Boydo's Tech Talk

Seems like a slightly crowded field these days for mobile OS market share. Up front we have Android and iOS while BlackBerry OS and Symbian are slowly being sucked into a black hole. Meanwhile, Windows Phone is carving out a small niche for itself prior to Windows 8 hitting the scene as WebOS is stuck in a vacuum.

It’s a harsh environment and betting the farm on a mobile OS can take a company under.

So why would Mozilla think of a mobile OS when it could be argued that they have lost control of their own browser?

That remains unclear at the moment but perhaps with their Google partnership for search engine revenues on the default homepage under doubt beyond the current contract. With Google having its own browser and mobile OS and Microsoft with its own browser, mobile OS and search engine it leaves slim pickings for search engine revenues if the two major players don’t want to play ball. Early diversification may help mitigate against this risk but only if there will be monetary gain which is not yet known.

Will B2G be a winner? Time will tell…

For people seriously considering a Windows 8 tablet as their next tablet OS here is something that might sweeten the deal a bit.

While the iPad has built in viewing capabilities for Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slidepacks the ability to edit them as part of the base operating system is absent. The situation is the same with OneNote notebooks although you can download a free app from the App Store for iPhone or iPad that will allow you to view and edit notes up in SkyDrive. The Android side of things is a bit scant in terms of native support although you can also download the official Microsoft OneNote app from Microsoft.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft is going to offer native support for Office documents in Windows 8 tablets, particularly given the support in Windows Phone 7. You won’t get the entire suite though but you’ll get Office 15 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote which should cover most bases. I guess we won’t be seeing Outlook as  we know it but there will be a Metro mail app (perhaps called Outlook) that will be better designed and optimised for the touch interface.

While this might have benefits for consumers it should also have a positive influence for small businesses and enterprises still assessing what sort of tablet deployments they could potentially undertake. Sure, tablets may not necessarily be the best content creation devices but for smaller bouts and minor document modifications it’s probably not a bad thing having such capable versions of Office 15 in Windows 8 for ARM devices.

Today I was helping someone officially upgrade the firmware on a couple of devices (specifically a Samsung Galaxy S and the original Samsung Galaxy Tab) and unfortunately the Galaxy Tab had seized up and would not respond to any inputs. Even holding in the power button wouldn’t wake the device up from its seemingly infinite slumber.

Normally, when all else fails with a device, you can pull the battery out of a device and put it back in but unfortunately that’s not readily achievable with this device.

So what should you do?

I found that holding the “volume up” button and the power button did the trick. Eventually, you’ll see some text come up on the screen at which point you can let go of the buttons. To get the device back into its graphical interface simply hold down the power button until it restarts again and you should be right from there!

It’s almost a two horse race these days for mobile phones for consumers and the enterprise between the iPhone and Android handsets but don’t let that stop you from getting a squizz at Windows Phone.

If you want to give the Windows Phone interface a go on your phone just browse to http://aka.ms/wpdemo and tap the screen to start the demo. It’s quite realistic to the real thing and it uses dummy data to simulate what a device with personalised data might work (as that is a far better experience that attempting to use a device in a mobile store with no information on it at all).

If you have a spare minute or two give this a go and see what you think. The worst that would happen is that you find that Windows Phone isn’t for you but I reckon that some people will find it an intriguing offering.

Hi folks, just wanted to give you an update on where I am at with testing the early alpha port of Ice Cream Sandwich (or ICS as it is now being abbreviated) to the Samsung Galaxy S.

Initially, I was testing Galnet MIUI as I believed that was a proper implementation of ICS but it was actually the MIUI  fully customised ROM containing the ICS kernel (everything else appeared to be the same as mainstream MIUI). So I ended up turfing that and going with a port being tracked on XDA Developers here.

