Samsung Galaxy S - 3 weeks in

My ageing iPhone 3G didn't take the update to iOS 4.0 very well. It still worked, but it seemed clunky and slow after the upgrade. Six weeks ago, I (conveniently) took this as a sign that I needed a new phone, and started considering my options. I could wait for the new shiny iPhone 4, or I could look at Android. It has been reported that Android has caught up to Apple now, both in terms of hardware and software. Of course, the biggest thing that everyone touted as the biggest advantage of moving to android was: freedom. Being a developer and nerd, this appealed to me.

So I went out and bought a Samsung Galaxy S I9000 (now there's a mouthful of a name...). Its got a big super amoled 4 inch screen, a very fast processor (reportedly faster than that in any other current phone), and came for free on a very reasonably priced Optus plan. I've had the phone for three weeks now, long enough for me to sort out any learning curves and kinks in the system, so I thought I'd post my impressions.

The biggest thing I noticed buying this phone was that it didn't "Just work" like an iPhone does. It turns out that there was a performance problem which detracted from the new phone feel that I expected. In order to get it working properly, I needed to go onto a bunch of technical forum sites and work out how to flash a new (leaked beta) firmware to fix the problem. Flashing was made even more difficult because they were windows only flashing tools, and they wouldn't work in a virtual machine on my mac. In the end, I needed to drag an old clunker machine out of the cupboard to get flashing to work.

The headphone jack also uses a different configuration to iPhones.  This means that I can't use my existing Sennheiser headset on the phone.  If I do, the sound ends up muddy and the lyrics almost disappear.  The supplied headphones are ok, but I'd still prefer to use my aftermarket headset.  Apparently Samsung have used the same configuration as Nokia, which makes some sense, but it still pisses me off that I need to use an adapter to get my headphones working.

Now that I've passed those problems, I can start to see why this is such a great phone. I now get twitter & yammer notifications on the phone in an unobtrusive way,  and there's no waiting for updates either.  On the iPhone, when there was a new message, a notification would appear, and when you clicked on "view" it took you to the application which then loaded the message (or whatever) from the internet.  This could take a few (up to 10) seconds.  On android, it loads the message first, then shows you the notification.  No waiting!

There's also widgets on the home screen. If I don't like the default home screen that Samsung Provides (TouchWiz 3.0) I can replace it with a number of open source alternatives that are much whizzier and glitzy. There's a cool little active background that makes the screen look like you can see through to a circuit board. There's just so much stuff!!!

Of course, there's also a downside to this. I installed a couple of different music players to try them out. When I pressed the "play music" button on my headset, all of them started at once :S. I worked out how to fix this, but its another example of not "Just working".  I also need to do a bit of research when I want an application, because there isn't just one way of doing it.

For work, there's exchange support built in, so it works just as well as an iPhone in that department.  There's also an office docs reader built in, and all the applications we are used to such as dropbox work as well, if not better than on the iPhone.

Battery life is okay.  Its taken a while to settle down into a pattern, but I'm now getting almost two days between charges, including moderate usage.  The firmware upgrade has been a big help here.

Finally, there's the looks. I have to admit that one reason for moving away from iPhone was that everyone has one now. Sadly, the I9000 doesn't help here, because it looks exactly like an iPhone 3GS.  They even copied the packaging with the phone coming in a little black cardboard box.   Its so similar I'm surprised apple didn't sue them. Oh well, its a pretty vain reason to want to change.

PROS:

1. The screen is gorgeous.
   
2. There's a lot of choice of applications
   
3. lots of storage - 16Gb internal, which I have since augmented with a 32Gb MicroSD card to give me a total of 48Gb.
   
4. SWYPE is a great text input method
   
5. Google integration is great
6. When Android 2.2 comes out, it will get much faster.

CONS:

• Performance problem - Now Solved!
• Doesn't like OS X very much
• There's a lot of choice of applications
• The Games aren't as good.
• Only available on Optus at the moment.  I would have preferred to stay on Telstra Prepaid

All in all, now that I've sorted out my performance problem, I'm very happy with my new phone. I like the choice that I get, and I'm willing to invest the time it takes to tweak the experience to my taste. In the end, I suppose thats the difference between the masses and the nerds: Some are willing to be told the best way to do something, whilst others prefer to tread their own path (or at least the path that is shown them by a bunch of other nerds on a forum)

Now, to work out how to program the thing!

How predictable are you?

