Headworx

Only 10 months ago I complained on the hotel check-in process being so easy to automate, yet still run by humans . The change is coming. A few days ago I was driving home for Christmas after having a couple of wonderful powder skiing days in the Alps. As the drive takes quite a while - ten hours to be exact - I usually stop half way for an overnight rest. And as there is a new highway bypassing Vienna on the North, this time I decided to look for a new hotel, close to the S33. I opened the Booking.COM application on my Android phone. I do like the Booking.COM app for one particular reason. It shows a map you can zoom and pan, and as you scroll the map, it keeps bringing new hotels to offer. Good-bye text "by address" search. Welcome to the visual experience. Point a finger on the map and pick a hotel. It offered me a cheap Clever Hotel exactly at the point I wanted. Only later I realized the hotel is fully automatic. Booking.COM sends you two numbers - confirmation and ...

When I first discussed the aspect of power consumption by software back in 2006 ( http://headworx.slupik.com/2006/10/software-power.html ), it seemed quite weird to many readers. fast forward five years of mobile / wireless explosion and we all now talk about how much power this or that function consumes. The main reason behind the Apple's decision to reject Adobe Flash was power consumption. It was bogging down CPUs, which in turn were drawing juice from batteries at a full rate. MacBook Air with Flash installed lives barely half the advertised time. But it is not only Flash. There are many subsystems in a mobile device, contributing to the overall power consumption. The last weekend I went skiing with a group of friends. We had a lot of fun with the Map-To-Snow iPhone application. Unfortunately it was eating through the iPhone battery in about five hours. So at the end of the day we were unable to reclaim prizes, by simply being unable to present collected pins on the iPho...

Connection sharing times are over. Yes, true, I can use the the [Tethering & portable hotspot] option in my Android phone. Which I actually use from time to time when I want to do something on my Android tablet, and there is no public / open WiFi around. I have 3G modem in the tablet, but there is no SIM card inside. Same with my laptop. The 3G option is present there, but the SIM card slot is empty. I also have a portable WiFi hotspot , in use only when we travel in a group of friends or family to places where WiFi is not available. And finally my car is now connected too. There is a SIM card inside. I realize, with five personal 3G devises and two SIM cards on contract, I am a little bit ahead of the crowd. But over the years I have learned many times the crowd follows. Not exactly following me, but rather accepting and adopting the trends I just discover a little bit earlier. Yes, people will be carrying many 3G/4G devices with them. They already do. May be not five or si...

A week ago I announced the availability of the Android Car Infotaiment System . Of course this system is connected, meaning it can use a lot of real - time information available on the Internet, on line. I have to admit I always tried to imagine this, but despite that, the real life experience has been  very surprising. A few snapshots worth sharing: Entering the navigation target. Usually, I mean before, I had to know the exact address to enter into the navigation system. Country, City, Zip code, street and number. Typing typing and typing. It is different now with Android. Launch the "Navigation" APP and speak. Just speak to it. And the beauty is, you actually do not have to speak the address. A company name or a hotel name and a city is enough. Beacause the process is two - step. First it sends the sound wave to Google to be translated to text, and then (all behind the scene) this text is fed into the search engine, looking for an address. You don't even have hav...

Being impatient by nature, I decided not to wait for car manufacturers to introduce Android - equipped models (which will inevitably come to market in the near future). I ripped away the old navigation system in my Subaru Forester and replaced it with the ViewSonic ViewPad 7 Android tablet. It took me good two days of work, and as you see on the photo on the right, there is still some finishing masking to be done. But the upgrade is working and it opens a new chapter of bringing together the Android OS and my car. "Why the ViewsSonic?", you may ask. Well, the choice has been driven here by the size factor alone. It simply fits the best the original Subaru dashboard console. I wanted it to look as close to the factory - installed system, as possible. Anything looking different always attracts unnecessary attention (you know what I mean...). Then there was the short list of other requirements: capacitive touch screen and built-in GPS receiver. And a few nice - to - have...

Humans fail. Computers do so too. But there is a difference. We are able to improve computers a lot. While we won't be improving humans that much. Aviation is the area where computers have been introducing the biggest changes. I would even say computers allow the modern aviation to exist. From design of aircrafts through handling the air traffic through handling the operations of airlines. Nothing would be possible today, have we turned the machines off. It is also impossible to fly a modern aircraft without a computer. The fact is pilots today operate computers that operate an aircraft. And in most cases the planes fly themselves. Humans are needed to go through a printed checklist and handshake some verbal commands with ground staff. Still verbal, because there is no unified digital plane-to-earth interface in place. Humans seem today like artificially introduced parts of the system. Almost unnecessary. And they fail. Human error has been by far the most common cause of a...