At the time of writing I have just flashed the Alpha 6 build of the ICS port and it is certainly much better than Alpha 4 that I had tried a day or two ago. A truckload of work has gone into it already to make it usable but there are a few things still to fix up including Bluetooth, GPS, camera and video recording. As such, I probably wouldn’t recommend it for regular use on your main phone just yet but if you have a secondary backup/test phone then knock yourself out. I have encountered a few reboots and screen glitches (things to be expected from stable builds).

Anyway, the interface has had more polish and shine applied over and beyond what we have seen in the 2.0 releases (Eclair, Froyo & Gingerbread) with some similarities with what has been seen in Honeycomb on the Android tablets (such as the screen unlock mechanism and screen transitions). The interface is still quite fluid even on an older device like the Samsung Galaxy S with its single core CPU. You can now also take screenshots by holding down the volume down button and power buttons simultaneously which will come in handy.

Speaking of screenshots, here are some to tide you over:

About Phone

Phone Dialer

Mobile Browser (Not Chrome Though)

Google Talk

Google Plus

Home Screen

Storage Utilisation

In the meantime, Samsung hasn’t formally announced a release for the aging Samsung Galaxy S but there does appear to be a release on the cards for the Samsung Galaxy S 2. We’ll see how that pans out but of course the developer community is pulling together to make it happen unofficially.

Since the iPhone 4S came out Siri, the enhanced voice control functionality found only on the iPhone 4S (for the time being), has become a a focal point for the state of the art of speech recognition. With smartphones packing quite a punch in terms of CPU power and access to the cloud becoming ubiquitous through traditional fixed broadband connections and popular cellular connections (GPRS, 3G and LTE) getting voice queries processed is becoming easier, more efficient and more accurate.

Of course, Google has had speech recognition in Android for a while now but it has taken a while to evolve to its current point and some people might say its fallen behind Apple’s offering (which was admittedly an acquisition).

So why is Google trailing?

My take on this is that Google relies heavily on its current ad model to bring in the cash (so ten links on a page, ads on the right hand side) and the diversion of search to a voice channel bypasses the opportunity to serve up ads without being obtrusive. Trying to slip in a spoken ad at the beginning will turn people off using a voice channel while putting it at the end will simply see people ignoring it by terminating the channel.

While the current method of obtaining information may be through a web browser it might not always be that way. With enablers like Siri, we may be moving to bite sized chunks of data to fulfil a search request or a query rather than pages and blocks of data that we receive now. Google needs to work out how voice will work for consumers while innovating its business model to support it.

This is my second eBook pick courtesy of my Kindle DX and sheds some light on the internal operations of Google covering things from its genesis in a university right through to significant products such as Google Mail, Android and, of course, search.

“In The Plex” was written by Steven Levy who also wrote Hackers, another book I have read on my Kindle DX which gave a great background on the early enthusiastic adopters of computers who wanted to find other uses for these machines including music, practical jokes and games.

Anyway, “In The Plex” gives a great insight into Google which has traditionally played its cards very close to its chest from an outsider perspective. Reading about how Larry Page and Sergey Brin built up the company from scratch was fascinating and to learn about how they reacted in particular situations was also somewhat humourous. Also learning about how Eric Schmidt took on the tough role of CEO to attempt to keep the young co-founders under some control while trying to familiarise them with how to run a company as a CEO. The book even covers the recent transition of the company leadership from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page (however brief) making it quite a comprehensive corporate biography of sorts.

The book even covers tensions between Apple and Google which will no doubt be covered in the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson (which is my next eBook). The tensions between the companies with the competing iPhone and Android products and the eventual resignation of Schmidt from the Apple board and the lead up to that event (including Schmidt leaving the board room when iPhone was being discussed) make a great read.

To put it simply, Google was and, to a degree still is, a master of keeping a lid on things unless absolutely necessary and the “don’t be evil” mantra is covered extensively throughout the whole book. The most interesting juxtaposition with this mantra includes the period in which Google maintained a presence in China whilst having to abide by the whims of the Chinese Government and “mysterious outages” while Baidu, the main player in search, seemed to coast along with minimal problems.

