those players may have been sold down the river by today’s deals between Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Twitter.

How could that be? After all, the OpenID logo appears on the login screen for Google Friend Connect and Yahoo! has been a big supporter of OpenID. I would argue that by putting the best known brands, with the easiest log-in experiences, at the very front of the parade – Google and Yahoo have further marginalized the distributed web. The PR email to journalists about the announcement was even titled “Google Friend Connect and Twitter Get Cozy Together.”

The Consequences of Today’s Deals

By choosing to favor branded log-ins and making standards-based systems an afterthought, websites using these systems are disincentivized to leverage the innovations that come from the open standards community and big Identity brands stay in control. Those websites might be Google and Yahoo! or they might be other big sites with all the more reason to favor incumbent leaders in Identity because of the support Google and Yahoo! have given them.

People have talked about combining OpenID and Friend of a Friend data for spam control on blogs. “We’ll just require Facebook log-in, thanks,” I can imagine big websites saying. People are working on implementing cross-network standards for user activity data so sites can understand the activity feeds of other social networks and users of small, innovative sites can still communicate with their friends on other, larger sites. That means people will use small innovative sites and give them the support to grow. “Most people just use Facebook or Twitter,” I can imagine big websites saying. People have talked about using things like content category tags and bookmarks to build cross-site user Attention Profiles. “We’ll just look at their Facebook profiles,” I can imagine big websites saying.

A distributed social web, communicating through interoperable, standards-based language, offers as much opportunity for innovation as a common tongue does for poetry, universally visible pigments do for art or cash money and free time do for a self-determined afternoon. Your clicks, your contacts, your measurable behavior and content online are like fuel to burn, cash to spend. You’ll either be able to spend that resource on things like recommendations, privileges, trust, recognition, greater efficiency and unforeseeable innovation – or those resources will be handed directly and exclusively to advertisers for the benefit of those who broker your Identity.

The identity and activity payloads that come with most systems of identity don’t seem to be of much interest to sites leveraging Facebook and Twitter as primary identity providers today, though. It’s hard to think about anything else when all that potential traffic from enabling broadcast of your content is dangling in front of you.

“All you little sites are interested in making it easy to do cross-site photo identification/ comment re-aggregation / book recommendation based on charecteristics of multiple social networking profiles (etc.)?” Big Website might say, “Well, Facebook and Twitter don’t do that and they are good enough for us. We’re excited about people broadcasting links to our site out to their Twitter and Facebook friends. That’s enough for us. Isn’t that innovative?”

This may be more cynicism than is warranted, but I don’t think so. When dealing with hundreds of millions of peoples’ identities, the future of human communication and trillions of dollars – it’s probably good to lean a little toward cynicism when considering collaboration with incumbent industry leaders.

I appreciate the ease of Facebook and Twitter login around the web as much as anyone, but every big Identity login action I take feels like an economic transaction where the change and the interest slip through my fingers and land in the pockets of Facebook and Twitter.

Wouldn’t it have been better for the web to say “no, we will not simply take the easy solutions when it comes to Identity, in exchange for traffic and money. We will instead look for ways to make it easier for users of any Identity provider to engage with our websites.”

The short-term trade of giving more control to two big social networks, in exchange for traffic and ad money, may not serve anyone well in the long run.

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The Verizon Droid Might Be Landing Sooner Than We Thought

Over the weekend Verizon unleashed its marketing campaign for its upcoming Motorola Droid smartphone, pointing out some of the iPhone’s biggest flaws on prime time television as well as on the website DroidDoes.com. The phone, which will be the first to run Android 2.0 and is sporting some heavy duty specs, may be the first viable challenger to Apple’s iPhone dominance. Thing is, the Droid still isn’t officially announced yet, and we still don’t have a release date.

But we do have some hints: DroidDoes.com features a mysterious countdown timer that consists of a bunch of nonsensical symbols swirling by. Though some trickery (namely changing your computer clock or looking at the site’s config.xml file), it’s pretty easy to see what it’s counting down to. When the site launched on Saturday the countdown was going to October 30, 12:00 AM CST. Sometime today, that changed: the clock is now counting down to October 28, at 12:00 AM CST. Or 48 hours earlier than it used to be.

Of course, it’s possible that October 28 is the day Verizon is going to actually announce the phone, with the actual release coming a bit later (remember, the “Droid Does” ad ends by saying it comes out in November). Or maybe we’ll be holding this thing two days earlier than we thought.

Thanks to Christopher Daggett for working this out.