Using USB as a power supply has been a theme on this blog since its inception back in 2006. At that time I coined the Universal Supply Bus term and have been watching the world adopting my idea. Well, not exactly my idea, as the idea of providing power together with signalling and data on a single universal connector has been invented long ago, and USB just made it widely popular. Designers went even to the extreme with products like AA cels charging directly from USB bus . What has helped recently was the EU and GSMA directives promoting the use of Micro USB as a standard communication and charging connectors. Powering mobile devices is a problem that has not been solved yet, despite being central to the wildly growing market of power hungry mobile devices. Today's standard is a day of work on a charge. It is the minimum that can be offered. Nobody will buy a mobile phone that lasts half a day. And we all assume devices have to be charged overnight. Which is acceptable, as lo...

My BlackBerry Torch did not make it to the next generation. I am switching to Android. The decision is made. And some post mortem afterthoughts below. First, I have to be clear, my initial decision to make a BlackBerry my primary mobile device three years ago was in part driven by curiosity (let's try this...!), and in part (the more significant part) by the fact BlackBerry was the only smartphone platform back then supporting UMA, or calls over WiFi. I cried a river over UMA , especially after Orange decided to turn the service off last June. Something I can explain only by huge misunderstanding and mishandling by the MNO. But simply after UMA had been turned off, my incentive to continue with BlackBerry has significantly diminished. As most of the users, I started judging the platform without any UMA - derived handicap over the others. And the advantages did not and do not look that strong. Actually I have started seeing more disadvantages of sticking with the ...

Exactly three years ago I noted there was no alternative for Microsoft Outlook . But this is no longer true. I have been using GMail for ages. For my private email address. For business, however, it took much longer to migrate. In my case it even took selling one company (the one using Outlook) and setting up a new one (the one that does not). OK this is a bit of irony. But the truth is at our new startup we are extremely, extremely happy with the Google Apps cloud service. We keep on discovering new things almost every day. It is hard to imagine people are still sending themselves DOC and XLS files as attachments. And that after a long editing work they are being asked "Save your changes"? This 30-year old paradigm of editing FILES looks very arcane today. But it still exists at the very heart of the world's most popular Office suite. But back to the Outlook. As I posted in 2008, the really last thing I was using it for was contact management. It was simply a backup ...

A week ago I did a quick jump across the Atlantic to attend the 2011 Singularity Summit . It was a fantastic event, well worth spending two days on a plane. I arrived in New York late Thursday evening. The Summit was on Saturday and Sunday, so having Friday time to spare, I strolled down the streets of the city. Very crowded streets. Seems like a lot of people have a lot of time to spare on Friday morning. Shops were overcrowded. I was standing for more than an hour in line just to get into the 5th Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch. There was nothing special inside. A&F as usual, only crowded and the crowd storming the shop from outside. I kept going towards the Cube Apple Store, where I saw even bigger crowd. Ah - the iPhone 4S - I realized. But they were lining outside the store, while others were walking inside. I soon realized the store had run out of the iPhones. As I did not want to buy an iPhone, I could get in. It was completely crowded inside. I quickly went out. The crowd ...

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day shopping for a new laptop. And I have to admit this was one of the most difficult research tasks I have had recently. And the results of my research have been most surprising, especially after I found the key element, which is 2537M. Remember this symbol, and here is the story. Up till today I have been using the already famous on this blog Nokia Booklet 3G . The Booklet has been outstanding in several aspects, with its crown features being the 12-hours battery life in a sub 3 lbs, 19mm unibody package. My personal edition of the Booklet has also featured the ultimate storage speed and security solution available - the 256GB FDE SSD drive. Unfortunately the Z530 Atom processor, while responsible with its 2W TDP for the 12 hours battery life, has been too slow for my recent needs, that are now extended far beyond simple Web browsing. Hence the need to upgrade. I started with formulating the list of requirements in form of must-have's: ...