I think the book is a good read particularly for the geeks out there wanting to know more about what has happened behind that white page with the search box and the occasional interesting graphic in lieu of the Google logo. You can grab it at Amazon.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Samsung Music Hub which could be checked out at a popup shop in George Street in Sydney. Today, the general media have covered the fact that this popup shop was also offering ten Samasung Galaxy S II handsets per day until the end of the week for two dollars each. To boot, it’s pretty much next door to an Apple store with at least one person trying to convince people in the line for the iPhone 4S to stand in the Samsung line instead.

I guess one might wonder if such a move is a bit feisty or foolish given the relationship between Samsung and Apple at the present time.

Samsung is already under fire for its Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet with injunctions lodged by Apple preventing its sale in Australia and Germany while Apple is reportedly looking around for other suppliers for the CPUs and displays in its iOS devices.

Part of me thinks that Samsung really has nothing more to lose by waving another red flag at the bull and only customers to gain by being a bit bold and brash about its product. Certainly on paper the Samsung Galaxy S II is probably the pick of the crop of the current Android devices until the Nexus Prime arrives. However, the ecosystem has been the gaping hole plaguing the Android platform since its inception. Samsung now fills in the music side of things now with its Music Hub and Amazon with its seemingly comprehensive offering on its new tablet.

That said, perhaps component manufacturers might find the market more lucrative being a “complete device” manufacturer rather than a component manufacturer. Of course, the risk is then shifted towards successful sales of devices to realise a profit rather than selling components in bulk to other OEMs.

Is Samsung past the point of no return? Well, I don’t think the popup shop by itself would probably be the straw to break the camel’s back but I think we are seeing Samsung progressively come out of its shell in pursuit of a slice of the smartphone market. Their support could use a bit of attention (particularly their speed to release updates) though. That said, I like to see a bit of spirited competition in the market and this looks to be just what the doctor ordered in my opinion.

It looks like Aussies will start to get more of a taste of subscription music to go head to head with Sony’s offering, Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity. This comes in the absence of an offering from Microsoft and its Zune service and Google preventing people from outside the USA from signing up to its Google Music service (although there are ways around that).

It seems that Samsung Galaxy S II owners will get a free trial subscription to the service after which it will cost $10 a month for one active device (so you can use multiple devices but not simultaneously) and you can’t use it in a web browser while $15 a month allows for four simultaneous devices plus the ability to stream in a web browser. Tracks can also be purchased for download as well.

I really do hope this signals the beginning of subscription based music in Australia. I’ll still be hanging out for the Zune subscription model when hopefully it materialises this year or next year (with the five free tracks a month intact as well which would be very nice). Digital music is very much the way forward and the sale of music on physical media should continue to decline. In fact, it still makes me wonder how CD shops turn a profit these days and remain viable.

Apparently, the beta version of the app is still rather buggy so it remains to be seen as to how good the experience will end up being. However, if you want to check it out apparently there is a popup store at 379 George Street in Sydney that is open until Friday 14th October, 2011.

It just amazes me that Samsung has done something for Australia that Google either couldn’t manage or just couldn’t be bothered doing outside of its own backyard. I’d also be interested to see if this service is made available on the Samsung Omnia 7 as well.

For more information on Samsung Music Hub, click here.

I guess one of the big features that Windows Phone users have been hanging out for is a friendlier solution for internet sharing. Since the initial release, you could make it work by dialling a string of numbers into the phone and manually assigning the APN but it was hardly an elegant and easily invoked solution.

Hopefully by now everyone has managed to update to Mango (or will be shortly) but you may be wondering where on earth the option to enable internet sharing is located? Well, it should be in the Settings hub but it will most likely be hidden for the time being. At this point, I’d be hearing cries of “why, what now?” or something similar.

Basically, internet sharing relies upon two things in order to be activated, specifically:

1. Your carrier allowing you to use tethering on your account/plan,
2. Your handset manufacturer releasing updated drivers to make internet sharing work.