Ars Technica has posted about research that has been conducted about prediction your location, based upon data gathered from mobile phone towers.  The research shows that it is possible to predict where you will be at any given time with 93% accuracy, even before additional information such as calendars is taken into consideration.  That is spectacularly good, and just goes to show how good the information that is being gathered by our gadgets really is.  What this article makes me think about is how well adaptive user interfaces, once provided with the appropriate data, will be.  I want it... now.

Toshiba announces 'digital secretary' functionality

Last week, I ranted about how our cellphones will start adapting to what we are doing based upon the information they can gather on our behaviour.  Right on cue, Toshiba have now announced that they are building exactly this technology, and it will be available by the end of the year.  I'm impressed.  I wonder if they will introduce it only into the Japanese market, or more widely on Android or something similar.

The time is now for inference engines in user interfaces

I've been thinking the last couple of days about the future of phone user interfaces, and I suppose the future of interfaces in general.  At the moment we have fairly static interfaces, with a scrolling list of applications with the occasional widget to tell us the weather forecast or what not.  We set it up how we like it and thats it.  Some user interfaces (in particular, I'm thinking of Android's pages) provide different screens to cater for different use cases, but it is still a manual affair.

What I'm looking forward to is the day when my phone can infer things about what I'm doing.  Our phones (and our extended computer networks)  know an incredible amount of information about us.  They know where we are, and if we are moving or not, and they can remember where we have been before and at what times.  They have our calendar, they know what time it is now.  That there is enough information to begin to infer things.

For example, I tend to finish work at roughly the same time every day.  When I finish, I walk to Flinders St train station and catch a train home.  During the day, I couldn't give a tinkers cuss what the train timetables look like, but when I walk out the door, all of a sudden I'm keen.  My phone, based upon my previous history of movement, detecting when I start moving from the building I've been in for the last few hours, could easily infer that I am leaving, and that my most likely destination is home.  Wouldn't it be cool if it could alter its home page to show timetable information because thats where it thinks I'm going.

We can get more sophisticated here by adding in additional information too.  If I throw my calendar into the equation, the destination guesser has more information available to it.  If I have an appointment at 5:30pm in a different part of town, it can logically infer that I'm not going home, but rather that I'm going to this location.  Instead of showing me the train timetables for my home line, it could show me a tram route to my meeting, or the location of the nearest taxi rank.  It could even choose which option to show me based upon the time until my meeting.  If I've left myself lots of time then I can take public transport, but if time is running short perhaps I should take a taxi.  My phone becomes a true digital assistant, rather than a window on to information that I have to instruct how to operate.

I want my phone to do this now, and there's no reason it couldn't be done.  I'm sorely tempted to get venture capital funding and go do this.  Its where the action is going to be in the near future, in my opinion.  I've got a whole bunch of ideas about what sorts of information could be fed into an inference engine.

We do need be careful to remember the lesson of Microsoft's clippy however.  In order for an inference engine to work, it needs to be accurate.  It needs to provide value to the user.  It should also be unobtrusive.  if the user simply wants to get to his email, or his web browser, it should be no more difficult to get to than it is on today's interfaces.  Clippy failed on both counts here, and was widely lampooned and hated for it.  The amount of information that the clippy inference engine had to work with was limited, so therefore the assistance it could provide was worthless.

No inference engine will be perfect.  If I walk out the door and start walking towards the train station, I might not actually be going home.  Instead, I might be going to a bar on the way to the train station to meet a friend that just phoned me up.  There's no way my phone is going to be able to guess that (unless it monitors my phone conversation, and understands what we are talking about.  We can't do that yet...).  The secret here is to be unobtrusive.  The phone should offer information on what it thinks I'm doing, but in such a way that if I want to do something completely different it doesn't get in the way.  Phone user interfaces are getting sophisticated now(e.g. SlideScreen) so I see no reason why inferred information can not be incorporated.

One final thought about this is privacy. In order for this to work properly, our computer/phone needs to collect, store (for pattern analysis) and cross-check a lot of really private information.  Where does this information get stored and analysed?  at Google/Yahoo/Facebook?  The inference engine will then construct a model of my behaviour to predict what I'm doing.  I'm not sure I want a big corporation like Google to be able to make these sorts of inferences for me...  but thats naive.  Big corporations like Google already construct models of our behaviour, and every time we sign up to a new service like Google calendar or gmail we give them more information to model us.  I'd prefer to run such a service on my own hardware, but that isn't the way that the industry is going.

But as I ranted recently, perhaps that isn't an issue any more.  Are we willing to give up fundamental privacy in order to get the advantages?  I'm not sure...