Unfinished products rushed out of the door plague us. We are tired. And not many seem to notice. The accelerated pace of innovation has been what we like. But the problem with the shortening design / products cycle is it does not improve the overall quality and satisfaction. I have posted around this subject many times here on this blog. It is the ROI thing. And being the number one. And delivering value to shareholders. You have to be fast. Or may be not? There are countless examples of products rushed out of the door just because they were expected. Both by shareholders and by markets. Probably the most famous of the last decade was Windows Vista. Delayed and delayed and yet released way to early. Looking from today's perspective, who really needed it? The Vista failure cut the value of Microsoft by a lot. It frustrated customers, accelerating the migration from Windows to MacOS. The opposite example is Apple. The market was disappointed with the iPad 2. Calling it even the...

For years I have been refraining from installing extra applications on my systems. Basically trying to live within a browser. It started long time ago with GMail. GMail has taught me using the browser as an application. Since then I have been typing documents and created spreadsheets in Google Docs. Only occasionally reverting to local apps, like PowerPoint for presentations or Visio for drawings and diagrams. Even for mind mapping I have been using the MindMeister.COM . Web platforms have one brilliant advantage over desktop. multiplatform access, collaboration and sharing. It is much easier to share a Google Docs spreadsheet than its Excel equivalent. And you get versioning as a free bonus. With Excel, you still have to maintain file naming conventions and us email as a transport layer. But one of the big disappointments of the Google Android Honeycomb tablet platform I have been using recently on the Samsung Galaxy Tab has been very poor support for Google Docs. Honeycomb has s...

As promised , I got myself the Samsung Bluetooth keyboard case for the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Even before ordering the accessory, I had had mixed feelings about it. But I had the urge to test drive this new approaching paradigm of convertible mobile computing. So to be fair with my review, I am typing this post on the keyboard equipped Tab. The first thing that surprised me when I unpacked the case (and to be honest, the one that surprised me the most!) have been the four rubber feet standing out from the four edges of the keyboard. Rubber feet are not unusual, but here they are on the upper side, not underneath the keyboard. First I thought they are there to protect the screen when folded (which is probably true). But then it dawned on me I can have the keyboard upside down. I mean you can fold it 350 degrees out to form a stand for the tablet. Wow this is smart. The true convertible. Exactly the setup I have been looking for. It can be a tablet (keyboard acting simply as a stand with a...

All our smart and mobile platforms are about sharing content, right? Wrong! I mean, that is what they are supposed to be, but do not deliver. Most of the time it is about as simple task as selecting a piece of text, copying it to a clipboard and pasting later somewhere else (an email message or a Twitter post). And we have to admit all the leading mobile OS platforms have it wrong. Apple did not support copy / paste at the very beginning of the iPhone era. Similarly Microsoft, with the first release of Windows Phone 7. Android (excluding the Honeycomb 3.1 and up) up till today does not provide any way to select a piece of text on a web page. Later on, both Apple and Google have added the select / mark / copy / paste to their OSes. But this is such a pain on a touch - only device. To do it right you would have to use a pencil sharpener to sharpen your index finger. By the way text selection using a good old mouse paradigm is such a delight, especially when you have just come back ...

Over the last two weeks I have been finally able to spend some more time with my first Android Honeycomb tablet - the [now banned] Samsug Galaxy Tab 10.1. I posted my first impressions more than two months ago and I have to say it has been consistently exceeding my expectations. So much that now going back to the iPad is like a step back in many areas. Nuff said. Now for the details. Honeycomb Android supports Adobe Flash Player. Not that I really like flash on web pages, but often I just cannot go without. What is a web page worth when it has the content you look for, embedded as a Flash object, and you are on an iPad. Bad luck. But not on the Android. It plays just about any flash content. Of course including the old fashioned Flash popup ads. By the way they can be easily taken care of - the browser has an option to activate Flash plugins on demand. So it is up to what you click on. An embedded movie will play and the ads will not show. While I find the built-in browser very ...

The ongoing IFA exhibition in Berlin has been entirely stolen by Android. Following the news it was difficult to spot anything that was not related to a release of a new Android tablet. All the big names have been there, with Samsung leading the pack. The war of tablets is the most intense. There are basically two contenders. Apple, who without discussion holds the crown for creating the market and leading it by a huge margin. Then there is Android, supported by almost everybody else, but RIM, Microsoft, Nokia and HP. Android has already overtaken Apple. But the iPad is still probably the best tablet you can buy. Unfortunately for Apple, usually what really matters is not the current state, but the trend. And the trend for Android is "to the Moon". It shows everywhere. In fully functional sub $200 designs like the Lenovo A1, in the dedicated book readers like the Nook and the upcoming Kindle and in the high end devices like the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 (I own one) and the al...