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Verizon Droid Is The Real Deal

Verizon and Motorola finally lifted the curtain on their new Droid Android phone yesterday. Make no mistake, this is Android’s flagship product, and the first phone that will pose a significant threat to Apple’s iPhone. And it will be available very soon, possibly as early as the end of this month.

MobileCrunch has been tracking the phone, which has also been called the Tao or Sholes, for some time. Just about anyone who has come in contact with the phone can’t stop talking about it. And from what we hear, they have good reason.

The phone is a three-way effort between Motorola, Verizon and Google. It looks a lot like the iPhone, and may even be as thin or thinner than the iPhone 3GS. It also has two key advantages over the iPhone – a slide out physical keyboard, and use of the Verizon network.

Unlike previous Android phones, the Droid is rumored to be powered by the TI OMAP3430, the same core that the iPhone and Palm Pre use, and which significantly outperforms Qualcomm 528MHz ARM11 based Android phones that exist today (Engadget has a great overview article on mobile CPUs).

Droid will also be running v.2.0 of Android, with a significantly upgraded user interface.

The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you’ve got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone.

And the scary thing for Apple is, it may only be a few months before something even better than the Droid comes out. With the flood of Android devices that are hitting the market, a few are bound to be hits. No wonder Google CEO Eric Schmidt is so bullish on Android right now. Things are about to get very, very interesting.

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Is Apple Going to Support Augmented Reality, After All?

The cranky elves that run the iPhone App Store may be warming up after all to the emerging field of Augmented Reality (AR). AR app makers, who are building sci-fi-like interfaces for viewing data about the physical world on top of the mobile phone’s camera, were beginning to feel spurned.

Today Apple both approved the most eagerly anticipated Augmented Reality app yet, Amsterdam’s AR browser Layar (iTunes link), and made its primary challenger, Wikitude (iTunes link), a featured app in the iTunes App Store.

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Those moves came a month after many AR-watchers were dissapointed that Apple didn’t offer big support to Augmented Reality when launching the latest version of the iPhone OS. Some critics complain that even if some forms of AR are being permitted by Apple, the company still has a tight grip on APIs that could enable whole new methods of displaying data on top of the phone’s camera view if made publicly available. It’s not a happy relationship, but perhaps that’s beginning to change.

Layar is a browser that displays geo-located information like real-estate listings and restaurant reviews on top of a mobile camera’s view of its surroundings. The company has used well-made demo videos to stoke excitement among iPhone owners for months. The app has long been available on Android handsets but just emerged from the dark and mysterious iTunes App Store approval process this morning.

Its competitor Wikitude displays Wikipedia data (as Layar does) as well as user-generated Points of Interest input through its website Wikitude.me. Wikitude was made a featured app in iTunes today, just hours before Layar went live in the store.

A long list of AR companies were at the edge of their seats waiting for a big announcement in September, believing that Apple would make public all the technical hooks they needed to created an Augmented Reality experience. Instead of the expected opening-up and perhaps some publicity for this very eye-catching software niche, Apple opened up only some of the APIs needed, didn’t make any public mention of AR and has slowly let AR apps trickle into the App Store with no fan-fare over the last month.

All of this creates a very different experience for startups compared to the way they can launch apps on Android phones. They simply post them to the Android App Store, no approval process needed. Application developers are also working on AR for Nokia, a handset with far greater user numbers than the iPhone has – but everyone’s been waiting for AR to bloom on the much-hyped iPhone and Apple hasn’t been very supportive.

Robert Rice wrote in an open letter last week that:

“One of two things needs to happen. Either Apple needs to quit screwing us around and make [all] the APIs public so we can get back to the business of innovating and building a new industry, or the respective communities of developers and venture capitalists need to abandon Apple entirely. There are good alternatives out there that may not be as shiny, but are certainly as powerful and definitely more open for us to work with.”

It’s also possible that Apple hasn’t been offering AR apps meaningful support because so far they are a little dissapointing once consumers get their hands on them. GPS data is clumsy, data sets are incomplete and the user experience still hasn’t been nailed yet by anyone. It’s also borderline embarrassing to wave your phone around in the air when out in public, surrounded by people you don’t know. That’s quite unlike the usual experience Apple tries to associate with itself.

Perhaps things are changing, though. It’s exciting to think about bringing latent geo-located data out into a view accessible through a mobile phone. It would be nice to see Apple help advance this early field, instead of giving it the cold shoulder and silent treatment. End-users should recognize as well that the super-wow but controlled experience of the iPhone could be holding back other, even more exciting innovations.

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