People have been saying Apple is the only company capable of forcing wireless carriers (MNOs) to decouple phones (terminals) and phone numbers from network access contracts. The truth is now Google is the other one. Commanding a huge user base, owning the Android OS, the Google Voice service, and now owning a mobile hardware division, Google definitely is in a position to release a decoupled device, with multiple physical, or even a virtualized SIM card slots. It would have a phone number associated with the Google account (not with a SIM card). And would use any network to complete calls. I have a feeling the GSMA is today, where the record labels were, when the first iPod was released and MP3 took the world by storm. SIM cards in 2011 are, where CDs were in 2001. Obsolete products of the old era.

I had a wonderful sabbatical last July. Packed my backpack as light as possible (managed to squeeze everything below 20 lbs) and took off to Peru. So how it looked like from the perspective of electronic devices and what worked and what did not? First of all - the 6" 3G/WiFi Kindle. It was great to have many books (including the Lonely Planet guide) in such a small and lightweight device. Perfect for long flights (Krakow - Frankfurt - Santo Domingo - Panama - Lima) and for long haul bus services in Peru. Kindle was also giving me a backup Internet access. All worked beautifully. Until I broke it. I must have squeezed it too hard in the backpack or something... Anyway at that point I realized how important it was to have paper backup copies of some important documents (like my flight tickets). Electronic platforms are great. But they are so easy to break. The second access device was my faithful Blackberry Torch. Just after I landed in Lima, I realized my mobile carrier (Or...

Despite having wireless connectivity, the Cloud, Facebook, Google+, Dropbox and the entire galaxy of services that enable electronic sharing among people and devices, the user experience (believe it, or not) is still in its infancy. Just recall how "easy" it is to send a photo to a group of friends: take a snapshot with your camera, remove the memory card (or connect the camera to a computer using an USB cable), download it to a local hard drive, learn how to use a cloud service to upload the photo, get the url link to the uploaded copy and paste it to your email application, praying it will become "hot" when you click "send". Then on the other device click "check for new messages", and open the link (if it is not hot, select it - not an easy task on a mouseless device - and paste into the address field of the web browser. Now imagine the possible alternative: you hold your camera, it is aware of the other displays in the neighborhood, you t...

As I wrote before , I took my 3G Kindle to my vacation trip to Peru. After my mobile data had been being cut off by Orange (no data roaming to Peru), the Kindle proved to be the great backup window to the world. It worked as expected, I was able to connect whenever I wanted over any 3G or EDGE network there (for free!) and also read the books I took with me, including the Lonely Planet guide. Until I broke it. I had it in my backpack and have no idea what happened. I must have sit on it or whatever... The display crashed and that was it. Quick realization of the importance of backups (like a paper copy of my flight tickets). After returning home, I contacted Amazon, explaining what I did. They said they were very sorry, but not to worry, as they were shipping me a new one. For free, no questions asked. I talked to them last Tuesday, and the new Kindle arrived on Friday morning. Not a bad timing, considering I was sent from the USA and had to cross the Atlantic and clear the EU customs ...

Wireless Carriers (or MNOs - Mobile Network Operators) make it to the top of the hall of fame when it comes to ignoring the existence of the Internet. They see their world span as far as their network coverage does. Or where they have roaming partners. Like German tourists going in hordes where their travel agencies reach. Not a mile further. But, believe it or not, there is a world in places, where there is no 2G or 3G or 4G signal. This is the world I live in. And this is the world I have been visiting over the last three weeks in South America - the Andes and the Amazon jungle. My Peruvian wireless experience started at the Lima airport, where I realized Orange, my MNO, did not have data roaming agreement with any of the Peruvian networks. Can you imagine? GSM is all about compatibility and roaming. We are twenty years since the system was conceived. And all I get is voice roaming. How pathetic... Who uses voice these days? It certainly is not my favorite mobile VAS. By the way, ov...

Thrutu gave one of my favorite presentations at the eComm conference. The idea is simple. Why can't we interact with each other or our connected multi - feature phones while having a voice conversation. Actually not many people even think they should. Plain voice calls have been with us for 150 years. And we do not dare to expect anything more. So when we talk, we just talk. That is it. Nobody expects being able to take a photo and send it over to the other party while talking. Or sending a GPS with map snippet. We are used to saying "when we finish I will send you my address". Or "when we finish I will send you the photo". Why wait until the call is done? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to share a phone's camera while on a call? Or click an icon that will send the GPS coordinates to the other party where it will be rendered by a mapping application? Such simple ideas... yet not available on a broader base. Such multimedia enhancements should be built in...